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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.83: Terror is Necessary

In the summer of 1918, Communist leaders looked out from the vantage point of the Kremlin and saw themselves surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. And because Lenin and his comrades made no distinction between the fortunes of the Communist Party and the fortunes of the Russian Revolution, that meant that the revolution was surrounded by an array of enemies, both foreign and domestic. This list of enemies now included their erstwhile coalition partners, the Left SRs, whose quixotic uprising on July the sixth, drove home the point to Lenin and his government that only the Communist Party could be trusted to defend the revolution. For them, the logic was axiomatic: for the revolution to survive, the Communist regime had to survive.

Lenin was not surprised by the array of threats facing the young Communist regime, nor believed that they could be avoided. The dialectic of events meant that revolution necessarily begat counterrevolution. Although, begat isn’t even the right word, because revolution does not precede counterrevolution temporarily or logically. Counterrevolution is embedded in the very fact of revolution. They are simultaneous events. One cannot stage a revolution such that one will not face a counterrevolution. No sensible revolutionary seeks to avoid conflict with counter-revolutionaries, they seek to win that conflict. So the Communist leadership was historically literate, and they had studied all the revolutionary precursors, most especially the original French Revolution, and more immediately the tragedy of the Paris Commune. Lenin believed that the latter had failed in part for their lack of iron will, that the Communards, in their idealism, dithered with administrative minutiae, instead of quickly arming and striking for Versailles before Versailles struck them. The Communards had hesitated to shed blood, and so, instead their blood was shed. For Lenin, revolutions are kill or be killed propositions, and he did not plan on getting killed.

So, in the summer of 1918, everything was happening pretty much as expected. On the one hand, there were the forces of revolution, with the assumption still in place that Russia was simply the leading edge of a broader international socialist revolution. And on the other hand, there were the forces of counterrevolution, of bourgeois capitalist imperialism, similarly joined by their own kind of international solidarity: international banks, stock exchanges, and exploitive colonial enterprises, managed by the diplomatic corps and defended by military apparatuses. These forces were of course currently enmeshed in a murder/suicide pact called World War I, which is what made international socialist revolution plausible to the point of being an almost guaranteed necessity. But they were still very powerful, still dangerous. And so even while the bourgeois imperialists were engaged in this capitalist civil war called World War I, they would stop at nothing to crush the socialist revolution in its infancy. Which brings us to the component of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War that we have not yet talked about, but which appeared to the Communists to be ironclad proof that their analysis of the situation was correct: in the summer of 1918, the Allied Powers began a whole series of armed interventions into Russian territory.

Now, ironically, the first armed Allied intervention after the October Revolution came at the behest of the young Soviet regime. Remember back in February, when Trotsky said neither war nor peace, and then walked out of Brest-Litovsk, and the central power said, okay, so war, and invaded? Well, recall that in this brief window, the Bolsheviks reached out to the allies, in case the Germans decided to just never stop advancing. We talked about this in Episode 10.78, this is when Lenin said, please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo French imperialism. Well, in the midst of this little window, local Soviet leaders in the far northern port of Murmansk faced a possible threat from encroaching White Finns. The British wanted to prevent Murmansk from falling into the hands of forces allied with the Germans, and they disembarked 170 Marines on March the fourth. The fact that Trotsky had invited the British in was later thrown in his face during the intraparty squabbles of the 1920s. But this very brief window coincidentally closed the same day the British Marines landed in Murmansk when the Russian signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And though the treaty obviously upended the political dynamic, it did not change the Allied interest in putting troops into places like Murmansk.

Their overriding objective was all about winning World War I. They read the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and knew how much of the store Lenin was ready to give away. So while they couldn’t, for example, stop the takeover of the Ukrainian breadbasket, Allied forces could block access to strategic ports, not yet in German hands. They also saw value in holding these ports to possibly run soldiers and supplies to forces inside Russia who were willing to reopen the eastern front. And despite the communist assumption, the initial Allied incursions were not about the forces of counter-revolution gathering to snuff out revolutionary socialism. It was entirely about the strategic imperatives of the war. From everything I have read, I have no doubt whatsoever that had Lenin buckled to left Communist and Left SR pressure to abandon Brest-Litovsk and resume the war against Germany, the pipeline of munitions, resources, and money from Britain, France, and the United States would have opened right back up.

In May 1918, the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion accelerated the ambitions of the Allied interventionists. The whole motivation for the Legion was to keep fighting the Central Powers, which meant that they were in complete strategic alignment with the Allies. But no matter what the Communist believed, it is not the case that the Czechs rose up at the behest of the Allies. It was simply that their interests neatly coincided, and they were obviously now on the same side. Though, it is worth mentioning that the Allies disagreed about what to do with the Czechoslovak legion. The British wanted them to stay in the region to help form the nucleus of a reformed Eastern front that would at least tie down the Central Powers in the spring of 1918; the French meanwhile were hoping to affect their speedy evacuation, and race them around the world. So they could shore up the western front. But more than anything, the Czechoslovak Legion served as an incredibly useful piece of propaganda. All the Allied governments could sell their people on the idea of committing troops to save the brave and beleaguered Czechoslovaks — that’s certainly what American president Woodrow Wilson is going to run with. So in late June, for example, 600 more British Marines landed in Murmansk, this time, not at the request of the Soviets, but in opposition to them. Moscow responded by sending up Red Guards to push them out, leading to the first skirmishes between the Allies and the Communists. The Allies won these skirmishes and were then able to set up a small defensive line about 300 miles south of Murmansk, which they now controlled.

Coinciding with this foreign intervention, other insurrections started breaking out that seemed very closely linked to Allied interests — for example, in the city of Yaroslavl, just about 200 miles northeast of Moscow on the rail line linking Moscow out to the northern ports where Allied navies are now landing troops. On July the sixth, 1918, which just so happened to coincide with the Left SR uprising in Moscow, a group of anticommunist Right SRs staged a successful armed uprising of their own. It was led by Boris Savinkov.

Savinkov had been a part of the SR combat organization during the days of the Revolution of 1905, but ever since then had drifted towards the center, and in 1917 served as deputy minister of war in Kerensky’s government. After October, he became an implacable anticommunist. When his forces took Yaroslavl, they were not benevolent in victory. They summarily executed any Red agents they got their hands on — because let’s never forget both sides in the Russian civil war engaged in ruthlessly punitive brutality. It was the nature of the Russian Civil War.

Savinkov’s uprising was meant to coincide with the Allied invasion of the Port of Arkhangelsk, but miscommunications had led Savinkov to strike too early. And so, within a matter of weeks, Red Army forces retook Yaroslavl, though Savinkov himself managed to flee into exile abroad.

Within days of Savinkov’s revolt, another rebellion broke out that seemed connected to Allied interests, this one more troubling because it involved treasonous betrayal. After the Czechoslovak Legions rose up, the Volga River had become a major front in the burgeoning civil war. The critical forces of the Red Army mobilizing to hold the line on the Volga were put under the command of Mikhail Muravyov. Now, ever since he had volunteered to defend Petrograd in the days after the October Revolution, Muravyov had been among the Red’s most dependable officers. He had never been a Bolshevik, and was never considered a hundred percent politically reliable by Lenin or the other members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but time and again, Muravyov proved his military reliability.

That came to an end in July of 1918. Muravyov had never supported the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and after the Left SR revolt was crushed, he got it in his head to revive the call to cancel the treaty and to have Russian stop fighting Russians, and instead, have everyone go off and fight Germans together. So on July the 10th, 1918, Muravyov publicly defected from the Red Army and led a thousand loyal troops down the Volga River from Kazan to Simbirsk, issuing orders for the rest of his troops to stop fighting the Czech Legions, and instead head west to reform the eastern front. Once Muravyov got to Simbirsk, he occupied several key points in the city, but his revolt was as brief as the Left SRs in Moscow: the very next day, July 11th, he was ambushed in Simbirsk by a mix of Red Guards, Latvian riflemen, and Cheka units, and he was killed in the subsequent exchange of fire.

To replace the dead trader Muravyov, Lenin appointed someone he believed he could trust: the commander of the Latvian riflemen who had just suppressed the Left SR revolt in Moscow. His name, and I apologize if I butcher this, was Jukums Vācietis.

Vācietis set up his headquarters in the city of Kazan, but faced daunting setbacks before he even got his feet wet. The Komuch, that self-declared government in exile of the constituent assembly that had set up shop in Samarra on June the eighth, had started raising what they called the People’s Army, and in conjunction with the Czech Legionaries, had made rapid advances all along the Volga River. At the end of July, they captured Simbirsk, costing the Reds the provincial capital, a key railway junction, and its munitions depot — to say nothing of letting Lenin’s hometown fall into the hands of the enemy — then on August 5th, they descended on Kazan and took the city after two days of street fighting. Vācietis watched several of the officers on his staff defect to the enemy, and then he himself was forced to slip out of the city with a couple of dozen rifleman under the cover of a heavy fog.

For the communist leadership in Moscow, all the threats coming at them in the summer of 1918 were merely aspects of a single phenomenon: the phenomenon of counterrevolution. On July 29th, Lenin told the executive committee of the Soviet, “What we are involved in is a systematic, methodical, and evidently long planned military and financial counter-revolutionary campaign against the Soviet Republic, which all the representatives of Anglo-French imperialism have been preparing for months.”

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this isn’t really the case. There wasn’t some carefully planned counter-revolution that was being executed from some central location in the halls of western imperialism. But I also don’t think Lenin was crazy to draw this conclusion. The facts on the ground seemed to perfectly conform to his prior beliefs, and there was a broad alliance of anticommunist forces forming out there. It’s just that they were never all tendrils of a single counter-revolutionary leviathan. They were individual snakes in the grass, doing their own things for their own reasons.

But in August, the Allies gave Lenin little reason to doubt that they were not in fact embarking on a single coordinated counterrevolutionary operation. By now, the British presence around Murmansk had grown to six thousand. Then on August the First, Allied ships finally arrived at the northern port of Archangel bearing 1500 British and French Marines. After brief skirmishes between rival political factions in the city drove the Red leaders out, allied Marines disembarked to secure the port. The British and French, however, did not have many more troops to spare, and so they pressed other Allied nations to provide reinforcement. The Americans, Canadians and Italians would all respond, but there wouldn’t be too much to do beyond simply hold the coastal enclaves. It would have been extremely difficult to invade Russia from these northern ports across a thousand miles of not particularly hospitable country, so when the additional Allied reinforcements showed up at these coastal cities, there they would sit.

Of more far reaching impact were events in the far east. By July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion had risen up and taken over Vladivostok, the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad. Nearly every Allied power proceeded to land some kind of expeditionary force in the city, and they had agreed amongst themselves to place about 25,000 troops total to make sure they controlled Vladivostok. The British landed a battalion on August the third; shortly thereafter, 500 French Marines came from their colonial holdings in Asia; between August 15 and August 21, the first 3000 Americans disembarked, the beginning of a force that would eventually grow to over 8,000. The Americans’ stated objective was simply to aid the evacuation of the Czechoslovak Legion, and they tried to hew to that narrow parameter. But by far, the largest contingent was the Japanese. The Japanese were both eager to extend their own influence in the region, but also justifiably concerned that the British and Americans were planning to box the Japanese out once they had gotten the Russians out of the picture. Now at first, the Allies requested the Japanese sent 7,000 men for this joint Vladivostok mission. The Japanese government then approved 12,000. Eventually they poured over 70,000 troops into the area. Without question, the Japanese were the largest influx of foreign troops into Russia during the civil war.

With this apparent leviathan of counter-revolution enveloping the Soviet Republic, Lenin concluded the time had come to follow the lead of their Jacobin forebears, who had faced a similar multi-front crisis in 1792 and1793. It didn’t really matter if the Terror was right or wrong, moral or immoral; it was necessary, and that was all that mattered. As we’ve noted, Lenin prided himself on being able to do the hard thing if it was necessary. He wasn’t going to let sentimentality or morality prevent him from doing that which needed to be done, because if sentimentality or morality caused him to flinch, that would mean they would lose. The revolution would be overthrown. And that would not mean that there would not be a Terror, it would simply mean that the terror would be inflicted by the Whites, rather than the Reds.

Lenin believed a Terror was necessary not just to kill opponents, but also to snap the population to attention, to ensure that areas under Red control stayed under Red control, to make sure people didn’t waiver from their revolutionary commitments, to make sure that conscripts into the Red Army maintained discipline, even if they didn’t want to be a part of the Red Army.

But also yes, to root out and exterminate enemies of the revolution.

Now, even before the Red Terror officially commenced, Lenin had already drafted what is now an infamous order on August the 11th. It was sent to loyal cadres in the city of Penza, where there had been some local resistance to grain requisitioning. “Comrades!” “Lenin’s” communique read, “The Kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity. You must make an example of these people.” Then he gave them orders in four bullet points:

1. Hang. I mean, hang publicly so that people can see it. At least 100 Kulaks, rich bastards, and known blood suckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Seize all their grain.

4. Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday’s telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty Kulaks and that we will continue to do so.

Yours, Lenin

P.S. Find tougher people.

This communiqué also gets to another component of the Terror, which is, trying to draw a sharp distinction between us, the good guys and those, the bad guys, the rich bastards, the bloodsuckers. This distinction would make the Terror, not merely something the population would endure with trembling fear, but also maybe even actively support.

Meanwhile out on the war front, things started to turn in the Red’s favor, and Trotsky was right in the thick of it. The commissar of war was now cruising around in a mobile train command center, and on August 28th was at the Romanov Bridge, a huge bridge that spanned the Volga 20 miles west of the city of Kazan. He was there surveying the scene when 2000 forces of the People’s Army marched out of Kazan and tried to take it over. But they had marched all day by the time they reached the bridge and were so tired that when they got there, the Red Army forces under Trotsky fought them off. But it was not a clean victory. One regiment broke and fled in the middle of the battle, and the next day, showing his own clear affirmation for uncompromising discipline and will, Trotsky had the commander of the offending regiment shot, along with one out of every 10 men. After its brief hiatus following the February Revolution, the death penalty was back with a vengeance.

The victory at the bridge meant General Vācietis had a clear path to retake the city of Kazan, and Lenin suggested to Trotsky that if Vācietis stalled, delayed, or hesitated in any way, that he should be shot; this too hearkening back to the good old days of the French revolutionary armies.

But while all this was going on, far more momentous events unfolded in Moscow.

Lenin was very much more in favor of killing than being killed, so he rarely left the safety of the Kremlin. But on August 30th, he gave a speech at a munitions factory on the southern outskirts of Moscow. After the speech, he was walking out of the building towards a waiting car. A woman called out Lenin’s name, and when he turned, she pulled out a gun and fired three shots at him. One of the shots missed and went through his coat, another one lodged in his shoulder, but the other one was the bad one. It passed through his neck, and partially punctured a lung. Lenin dropped in a bloody heap on the ground as confusion exploded all around him. Still conscious, Lenin refused to go to a hospital because he didn’t trust anyone there, and he demanded he be taken to the Kremlin and that doctors be brought to him. Now given the scope of the injuries, and the inadequate medical facilities at the Kremlin, there seemed to be very little chance that Lenin would survive this. I mean, if you move these bullets just a centimeter, he’s dead before he even hits the ground, and history starts doing its summary assessment of the life and career of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was assassinated at the age of 48 here on August 30th, 1918.

But the bullets landed where they did. And he did not die that day. Through that magical combination of luck and will, he survived.

Now as for the would be assassin, it turned out to be a woman named Fanny Kaplan. At least, that’s the official story. Fanny Kaplan was a longstanding member of the SRs. She had joined the party as a teenager in 1905 and been arrested in 1906 as a part of a bomb plot. After 11 trying years in Siberian exile, she was set free in the political amnesties following the February Revolution. Kaplan had no love for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and she had completely soured on their vision for revolution after October. With the outset of deep political repression in the summer of 1918, she and several SR comrades — who she refused to subsequently name — decided to start assassinating people. She was assigned Lenin.

There were a bunch of arrests in the wave of the shooting, and under questioning Kaplan made the following recorded confession:

My name is Fanny Kaplan. Today, I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the revolution. I was exiled to Siberia for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labor. After the revolution I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.

This confession was good enough for a speedy conviction; Fanny Kaplan was taken out and shot in the back of the head on September 3rd.

Now, the thing about this is so far as I can tell, there were no actual witnesses saying, oh yes, I saw that woman there, Fanny Kaplan fire the three shots at Lenin. Nor was she wrestled to the ground gun in hand right at the moment that it all happened. So, there are lingering alternate theories that maybe she wasn’t actually the shooter, and that she either willingly gave herself up as the shooter to protect her comrades, or that the very clear and straightforward confession she offered was extracted after some good old fashioned enhanced interrogation techniques. The further details about Kaplan and the assassination attempt came from one of her comrades who turned informant a few years later and was the star witness for the public trials of the SRs in 1922. And yes, that witness confirms and elaborates on all these details, but he isn’t exactly the most reliable source either. Now, I’m not trying to inject conspiracy theories into this, I’m just reporting that what actually happened is surprisingly muddled. Uh, if you’re ever on jeopardy and they say this SR shot Lenin on August 30th, 1918, the answer is Fanny Kaplan, that’s the historical answer.

So Lenin managed to live, but he is now confined to a recovery bed. And in that bed, he absolutely resolved at the time had come for Terror. Now, Cheka was already out there arresting people and interrogating people and executing people, but it’s all about to get ramped up to vast national policy. Just a few days after the assassination attempt on September 3rd, Pravda published an appeal to the working class, which said that the people must crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror. And it said the defenses could be slight, but invite swift and permanent retribution. “Anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp.”

Then on September 5th, the Peoples’ Commissars issued the following decree:

The Council of Peoples’ Commissars, having heard the report of the chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution Speculation and Crime [which is by the way, just the official name of Cheka] about the activities of this commission finds that in the present situation the safeguarding of the rear by means of terror is necessary; that it is necessary to send a greater number of responsible party comrades to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution speculation and Crime in order to strengthen its work, and introduce into it a more systematic character; that it is necessary to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps; that all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots, and rebellions are liable to be shot; that it is necessary to publish the names of all those shot and the reasons for shooting them.

This decree of September 5th, 1918 is the legal embarkation point for what becomes the Red Terror and the foundations for a generally repressive police state.

So, the Red Terror is going to last for years, and go through periods of winding up and winding down, and obviously the first several weeks and months after the decree were a period of major windup. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about casualties and victims; some people tend to downplay how many people were killed, other people obviously exaggerate it beyond all reason. The Communists were often fastidious record-keepers about who was being killed, where, and why, but oftentimes local decisions were simply made on the fly. Groups of people were taken to the outskirts of town and shot. The who, what, when, and why of their deaths never recorded. Among the first victims were those who had already been rounded up and held in custody, whether as hostages or as potential threats to the regime; they were executed. Lots of SRs were executed. There were also large police sweeps to pick up all kinds of suspects, people were just rounded up and crammed into prisons. There were little revolutionary tribunals operating at the local level, haphazardly and ruthlessly. Now very often, yes, they were identifying real threats to the Communist regime, arresting them and executing them — or they were picking up people from rival political parties. But as often as not, the basis for an arrest is extremely flimsy: a single denunciation from an anonymous informant; maybe somebody is arrested for the crime of being a foreigner. And as history has seen in several different times and locations, sometimes people are arrested for having the same name as somebody who the government is looking for, that happens a lot during the initial phase of the Red Terror. And then of course as we’ve also seen many times throughout history going all the way back to, let’s say, the Sullan Proscriptions and people like Crassus and Catiline, where denunciations and arrests are driven entirely by greed and avarice, or maybe a ruthless desire to get ahead, settling personal grudges, settling old scores, none of which had anything to do with politics. Now, this is all just the very beginning of it, and as we move forward, there will be dungeons and tortures and executions, and the whole thing will become an absurd, paranoid blanket spreading out over everything. Initially justified by the context of the civil war, it would become a permanent feature of post-revolutionary Soviet life.

As the Cheka fanned out and fulfilled its mandate to grow its operation and systematically impose a reign of terror, the Red Army advanced on the Volga. They recaptured Simbirsk on September the second, and then on September the 12th took Kazan, which meant, by the by, that General Vācietis did not become an early victim of the Red Terror, which he surely would have had he failed, and instead is on his way to being promoted to commander in chief of the whole Red Army.

In the face of this onslaught, the Komuch collapsed as a potential threat to the Communist regime. The People’s Army they created topped out at just 30,000 soldiers and they couldn’t get any more as the Red Army poured reinforcements into the region. In the first week of October 1918, with the Red Army closing in on Samarra, the Komuch disbanded, and everyone fled east, seeking the protection of White armies that were forming inside Siberia.

Meanwhile, the Czechoslovaks grew demoralized and frustrated. They’d never wanted to get involved in a Russian civil war in the first place, but it tolerated it because the Reds were putting up practically no resistance. Now that it was turning into a real war, they wanted out. And as they reoriented themselves back to their original goal of trying to get out of Russia, the Allies continued to bring forces into Russia, under the cover of getting the Czechoslovaks Legions out of Russia. On September the fourth, 4,500 Americans arrived at Arkhangelsk — they were officially dubbed the American Expeditionary Force, and unofficially they were called the Polar Bear Expedition — and then more troops flooded into Vladivostok, most especially the Japanese. But if you take a quick glance over at the calendar, you know that in next week’s episode, everything is about to get rocked by another major event that is going to re-destabilize the whole Eurasian continent. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is just around the corner. And I have taken pains to impress upon you that everything that we have understood so far about the Russian Revolution has to be understood in the context of World War I.

So, how are things going to change when World War I isn’t a thing anymore?

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.82: The House of Special Purpose

Way back in Episode 10.62, I bid a very grateful adieu to Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov, whose incompetent shenanigans finally penetrated the last shred of my composure. You’ll notice we haven’t heard a peep from them since. This is partly yes, because I was sick of talking about them, but there is some historical justification for their absence from the story. After Nicholas abdicated in March 1917, he and his family became remarkably irrelevant. On the international front, the Allied Powers, eager to have new management in charge of the eastern front, exerted no diplomatic pressure on behalf of the Romanovs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the lines, the Central Powers did not add the restoration of the Kaiser’s cousins to their list of war aims. Domestically, the imperial couple had alienated, disappointed, and disillusioned so many people that there was no outraged movement fixated on the overthrown tsar. There were no serious plots to rescue them, certainly none to restore them to power. Even right-wingers who joined the White movement after October 1917 rightly saw Nicholas and Alexandra as fatally discredited, running around saying we fight for Tsar Nicholas was a pretty good way to get no one to volunteer for your volunteer army. Meanwhile, in the post February revolution, political dynamics, the governing coalitions of Octobrists, Kadets, Right SRs, and Mensheviks, were neither driven by a thirst for revolutionary vengeance on the one hand, nor a willingness to just let the ex-imperial family walk free on the other. With far more important things to worry about, the various provisional governments, just let the Romanovs hangout in a state of limbo. And then finally, on the far left, the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and anarchists aimed their post-February passions, polemics, and weapons at the provisional government. The immediate enemy was Kerensky, Kornilov, and the Cossacks, not Nicholas and Alexandra. After the February Revolution, the Romanovs ceased to be the center of anyone’s political calculations, either bore them or against them. It is amazing how quickly, after more than 20 years on the throne, and carrying the historical weight of a 300 year old dynasty, Nicholas and Alexandra became quite simply irrelevant. They had become little more than a loose end to tie up, and today, we are going to tie up that loose end.

Initially, the Romanovs were placed under house arrest at their ancestral residence at Tsarskoye Selo just outside of Petrograd. There, Nicholas, Alexandra, their four daughters, Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia, plus their only son Aleksei, enjoyed a pretty carefree and comfortable life. Through a kind of of passive inertia, the provisional government continued to pay out state subsidies for the ex-imperial family to live on, even though they were now legally private citizens. Nicholas in particular seemed absolutely rejuvenated by the abdication and was as happy as he had ever been. No longer a helplessly deteriorating insomniac with the weight of the world on his shoulders, he relaxed into the responsibility free life he had always wanted. Alexander Kerensky met with the former tsar several times during the first months of their house arrest and said, “All those who watched him in his captivity were unanimous in saying that Nicholas the Second seemed generally to be very good tempered and appeared to enjoy his new manner of life. It seemed as if a heavy burden had fallen from his shoulders and he was greatly relieved.”

So even if there was some huge coordinated effort to restore Nicholas to power, which there absolutely was not, Nicholas himself would have been a very reluctant participant. This initial idyllic phase of their post-abdication house arrest ended in mid August 1917. With the failure of Kerensky’s June offensive, the Russian army dissolving, and the political situation deteriorating rapidly, the family’s life at the old Alexander palace came to an end. Tsarskoye Selo was after all very close to Petrograd, and after the insurrectionary violence during the July Days, Prime Minister Kerensky decided to move the family deeper into the Russian interior. He said it was for the family’s safety, which is almost certainly true, but let’s also not forget that after the failure of June offensive, the Germans were looking at an increasingly clear path to Petrograd. It would not take much for them to capture both the capital and the Romanovs. So in mid August 1917, Kerensky ordered the family moved out to Western Siberia.

On August 13th, 1917, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children departed the Alexander palace for the last time. Their new home would be the remote town of Tobolsk. They traveled first by train to the city of Tyumen, the nearest city with a railroad station. After disembarking, it was another 150 miles by carriage and ferry boat to Tobolsk, which was the point. With no railroad station, it was not an easy place to get in or out of. But remote did not mean primitive. Upon arrival, the Romanovs were put up at the governor’s palace, a well provisioned and pretty nice house. It wasn’t the Alexander Palace of course, but it also wasn’t a straw hut. Here, their life of carefree ease continued. They brought with them a whole cadre of retainers and servants: two valets, six chambermaids, 10 footmen, three cooks, four assistant cooks, a butler, a steward, a nurse, a clerk, a barber, and two pet dogs joined them in the house. The family read books and played games, Nicholas and Alexei cut firewood. Far removed from the trouble or danger of responsibility, they lived like affluent country gentry. Obviously they maintained hope that one day friends on the outside would help them escape to someplace truly safe, but it’s not like they were in immediate danger. Or even immediate discomfort.

Their situation did not even change much after the October Revolution came along. The family eventually heard the news, but the October Revolution spread by way of Red Guard detachments fanning out from Petrograd and Moscow by way of the railroad. And as I just said, Tobolsk itself was 150 miles from the nearest railroad station. So it’d takes several months before Red Guards appeared. Besides, to the limited extent the Romanovs received any kind of political news at all in late 1917, they probably would have heard the conventional wisdom of nearly all non-Bolshevik observers: the Bolsheviks are not going to last. After new year’s 1918, with the one-year anniversary of the abdication approaching, the lives of the Romanovs finally took a real turn for the worse. Defying all expectations, the Bolsheviks lasted. After successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly in January. Lenin’s government became more self-confident, and started working through all the responsibilities they had inherited.

There were a million little policy questions they needed to answer, and one of them, which no government had answered since March 1917, is what do we actually do with the Romanovs? The People’s Commissars had no ready answer, but at a minimum, the family would no longer be allowed to live a life of luxury at the people’s expense anymore. At the end of January 1918, the guard to the governor’s mansion put the family under much tighter daily restrictions. Then in mid February, the People’s Commissars announced that the Romanov allowance would be cut to 600 rubles a week. This forced them to give up such luxuries as butter and coffee, and also let go almost their entire household staff, who they could no longer afford to pay.

But that only covered the terms of their confinement, not what was ultimately going to happen to them. Now the most obvious thing would be to put Nicholas on trial for crimes against the people. Russian revolutionaries of every stripe were steeped in the history of the French Revolution, and they knew that the great public trial of Louis the 16th was a pretty important plot point. Trotsky in particular seems to have expected a public trial to prove beyond all doubt the guilt of the ex-tsar. Then they would execute him publicly for crimes against his people, demonstrating revolutionary justice that would serve as an inspiration for the workers of the world. Trotsky naturally cast himself as the main character of this theatrical show trial. He would play the part of the brilliant prosecutor, skewering the haplessly feeble — but yet also monstrously terrible — former tsar. Trotsky said he envisioned, “an open court that would unfold a picture of the entire reign — peasant policy, labor, nationalities, culture, the two wars, etc. The proceedings would be broadcast to the nation by radio, in the villages accounts of the proceedings would be read and commented upon daily.”

But with everything else going on in the spring of 1918, the People’s Commissars made no specific plans to stage this trial. They did not even know what would happen if they brought Nicholas back to Moscow. It might spark an uncontrollable lynch mob. It might spark an uncontrollable uprising to set him free — now, maybe not. But without any real pressure to come up with a final plan, the People’s Commissars procrastinated, and they set the decision aside for another day.

The pressure to come up with a final plan ultimately started building from local circumstances east of the Ural Mountains. In February, a Congress of Soviets from the Ural region convened in the major industrial city of Yekaterinburg, which elected a Bolshevik dominated executive committee. The Ural Bolsheviks tended to be more hard line and radical than their comrades in Moscow, and they were also more immediately annoyed that Bloody Nicholas and his family were allowed to just hang out in their backyard like nothing had ever had ever happened. They started petitioning Moscow to transfer the Romanovs to Yekaterinburg, where they would be held in the kind of real prison they deserved. This was a matter of some delicacy for the Central Committee back in Moscow, because they were aware many of their comrades in the Urals were itching to answer the question of what to do about the Romanovs with a few well-placed bullets. The Central Committee of the party in Moscow. Wasn’t sure that’s what they wanted to happen, but they also didn’t want to cause any schisms with the Ural Bolsheviks, nor provoke them into doing something they’d all later regret.

Pressure mounted further when Red Guard detachments finally arrived in Tobolsk in late March, the problem being that the Red Guards were not on the same page. One group of about 250 were sent from Yekaterinburg, while another 400 arrived representing the rival city of Omsk. Neither detachment was particularly disciplined, nor were they interested in subordinating themselves to the other’s authority. Meanwhile, the guard units at the governor’s palace were getting awfully restless, because their wages hadn’t been paid for an obnoxiously long time. With reports about all this in hand, Moscow finally appointed a guy called Vassily Yakovlev to go take command of the whole situation. Yakovlev arrived in Tobolsk on April 22nd with his own detachment of soldiers, imposed some discipline and paid off the wages of the angry guards. But he was not there to maintain the status quo. There is a lot of mysterious confusion about all decisions surrounding the Ex-Imperial family at this point, but Yakovlev’s mission appears to have been to collect the Romanovs and bring them back to Moscow. The most likely explanation being that at this point, the People’s Commissars still planned to put Nicholas on public trial.

That very night, Nicholas was told to pack his bags. He was not told what his final destination would be, but was told that anybody who wanted to was free to depart with him, Aleksei had recently aggravated his hemophilia and couldn’t be moved, so the whole family traveling together was out of the question. At first, Alexandra was torn between accompanying her husband and staying with her son, but she was convinced by the others to go with Nicholas to support him in whatever may come. Showing how out of touch the couple had become — not that they were ever actually in touch — they believed that the reason Nicholas was being fetched was to force him to sign the humiliating treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which they both loathed. They appeared quite unaware of the fact that Nicholas’s signature had not been required for anything for quite some time.

Since the rivers were not yet free of ice, they had to travel by carriage over crummy roads for two days, which was miserable, but it did lead them through the hometown of their old friend Rasputin. Alexandra noted in her diary, “Stood before our friend’s house. Saw his family and friends looking out the window at us.”

When they got to Tyumen, they boarded a train that would take them through you, Kettering Borg. But at this point you cough laugh was concerned. Nicholas and Alexandra might not make it out of the city alive.

He informed Moscow. He was going to faint like he was going through Yekaterinburg, but then take a very roundabout path to the capital through Omsk, which meant speeding off a couple hundred miles southeast. When news reached Yekaterinburg that Nicholas and Alexandra were suddenly on an eastbound train, it set off alarm bells for the local Communists, who now suspected Yakovlev was a traitor and planning to spirit the imperial family to Vladivostok, where they could make a getaway via the Pacific Ocean. So Moscow dealt with dueling communiques, each side warning them that the other side had nefarious intentions. One was accused of preparing to shoot the couple on sight, the other accused of playing Russian Scarlet Pimpernel. Moscow finally decided that, at least for the moment, the Romanovs would be transferred to the custody of the Yekaterinburg Soviet, on the promise that nothing would happen to them without direct instructions from Moscow. Yakovlev relented, reversed course again, and headed back northwest. On April 30, an angry mob greeted Nicholas and Alexandra at the Yekaterinburg train station, but they were in fact placed in safe custody and not shot on sight. Their new home had been commandeered the day before from a retired businessman named Nikolai Ipatiev. After the house was requisitioned, it was somewhat menacingly redubbed “the house of special purpose.” Demonstrating either the indecision of the leaders back in Moscow, or that they had maybe already secretly made their decision and just weren’t ready to act yet, Nicholas and Alexandra would not continue on to Moscow. They would remain in the house of special purpose for the time being, and we now know that for the time being meant for the rest of their short lives.

As they sat in the house of special purpose, the world exploded all around them. The Czechoslovak Legions went into revolt at Chelyabinsk on May 14th, which was a pretty big deal locally, as Chelyabinsk was just 130 miles south of Yekaterinburg. But it didn’t immediately change anything. The imperial couple was neither hastily transferred to Moscow, nor sent back to the railroad-less Tobolsk. In fact, on May 23rd, the rest of the children completed their own journey and joined their parents. All the Romanovs, plus their last remaining handful of servants, were now together again under one roof.

Their days of easy house arrest, however, were now over. The house of special purpose operated on prison rules. A large wooden palisade was built around the entire house to prevent anyone from seeing in or out. Then, to prevent any kind of communication, the windows were painted over with whitewash. The family was guarded round the clock by guards both inside the house and outside patrolling the grounds. They could only leave their chambers for meals, and were even followed into the bathroom. Now, despite the constant hostile surliness of the guards, the officers in charge did seem intent preventing any overt abuses, and the diaries of Nicholas and Alexandra both indicate their conditions were stifling and uncomfortable, but not necessarily cruel and abusive. Nicholas finally sat down and read War and Peace for the first time.

By mid June 1918, however, the situation for the Reds in the Ural region grew into a full-on crisis. That SR group down in Samarra had just declared itself the valid government to the Constituent Assembly backed up by the Czechoslovak Legions, who now pretty much controlled the entire Trans-Siberian railway. The Cossacks and volunteer army were on the march in the south, the Communist outposts in the Urals were in danger of being completely cut off. At some point in the midst of all this, Lenin and the other leading Communists shifted away from the idea of staging a great big show and towards the idea of just tying up loose ends the old fashioned way.

The final decision appears to have been made in the first week of July 1918. The most influential leader of the Ural communists had come to Moscow for the Fifth Congress of Soviets, and he was among the more forceful advocates for just doing it and being done with it. Doing it and being done with what, you might ask. Well, you shouldn’t have to ask. Whether the surprise assassination of Count Mirbach and the revolt of the left SRs on July the Sixth played any role in the decision-making isn’t clear, but it is worth noting that a loyal Cheka officer had already taken over command of the house of special purpose on July 4th before all that went down. Then on July 16th, it was communicated from Yekaterinburg back to Moscow that plans were in place, and due to prevailing military circumstances — those circumstances, being that the Czechoslovak Legion was surrounding them and the city would soon fall — that they were prepared to go ahead with you know what as soon as Moscow transmitted a confirmation order.

Now, before we go on, we should note that while the Czechoslovak Legion was advancing and they would capture Yekaterinburg in a week, trains had obviously been going back and forth to Moscow no problem right through the first week of July. So it’s really not the case that, oh, gee whiz evacuating the family is just impossible. Now, maybe it was impossible by July 16th, but if they had wanted to, they could have moved the family at any point before that. If they had wanted to.

So we know from everything that happens next that the requested confirmation order from Moscow came in that very night of July 16. Now there is no documentary evidence for this order. There is no piece of paper hiding in any archive out there proving that the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow gave the order to execute the Romanovs. But, as we’ll discuss here in a second, the conclusion to be drawn is not that they didn’t order the execution, but that they destroyed all evidence that they ordered the execution.

After receiving this confirmation, the Cheka officer commanding the house of special purpose ordered the Romanovs and their last few servant rousted after midnight. They were told there had been some shooting in town and that they were all going to move to the basement for their safety. The family had no reason to doubt this story and complied. So at some point after one in the morning on what was now technically July 17th, 1918, 11 people assembled in the basement of the house. Nicolas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Aleksei, plus their doctor and three remaining servants. The room was not very large, it was like 15 feet by 20 feet, with only a single small window. Still not suspecting anything, they requested two chairs be brought down one for Aleksei and one for Alexandra, a request that was granted. Then suddenly, the Cheka commander entered the small room flanked by 10 men, all armed with revolvers. Without any warning or ceremony, he pulled out a piece of paper and read a death sentence.

Nicolas could only respond, “What? What?” before the Cheka commander shot him point blank in the chest, killing him instantly. Alexandra attempted to cross herself, but was similarly shot point blank and died instantly. Unfortunately, their shockingly quick deaths made them the lucky ones. Each of the executioners had been assigned a different person to kill, but when they entered the room, most of them were not standing directly across from their assigned victim. They weren’t that organized. So they all pulled their guns out and started firing quite wildly. The room filled with smoke and blood and screaming.

After the first round of shooting though, only about half the victims were dead. The rest were in various states of wounded terror. Now, I’m not going to go into all the grizzly details here, but it did require another fifteen minutes of additional pistol shots and repeated bayonet plunges to finally kill all eleven men, women, and children in the room. Once everybody was finally dead, the bodies were loaded into a truck and driven to an abandoned mine shaft that had been earlier identified as the best place to dispose of the remains. There, they were met by a group of about 25 men who had been called in to quickly help bury the bodies, and this group was apparently incensed because they thought they had been called into join the execution, not simply help cover it up and they were very disappointed. There was then a great deal of scuffling between the men and the commanding officers as the bodies were stripped and searched for valuables — and there were valuables, the ladies had secretly sewn diamonds into their corsets. Once this was done, everyone departed, but the next day the commander concluded the mineshaft wasn’t actually deep enough, and so he came back with a party the next day, dug everything back up, and loaded it onto a different truck to take it to a different, deeper mineshaft. But along the way, the truck got stuck in the mud, and so they decided to just dig some holes and bury the corpses, though before they finally dumped the bodies, they poured sulfuric acid all over the faces to prevent identification of the bodies.

Now, the final resting place of the Romanovs was known locally, but it was not revealed until after the fall of the Soviet Union. After sitting around for nearly 75 years, a team dug up the bones in 1992, ran some DNA tests, and successfully identified most of the remains of the Romanov family.

When confirmation of the executions reached Moscow, the People’s Commissars were in the midst of debating national health policy. That discussion was briefly paused for the announcement that the tsar was dead. After a brief silence, Lenin simply said, “We shall now proceed to read the draft decree article by article.” And then they went back to business as if they had just been told a parcel of mail had been delivered. The first official acknowledgement came from the party newspaper on July 19th, which only said that the tsar was dead. The famous British super spy. Bruce Lockhart was in Moscow at the time and reported that when they were told the tsar was dead, “The population of Moscow received the news with amazing indifference.”

There was no grief, remorse, or regret. There was no outrage in the streets, nor was there any cheering in the streets. There was just nothing. It was a big nothing. Now the total lack of response may have been because the people were only told that the tsar himself was dead, not that the whole family had been killed. That July 19th announcement straight up lied and said, “The wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place.” This marked the beginning of a whole web of lies about what had happened in the house of special purpose on July 17th. For all his talk about being willing to do the hard and necessary thing bravely and unflinchingly without sentiment or guilt, Lenin very much refused to admit he had ordered the execution not just of the tsar, but also women, children, and some servants. The Soviet government officially maintained that the rest of the family was still alive well into the mid-1920s — like, yes, they are alive and well, but no, you can’t see them or talk to them. Not only did they deny what they had done, the Communist Party also concocted a cover story about who had done it. The official version of events was that the leaders of the Ural regional Soviet Congress had ordered the execution on their own initiative, and it had only been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party after the fact. The official story would be maintained until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the assassination of the tsar and his family were the sole responsibility of the leaders in Yekaterinburg, not Moscow. But that story never fit any other established facts, evidence, witness accounts, or, frankly, common sense. Trotsky, for instance, was off running the civil war at this point, and he wasn’t around Moscow for the final decisions, but later recounted in his diary about how he found out about the executions from the Central Committee Party Secretary Yakov Sverdlov.

> Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: “Oh yes, and where’s the tsar?”

“Finished,” he replied. “He has been shot.”

“And where’s the family?”

“The family along with him.”

“All of them?,” I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.

“All,” Sverdlov replied. “Why?”

He awaited my reaction. I made no reply.

” And who decided the matter?” I inquired.

“We decided it here. Ilyich thought that we should not leave the White a live banner, especially under the present difficult circumstances.”

I asked no more questions and considered the matter closed.

Now, this was written in 1935, and Trotsky certainly had his own agenda at that point, but this anecdote fits the facts, the circumstances, the record, and the personalities of everyone involved far more than the story of, hey, we were surprised as anybody that the whole family got offed in the middle of the night.

Now, while the Soviet regime kept up the story that Moscow had nothing to do with it right until the bitter end, their story that only Nicholas had been killed was blown up in 1926. After Siberia briefly fell completely out of Soviet control during the civil war, Admiral Kolchak — who we’ll be getting to soon enough — ordered an investigation. A guy called Sokolov spent two years interviewing witnesses, accumulating evidence, and searching for the grave sites to find out who had done what to the Romanovs, where, when, and how. Now, he was forced to flee Russia in 1920 as the civil war turned decisively in favor of the Reds, but he published everything he had accumulated in Paris in 1926, forcing the Soviet government to admit that the Romanovs were dead. All of them. But the years of official denials spread rumors and myths that some of them had gotten away. Most especially, these myths centered around the youngest daughter, Anastasia. But she didn’t live. She was dead the whole time. It was quite a grizzly death too, I might add, if you’re ever inclined to read the details.

So, that’s the end of the Romanovs. They are now dead and buried. Not just metaphorically, but literally. And on the whole, and I think their executions were pointless, unnecessary, and serves no real purpose. Now I’m not going to lose a ton of sleep over the grizzly fate of one family that had sat perched atop a pretty ruthless military and political apparatus that kept them in power by inflicting lots of grizzly fates on lots of different families who we’ve never heard of. But that doesn’t mean that their execution was righteous, necessary, or even useful. Trotsky said that Lenin didn’t want to leave the Whites with a live banner. But what would the Whites have done with that live banner? Probably nothing except be annoyed that they were the ones who now had to figure out what to do with the Romanovs. Indeed, the Romanovs were probably more of a threat to the Communists as dead martyrs than live political actors. When they were dead, they couldn’t keep bungling and screwing everything up. This is why the Communists went to such lengths to deny the murders and bury the bodies under a bunch of sulfuric acid. Now, there may have been some revolutionary utility to the idea of a public execution of Nicholas following a great public prosecution, but by killing them all in the dead of night, the Communists denied themselves even that opportunity. And instead of getting to proudly brag about serving revolutionary justice to a tyrant, they spent the next years and decades covering it up, hiding it. .Mumbling not very convincing lies about what they had done. So it’s not just enemies of the Communists who treated the murders of the Romanovs as a shameful crime. The Communists themselves treated it like it was a shameful crime.

And as for the old revolutionary truism, voiced most famously by Robespierre, that for the Republic to live, the king must die — I mean, lots of successful revolutions have wound up with the ruling monarchs booted off into exile and thereafter posing no future threat to the new regime. Republics have lived and monarchies have died without the monarchs themselves getting killed off in the process. The argument that a political revolution to overthrow a monarchy will only succeed if the specific human currently raining as monarch dies in the process is disproven by plenty of historical revolutions, revolutions we’ve covered on the show — King Charles the 10th of France, Louis Philippe, Napoleon the Third. Meanwhile, plenty of other revolutions have ultimately failed even after the former monarch was executed. Charles the First, say hello to Charles the Second.

The monarch literally living or dying is a variable that just float independently of any causal relationship to the larger cycle of revolutionary events. And besides, the whole operating principle of the monarchy is that the chain of custody never breaks. The king is dead, long live the king. So when you kill one guy who’s currently king, another guy’s just going to claim to be king. There’s right now a claimant to the Romanov dynasty out there, just as there are Stuarts and Bourbons and Orleans and Bonapartists. A monarchy doesn’t end with the death of the last king, but rather when enough people stopped believing in the monarchy. And in July 1918, the Russian people were already there. It didn’t matter whether Nicholas Romanov lived or died, the monarchy was dead. So I think the murders were wrong because they were pointless and unnecessary and, well, murder is wrong. In this case, it was an early signal that the brutal crimes committed in the name of the tsar, the crimes, which may have justified his execution in the mind to the revolutionaries, then and now, were now going to be played out in reverse.

And just as the execution of Louis the 16th was the initial harbinger of the Jacobin Terror, the execution of the Romanovs was a harbinger of the red Terror.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.81: The Revolt of the Left SRs

Hello, and welcome back from holiday hiatus. I hope everyone is good, or at the very least, getting through it. Before we get going, I have one bit of business and one upcoming event to discuss. The bit of businesses is, as you probably noticed this week, there were two ads attached to the beginning of the show, rather than just one, that’s a thing that’ll start happening more in 2022, just be aware. But also be aware of that I remain committed to not inserting mid roll ads into this thing — once the music starts, the content will proceed uninterrupted. I can’t promise that’ll be the case for my future podcast endeavors, as the podcast industry is making my mid-roll holdout position increasingly untenable, but at least for the round of the Revolutions podcast, there aren’t going to be any mid-roll ads.

On the event front, I am very excited to tell you that on Tuesday, January 18th, I will be playing the role of interviewer/conversation partner for Jonathan Katz to discuss his new book Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. If you remember from way back in the final episode of the Haitian revolution series, I said that if you want to understand the burden and expansion of America’s empire, that everybody needs to go investigate the life and career of Smedley Butler. I even spelled his name for you. Well, now we have a thorough modern up-to-date account of the life and career Smedley Butler. Gangsters of Capitalism as a sensational read, and Katz did a great job exploring not just Butler’s historical life and times, but also the ongoing legacy of those life and times in the present day. So this is going to be a digital event, with politics and prose, on Tuesday, January 18th. I’l drop a link with all the information in the show notes, but truly, put this on your calendar, it’s going to be me and Jonathan Katz talking Gangsters of Capitalism, which obviously you should all buy and read.

Okay, so on with the show. We left off with Lenin’s communist government grappling with major economic, political, and social upheavals in the spring of 1918. Civil war was breaking out all around them; the Czech Legions had taken over the Trans-Siberian Railway; people in the cities were starving; industrial production had collapsed. In the context of this crisis, the government of the People’s Commissars unveiled new policies on almost all fronts that we have retroactively called war communism. Now there is an ongoing historical debate how much of this policy shift between the fall of 1917 and the spring of 1918 was the result of the People’s Commissars trying to survive the emergency of civil war and urban famine, and how much of this was just the Bolsheviks-turned-communists taking the mask off and doing what they had always intended to do after they tricked everybody into supporting them back in October with a bunch of decrees they never intended to be their permanent policies. But whichever explanation you prefer, the change in course was very real, and one group in particular — who clearly believed all those Bolshevik decrees back in October — now felt deeply betrayed. And that was the Left SRs.

The Left SRs as a party were defined by their decision to support the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. Their presence inside the government, their votes in the Soviet executive, their vocal support for the Communists in the streets and in the villages, legitimized the government to the People’s Commissars and effectively countered accusations against Lenin, Trotsky, and the gang that they were trying to build a one party dictatorship. After all, it wasn’t a one party dictatorship, there were two parties. And what the second party brought to the table was, for example, access to the peasantry. The Communist Party had essentially zero operational presence outside the cities, and it was the Left SRs who provided a supportive link to the rural peasantry, who still, after all made up a vast majority of the population of Russia.

And initially, the Left SRs could offer this support without feeling queasy about it. The land decree Lenin had issued on October 26 was just him copying and pasting the SR land program. The Left SRs also supported worker control of factories, the end of any compromise with the bourgeoisie and the liberals, and all power to the Soviets. All of which was rapturously declared in the assembly hall of the Smolny Institute in those first heady days of late October and early November. Now the Left SRs had their disagreements with the Bolsheviks, but those were quibbles compared to the big pieces the October Revolution seemed to be locking in place. But after the Left SRs supported the Bolshevik dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, the relationship between the two parties started to sour.

The first biggest and most directly consequential difference between them was the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Left SRs hated the treaty. They believed, not without good reason, that it turned Russia into a subordinate colonial satellite of the German Empire. They also believed that it was a betrayal of the Bolshevik promise of peace without annexations or indemnities, as it allowed the Central Powers to effectively annex like a third of the former Russian Empire. They also believed that it sold out their brother and in the territory sacrificed to German occupation in the west, to stay nothing of their revolutionary comrades through Europe. The Left SRs agreed with the left Communist critique of the treaty, that ending the imperialist war was not supposed to mean utter capitulation to the Kaiser. If that was the only option, it was far better to embrace the fortunes of revolutionary war, and sweep a revolutionary army across Europe, to tear down imperial capitalism everywhere, root and branch. When Lenin got his way and the treaty was signed in March 1918, the Left SR commissars inside the government resigned rather than go along with it.

Even years later, the Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova told Emma Goldman that the treaty was the Bolsheviks’ first and greatest sin. “And as concerns the revolution itself,” Goldman wrote, summarizing what Spiridonova had told her, “it was precisely the Brest Treaty which struck it a fatal blow. Aside from the betrayal of Finland, White Russia, Latvia, and the Ukraine, which were turned over to the mercy of the Germans by the Brest piece, the peasant saw thousands of their brothers slain and had to submit to being robbed and plundered. The simple peasant mind could not understand the complete reversal of the former Bolshevik slogans of no ‘indemnity and no annexations,’ but even the simplest peasant could understand that his toil and his blood were to pay the indemnities imposed by the Brest conditions.” Spiridonova believed that the treaty fatally poisoned the revolutionary waters. “The peasants grew bitter and antagonistic to the Soviet regime,” she said. “Disheartened and discouraged, they turned from the revolution. As to the effect of the Brest piece upon the German workers, how could they continue in their faith in the Russian revolution in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks negotiated and accepted the peace terms with the German masters over the heads of the German proletariat? The historic fact remains that the Brest piece was the beginning of the end of the Russian revolution. No doubt other factors contributed to the debacle, but Brest was the most fatal of them.”

As a rejoinder to this, Lenin would note out point out two things: first, that the Germans’ obstacle- free invasion of Russian territory after the Russians stalled on signing the treaty in late February 1918 was proof positive that any call to launch a revolutionary war was pure fantasy. It wasn’t just that it was a different option or a less preferable option, but that it wasn’t an option at all. And second, that Spiridonova and the Left SRs generally overstated the hostility of the Russian peasantry to the treaty. They wanted peace. They had been voting for peace with their feet for like a year. And when the Left SRs go into revolt in the name of resuming the war, as they are about to do in this episode, no one’s going to rise with them. Now Spiridonova wasn’t wrong that the peasantry was growing bitter and antagonistic towards the Soviet regime, but this had far more to do with Communist land policy than Communist foreign policy.

Spiridonova and the Central Committee of the Left SRs knew the anger and bitterness of the peasantry very well, as they were presently fielding innumerable complaints from the peasantry about the advent of the food dictatorship and armed requisition of grain. Then on June 11th, 1918, the Communist government unveiled a new institution called the Committees of Poor Peasants or as they were called, the Kombedy. The Kombedy were the beginning of Lenin’s attempt to import class warfare into the rural areas by pitting landless peasants who lived on wage labor against Kulaks, the better off peasants who hired those landless workers. Now we’re going to talk more about this next week, but in addition to ratcheting up coercive pressure in the rural areas, the Kombedy looked like they were being established to supplant all the local Soviets that had grown up since 1917 and which represented all peasant interests, not just wage labor peasant interests. These local Soviets also just so happened to be dominated by the SRs, and they formed an institutional base of power for the SRs independent of the Communists. And that base of power now appeared targeted for demolition.

Now in general, the Left SRs had more libertarianish instincts than their Communist comrades, and the Left SRs were becoming concerned about the whole tilt of Communist policy. The worker control of factories that had been proclaimed right after the October Revolution was now being replaced by nationalization, centralization, the return of bourgeois managers and hierarchical factories. The new Red Army that was being formed was not being formed on the principle of voluntary enlistment and democratized regiments, both of which seem to be key gains of the revolution, but instead going back to the old ways of forced conscription, traditional military discipline, and even the active recruitment of former tsarist officers. Meanwhile, the Cheka, the effectively unaccountable secret police meant to protect the government from political threats, was rapidly growing in size, scope, and ruthlessness. To placate the Left SRs, the Bolsheviks had given them key positions inside the Cheka, but the Left SRs appear to have taken up those positions with the almost single purpose of curbing Bolshevik abuses. It became, for example, Left SR policy for party members in the Cheka to veto nearly every death sentence that came across their desks. Now, this is not to say that the Left SRs had any problem murdering people — they just wanted to murder the right people: nobles, bourgeoisie, bankers, imperialist, capitalists; not salt of the earth peasants who simply didn’t want to give up their last reserves of grain to a bunch of thugs holding bayonets to their throats.

So, all of this made the Left SRs incredibly concerned about the intentions of the Communists by about June 1918. And this was not just about bickering among various party leaders. The concerns of the Left SRs reflected a widespread and growing backlash to the behavior of the Peoples’ Commissars. A fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets was scheduled to convene in July of 1918, and both the Communists and the Left SRs considered it a distinct possibility that the Left SRs would come into the Congress wielding a majority of the votes. Believing that the wind was at their backs, the Left SRs decided to force the government of the People’s Commissars to change their policies. Most dramatically, they planned to use the Congress to force the abrogation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and demand Lenin’s government re-declare war on Germany. As we just heard Maria Spiridonova express, they believe the peace treaty was the poisoned route sapping the vitality of the revolution that they had signed up for. Indeed, the Left SR leadership considered the resumption of war to be the vital course correction the revolution needed, and they plan to go to any length to achieve it.

On June 24, the Left SR Central Committee resolved. If they did not win enough votes in the Fifth Congress to abrogate the treaty, they would force the resumption of war by other means. They adopted a resolution which said, “The Central Committee believes it to be both practical and possible to organize a series of terrorist acts against the leading representatives of German imperialism. In order to realize this, the forces of the party must be organized, and all necessary precautions taken so that the peasantry and the working classes will join the movement and actively help the party. This must be done after Moscow gives a signal. Such a signal may be an act of terrorism, or can take another form.”

This same resolution spelled out what they hope to achieve by this, which was not the overthrow of Lenin’s government, but simply forcing that government into a massive shift in policy. “We regard our policy,” the resolution said, “as an attack on the current policy of the council of Peoples’ Commissars but definitely not as a fight against the Bolsheviks themselves.”

So really what’s going on here is an attempt by the Left SRs to revive the dual power dynamic that had prevailed in 1917 between the Petrograd Soviet and the provisional government. And if you’ll remember, it was said that the job of the Soviet was to point a gun at the head of the provisional government and force them to do what the Soviet wanted, rather than overthrow and displace them. And that’s essentially what the Left SRs planned to do. They wanted to take up the role that had been played by the Petrograd Soviet 1917: point a gun at the head of the Peoples’ Commissars, and forced them to change their policy.

The Left SRs did not much hide what they were up to. They sent agents into the barracks and factories of Moscow to either win active support, or at the very least secure neutrality in case of a coming conflict. And they were pretty successful, as disillusionment with Lenin’s government was on the rise. On June 29th, the front page of the party newspaper contained an appeal to Left SR party members to report to their regional offices for orders, instructions, and military training. On June 30th, Maria Spiridonova publicly declared that the only thing that could save the revolution now was an armed uprising. They were quite open about this, just as the Bolsheviks had been very open in the lead up to October about what they planned to do. People are often under the mistaken impression that bold political insurrections must be preceded by hyper secretive codes of silence. But as often as not, these things are published, discussed, and planned right out in the open.

The Fifth Congress of Soviets opened on July 4th, 1918, in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. The Left SR delegates discovered that they compose something like 35% of the seats. Now it’s entirely likely they actually won a greater share of seats, but that the Communist controlled credentials committee may have approved a number of Communist delegates with incredibly dubious credentials, just to, uh, pad their numbers. But regardless, there was still some hope among the Left SRs that the Left Communist opposition to the peace treaty would join them. And the Left SR leaders got up one after the other and issued a series of blistering denunciations of the peace, culminating with the motion to tear up the treaty and re-declare war on Germany. But despite their own angry misgivings with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left Communist delegates chose not to break party discipline and they voted against the Left SR motion. It was defeated. The treaty stood, war would not be re-declared. With this critical vote lost, the Left SR delegates promptly walked out of the room. That very night, they initiated their plans for the act of terrorism that would be the signal for a nationwide popular revolt. They ordered a hit on the German ambassador to Russia: Count Wilhelm von Mirbach.

The Left SRs had laid their plans to assassinate the ambassador quite well. And while they were openly signaling their intentions to stage some kind of uprising, they did not openly announce their intention to assassinate Mirbach, which came as quite a surprise to everyone. As I said earlier, the Left SRs had been given a number of positions inside the Cheka, and they now used those positions both to organize the hit and prepare for an insurrection they expected to follow. The deputy director of the Cheka was a Left SR named Pyotr Alexandrovich; the commander of the Cheka’s cavalry detachment was a guy named Dimitri Popov. They organized Cheka units composed almost entirely of Left SRs to be armed and ready to move. The two men tasked with actually carrying out the assassination were Yakov Blumkin, head of the Cheka’s German counter intelligence division, and Nikolai Andreyev, who was a photographer by trade. With all these senior Cheka officials in on the plot, it was easy to secure necessary papers and a believable story for Blumkin and Andreyev to get inside the German embassy. They arrived on the afternoon of July 6th, saying they had come to discuss the case of Lieutenant Roger Mirbach, a German officer suspected of espionage. This was a sensitive case, they said, as the suspect was presumed to be a member of the ambassador’s family, and they said it was vital for them to speak to the ambassador directly.

Now all their paperwork checked out, and this got them in the building, but Count Mirbach himself tried to get a subordinate official along with a staff translator to handle the meeting. But Blumkin insisted he had been instructed to only speak with the ambassador, so Count Mirbach reluctantly entered the room. He said that he much preferred all of this to be handled in writing, whereupon Blumkin and Andreyev opened their briefcases and pulled out revolvers. They started firing. Point blank range, and incredibly they missed with all of these point blank shots. The three Germans in the room dove for cover and Mirbach himself nearly got away through an adjoining room, but Andreyev managed to hit him with another bullet, and Blumkin tossed a bomb, blowing the wounded ambassador sideways. The two assassins then hustled out the window, up over a fence, and into a waiting car. They made a totally clean getaway.

They left behind a German embassy now consumed by blood and fire. The ambassador laid dead. No one in the building knew who the assailants were, why they had done it, whether this would be an isolated incident, or the beginning of an all out attack on Germans in Russia. In the Kremlin, Lenin was informed of the murder around 3:30 in the afternoon, and immediately a string of Peoples’ Commissars converged on the German embassy; first, to find out what had happened, and second, to assure the Germans that the government had nothing to do with it and would punish those responsible. Lenin himself came down around 5:00 PM, answering a demand from the German that he personally apologize for the murder of their ambassador, which was an unusual order from a foreign embassy to a head of state, but Lenin came down and complied, though witnesses reported the apology was cold and perfunctory, and he was mostly interested in the details of the crime itself. Lenin was very shaken to discover the assassins had clearly gained access to the ambassador with the help of top officials in the Cheka, which did not bode well for his own personal safety.

After the assassination, armed Left SR detachment started to move out and occupy key parts of Moscow, including the main Cheka headquarters, and the post and telegraph office, where they publicly broadcast their responsibility for the assassination, and called for a general popular uprising. They had at their disposal about 2000 sailors and cavalry, along with eight artillery guns, 64 heavy machine guns, and a half dozen armored cars. When the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky — who we’ll also talk about more next week as we start getting into the Red Terror days — headed down to the barracks of the cavalry detachment and demanded the two assassins be handed over at once. Instead, the men inside placed him under arrest and held him hostage. One Left SR boasted to Dzerzhinsky, “You stand before a fait accompli. The Brest treaty is over. A war with Germany is unavoidable.”

Meanwhile, Lenin was back at the Kremlin doing some nuclear grade fretting. He was one of the few people who understood just how shaky the Communist government actually was. For all their boasting and propaganda and decrees, at this moment, in Moscow on July 6th, 1918, the Left SRs could have quite easily taken over the Kremlin and shot Lenin and all his comrades had they wanted to. Lenin knew this better than anyone. The only troops he could really trust were a division of Latvian rifleman, who during 1917, had decided to tie their own future fortunes to the Bolsheviks, and ever since had proved to be Lenin’s most loyal and reliable troops. The Latvian riflemen were the only ones he really trusted to serve as his personal bodyguards. The Left SRs had chosen their day to assassinate Count Mirbach well, because it happened to be St John’s Day, a Latvian national holiday, and most of the Latvian rifleman were out on the outskirts of town celebrating, leaving behind only a skeleton crew of about 700 men. So for all the political momentum that had been building behind the Left SRs for the past few months, and the now practically open path to overthrowing the government if they want it to, the Left SRs didn’t really want to overthrow the government. This was not meant to be a coup. The assassination of Count Mirbach was supposed to fatally break relations between Germany and Russia and also spark irresistible, popular pressure that would force Lenin to re-declare war on Germany. And frankly, everything was going according to plan right into the evening of July 6th. But then it started to go sideways. A popular uprising did not materialize, and the Left SR insurrection fatally stalled out.

At around 7:00 PM, Maria Spiridonova and other Left SR leaders went down to the Bolshoi Theater and called on the Fifth Congress of Soviets to reconsider their unwillingness to re-declare war on Germany, but the Communist majority still refused to budge. And as the Left SRs delivered speeches to nervous but ultimately deaf ears, Latvian rifleman surrounded the building. The Communist delegates were allowed to depart, but the Left SRs were cooped up inside. They had, in fact, helpfully congregated themselves for a mass arrest. As Bukharin later said to Left SR leader Isaac Steinberg, who had been commissar of justice ithe government before resigning after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, “We were sitting in our room waiting for you to come arrest us. As you did not do it, we decided to arrest you instead.”

This was hardly the end of it, though. In terms of raw forces, the Left SRs still outnumbered the Communists nearly three to one. At midnight, the commander of the Latvian rifleman went to confer with Lenin and described the following scene:

The Kremlin was dark and empty. We were led into the meeting hall of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars and asked to wait. The fairly spacious premises in which I now found myself for the first time were illuminated by a single electric bulb suspended under the ceiling somewhere in the corner. The window curtains were drawn, the atmosphere reminded me of the front in the theater of military operations. A few minutes later, the door at the opposite end of the room opened and comrade Lenin entered. He approached me with quick steps and asked in a low voice, “Comrade, will we hold out till morning?”

Having asked the question, Lenin kept on staring at me. I had become accustomed that day to the unexpected, but Comrade Lenin’s question took me a back with its sharp formulation. Why was it important to hold out until the morning? Won’t we hold out to the end? Was our situation perhaps so precarious that my commissars had concealed from me it’s true nature?

Lenin’s own pale fear that a few thousand armed men were actually too much for his regime to handle did not align with Communist party pronouncements about the breadth and depth of their power, which they had apparently led even their most loyal operatives to believe. But the commander of the Latvian rifleman went about his business. He surveyed his available forces and found them augmented only by some Hungarian prisoners of war who had turned communist in the prison camps — they were led by a guy called Béla Kun, who offered to fight for the government — but as that was not nearly enough, the Latvian rifleman elected to hold off their counter attack until close to dawn, when the bulk of their forces who had been celebrating on the outskirts of town would be back in the central city. At 2:00 AM, the commander returned to the Kremlin.

“This time,” he said, “Comrade Lenin entered by the same door and approached me with the same quick steps. I took several paces towards him and reported, ” No later than 12 noon on July seven, we shall triumph all along the line. Lenin took my right hand into both of his and said, pressing it very hard, “Thank you, comrade. You have made me very happy.”

At about five o’clock in the morning, about 3,300 men were armed and ready to go, and they launched their counter attack. The Left SR detachments fought tenaciously for what was by now a collapsing lost cause. There was no popular uprising. They had not forced the government to change policy. War with Germany was not in fact now inevitable. It took six or seven hours worth of fighting in the streets, but the Latvian commander was right: by noon on July 7th, they had triumphed all along the line. The Left SRs were defeated.

Over the next several days, hundreds of Left SRs were arrested in Moscow, Petrograd, and other major cities. But in general, the punishment doled out by the government of Peoples’ Commissars was incredibly light. They summarily executed without trial a baker’s dozen of combat leaders from the ranks of the Cheka, including Deputy Director Alexandrovich. But as they interrogated other detainees, they just released anyone who claimed that they opposed the Central Committee’s decision to go into revolt or those who hadn’t actively participated. Plenty of other leaders were allowed to slip somewhat uncontested into the underground. Maria Spiridonova was held in custody at the Kremlin and would go on trial in November. She received a very light one year sentence for the crime of ordering the assassination of a credentialed diplomat in the service of literally trying to start a war. Now that is not the end of Maria Spiridonova’s persecution at the hands of the Communists, but in this initial context, this is a very light sentence. The Left SRs were treated very lightly for all this. And the general suspicion among both domestic and foreign observers is that the Communists, despite having weathered this brief storm, did not believe themselves strong enough or secure enough to just out and out persecute the Left SRs with a much heavier hand, if for no other reason than Left SRs were obviously quite adept at terrorist assassination, and it only takes a handful of people interested in vengeance to start picking off commissars of the people like they are ministers of the tsar.

But though the individual punishments were light the failure of the revolt of the Left SRs marks the end of them as a political party. Their membership split three ways, with some of them condemning their former comrades and reaffirming their support for the Communists. Others headed into the underground, and mostly focused on staging guerrilla, terrorist acts and places occupied by the Germans like Ukraine. Meanwhile, just a little while later, one of the assassins of Count Mirbach, Yakov Blumkin, came out of the underground. He comes back and he joined the Communist Party, and would join Trotsky’s staff, and would only be killed in 1930 on Stalin’s order, on account of his connections to Trotsky, not for his assassination of Count Mirbach.

So to round out today’s episode, the Left SRs made a number of crucially incorrect assumptions that led to an across the board failure of their plan. The main one being that they believe that the peace between Germany and Russia was so tenuous that something is trivial as the assassination of an ambassador would provoke Germany back into war, or, that Lenin and his government would allow themselves to be forced back into war. The truth was, both the German government and the Russian government, each for their own reasons, believe that maintaining peace between the two was absolutely vital. At this very moment, the Germans are off launching their spring offensive against the Allies in the west, their final, last ditch effort to win the war. They could absolutely not be distracted by the resumption of hostilities on their eastern front. Lenin’s government, meanwhile, realized that resuming the war against Germany would be the absolute end of them, and besides, they didn’t really have an army to fight them anyway.

There was also very clearly a misunderstanding about how hostile the people of Russia were to the peace. Sure, it was ignoble, and maybe even a little humiliating, but it was nothing compared to the horrors of war that they had been forced to endure. And then finally, the uprising failed for kind of the same reason the Bolsheviks attempted uprising during July 1917 had failed: they didn’t really have a clear plan for what to do if their intent to intimidate the government into doing what they wanted failed. And when the Communists refused to be intimidated, there wasn’t really a next step to take.

The July 6th uprising of the Left SRs is in many ways, a small wave amidst a much larger storm tossing around Lenin’s government. It came, it went, they moved on to bigger challenges. But it does mark a major milestone in the Russian Revolution, and the history of Russia generally, because the Left SRs are going to be expelled from every committee, congress, and position of authority they held. And as they were the only party besides the Communist Party presently participating in the administration of things, their expulsion marks the beginning of true one party rule in Russia. From here on out, the communist party will be the only party.

And next week, the Communists are going to draft a new constitution for Russia, and then set about ensuring that they will remain, forever after, the only game in town.

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~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.17: Emancipation and Labor

So I’m sure you have noticed by now that this week’s episode sounds different than normal. My microphone gave up the ghost on me so I have had to improvise a temporary solution to get the job done for right now. I am going back to the United States on Wednesday morning for the Sound Education Conference and apparently buy a new microphone just got added to my list of things to do while I’m there. So this isn’t ideal, I know, but I think we can all just with it together for the moment.

In our last episode, we introduced a whole bunch of new people and new ideas, and I hope you were able to keep them all straight. We retraced the tumultuous 1870s and followed the shifts in revolutionary tactics. First, they tried to slowly and peacefully educate the peasants towards mass social revolution, as per Pyotr Lavrov. Then they switched to a quick and violent vanguard party political revolution as Pyotr Tkachev. But when People’s Will finally succeeded in killing Tsar Alexander the Second in 1881, they found that Jacobin terrorism had brought Russia no closer to socialist revolution than Lavrov’s patient school master strategy had.

So. Where do we go from here? Where can we go from here?

Well, Georgi Plekhanov, Pablo Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, and Lev Deutsch believe they have the answer. And while I’m here, I should say that I received both praise and concern over my pronunciation of Deutsch. Some people said, yeah, you nailed it; other people said in Russian, it would be more properly Deytch, but to be consistent, I’m just going to use Doiych again because he disappears after today anyway, and we won’t have to worry about it.

So we left this little group in early 1881, having found their temporary life as expats in Switzerland becoming a permanent life as exiles in Switzerland. Because the response to his father’s assassination from new Emperor Alexander the Third, the 26 year old son of the now blown to bits Alexander the Second, was uncompromising repression. His father, the Tsar Liberator, had embraced political and social reform. He had emancipated the serfs, created the semi-democratic zemstvo, built an entirely new progressive judicial system, and for his trouble, he had been targeted for death by ungrateful and probably psychopathic revolutionaries. Almost as soon as the lump of flesh that had once been his father was cold, Alexander the Third turned from reform to reaction. Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. It was back, and it was back with a vengeance.

There will be more to talk about on this front, but of most pressing concern for us here today is the arrival of a new political police to seek and destroy the underground enemies of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Because remember, even before his eventual assassination, Alexander the Second had given up on the Third Section. They had been okay at monitoring the upper classes, but they were impotent in the face of underground terrorist groups like People’s Will. Russia needed a new political police for this new era, and shortly before his death, Alexander the Second mostly dismantled the Third Section and reassigned their powers to a new department of state police inside the Ministry of the Interior.

Now what replaced the dismantled third section was the infamous Okhrana. Officially known as the Department of Protecting Order and Public Peace, the Okhrana started as a small St. Petersburg office of 12 detectives that had been created back in 1866 after the first near-miss assassination attempt on Alexander the Second. Well, after the successful did-not-miss assassination attempt of 1881, Alexander the Third created two more offices in Moscow and Warsaw. To ensure nothing hindered the work of this newly reorganized secret police apparatus, in August of 1881, the tsar issued the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace, which gave the police broad powers of surveillance, arrest, prosecution, and punishment. The statute was meant to be a temporary measure in the emergency wake of the tsar liberator’s assassination, and it was drafted to expire after three years. But the Statute on Measures to Preserve Order and Public Peace was perpetually renewed every three years for an additional three years. And it would keep being renewed right up until 1917. So the Russian Empire was now, effectively, a police state.

The effect of all this on the People’s Will organization was swift and devastating. The burgeoning Okhrana rounded up anyone who might’ve been even tangentially linked to People’s Will, smashed their presses, hanged anyone they thought a ringleader, and exiled the rest to Siberia. In the short term, it meant that People’s Will was finished as a viable revolutionary organization. Though as we will see in a moment, it took a while to figure that out, and there were still pockets remaining out there, more committed than ever to continuing the terrorist campaign, in their bitter and hopeless desperation latching on to violence practically for the sake of violence.

The long-term effect was that any new revolutionary organization in Russia was going to have to contend with the wily Okhrana apparatus, and they were creative about their tactics. They were not just about surveillance and arrest, they planted longterm spies and agents provocateur, they co-opted and misdirected and controlled left-wing movements with slush funds and secret financing channels that duped would be radicals into joining organizations that were actually monitored and directed by the Okhrana. We’ll talk about that all later.

So for the small cadre that formed Black Repartition, they could only watch this unfold helplessly from their new base of operations in Switzerland. And this was exactly the kind of thing they had feared from a movement built on aggressive terrorist violence: an apocalyptic state backlash.

But by the time they arrived in Switzerland, they were not only disagreeing with their estranged comrades over revolutionary tactics, but also revolutionary theory. When they organized themselves in 1879, they declared their ideological adherence to scientific socialism, which for them meant not just Marx, but the whole array of western socialists writers coming out of Germany and France and Britain. This distinguished them from People’s Will, who adhered to narodist populism, built partly on the idea that the Russian peasant was a unique and special entity on whose behalf the revolution would be staged. So this means that we’re starting to recapitulate the old westernizer/slavophile debate that had raged in the 1830s and 1840s, and which really had been an ongoing debate among educated Russians going all the way back to Peter the Great. Should Russia look to quote unquote more advanced Europe for answers, or were concepts like backward and behind meaningless because Russia was its own unique thing, playing out its own unique history?

After they arrived in Switzerland in 1880, Plekhanov buried himself in a three-year long intensive study of economics, history, philosophy, and political science to develop a new theory that would guide Russia towards its revolutionary destiny. From which he emerged convinced that the really hard work of synthesizing economics, history, philosophy, and political science into a new revolutionary doctrine had already been done by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And that the answer to all of Russia’s problems was found in Marxism.

So Marx and Engels were already well-known in the Russian intelligentsia, both above board intellectuals and underground radicals. Most of their early work was banned of course, but the weighty tome that was Capital was legally published in Russia in March of 1872. The conclusion of the censors was that it was a doorstop, filled with boring statistical analysis that few would read, and even fewer would understand. And even if they did understand it, Capital was clearly an attack on western style industrial capitalism, and we’ve got none of that here, so it’s not like any of this is even applicable to Russia. So they let it be published. And the Russian edition was the first foreign edition of Capital ever published. Marx himself was very pleased when the initial print run of 3000 copies sold out in a single year. The reason Capital turned out to be so popular among the Russian intelligentsia was not because it described the situation in Russia, but because it was an exquisitely detailed description of the horrors of western capitalism. And as I just mentioned, one of the driving ideas behind the narodism was the belief that the existing communal spirit of the historic Russian village could be harnessed to bypass all the horrors described so eloquently by Marx. So Capital became a cautionary tale. It’s not like anybody was reading Marx as a blueprint for the Russian revolution. Plekhanov, meanwhile, read Marx and said, I have a blueprint for the Russian revolution. And that’s why Plekhanov gets to go down as the father of Russian Marxism.

But as Plekhanov and his friends turn towards Marxism in the early 1880s, they engaged in a dialogue with their still kind of comrades in what was left of People’s Will to try to reform a unified revolutionary party. They had, after all, been together in Land and Liberty right up until 1879. But neither side showed a burning desire to mend fences. Plekhanov was already developing an acid pen, and his treatment of the narodist theories and tactics that had so obviously failed was dismissive and caustic. For their part, the remaining at-large members of People’s Will dug in even harder on their Jacobin terrorism. And if this insistence on staying the course seemed crazy to the members of Black Repartition, just imagine how crazy Black Repartition’s claim that they should plot a new revolutionary course based on some old German’s analysis of industrial capitalism seemed to the members of People’s Will.

The talks went nowhere.

So the members of Black Repartition decided to cut their ties and boldly move in a new direction. In September of 1883. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich, and Deustch got together in Geneva, and they formed a new society they dubbed: the Emancipation of Labor Group. The Emancipation of Labor Group would be an explicitly Marxist society. Their principle objective would be to spread Marxist ideas into Russia, to reorient the entire ideological underpinning of Russian revolution away from the failed utopianism of anarchism and narodism and toward the advanced scientific socialism of Marx. They specifically organized themselves as a propaganda operation, focused on disseminating and teaching Marx’s theory. The plan was to translate the work of Marx and Engels into Russian, and then write new books and pamphlets elaborating on their ideas to make it intelligible and relevant to a Russian audience. This kind of education-based revolution fit right in with Lavrov’s theories, and they invited him to join the group, but he declined. Lavrov was not a Marxist.

The one other guy they did get to join was this kid named Vasily Ignatov, who was able to contribute some seed money to get the group off the ground. Now, half the time, Ignatov is not even mentioned among the founders, since he contributed little more than money and then he died in 1885, but for the record, he was like the fifth beetle of the Emancipation of Labor Group.

By his own self-assertion, and the agreement of his comrades, Plekhanov would serve as an intellectual leader of the new group, and he set to work laying out their new Marx’s program for Russia in three early works. First, the official statement of principles that accompanied the formation of the new group, and also a pamphlet that was published around the same time called Socialism and the Political Struggle. Both of those were published in 1883. These were followed by a longer book called Our Differences published in 1885.

In these early works, Plekhanov staked out their position relative to previous theorists and activists, like Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, and Tkachev, and mostly attacking the unscientific utopian fantasies of the narodists and the anarchists. And indeed the thing Plekhanov probably found most exciting about Marx was that Marx was offering a scientific theory of economics, society, and history. Plekhanov believed Marx had done for social relations what Newton had done for physics and what Darwin was doing for biology. The scientific nature of the theories is what made them so profoundly important.

The most important of these profoundly important scientific truth is that Marx had discovered, was the theory of historical materialism. Plekhanov came to believe that the stages of history outlined by Marx were inevitable and inexorable, which meant that when describing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Marx may have been talking about the past history of places like France and Britain, but because Russia had not yet emerged from their medieval mode of production, Marx was also describing a future for Russia yet to come. He was like a fortune teller with a crystal ball. Plekhanov believed historical materialism had universal application, so while the populists and the anarchists believed that Russia could avoid the horrors of western industrial capitalism thanks to their own unique culture and history, Plekhanov said no, that is impossible. Marx has described a path of socio-economic development that cannot be avoided. You cannot skip from feudalism to socialism. Because again, when Marx said that the revolutionary class in feudal society was the bourgeoisie, and that they were the only ones who could topple feudalism and further develop the forces of production, Plekhanov believed him. And it was not until after the bourgeoisie had overthrown feudal aristocracy that the next revolutionary class, the urban proletariat, could rise up to fulfill their own historical destiny.

As a result of his belief in the scientific, universal truth of historical materialism, Plekhanov advanced the controversial doctrine of two revolutions. Because to get to the socialist revolution, they were all aiming at, there must first be a bourgeois democratic revolution, which meant the capitalist mode of production must come to Russia. Now this theory is going to be a tough sell to Russian radicals who have just spent the last few decades agreeing that the industrial capitalist mode of production sounded really crappy, and it was to be avoided at all costs. Remember: the basic premise of Tkachev’s now or never imperative was that the revolution had to be carried out before capitalism arrived in Russia, otherwise it would be too late. Plekhanov reversed that position. Capitalism had to come to Russia before the socialist revolution could be carried out. So socialists should join with the bourgeoisie in the historical materialist approved overthrow of tsarist autocracy. Then, the socialist must endure a period of bourgeois capitalist rule in order to develop the forces of production to the point where the proletarian socialists could stage their own second revolution. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is what young Marx was arguing during the early days of the revolution of 1848. We talked about this in Episode 10.2, that the workers must join with the liberal democrats to overthrow the monarchies of Germany before the next revolution, the workers’ revolution, could be staged, and it was a theory of Marx himself grew disenchanted with by 1849.

One of the other big things that drew Plekhanov to Marx was that Marx positively savaged the ideological fixation on the revolutionary potential of the peasants. Personal experience had turned Plekhanov into a convinced skeptic of the revolutionary potential of the peasant, and he found in Marx the theoretical justification for this conclusion. So Plekhanov fundamentally disagreed with Lavrov about this. He believed there was no hope in trying to educate the peasants to revolution, it can’t be done! And more importantly, it didn’t need to be done. Because according to historical materialism, what was going to happen was that the centralizing forces of capitalism were going to draw the peasants from their rural villages into the cities, where they would be turned into the urban proletariat, and thus become the future revolutionary class. Because unlike the hopeless sack of potatoes that was the peasantry, you could cultivate the revolutionary class consciousness of the urban proletariat. Thus the anarchist’s claim that the Russian peasant villages were the future of Russia was all wrong. Those villages were in fact, in archaic relic of the past that had to be destroyed.

Now, as we saw last week, this disenchantment with the peasants was shared by Pyotr Tkachev. But Plekhanov and Tkachev drew different tactical conclusions. As we talked about last week, Tkachev said the peasants are hopeless, that’s why we need a vanguard party of hyper disciplined revolutionaries to do the work of toppling the tsar. Plekhanov blasted this because, first of all, it tried to do an end run around historical materialism. A small group of terrorists could not initiate a socialist revolution by blowing up the tsar. Feudalism could only be toppled by the historical forces of bourgeois capitalism, that was how the first revolution had to go. And even when it came time for the second socialist revolution of the proletariat, that had to be carried out as a mass movement of workers once they had to become the largest class of boardwalk capitalist society. The dictatorship of the proletariat was not a dictatorship in the sense that Blanqui or Tkachev used the term, a tiny all-powerful revolutionary committee, but it was instead a true democratic majority capturing control of the state from the minority bourgeois capitalists.

So in the debate between mass movement versus small vanguard party, the Emancipation of Labor Group were firmly in the mass movement camp. So all of these beliefs and positions we’ve just talked about mean that the Emancipation of Labor Group is mostly in alignment with German social democrats. Now, the definition of social democrat and social democracy has changed a bit over the years, but in the terminology of the 1870s and 1880s, it meant socialists who were willing to engage in parliamentary politics. To build so-called labor parties. To stand for election. To advocate democratic civil rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association. They also agitated for practical labor reforms, safer conditions, higher wages, the eight hour day. Now this kind of activity was scorned by more radical socialists and especially the anarchists, who thought this kind of political work granted legitimacy to the bourgeois state, and that supporting labor reforms would sap the necessary revolutionary energy of the working classes without actually emancipating them. Social democrats, the Emancipation of Labor Group among them, believed that the state could and should be engaged with, especially as a necessary step in the doctrine of two revolutions.

So in the initial proclamation of principles for the emancipation of Labor Group, they said that the first goal would be establishing a democratic constitution for the state. This was also important not just as a step in historical materialism but also because of the Emancipation of Labor Group held democratic principles. They did not advocate small dictatorial committees. Again, when they advocated for the dictatorship of the proletariat, they meant majority rule democracy. The Emancipation of Labor Group was conscious of the disdain held by radical Russian revolutionaries of this watered down German social democracy, and it’s partly why they called themselves the Emancipation of Labor Group, and not the more obvious, and more accurate, Russian social democrats.

Not that it really mattered. It is safe to say that initially, this all landed somewhere between a thud and a whimper. Mostly, it just didn’t land at all. Those revolutionaries still left in Russia were all still with People’s Will, whether out of stubbornness or true belief. And the scathing attacks from Plekhanov were not going to coax anyone towards his new ideas. Even without the acerbic language, he was still advocating literary study and propagandizing, not direct revolutionary action one. Old Bakuninist veteran scoffed that they weren’t even revolutionaries anymore, they were sociologists. Old Lavrov, meanwhile, was livid at their activities because he believed that in these difficult post-assassination years, that the remaining revolutionaries had to focus on maintaining a broad platform of unity that kept everybody together. The Emancipation of Labor Group seemed to focus on sharpening and exacerbating internal divisions.

Meanwhile, those who got past all of that still couldn’t quite grasp how Marxist doctrine was ever going to work in Russia. Or this argument about how we have to embrace the horrors of western capitalism? I mean, dude, I’m a revolutionary because that’s what I’m opposed to, not because I want to invite it into my backyard.

Striking out at home, the Emancipation of Labor Group also got very little love from western socialists in Germany and France and Britain, who were equally frustrated that they were focused on the wrong things. From the perspective of western socialists, Russian tsardom meant only one thing: it was the war chest, arsenal, and bunker of last resort for reactionary conservatism everywhere in Europe. The tsar had agents in every capital, money was paid to western politicians to oppose socialism and anarchism and even liberalism. Marx personally hated the tsar so much that he believed every single conspiracy theory about malevolent Russian interference, no matter how farfetched. Not that Russian diplomacy wasn’t heavy on supporting reactionary politics in the west, it was. It’s just that it wasn’t all true. I mean, Marx openly believed that William Gladstone had been on the tsar’s payroll.

So what the western socialists wanted revolutionaries in Russia to do was toppled the tsar. That’s it. That’s all they really cared about. Peasants, workers, mass movements, small vanguard parties, we don’t care, just get it done. So they were happy to support a movement like People’s Hand, which had a singular focus on toppling the tsar. They didn’t want to hear about the slow process of historical materialism needing to play out in Russia, especially not from the Emancipation of Labor Group, whose attacks on their former comrades threatened the unity of the Russian revolutionary underground.

Arguably the most disheartening thing of all though, was the attitude of Marx and Engels themselves. They’re still alive and kicking out there. At various points in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Vera Zasulich exchanged letters with both men, and their replies were not exactly encouraging. For one thing, Marx and Engels were among those western socialists who just wanted the hated tsar to fall by any means necessary. For the good of humanity, that, and that alone, needed to be the focus of the revolutionaries in Russia. But on top of that, Marx and Engels also tended to believe that Russia was not on the same historical materialist path as western Europe, and they considered the kind of arguments Plekhanov would be making in the 1880s and 1890s a misuse of their work. And they said so. Marx warned Zasulich not to mix western theory with Russian culture and history. Russia was not even in the feudal mode of production at the moment. Politically and economically, feudal culture is a transactional arrangement between autonomous families and a landowning aristocracy. Russia had never had these kinds of transactional arrangements. Russia had always been the tsar’s property, everyone else just lived there.

What Marx and Engels believed was that Russia was off on this dead end of evolutionary historical development called the Asiatic mode of production. And I mentioned this mode very briefly in Episode 10.4, when I was introducing the stages of historical materialism, and I’ll just quote myself here to remind you: there are slightly modified versions that involve an Asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that existed in the area between tribal and ancient. But I’ll set those aside for now.

Well, the time has come to pick them up, at least the Asiatic mode.

Marx and Engels only discuss the Asiatic mode of production in a few scant and not very deep passages. But they dubbed it Asiatic because they were trying to describe certain civilizations that grew up on the Asian continent after the Neolithic revolution in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Indus Valley, and China. Politically the Asiatic mode was defined by a ruler presented as the theocratic incarnation of the gods on earth. Economically, this god king owned all the land, and was able to marshal huge workforces to build large capital cities, huge monuments, and infrastructure projects, most especially, large and complex irrigation systems to make the land more productive. Technological and cultural progress would have given the Asiatic civilizations, writing, mathematics, record keeping, calendars, and sophisticated engineering, all of which would be utilized by a central bureaucracy that ruled a population, mostly confined to small communities that knew only their own timeless little village, and whose only political role was total obedience to the god kings. This sense of eternal timelessness pervaded this alleged Asiatic mode of production, and lacking the willingness or the desire to further develop the forces of production, which remember for Marx, is the motor force of history, the Asiatic civilizations eventually decay and pass away, even if it takes thousands of years. Now, I’m not endorsing any of this as a theory, I’m just saying this was an idea Marx and Engels had been kicking around since the 1850s.

And so, when Marx and Engels looked at Russian tsardom, they saw the Asiatic mode of production: isolated, timeless communities acting as obedient slaves to a god king who exercises power through a central bureaucracy, and a society with no strong concept of private property. They were very skeptical of guys like Bakunin who argued that the timeless Russian commune could be the basis of future socialist society, because Marx and Engels believed those communes were part of the foundational essence of a dead end Asiatic civilization. And they were skeptical of anyone who argued a robust bourgeois class could emerge out of this environment. The pieces just weren’t there, culturally, economically, or psychologically.

Now Marx and Engels did provide a preface to a new Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto Plekhanov drafted in 1882. And they said that toppling the tsar through violent insurrection was possible, and might hopefully serve as a “signal for a proletarian revolution in the west.” And if it did, then it was possible that the effects of that proletarian revolution in the west would rebound back to Russia, and allow the economic forces underlying their historical commune to develop, and serve as the basis of Russian communist society. But there is no hint that they thought Russia was itself on some inexorable road to proletarian revolution. Now Marx died in March of 1883, just before the Emancipation of Labor Group was officially formed, but Engels kept right on living. And throughout the 1880s, this very first Russian Marxist society did not exactly earn his hardy approval or endorsement.

So it was rough going in the early years. The Emancipation of Labor Group had no real allies, they had no contacts in Russia to spread their work, they were all dirt poor and struggling to feed themselves and their families. But they kept at it. Zasulich translated Marx’s own works to make sure the primary source material was available. Plekhanov wrote his pamphlets and books, explaining why they were right and everyone else was wrong. Axelrod studied western labor movements and developed personal working relationships with German social democrats like Edward Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. And finally, Lev Deutsch was the logistical organizer, fundraiser, and chief smuggler.

But the results were discouraging. Deutsch returned from one trip to Russia saying that there were less than ten people in the whole empire who cared about what they were doing. Then in 1884, the group was dealt a serious setback, when Deutsch was arrested in Germany on a smuggling run. It was general policy not to extradite political targets back to Russia, but Deutsch still had an attempted murder charge on his head, making him a little more than a common criminal. Extradited back to Russia, he was tried and sentenced. But surprisingly, he wasn’t hanged; he was sent into perpetual exile in Siberia. His devastated comrades in Switzerland assumed they would never see him again. Though, spoiler alert: he would later write a memoir called 16 Years in Siberia, in case you’re wondering exactly how long his perpetual exile wound up lasting.

But really for the rest of the 1880s, it was down to just the three of them. Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod. Now, they were not totally friendless. Younger Russian students studying in Switzerland were interested in their ideas. But it’s fair to say that by the dawn of 1890, the Emancipation of Labor Group had zero influence on socialist politics at home or abroad. But much to everyone’s shock, the forces of history turned in their favor. Plekhanov suddenly appeared to be a mad prophet who had predicted a great flood, and who everyone had laughed at, and then the flood suddenly came.

And next week, we’re going to talk about that flood. Because while the industrial capitalist mode of production was going to have trouble coming around on its own, if it was spurred by, say, an energetic finance minister who was tasked with modernizing Russia so it can compete with western rivals economically and politically, if that happened, then the resulting industrial boom might look exactly like the historical materialist transformation Plekhanov had been talking about, and many up and coming radicals would look around and agree that the growing urban proletariat, not the dying rural peasantry, was the revolutionary future of Russia.

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.16: The Russian Colony

Today, we are finally going to start mixing together our general history of Russia with those introductory episodes we did on 19th century revolutionary theory. We are going to mix them together like baking soda and vinegar to create a couple of those science fair volcanoes. The first one is labeled 1905, that one won’t really work and will just kind of froth itself into a disappointing mess. The second one is labeled 1917. That one is going to get the fire department called. Now that metaphor took like seven drafts to get right, so you better not be rolling your eyes out there. To begin this mixing process, we are actually going to replay the events of last week’s episode from the perspective of a very specific set of people: those who would push toward the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, not from inside Russia, but from abroad. And even more specifically, from the so-called Russian colony in Switzerland. The Russian colony had a radical wing, dedicated to advancing revolution in Russia by way of proclamations and pamphlets and books. And it featured, among other luminaries, the scruffy old anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, but we are much more interested in the generation that will follow Bakunin, the generation who had succeeded the so-called men of the forties as the driving force of revolutionary theory and practice. And it is through this next generation that we will open up a whole new chapter in our series on the Russian Revolution.

We begin this new chapter with a man named Pavel Axelrod. Now I’m introducing Pavel Axelrod first, not because he’s the most important person in our story, though he is pretty important, but because through the 1870s, he very helpfully bounces back and forth between Russia and Switzerland and meets every person and engages in every debate that I want to talk about today. So let’s begin with Pavel Axelrod.

Pavel Axelrod was born in Chernigov in Northern Ukraine in 1850. He was Jewish and his parents were pretty poor, making Axelrod relatively unique among his radical comrades in that he did not come from the more elite rungs of society. He was not just for the people, he was of the people. He started dipping his toe into radical ideas as a teenager, and when he went off to Kiev University, he read an eclectic mix of western authors: John Stuart Mill. The German social Democrat Ferdinand Lassalle, he also read stuff coming out of the Russian émigré community like Bakunin, who we already know, and Pyotr Lavrov, who we are about to meet.

An idealistic young radical, Axelrod spent his free time working at literacy programs for workers. He also took a job tutoring the daughters of a guy named Isaac Kaminer, himself a Ukrainian Jew who was a notable local physician with a radical socialist bent. Axelrod said it was here at the Kaminer home that he first encountered the work of Karl Marx, though he admitted he did not really understand it at the time. More important than Axelrod’s encounter with Marx though was his encounter with Nadezhda Kaminer, one of the young women he was tutoring. Nadezhda was herself rapidly radicalizing, and the two were very soon engaged, beginning a lifelong revolutionary partnership.

The political and emotional inclinations of the young couple naturally led them to support the Going to the People in the mad summer of 1874. But Axelrod took on a unique mission: there were rumors of a Robin Hood-like bandit running around out there, raiding rich estates and distributing the proceeds to the poor. And there was some hope that, if the rumors were true, that a guy like that would be a great candidate to run a peasant revolution. So basically Axelrod went off looking for Pancho Villa, but never found him. When he came home in September 1874, he found his old network of like-minded friends decimated by arrests and flights and disillusionment. Believing he too was very likely to be arrested, Axelrod split for Berlin where Nadezhda joined him a few weeks later. The couple then headed to Geneva in January of 1875, where they were officially married. Now life was difficult in Switzerland, and through these years, they lived on the knife’s edge of real poverty, but in between working crummy jobs for low pay, they also entered the intellectual and social milieu that was the revolutionary wing of Switzerland’s Russian colony.

By the time the Axelrods arrived in 1875, the most famous member of the Russian colony, Mikhail Bakunin was mostly in retirement, with his influence on the politics of northern Europe on the wane thanks to the split of the first international a few years earlier. But Bakuninist anarchist groups were still flourishing in Italy and Spain, and his message fit in very nicely with Russian narodism, the Russian populism we talked about last week, which had a special emphasis on getting the peasants to erupt from their communal villages to throw off the superfluous and parasitic tsarist state. A lot of Bakunin’s worldview was in fact shaped by the model of the Russian communal villages he carried around in his head. And Bakunin had no doubt that such a popular revolution would come. He said that the Russian peasant was revolutionary by instinct and socialist by nature.

Old Bakunin was not the only game in town though, and in 1872, another radical immigrant named Pyotr Lavrov had arrived in Zurich to challenge the intellectual ascendancy of Bakuninist anarchism. Lavrov was almost 50 when he settled in Switzerland. He had been born back in 1826, endowed with a polymath’s intellect, and he had spent 20 years teaching mathematics while using his free time to study everything else. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Lavrov directed his vast knowledge of natural science, history, economics, and psychology towards radical politics. This got him in big trouble and an 1868 Lavrov was exiled to the Ural mountains, but he escaped and fled west, eventually finding his way to Paris. Now, more radical than ever, he joined the First International in 1870, and was still in Paris when many of his friends in the International staged the insurrection that created the Paris Commune in 1871. A thrilled supporter of the commune, Lavrov decamped Paris to go drum up support abroad. But of course the whole thing fell apart in one very bloody week, and Lavrov never came back. When he settled in Zurich in 1872, he quickly established himself as an alternative to Bakunin inside the socialist and anarchist circles of the Russian colony.

Now Lavrov and Bakunin shared a lot in common. They both wanted to destroy the tsarist state root and branch. They dreamed of remaking the existing social order. They both identified the peasant commune, autonomously governed and collectively owned, as the natural future for Russia. They also thought that politics as such was a waste of time, energy and spirit. Theirs was not a struggle for the right to vote, for freedom of the press, or for an eight hour day. This was about a complete and thorough going revolutionary rebirth.

So not unlike the Marx/Bakunin conflict, the Lavrov/Bakunin conflict was not so much about where do we want to go, but how do we get there? Lavrov insisted on a course of slow, steady education of the people, that knowledge was power. Indeed, knowledge was the only power that could lead to a successful revolution. Lavrov thus assigned a special role to the intelligentsia: to educate, prepare, and propagandize the peasants, to raise their revolutionary consciousness. He described the task of the radical intelligentsia as that of a penitent who must make amends for the historical crime of subjecting the peasants to millennia of ignorant impoverishment. Lavrov’s ideas helped fuel the Going to the People, and he was not dissuaded by its resolute failure. In his mind, the going to the People had been altogether too brief and too superficial. He had said long term commitment, not go to summer camp.

Bakunin of course thought this was all wrong. The problem with the Going to the People was the presumption that the peasants needed any further education at all. They don’t need a bunch of idealistic but misguided rich kids coming around at teach them about revolution. For Bakunin, anyone who doesn’t like their landlord is a potential revolutionary. The only role Bakunin assigned to the intelligentsia was to be ready to act as a communication link between these spontaneous local rebellions he predicted would get going any day now. This was a prediction he would keep making pretty much until the day he died in July of 1876.

But this argument between Bakunin and Lavrov was about whether the peasants needed to be educated, and how long it would be until they were ready for revolution. But there was fundamental agreement between Bakunin and Lavrov that the revolution would come from below, that it had to come from below. It had to be by the people, in order for it to be for the people.

But there was this other dude out there who entered the Russian colony preaching an altogether different and very enticing message: this was Pyotr Tkachev. Born in the lower rungs of the gentry in 1844, Tkachev got involved in radical politics as a teenager, and was arrested for the first time in 1861 for participating in some student strikes in St. Petersburg. And it was while imprisoned for this that he was fed even more radical ideas. When Tkachev got out of prison, he fell into the circle surrounding the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev, who we talked about last week. And so was among those rounded up in the fallout of the murder Nechaev committed in 1869.

Tkachev had nothing to do with the murder though, and was eventually released from prison, but he still wound up exiled from Russia. So coming out of Nechaev’s hardcore world of compact disciplined revolutionary action Tkachev came to Switzerland telling everyone that it was hopeless to wait for the people, impossible to educate and cultivate them the way Lavrov demanded. The revolution must be carried out by a small, utterly committed revolutionary vanguard party who could topple the repressive tsarist apparatus and create a revolutionary dictatorship. This program gets Tkachev described as a Jacobin, or a Russian Blanquist, since this is exactly the theory that Blanqui preached. And the foundation of that theory is that while the revolution was for the people, it could not be by the people. And for Tkachev, ignoring the people was an asset, not a liability. He believed that unless some kind of unified revolutionary dictatorship was established with the power to remake society, the temperamental resistance to change inherent in all people would simply be an impossible obstacle to overcome. He especially thought that Bakunin’s idea that destroying the central government without having anything to go in its place would lead to disastrous chaos.

Now the other key point about Tkachev is that he believed the revolution had to be carried out right now, immediately, ASAP. And we’re going to talk about this a bit more next week, but Tkachev believed the revolution had to be accomplished before western style industrial capitalism set in, and all of these guys suspected that western style industrial capitalism was coming to Russia. Tkachev believed that once that happened, the anti-revolutionary forces would simply be too strong. Now, partly owing to the death of Bakunin in 1876, and partly owing to the course of events back in Russia, Tkachev wound up becoming very popular among the post Going to the People radicals who would soon be forming People’s Will.

So I’m going back now to Pavel Axelrod. Axelrod himself mostly fell in with the Bakuninists after arriving in Switzerland, Lavrov was too passive. Tkachev too much an authoritarian Jacobin. And in criticizing Tkachev, Axelrod would use the same eternally devastating observation made by Bakuninists everywhere: that if you’ve asked the most ardent revolutionary with absolute power, they become a tyrant within a year, guaranteed. That there is a low probability they will use absolute power to advance liberation and socialism, and a high probability they will use it to just stay in power at all costs. That’s how these things go.

So as a promising young Bakuninist, Axelrod was sent back to Russia in 1875 on a mission. First, he was to make contact with other anarchist groups in Russia and encourage their members to volunteer for the army. This was both about getting anarchists inside the military to radicalize the rank and file, and about getting military training that would be very helpful when the revolution came. But Axelrod was also tasked with seeing what he could do about steering this thing called the Chigirin Affair. Some peasants in Ukraine had gotten very upset, and they were in low grade insurrection against their local officials. But these insurrectionary peasants were operating under the assumption that their good father the tsar supported them in their efforts. A few revolutionaries proposed using this insurrection to the movement’s advantage: let’s print phony but official looking proclamations from this are saying, yes, go into revolt. I am with you. I support you. The idea was that any de-stabilizing revolt was good. But Axelrod was there repping the émigré Bakuninists and saying, don’t tell people that support from the tsar is a necessary condition for them to go into revolt. This does nothing to help with our real long-term problem of getting them to overcome their traditional sentimental, and in Bakuninist eyes, ignorant attachment to the tsar.

Among those encouraging the exploitation of the Chigirin peasants was an old acquaintance of Axelrod’s named Lev Deutsch. And I’m sure I’m mispronouncing that, but that’s his name? D E U T S C H Deutsch. So I’m going to say Deutsch. Deutsch was five years younger than Axelrod. He was born in Tulchyn in 1855 to a jewish father and a peasant mother. He started out young and idealistic, and got swept up in the desire to educate and liberate the people. So at the age of 19, Deutsch had joined the Going to the People, believing that once they were enlightened to the realities of the world that the peasants would naturally rise up and overthrow their oppressors, the revolution would probably be over by Christmas. This is not how it went. And Deutsch himself managed to avoid getting arrested, but like Axelrod, he came home again in the summer of 1875 and found his old friends and comrades either arrested, fled, or turning their backs on radical politics.

But Deutsch didn’t want to give up. And when this little insurrectionary crisis started brewing in Chigirin, he wanted to stoke and use that energy any way possible. And though Axelrod tut tutted the plan, he and Deutsch further cemented a friendship, a comradeship, that would last for the rest of their lives. And before moving on, Axelrod probably played a role in encouraging Deutsch to volunteer for the Russian army, which he did in October, 1875, becoming a private and self- assigning himself, the mission to radicalize his regimen and learn all he could about military logistics, tactics, and weaponry.

Axelrod, meanwhile, kept moving from city to city, trying to make contact with revolutionary groups and keep them on the pure Bakuninist path. By the end of 1875, he was in St. Petersburg, where he met probably the most important person we’ll talk about here today, certainly more important than Axelrod himself: Georgi Plekhanov. When they met, Axelrod was an experienced revolutionary of 25, while Plekhanov was a yet-unbaptized 19-year-old student. Plekhanov missed going to the people, and was only just now really finding his way into revolutionary politics. The eldest son of a small land owning family may own 270 acres and 50 serfs, Plekhanov spent the first seven years of his education in a military academy, where he was noted mostly for being intelligent, well-liked, and well-behaved. In 1873, Plekhanov transferred to the Metallurgical Institute in St. Petersburg, a university focused on mining and engineering, and found himself drawn to the exciting modern ideas coming out of France and Germany. Prior to meeting Axelrod, Plekhanov mostly dreamed of traveling abroad to advance his education, and both Axelrod, and Plekhanov implied that it was this encounter here in 1875, that set Plekhanov off on his path to revolution. But this wasn’t some kind of abrupt, overnight conversion, as Axelrod’s biographer, Abraham Asher, points out, they only met because the Plekhanov’s house was considered a safe place for an itinerant revolutionary like Axelrod to crash, which means he already had one foot in the door.

During their initial conversations, Axelrod discovered in Plekhanov an intelligent, well-read, passionate, creative articulate mind that would be of enormous value to the revolution, so he encouraged Plekhanov to give up petty thoughts of going abroad to complete his education. He was needed here, now, at home. The cause was the thing. Axelrod then kept moving, and Plekhanov stayed behind in St. Petersburg. When the new Land and Liberty party formed in 1876 and held their first public demonstration at the end of the year, Plekhanov was there. He gave a fiery speech denouncing the tsar, then had to disappear underground. He never did finish his degree.

By early 1876, Axelrod was back in Switzerland, where he found the Russian colony splitting between the still faithful Bakuninists, the slow and steady Lavrovists, and Tkachev’s Jacobin militancy, with Tkachev now taking a decisive lead. Axelrod himself remained somewhere between Lavrov and Bakunin, still believing absolutely that if a social revolution was going to come, it would have to be staged and carried out by the people themselves. Tkachev’s revolutionary dictatorship was sure to be short on revolutionary and long on dictatorship. But he was never a doctrinaire Bakuninist, and certainly agreed with Lavrov that the people did require further political education, that they would never just be spontaneously and magically anarchist revolutionaries. But this meant a program of slow and steady cultivation of forces that could erupt when the time was right. But as we saw last week, this puts Axelrod at odds with those back in Russia, who are well on their way towards forming People’s Will; men and women who were concluding that they couldn’t count on the people, that they couldn’t wait that long. We have to destroy the Imperial government by violent revolution and seize power, and we have to do it, like, yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, many of those coming to this conclusion were coming to this conclusion because they were locked up for their role in the debacle that was the failed Going to the People. I mean, it’s not like they hadn’t tried it Lavrov’s way, it just hadn’t worked. One of those in prison was an old friend of Lev Deutsch’s, which is how Lev Deutsch’s recently launched military career lasted all of about four months. When he found out he was in a position to help, Deutsch helped. In February 1876, Deutsch sprang his buddy from prison and then deserted from the army. Now on the run, living under an assumed name, Deutsch joined a militant revolutionary cell in Kiev, which led, in June of 1876, to the most infamous moment in his own revolutionary career.

An old comrade picked up in the Going to the People had been released very quickly — no harm, no foul. And it was widely suspected this guy had given up every name he could think of in exchange for clemency. In his memoir, Deutsch says, if the guy had just retired from radical politics quietly, no one would have harmed a hair on his head. But instead this guy came around looking to rejoin the party. Some newer members let him in, but Deutsch and another guy recognized this probable informant and resolved to take care of the rat permanently. They invited this guy on a trip to Odessa, and on the road beat him nearly to death and left his body on the side of the road with a note pinned to his chest that said, roughly, this is what happens to rats.

But unfortunately for Deutsch, they beat this guy nearly to death, not to death. The guy lived, and he spilled a bunch more names. Deutsch himself once again managed to get away, but most of his immediate comrades were rounded up. Deutsch himself then returned to the area around Chigirin, where he rejoined the effort to trick the peasants into going into revolt in the name of the tsar. But though they successfully recruited — or tricked, however you want to say it — some 2000 people into this phony scheme, it was eventually betrayed, and everything fell apart by the summer of 1877, and Deutsch was finally arrested. He was facing a certain death sentence, but he managed to escape from prison in May of 1878 and go on the lam again. By that point, both the government and the revolutionaries had been thrown into violent confusion, thanks to the near assassination of Governor General Trepov in January of 1878, and then the shocking acquittal of the assailant a few months later, 27-year-old veteran revolutionary Vera Zasulich.

Now for the sake of moving through events last week, I only noted the assassination attempt and its consequences, but I do now need to fully introduce the doer of the deed. Vera Zasulich had been born in Smolensk in 1851 into a family of relatively impoverished lower gentry. Her father died when she was three and little Vera was sent off to live with wealthier relatives who saw to her education. Intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she graduated school in 1866 and went off to St. Petersburg to work as a clerk. As a young woman in the 1860s who was intelligent, precocious, and with an instinctively rebellious spirit, she was drawn into the nihilist circles where men and women considered themselves equals, unbound by the old repressive patriarchal family structures. Her two sisters soon joined her in these progressive egalitarian circles. Fully radicalized before she turned 20 years old, Zasulich spent her off hours working as a literacy tutor to educate workers towards dignity and self-confidence. And it was at one of these literacy workshops in the late 1860s that she encountered the soon to be infamous Sergei Nechaev. Nechaev tried to recruit Zasulich into his little cell, but she remained aloof. He kept after it though, and a few months later, he declared that he was madly in love with her, which Zasulich dismissed as him trying to manipulate her on behalf of his own agenda, and she remained aloof. But not aloof enough.

She did let Nechaev use her address to send and receive mail, and so when he murdered that guy and skipped town in 1869, Zasulich was also caught up in the resulting police sweep and spent the next few years in prison. When she was released, she settled in Kiev and immediately resumed her radical activities, joining that same militant revolutionary cell in Kiev that Deutsch would join just a few years later. In Kiev, Zasulich was highly regarded as a natural leader, sincere, magnetic, and committed to the cause. She spent her time working as a typesetter for an underground press operation. And it was while following the course of the trial of the 193 in 1877 that she and a friend of hers resolved on the double murder pact that we talked about last week. And while her friend failed to kill the prosecutor in the trial of the 193, Zasulich returned to St. Petersburg. She got into see Trepov, she pulled out a revolver, and she shot him point blank in the chest.

This assassination attempt, and the even more amazing acquittal a few months later made Zasulich a legend in the underground, a woman who had the courage and the guts to do what was necessary. But the interesting twist is that this is simultaneously the moment when Zasulich herself turned away from advocating terrorist violence as an effective means of revolution. The debate about terrorism, which had begun when she shot Trepov in January of 1878, intensified in April, 1879, when Alexander Soloviev nearly shot the tsar — that’s the time Alexander dodged five bullets running away from his would be assassin in a frantic zigzag. The majority of revolutionaries out there regretted only that the tsar yet lived. They were all now fully on board with the idea that the tsar must die. So they embraced Tkachev, and his call for an immediate vanguard style revolution to kill the tsar, overthrow the government and seize power.

But as we also talked about last week, there was that smaller minority group who still followed something along the Trepov and Bakunin lines: that the revolution had to originate from below. The tsar had to be toppled by an earthquake, not a lead pipe to the back of the head. And looky here, wouldn’t you know it, the core of that minority group was: all the people we’ve talked about today. Pavel Axelrod, Lev Deutsch, Vera Zasulich, and emerging as their main intellectual leader, Georgi Plekhanov, who had by now had his revolutionary baptism by way of two brief stints in jail. They continued to insist that propagandizing education and building the revolution from below was essential.

In August of 1879, the split inside the Land and liberty party became permanent. The majority formed People’s Will and went off to wage their terror campaign on behalf of a political revolution, while the smaller group around Plekhanov formed Black Repartition. Based in St. Petersburg and aiming to keep up their own separate propaganda efforts, the whole crew came together in the same place at the same time very briefly in the fall of 1879. But there was a lot of heat on Plekhanov and Zasulich and Deutsch, and they resolved to temporarily leave the country, inviting Axelrod to stay behind in the capital and act as editor of their press operation. But I am now required by law to tell you that when this group departed for their quote unquote temporary sojourn in January of 1880, that they would not in fact, return to Russia for 37 long years.

Now Axelrod wasn’t far behind his friends, their press was seized almost immediately by the police and he had to go back underground. And with almost everyone left in Russia now on board with People’s Will Axelrod left for Switzerland in June of 1880. Which turned out to be just in time, because the cops burst in on his last known address just a few days later.

Now in among the Russian colony of Switzerland, the members of Black Repartition continued to argue for their side of the split with People’s Will. They tried in vain to convince their comrades that this path of terrorist violence would backfire. Whatever hopes they had that their exile would be temporary were blown to pieces along with Tsar Alexander the second in March of 1881. The aftermath of that assassination was repression, reaction, and a shattering of People’s Will as a viable revolutionary organization, just as the members of Black Repartition had predicted.

And next week we will open with that swift and thoroughgoing repression, and the reaction from our little cadre that is still Black Repartition. It was no longer safe for them to come home. It would probably never be safe for them to come home. And as the split with what was left of People’s Will became permanent, they decided to form a new revolutionary party based on new reading they had been doing in their now accidentally permanent exile. Dubbing themselves the Group for the Emancipation of Labor, they would be the founders of the first party of Russian Marxists.

 

 

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Episode 10.15: The Tsar Must Die

Before we get going this week, I want to remind everybody that I will be at the Sound Education Conference from September the ninth to the 12th. I’ll be giving my own talk and then also doing a panel with the History of Byzantium. I also have interviews lined up with great podcasts like the Eastern Border and Pax Britannica, so you’ll also get to hear me coming out of multiple other podcasts in the near future and I’ll bump any and all interviews that come out of this. I hope to see you there.

So where we left it last time was in the midst of this era of great reform. When the emancipation of the serfs was followed by political and judicial reforms, all under the auspices of the Tsar Liberator. But where we really left things was that the expectations created by this era of great reform would soon be going unmet.

Now Alexander the Second had loosened censorship a little bit in the leadup to emancipation and public discussion of ideas and events were now moderately tolerated, as long as they stayed within certain bounds. This discussion was most gratifyingly embraced by a small but growing segment of the population that was just now being dubbed the intelligentsia, a term I’m sure you’re all familiar with, that was being coined right now here in Russia, in the mid 19th century. The intelligentsia described a group of non-elite, non-noble, or at least lower noble educated men of society. The lawyers and doctors and businessmen who were beginning to assert their own tastes and preoccupations ideas and desires into Russian culture. They were now both the creators and audience for books, art, literature, philosophy, poetry, and music, and this was in contrast to the old noble patronage model, where the tastes preoccupations ideas and desires of the aristocracy reign supreme. The intelligentsia tended to be pretty liberal in its outlook, especially those joining the conversation in this age of great reform. They were keen to improve Russian society, and they lauded the tsar’s good work, but they also didn’t want to rock the boat too much after all, their own property and position might be at stake.

There was, however, a more radical faction inside this intelligentsia who wanted more than just liberal reform, who would not cheerlead the great reforms the government was unrolling, but rather criticize them for not going far enough, or for not being implemented fully. These radicals, as you can imagine, tended to be younger and more plebeian. They were too young to have really been stamped by the military autocracy of Nicholas the First, and they now are arrived as energetic teenagers and 20-somethings in the late 1850s and early 1860s, in an environment that encouraged reform and rejuvenation and reappraisal, and some of them hoped, revolution.

These young radicals were a long way from the liberal noble Decemberists. They were also well removed from the now middle-aged and middle-class intellectuals who had gone through the 1830s and 1840s in various semi-secret literary societies who dared to read prescribed books and articles. This new younger set was a irrevent, iconoclastic, and ready for action.

Their hero was a guy named Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky was the lowborn son of a priest, who graduated from seminary and then took a master’s degree in literature from St. Petersburg university. He was in his late twenties when the tsar announced the goal of emancipating the serfs, and was by then already coming into his own as a journalist. He was a student of western ideas and new socialist writers like Fourier; he had read and absorbed his exile countrymen like Herzen and Bakunin. But he also moved away from strict philosophy and economics, and also absorbed the rapid advances being made in the natural sciences. We are now in the age of Darwin, so he was less interested in abstract German philosophy and more interested in concrete, evolutionary biology, Chernyshevsky wanted to elevate and center the narod, which we would translate as the people, and serves as a kind of idealized abstraction, not unlike the German volk. Chernyshevsky synthesized a set of political principles that define the next generation of social and political battles: narodnichestvo, or to westernize it, so I don’t have to keep trying to pronounce it: narodism. Chernyshevsky envisioned a kind of agrarian socialism that could spring naturally from the already existent village communes. He was personally and temperamentally a revolutionary, but kept his prose mostly clear of those kinds of suggestions, though he did warn against trusting too much in the tsar’s emancipation scheme. True liberty could never be handed down from above, it would have to be seized from below. Despite being very careful about his published utterances though, Chernyshevsky was ultimately arrested by the Third Section in 1862, and they convicted him on some trumped up charges and sentenced him to exile in Siberia.

The crazy thing though, is that while locked up in the St. Peter St. Paul fortress waiting to be tried, the authorities let Chernyshevsky keep writing, and he produced a novel called What is to Be Done. Then even more incredibly, they allowed this novel to be published in 1863, presumably the censors were like hung over that morning, and didn’t feel like reading it. What is to Be Done tells the story of a young woman who escapes from an arranged marriage, but it is mostly a vehicle for expressing a semi-utopian vision for the future that was built around communal factories. This new utopian order would help end poverty and break down the old and clearly outmoded political, social, and family structures of the present day. What is to Be Done was a landmark event for our budding young social and political revolutionaries of the post-emancipation world. If the title, What is to Be Done, rings a bell, that’s because Lenin said he read the book five times over a single summer and titled his own famous 1902 pamphlet What is to Be Done as an homage that would have been well-known to all his readers. Everyone read Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done, and everyone had something to say about it: Dostoevsky ridiculed it, Tolstoy wrote his own nonfiction track that is often translated into English as What is to Be Done, which outlined his own Christian pacifist anarchism.

But that is the novel’s later legacy. Back here in the 1860s, Chernyshevsky himself was exiled to Siberia, and the young radicals gained a martyr and a legend that gave the novel he left behind an even more urgent, emotional heft. Young radicals treated it as a kind of Bible, and they copied their own dress and styles and attitudes around various characters in the book. And these kids were now creating a little counterculture youth movement for themselves. They deliberately dressed sloppily and were rude in posture and appearance. Men grew their hair long, women cut their’s short. And women were active and enthusiastic participants in this radical counterculture. As of 1859, women were allowed to go to university, and so one of the defining traits of this generation is their equalitarian and feminist flair. They started living together in communal groups, both for ideological and economic reasons. And most scandalously, for polite society, the men and women were living together as equals outside the bonds of marriage. Freeing themselves, at least psychologically from a society they were highly critical of, they indulged in hedonistic and leisurely pursuits. They were a bunch of hippie punks, basically.

Because of this, they came to be called nihilists, which came from the 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. But these young nihilists didn’t believe in nothing, as the name seems to imply, they just didn’t believe in the same things their parents did. And since time immemorial, flummoxed older generations have always accused younger generations of believing in nothing when they found themselves unable to comprehend what they were looking at, which was simply an alternative set of values. So, this is just standard issue is nothing sacred hand-wringing from the oldsters, to which the youngsters would reply it’s not that nothing is sacred, it’s that different things are sacred.

So, what they did believe in was narodism, this new style of revolutionary populism, agrarian socialism run by truly free people. And in this era, a little proto-party called Land in Liberty showed up to espouse those principles. Pamphlets and declarations floated around the underground advocating radical social change: they should reject existing social conventions, educate the peasants about their glorious place at the center of a coming socialist utopia, and topple the parasitic and unnecessary tsarist regime. This younger and more radical faction of the intelligentsia believed that their role was to be the intellectual leaders of a social revolution. They would use the tools found in the first Russia, modern enlightened education, to elevate the other Russia. The second Russia, the mass of Russia, which currently labored in ignorant superstition, they wanted to take that other Russia and make it the center of a real Russia, a post-imperial socialist Russia. I mean, the peasants were already doing collective ownership and managing their own affairs perfectly well, all we need to do is get rid of the tsar.

There was a debate though, about how best to achieve this. Some said, we must go out and educate the peasants, then the revolution will grow inexorably from below. Others said, we must directly attack the imperial state because the state strEngels the minds and sometimes the bodies of the people and prevents them from realizing their natural freedom. In 1866, a minor noble from the Volga region named Dmitry Karakozov decided to cut to the chase. Karakozov had personally concluded that for the revolution to live, the tsar must die. It was nothing personal against Alexander the Second specifically, nor did he think that killing Alexander would in and of itself do anything? Karakozov believed the peasantry was inhibited by superstitious beliefs about the mystical power of the tsar as a quasi-deity, and what he hoped to do was break that spell to prove the emperor was a mortal like everyone else. And once that spell was broken, the people would rise up.

So the tsar was leaving the summer garden on April the Fourth, 1866, when Karakozov approached, pulled out a revolver, and started firing. But he missed. The tsar was not even wounded. Quickly arrested, Alexander came and spoke directly to Karakozov and asked if Karakozov was a Polish nationalist. Karakozov said, no, I am a proud Russian. Which spooked the hell out of the Tsar Liberator, who was pretty sure he had been doing a good job, and hardly in need of being assassinated.

This assassination attempt could not have backfired harder. Rather than triggering a popular uprising, it triggered a reactionary backlash. A heavier hand was put in charge of the Third Section. Liberals were purged from the government. A harsh white terror descended against radicals who were not really given the benefit of the tsar’s new judicial system. Most of them had to run for it, which is the partial origin story of a whole new generation of Russian revolutionaries in exile who we will talk about next week.

The era of great reform that Alexander had kicked off with his speech in Moscow in 1856 ended with those gunshots in 1866. But though this assassination attempt, triggered not revolution but reaction, it was not the end of radical nihilist revolutionaries in Russia. Indeed, this is right when the most infamous of them all shows up: Sergei Nechaev.

Nechaev got into radical politics as a teenager, reading smuggled Bakunin and Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done. Joining in the going fad, he modeled himself after a strict and uncompromising revolutionary character from the book. An extremist from the jump, Nechaev hosted meetings that featured historical idols like Robespierre and Saint-Just, men who had seen what needed to be done and had done it. But in addition to being a hardcore revolutionary, each Nechaev was also part con artist and habitual fabulist. He went abroad in 1869, amidst a flurry of purposefully self-manufactured rumors that he had been arrested. Arriving in Switzerland, he sought out the great old man Bakunin and came bearing another pack of lies: namely that he represented the central committee of a revolutionary network in Russia.

No such committee or network existed.

But Bakunin was excited by Nechaev’s evident, dedicated enthusiasm, and took them on as a protege, much to the delight of Karl Marx, who merrily criticized Bakunin’s association with this unsavory kid who was already dogged by rumors of fanatical craziness, dishonesty, and self-serving recklessness.

While in Switzerland in the spring of 1869, the Nechaev penned the famous, or infamous, Catechism of a Revolutionary. Which is as blunt and uncompromising a statement of revolutionary principle as you are ever likely to read. Those who wanted to join the revolution must dedicate themselves to it with every fiber of their being. The revolution must be put before friends, family love, even the truth. There was no greater exemplar of the ends justify the means than Nechaev, who frankly makes Auguste Blanqui look like Louis Blanc. This was not about embracing immorality, but definitely about embracing amorality. The only compass point was how can this advance the revolution. And it opens, the revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought, and the single passion, for revolution.

But after sneaking back into Russia, Nechaev engaged in some means, that even the greatest of ends, would have a hard time justifying. One of his followers started questioning Nechaev’s story about this secret revolutionary committee no one else had ever heard of, and openly questioning Nechaev’s tactics. So Nechaev decided this guy had to go. Telling their other comrades the guy was an informer, Nechaev and a few accomplices lured him into a trap, killed him, and dumped his body.

A subsequent murder investigation uncovered Nechaev’s little revolutionary ring. Nechaev himself managed to skip town while his duped accomplices were all arrested. Returning to Switzerland, Nechaev was initially welcomed back with open arms by Bakunin, but then his bullshit and his lies and his duplicity caught up with him. Because, as it turns out, revolutionaries do owe each other trust and comradeship, they can’t just use each other. Bakunin distanced himself from Nechaev who was then rebuked by the International. And remember, the International is supposed to be this umbrella organization where everyone is welcome. Well, yeah, everyone, except that guy, we’ve got nothing to do with him.

Mostly friendless, Nechaev was arrested in Switzerland in August of 1872, and then extradited back to Russia to stand trial. He spent the next 10 years in prison, believing he was still working towards the revolution, but he would die in prison in 1882. And though he was an extreme case and something of a black sheep personally, elements of the Catechism of a Revolutionary are going to be picked up by those who came after him. So Nechaev was an infamous, but still influential, figure in revolutionary circles.

Meanwhile, Nechaev’s contemporaries had moved away from his kind of violent fanaticism. Most had taken the white terror as proof that violent direct action was counterproductive. We should plant ideas, not bombs. If we’re going to have a social revolution in favor of decentralized agrarian socialism, we probably need to get the peasants to understand what we’re trying to do.

So in the summer of 1874, we get this famous event called the Going to the People. Thousands of young narodst radicals spontaneously left their homes and jobs and universities in the major cities, and they fanned out to go live among the people. The plan, if there was a plan, was to teach their new neighbors advanced ideas of revolutionary self-consciousness and self-determination. Initially driven by a kind of missionary zeal, the whole thing turned out to be a fiasco. Those who went to the people had never actually met the people, and they found the peasants unreceptive to their ministrations. Disillusionment set in very quickly. The villagers turned out to be dull, conservative, and very suspicious of these strange men and women showing up one day spouting all kinds of heretical nonsense. These kids spoke against the tsar, and the church, bedrocks of traditional life. And the gender equality that was taken for granted amongst these radicals was bizarre and out of place in the traditional villages. Many peasants just arrested the interlopers and handed them over to the authorities. Over about two years, something like 1600 people were arrested and held on the charge of being, you know, vaguely suspicious. By 1876, the Going to the People was going down as an embarrassing debacle. As the Marxist historian Alan Woods puts it: they went to the people, and the people sent them back.

The failure of the Going to the People swung the strategic pendulum away from cultivating revolution from the people below, and back toward direct political action against the powers above. So in 1876, a new revolutionary party called Land and Liberty was founded. They took their name from the earlier 1860s group, but otherwise were completely new. This would not be some loose knit literary society, but a disciplined revolutionary party. This new party was a gifted a huge PR coup by the tsar himself when it came time to punish some of those detained during the Going to the People. Hoping to use the new open trial court system to discredit all of these lunatic kids, the authorities convened a mass trial that became known as the trial of the 193. The press was invited in to cover this trial extensively.

But rather than discrediting the radicals, they each stood up and gave passionate speeches, accurately denouncing the reality of conditions in Russia, and generally ginning up sympathy among anybody who was reading about the trial and the newspaper. The kicker came when the verdict was handed down and there wasn’t even enough evidence to convict like 150 of them, because they hadn’t really done anything provably wrong. The net effect of all this was to further radicalize the radicals. Not only had many of them now been held for years without really having done anything wrong, but it also seemed like maybe the regime was not nearly as powerful as it thought it was, that maybe it could be toppled.

While the trial of the 193 was ongoing in the summer of 1877, there was another little incident where one of the political prisoners was publicly flogged for not removing his cap in the presence of St. Petersburg Governor Fyodor Trepov. The flogging outraged public opinion it also outraged a young woman and her friend, who were already talking themselves into assassinating the prosecutor in the trial of the 193. Now Trepov was also targeted. In January of 1878, our young woman managed to get into Trepov’s office when he made himself available to the public. She walked in, pulled out a gun and shot him. But though she hit Trepov he lived, and the young woman was arrested. Incredibly though, when she stood trial, her case was presided over by a liberal judge, and heard by a sympathetic jury. Then her lawyer successfully made the trial about the victim Trepov, not the would-be assassin, who he said had acted from the noblest of motives. And she was, shockingly, acquitted.

But well aware that the authorities would no doubt rearrest her at the first opportunity, she skipped town, beginning a sojourn that would carry her into prolonged political exile. And many of you out there already know that I have just introduced Vera Zasulich, who we will meet back up with next time, to discuss her foundational role in creating the first Russian Marxist Society in 1883.

After these events, Land and Liberty started fracturing over the question of the utility of political terrorism. There had been other bombings and assassination attempts, some successful, some not, and a majority of Land and Liberty thought this now necessary, a form of self-defense or a righteous verdict they were handing down against guilty tyrants. And the violence was not indiscriminate attacks on civilians. They targeted specific ministers, police officers, provisional governors, and, naturally, the tsar himself. But a smaller minority wanted to focus on propagandizing, organizing, educating, and winning the war of ideas. That all of this violence was a counterproductive distraction, and worse, it was leading to severe reprisals that were crippling their ability to organize further, and alienating them from respectable opinion.

The final split came with the third near-miss assassination attempt of the tsar in 1879, the second attempt, I should mention, was by Polish nationalist whose gun misfired in Paris when the tsar was with Emperor Napoleon the Third for the 1867 Universal Exposition. The third attempt though was here in 1879, and committed by a member of Land and Liberty, who came with the tsar with a revolver, but the emperor saw the weapon in time and dodged five bullets while running away. This latest assassination attempt had two effects: first, certain security powers were taken away from the ones feared and vaunted Third Section. They had been unable to detect or prevent far too many things of late. The other was a permanent split inside Land and Liberty.

A minority faction redubbed itself Black Repartition, and concluded violence was bad and counterproductive. They would focus on their ideological writing and thinking and propagandizing, and they disassociated themselves from the violent majority, and many of them wound up emigrating either to Switzerland or England. Those who remained, now committed to terrorism, restyled themselves Narodnaya Volya, which has always translated in English as, the People’s Will. Now shed of moderates, People’s Will was an overtly political terrorist organization, run by a central committee, and composed of somewhere north of 500 dependable members, of whom about 15% were women. They had cells in every major city, as well as key army garrisons and naval yards. In August 1879, People’s Will passed a death sentence on the tsar, and for the next two years, Russia was a running low-grade warzone. The revolutionaries would kill a governor or a police officer, the state would retaliate. Guns were being pulled out of overcoats, bombs were going off. There were shootouts in the streets, jailbreaks from the prisons, raids on homes and offices. But the goal of People’s Will was not just, kill ’em all. Ideologically the rationale for all this was an aggressive kind of anarchism, that the repressive state apparatus needed to be disorganized, it needed to be attacked until it collapsed. Once this was done, the peasants would be free to self-organize into agrarian socialism that didn’t require them to pay things like redemption payments. So People’s Will believed that political freedom was the key to social change, and political freedom was to be had by destroying the state, and most especially, by killing the tsar.

Emperor Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator, was slow to accept that this threat was really real. For personal, logistical, and political reasons, he didn’t want to alter his habits or routine, even as he avoided near miss assassination attempt number four, a bomb planted to derail his train in December of 1879 that failed only because they missed the train. Then just a few months later in February of 1880, a People’s Will operative went undercover into the Winter Palace disguised as a carpenter, and he managed to plant a bomb in the dining room that was set to host the tsar and his court. The bomb exploded on time, killing 11 and wounding 30, and missed the tsar this time only because Alexander was by chance late to dinner. That was near miss number five. And it would be the last near miss.

After the Winter Palace bombing, the emperor finally realized that this was a major crisis and he needed to respond. First he closed down the Third Section entirely. This was the end of the line for the department that had been created by his father in the wake of the Decemberist revolt back in 1826. The Third Section had been okay tracking high level bureaucrats and grumbling nobles, but were clearly incompetent when it came to tracking down these lower-class terrorists. Dealing with them would require the creation of a whole new secret political police.

The other thing the tsar did was elevate Count Mikhail Loris-Melikov, who counseled the tsar to take a two-pronged approach to all this: first, ruthlessly eradicate the People’s Will and any other revolutionary group. But pair that by announcing the resumption of great reform efforts. Ultimately Loris-Melikov wanted to create a national consultative legislature modeled on and built out of the zemstvos that we talked about last week. So with one hand, choke the enemies we have. With the other, draft reforms that will stop young potential revolutionaries from thinking they need to become revolutionaries at all. The very last decree Tsar Alexander the Second signed was approval for a slate of reforms that he himself acknowledged were the first step towards a political constitution.

But he wasn’t going to live to see any of those possible reforms enacted, nor would they ever be enacted. With this new reform plan possibly having its intended effect of reducing the urgency of revolutionary action, People’s Will put everything they had into killing the tsar. On March the first 1881, the sixth time would be the charm. The tsar’s entourage was traveling along the Catherine Canal in St. Petersburg when a man pushed through the crowd and hurdled a package at the emperor’s coach. The package turned out to be a bomb. It exploded and killed some soldiers and bystanders, but only damaged the tsar’s bulletproof coach, a gift from Emperor Napoleon the Third, dontcha know. When the dazed tsar got out to survey the damage, a second man pushed through the crowd with a second bomb. He tossed it at the tsar’s feet. The explosion was point blank enough that the bomber himself was killed in the explosion. The emperor, meanwhile, was merely torn to pieces: leg blown off, guts hanging out, all that good stuff. His dying body was dragged back to the Winter Palace and the Tsar Liberator died in the very study where he had once signed the Emancipation Decree.

When he breathed his last bloody breath, he was attended by his family, including his own son Alexander, now set to rule as Tsar Alexander the Third, and his 12 year old grandson, little Nicky, who was now heir to the throne. And it would be hard not to draw a lesson from the fate of his dead grandfather, who had done all of these great reforms, and for his benevolent efforts had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.

But we will come back to little Nicky later, because next week, we are going to follow our now threading threads of 19th century revolutionary philosophy and the course of Russian history as they combine into a single narrative. The age of great reform died with the Tsar Liberator in 1881. Now would be a time of a ruthless reaction. But in secret corners of the empire and most especially abroad in the salons of exiled Russian radicals, the candle of revolution would be kept flickering, and it would be maintained long enough to pass it along to the next generation. A generation of boys and girls who were currently a bunch of kids running around in short pants.

But who would, in just a few years, bring the Russian Empire to its knees.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.80: The Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion

Last time we pivoted from revolution to civil war by talking about the peripheral crescent off to the west and south that would become major centers of conflict over the next several years. This week, we are going to start by returning to the Russian heartland to cover how the Soviet government in Moscow navigated their own pivot from revolution to civil war, which for the record, Lenin and the gang didn’t really see much of a distinction between the two. For them, class war was civil war, and civil war was class war. They were not two peas in a pod, they were literally just the one pea, going by two different names. But though Lenin expected and even embraced civil war, I don’t think he suspected how big that civil war was going to get. Because no one expected a wildcard called the Czechoslovak Legion to blow the whole thing sky high.

So given everything we’ve discussed over the past few episodes with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and its humiliating abandonment of huge swaths of territory, I might have tempted you into believing Lenin’s government was only left in charge of a small chunk of territory, some little blob connecting Moscow to Petrograd that amounted to a little more than a glorified city state. But this is really super not the case. Soviet Russia was huge. It encompassed about a million square miles and contained more than 60 million people. It was, in fact, still the largest single political entity in the European orbit, both in area and population. Soviet Russia was bigger than France, was bigger than Germany, it was certainly bigger than any of the individual peripheral bits they had renounced at Brest-Litovsk. And, spoiler alert, it’s going to be one of the big reasons they ultimately win the civil war.

But here in the spring of 1918, the potential resources and manpower the Soviet government could harness from this vast territory was just that: it was potential. The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 did not magically solve all the social, economic, and political dysfunction that had plagued Russia since the start of the war — and also, I suppose, the several centuries before that. Inflation and scarcity, the two big problems that had sparked the February Revolution in the first place, remained ongoing issues. The only difference after October was the Bolsheviks could no longer blame the powers that be for the dysfunction, because they now were the powers that be. They would need a solution, or they would follow the governments of Tsar Nicholas, Prince Lvov, and Alexander Kerensky into the dustbin of history.

By far the biggest immediate problem in Soviet Russia was food scarcity in the cities. One year earlier, food scarcity had been so bad that people overthrew a 300 year old monarchy. Now, it might even be worse. Because though the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left Soviet Russia with a great deal of territory, it still costs them the produce from major agricultural centers like Ukraine and the Trans-Caucuses. And then, as we’ll talk about here in a minute, they are also about to be cut off from the additional fertile regions around the Volga River.

Meanwhile, inside Soviet Russia, the Decree on Land led local villages to absorb and parcel out the huge land estates in their neighborhoods, whereupon they imported their traditional systems of agriculture, small plots worked by individual families oriented toward subsistence farming, without much care or concern for producing the amount of grain needed to fill empty bellies in the city. And even when and where there was a surplus of grain, it was a challenge to procure and transport it. The rail system had fallen into a state of acute disrepair, and was presently running at like a quarter of its potential capacity. Plus, there was a problem of acquisition. The peasants didn’t want to sell their grain for worthless paper money, and any attempt to force them to sell for worthless paper money led them to simply hide their grain, rather than give it away for nothing. The food scarcity problem was exacerbated by another acute economic problem the Soviet government had to grapple with: a manufacturing crisis. Since the war started in 1914, factories, plants, and mines had all been oriented towards wartime production: guns, munitions, and uniforms replaced regular old consumer goods. And as we talked about in Episode 10.blank, industrial production also massively ramped up when the war started, so the ranks of the urban working class has exploded by like blank percent. This is where so much of the energy and momentum of the Revolution in 1917 had come from. But now the war was over, leading to three interrelated problems.

First, factories were shutting down as war time demand collapsed.

Second, factories repurposed for wartime production could not return to manufacturing regular old consumer goods just at the drop of a hat, and

Third, even those factories that could have remained open were often idle on account of ongoing shortages and fuel and raw materials.

So this led to a growing unemployment and underemployment crisis. In the spring of 1918, unemployed workers either lingered, hungrily and dangerously in the cities, or they decamped back to their home villages.

In response to the disorganized and hungry chaos of the winter of 1917-1918, a spontaneously self-organized phenomenon appeared. This was the bag men. The bag men were individuals who filled bags with small tradable goods, hopped on trains to rural areas, and then bartered and exchanged those goods for food. Then they came back to the cities to either sell what they had acquired, or as often as not, make deliveries to the people who had given them the tradable goods to go out and exchange for food. Now, one single bag man was just one guy, carrying some bags. He was limited to what a single person could carry. But as this became the most reliable way for an urban family to get food, the ranks of the bag men grew exponentially and soon hundreds of thousands of them were swarming back and forth from city to country and back. Over the weeks and months, the phenomenon took on a bit of organized cohesion. Bag men started traveling in groups, usually armed, co-ops sprouted up in both town and country to reliably facilitate exchange and delivery. Inside the factories, which were now controlled by worker committees, the hungry workers abandoned whatever they were supposed to be doing and turned to off the books manufacturing of tradable goods that the household peasants actually wanted. They made stoves, knives, work tools, candle holders, axes, plows, and especially cigarette lighters, a much coveted novelty. To make these goods, they often cannibalized the machinery in the factory itself.

So over the winter of 1917-1918, the people self-organized a chaotic, if passably effective, barter economy under the rubric of the initial decrees that had been issued by the Bolsheviks. Worker run factories were deciding to produce goods for trade, that they would then trade for food, from peasants who owned their own land. Co-ops and bag men sprouted up serving as the means of exchange and delivery.

But there was one small hiccup: this is not exactly the Bolshevik vision for what post-revolutionary socialism is meant to look like. The Bolsheviks were, after all, not anarchists. They had always advocated nationalization of both land and industry. They tended to argue in favor of large scale national collectivization of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing. That is how they would take a backward medieval society like Russia and turn it into a modern and advanced socialist society, without the prolonged period of boardwalk capitalist rule demanded by their rivals, the Mensheviks and SRs. The Bolsheviks also tended to be very hostile to the idea of market activity in general, assuming that it was an exploitive feature of capitalism that would have no place in the society they were building. They portrayed the bag men, for example, as greedy parasites and speculators, exploiting the food crisis for their own selfish advantage.

So the policies the Soviet government started rolling out in the spring of 1918 thus aimed to bring organization and control to an anarchistic system growing up organically under their feet. And we call this collection of policies, war communism.

Now, just to be clear, no one called it war communism at the time, this is a term we use to retroactively describe the system. Other thing we need to be clear about, it’s barely a system at all. The term war communism encompasses several different policies enacted by different commissars as the Soviet government improvised responses to simultaneous crises on multiple fronts. One thing we know about Lenin is that practical improvisation is going to trump rigid doctrine every time. So as war communism gets going, it’s not like they’re out there systematically implementing a color coded timetable they had dreamed up back in Switzerland. It also gets called war communism because it’s so closely linked to the Soviet mobilization for civil war. They needed to turn all those potential resources and manpower into actual resources and manpower, and the blunt instrument of war communism is how they decided to do it. Now, there is a big ongoing historical debate about the nature of war communism, and its relationship to Bolshevik ideology, whether it represents an aberration, a culmination, a detour, a mistake, a necessity, random flailing, or Machiavellian plotting. The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

So for today, I want to talk about two big parts of war communism. First, on May 9th, 1918, the government declared a food dictatorship. The food dictatorship blew up the peasants’ claim to ownership over the grain they were now selling. The government appointed by the Soviet of Worker Soldiers and Peasant Deputies representing the workers, soldiers, and peasants of Russia, claimed the responsibility for acquiring and delivering food to the cities.

Food was a right. Food belonged to everyone, not merely the peasants who grew it. To implement the food dictatorship, the Soviet formed food detachments, armed companies who would travel out to the rural areas and simply take surplus grain and bring it back to the cities. There’d be no more buying and selling, no more trading, no more bag men. But, you can imagine what happened when these food detachments started fanning out. They used incredibly heavy handed tactics to extract grain and food they believed the selfish peasants were withholding. There are tons of stories about food detachments trashing houses, burning buildings, assaulting people, raping women, and murdering people who stood in their way. And then as they loaded up the quote unquote surplus, they often did not care whether or not they were taking actual surplus. Most of the time they were taking the food the peasants needed to feed themselves. So the brief honeymoon period of peace between the urban and rural populations after the October Revolution is now over, and it is going to get very messy from here on out.

The other part of war communism I want to talk about today is the increasing nationalization and centralization of manufacturing. Unhappy workers went out organizing strikes not on behalf of the Bolsheviks, but against them. In their opinion, nothing had changed since October and in many real ways, things had only gotten worse. So they started forming what were called Extraordinary Assemblies of Factory and Plant Representatives who worked outside the system of Soviets of workers deputies. Menshevik and SR activists were happy to enter this movement to stir up trouble against the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1918, one striking group declared, “the Soviet government has become completely alien to us. It promised to bring the worker socialism and instead has brought them empty factories and destitution.”

In response, the Soviet government started implementing wider nationalization and central administration of factories. Controversially, they granted the need to bring back many of the experienced managers and restore the old top-down structures of authority. Worker mismanagement was seen by the government as one of the primary causes of the empty factories and the destitution they complained about. So, after about six months, the brief experiment of worker controlled factories gave way to the return of centralized hierarchy, with old plant managers offered high salaries to come back and run the factories, only now their salary would be paid by the state rather than a private owner.

So the food dictatorship and nationalization of industry are two big pillars of war communism, and they are going to lay the groundwork for what the October Revolution ultimately means for Russia.

But now I want to transition away from the communism part of war communism, and back to the war part of war communism. Because in May 1918, the Soviet government found itself besieged on all sides and facing a very real military threat to its existence, most especially as a result of the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion.

So what the heck is the Czechoslovak Legion? The Czechoslovak Legion was formed at the beginning of World War I by Czechs and Slovaks living in Russian territory, eager to go fight the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They harbored nationalist dreams that had been kindled in the springtime of the peoples in 1848, and they hoped 1914 would prove to be the winter of empire, and they were hoping to join their brethren living under Austro-Hungarian rule as an independent nation. Initially it was just a couple companies of volunteers, but the Czechoslovak Legion turned out to be as dependable a fighting unit as existed on the Russian side. This proved, especially true as the Russian side collapsed in the summer of 1917. The Czechoslovak Legion was one of the few groups involved in the Kerensky Offensive to perform with anything resembling heroic determination. After their success, Kerensky’s government gave permission to representatives of the Czechoslovak National Council, a political lobbying group advocating their national cause, to go recruit Czech and Slovak prisoners of war being held in Russian POW camps. It was not a hard sell, and in short order, the Czechoslovak Legion ballooned to more than 40,000 men, most of them stationed in Ukraine.

After the failure of the Kerensky offensive, the Russian army of course plunged into terminal decline. But unlike the Russian soldiers, whose revolutionary hopes and military disillusionment were leading them to desert the army in droves, the one overriding hope of the Czechs and Slovaks — that is, national independence — remained unfulfilled, so they wanted to keep fighting. When the Central Powers invaded Ukraine in late February 1918 to force the Russians to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Czechoslovak Legion was again, like, the only military force, opposing them with anything resembling energetic discipline. They fought with particularly stubborn tenacity, because all of those who had been recruited out of the POW camps were considered deserters guilty of treason by the Austro-Hungarian military. They would be summarily executed if captured. After Brest-Litovsk, the Legion still had high morale and discipline cohesion, and they wanted to figure out a way to stay in the war against the Central Powers, because it was still their war, even if the Russians had now bailed. So they decided they wanted to provide reinforcements for the Allies on the western front. But, small problem, they couldn’t go west by heading west, there were enormous enemy army standing between them and France. So they settled on a very ambitious plan: go west by heading east. First, they would travel 6,000 miles east of Vladivostok. Then they would board ships that would take them across the Pacific, then they would traverse the Americas, then cross the Atlantic and land in Western Europe, completing a near total circumnavigation of the globe. Now the Soviet government and the legionaries didn’t trust or like each other, but on March the 25th, the Soviet government granted them safe passage to Vladivostok. Berlin and Vienna would not be happy to learn that the Russians were letting a formidable opponent of the Central Powers move on to fight them on a different front, but Lenin and Trotsky and the other Soviet leaders balance this with the knowledge that the Czechoslovak Legion also post a threat to them. So they decided it was safer to see the Legion off, rather than force them to stay.

As the Legion started to move east along the Trans-Siberian railway over the course of April and early May 1918, they did not simply move as one giant force of 42,000 men. They traveled in separate smaller groups, depending on the capacity of the railroad at any given moment. By May 1918, the company’s furthest along had reached Vladivostok, while those furthest behind had barely left European Russia. In his very good book on the Russian civil war, Evan Maudsley illustrates the scope of the spread for an American audience — and if you’re not a part of the American audience, just bear with me, and also, probably you’ll find this interesting too. But if you were to put a pin where New York City is on a map of North America and say, this is where the legionary group that’s furthest east is, then their western most comrades would be at a point 1300 miles west of San Francisco. West of San Francisco. 1300 miles out into the middle of the Pacific. That is the scope of the distance we’re talking about here.

Now so far, there’s no problem. The 42,000 legionaries are departing peacefully. But, problems erupted in mid May. Despite the deal with the government in Moscow, local Soviet authorities were suspicious and hostile of these heavily armed Czechs and Slovaks passing through town. Sometimes the legionaries were delayed for long periods while they waited for trains. This led to a great deal of irritated frustration and impatience on both sides. Finally, on May 14th, 1918, a group of legionaries moving east encountered a group of Hungarian prisoners of war traveling west. The legionaries were obviously on their way to Vladivostok, the Hungarians were being repatriated by the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They ran into each other in the city of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains. The Hungarians considered these Czechs and Slovaks to be traitors, while the legionaries were like, traitors to what? It may be your empire, but it’s not our empire. Insults were hurled, fighting broke out. The municipal Russian authorities then stepped in and arrested some of the Czech leaders. Outraged legionaries then staged an armed attack to rescue their brothers from jail, and in the process wound up taking effective military control of the city.

Now this might have not been a big deal, but for the response of the Soviet government. Trotsky has by now resigned as commissar of foreign affairs and taken up his job as commissar of the army and navy. Believing the revolt of the Czechoslovak legionaries was part of a wider effort by anti-Soviet elements to foment counter-revolutionary uprisings along the critical Trans-Siberian railway Trotsky sent out an order on May 25th demanding the immediate disarmament of the Legion. His order was blunt:

“Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot.”

This turns out to have been something of a blunder. Local Soviet forces were going to find themselves inferior to the Czechoslovak legionaries whenever and wherever they encountered each other. And in fact, for all of 1918, wherever the Czechoslovak Legions were, they were the best trained, most disciplined, and most effective fighting force in the field. That’s why they’re uprising is such a big deal. So at the moment, anybody who tried to implement Comrade Trotsky’s order was not going to shoot armed Czechoslovaks on the spot, they were going to get shot by armed Czechoslovaks on the spot.

After the seizure of Chelyabinsk, word went up and down the Trans-Siberian railway to other Legionnaire units, and wherever they happen to be, they pulled out their rifles and machine guns and took over. The Legion soon controlled almost the entire length of the Trans-Siberian railway. This is a very big deal.

Now, the point that links the revolt of the Czechoslovak legions to the Russian civil war is the city of Samarra, situated about 600 miles southeast of Moscow, where the Volga River meets the Samarra River. The city in particular and the Volga region in general had been one of the main bases of SR popular peasant support, and a group of SR delegates to the constituent assembly had regrouped there in the aftermath of the closing of the constituent assembly back in January. Here, they hoped to plug themselves into a large and hostile reaction to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and they dreamed of establishing a rival government to the Soviets by claiming the superior sovereign authority of the constituent assembly. But they spent the first couple months of 1918 supremely disappointed, because as we’ve seen, even areas where there was a real SR population? They didn’t care much about the constituent assembly per se. They just wanted land and local autonomy, both of which the Bolsheviks had promised.

The other problem for the SR leadership was that they couldn’t rally anybody to fight for them. They couldn’t even rally enough armed supporters to take over Samarra, which at the moment was only tenuously held by a Soviet aligned municipal government defended by about 2000 Red Guards. And not for nothing, but if you’re claiming to be the legitimate government of a country and you can’t get anybody who’s willing to kill or die for you, well, how legitimate are you? Because one of the unspoken tests of political legitimacy is, can you find enough people willing to kill or die for you.

In early June 1918 though, after the revolt in Chelyabinsk, a large cluster of about 8,000 Czechoslovak legionaries started rolling east to meet up with their brothers on the far side of the Urals. Now the legionaries had never been keen to stick around in Russia, nor did they really want to get caught up in a civil war, but the SR leaders in Samarra made the point that they all agreed on one thing, that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a humiliating disaster. If the SR government reclaimed power from the Bolsheviks — who were, after all, probably on the German payroll — they might be able to reopen the eastern front and fight on the same side again. The SR leaders made some extravagant claims about already securing French support, and they convinced the 8,000 legionaries to roll into Samarra on June 8th and take over the city from the meager force of Red Guards, practically without firing a shot.

I mean, they fired a few shots, but it was practically without firing a shot.

With the legionaries standing behind them with rifles and machine guns, the SR leadership then declared themselves to be the committee members of the constituent assembly, ever after called by the Russian abbreviation, the Komuch. The Komuch called upon all constituent assembly delegates to convene in Samarra to reconstitute a quorum in order to stake a claim to being the true, legal government of Russia. Initially, the Komuch was just a small five man committee, but it would grow over the next several months as many delegates did in fact, heed the call, including the chairman of the constituent assembly, Victor Chernov, whose name still counted for something. And also, old Breshkovskaya, who had long since shed her most radical and violent tendencies, but she showed up to lend the Komuch her impeccable revolutionary aura. Their simple stated goal was the restoration of constitutional democracy, which had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks in January.

These events then directly influenced events in the far east in Siberia. With a north/south frontline of a civil war being drawn down the length of the Volga, coupled with the fact that the Czech legionaries now controlled the Trans-Siberian railroad, most of Siberia fell out of Soviet control. Shortly after the canceling of the constituent assembly, some SRs had set up what they called the provisional Siberian government in Vladivostok, while more conservative monarchist and nationalist elements had set up a rival Siberian organization in Omsk. The Vladivostok SRs refused to recognize the more conservative Whites in Omsk, and that nonrecognition was mutual. To the extent that there remained an officer corps and remnants of the old imperial army out in Siberia, they all naturally gravitated towards Omsk, where they hoped to rebuild not just an anti-Bolshevik force, but an anti-Red force, to drive out all the hated socialists, and restore something like dignity to the Russian Empire.

The group in Omsk would soon be joined by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who is presently in the midst of his own odd sojourn around the world towards his date with historical destiny. But that’s for later.

By June 1918, Soviet Russia was now surrounded. With the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion and the formation of the Komuch on the Volga, and an alternate Siberian government down in the far east, their eastern border now fell well short of the Ural Mountains. Down south, General Denikin’s volunteer army was growing alongside a Don Cossack army. In the Caucuses, the Menshevik led Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic was presently ascendant. And then obviously along their western border, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic, and Finland were all teaming with armies of the Central Powers. And this is to say nothing of the Allied Powers, who were making their first concerted efforts to influence events inside Russia, using the Czechoslovak Legions and other White Armies to maybe get rid of the communists, and reopen the eastern front.

So that brings us to the other big thing that emerges out of Soviet Russia in the spring of 1918, the Red Army. Now of course the old Imperial Army had been demobilized and simply ceased to exist, so in the first phase of their conflict after the October Revolution, the Soviets had relied on enthusiastic Red Guard detachments and regiments of soldiers who had been brought into the framework of the military revolutionary committee. Technically the government had issued its first decree forming a new Red Army back in January, but that force was still entirely reliant on volunteers. Lenin himself personally enjoyed a brief moment of hope in April 1918, that after Kornilov was killed, the civil war that necessarily accompanied the revolution was maybe already over. But instead, it came roaring back to life with a dangerous vengeance. The Red Army was not recruiting volunteers fast enough to wage the multi-front and multinational war that was now confronting Soviet Russia, especially as foreign powers were probably backing the sides arrayed against them.

With the defeats and setbacks of May and June, most especially the Czechoslovak revolt, the Soviets needed a more professional and disciplined army. A handful of enthusiastic volunteers were no longer enough to save the revolution, they needed a million man army.

Trotsky was one of the key architects of the new Red Army. He abandoned all pretense of democratization and volunteerism, and instead set about building a very traditional army. After resigning as commissar of foreign affairs, Trotsky had become commissar of the army and navy, a position he would hold until 1925. And for all of Trotsky’s historical reputation as like Brainy Smurf, the intellectual, the writer, the orator, his role as the organizer and leader of the Red Army and the Russian Civil War was probably his greatest contribution to the Russian Revolution. And that’s saying a lot. Alongside Trotsky at this early phase was an old Imperial officer, named Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, who served as chief of field staff and military director of the Supreme Military Council of the Soviet government. Bonch-Bruevich may not have been a dyed in the wool communist, but his younger brother was. His younger brother had served for years as Lenin’s private secretary, and so General Bonch-Bruevich was trusted enough to organize a real army. And he did a pretty decent job of it, developing both the logistical and strategic architecture of the Red Army.

Several controversial decisions went into the formation of the Red Army. First, the reintroduction of conscription. The Red Army needed men, a lot of men, and they needed them right now. Continuing to try to fill the ranks on an all volunteer basis was not going to work. In April 1918, the Soviet government decreed universal military training for all men of military age. Then, on May 29th, after the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, the government ordered their first major levée of troops. To fill this levée, they relied on the conscription lists of the tzars, and simply put it to work for the Red Army. Conscription triggered a lot of resistance out there, but it was not wholly resisted. Economic conditions were pretty bad out there. Unemployment was high, many former soldiers returned to their old villages and found nothing to return to. They saw the Red Army offering wages and coats and boots, they shrugged their shoulders, and went back to war.

But perhaps an even more controversial decision was the aggressive recruitment of former imperial military officers. These guys were generally considered a bulwark of the old regime, but they were also the only ones who knew how to organize, lead, and run an army. So setting aside ideological objections, Trotsky and Bonch-Bruevich threw open the doors for the old officer corps, pitching the Red Army as a force being mobilized to defend Russia from foreign threats, which any patriotic Russian officer could get behind. Of course, it didn’t hurt that with mass demobilization in the end of the war, most of these officers had lost their wages, careers, pensions, and sense of purpose. So even if they too had ideological objections to the Soviet government — and many of them did — they were basically being offered their old jobs back, and they took them. In the first month of the civil war, nearly 10,000 such officers signed up; by the end of 1918, there were 22,000. Now, you might be asking yourself, how on earth can the Communists trust these people with their Red Army? And the answer is, they didn’t. Which is why at the same time you get the further development of political commissars. The political commissars would be assigned to keep an eye on the officers and countersign all their orders to ensure political reliability. Trotsky also let it be known that the family and friends of these officers would be kept under watch. He said, “let the turncoats realize that at the same time they are betraying their own families, their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children. He was deadly serious about this, as were the Cheka, the organization tasked with ensuring everyone’s political reliability. Not just officers, everybody. By any and all means necessary.

Next time, we will advance into the summer of 1918. With opposition to Soviet authority in Russia growing, the government systematically outlawed all political parties — not just the Kadets, but also the Mensheviks and the right SRs. And with their own hopes and dreams getting tossed aside by Lenin’s government, the left SRs, who had joined the Bolsheviks in October, broke with the regime and attempted to stage a new October 1917 in July 1918. And when it failed, one party Communist rule in Russia would be permanently cemented.

But I say next time, because Saturnalia is upon us once again, and I will be taking the next two weeks off for the holidays. Now, if you need a last minute gift idea, by all means Hero of Two Worlds: the Marquis de Lafayette and the age of revolution is right there, just saying. But other than that, I hope everyone out there is happy and healthy, and I wish you a very happy Saturnalia, and a very happy new year, and I will see you in 2022. .

 

 

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~dramatic musics swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.79: Reds and Whites

Today marks something of a transition. We are crossing the line and heading into the final lap of our final series of the Revolutions podcast. Part one of this final season, episodes 10.1 through 10.39, climaxed with the first Russian revolution, the Revolution of 1905. But since we returned with episode 10.40 for part two, we have spent our time building towards the Revolution of 1917. We passed through the post 1905 era of the Dumas and the Stolypin reforms, then we covered the events, personalities, and triggers that brought about the February Revolution, most especially World War I, and even more most especially, Nicholas and Alexandra’s disastrous management of World War I. Episode 10.62, International Women’s Day, kicked off the much anticipated Revolution of 1917, and that’s where we’ve been ever since. The February Revolution, the April Crisis, the June Offensive, the July Days, the Kornilov affair, and finally the October Revolution.

But now that’s done. Everything we’ve been building towards is now in the rear view mirror.

Now, if we applied the narrowest definition to the Russian Revolution of 1917, it ends on October 26 with Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks overthrowing Kerensky and the provisional government. But that’s not very satisfying, especially because a whole slew of historical contingencies all needed to break a certain way for the events of late October 1917 to go down as momentous days that shook the whole world. Nearly everyone at the time expected Lenin’s little gang to be bounced out of power within a few days, if not a few weeks, with the arrival of the Constituent Assembly marking the absolute limit of their time in power. Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks alike were hyper aware that the new regime — if it could even yet be called a regime — was in an incredibly precarious spot. This is why I tend to extend the periodization of the quote, unquote, October Revolution and the quote unquote Revolution of 1917, to the two big events we talked about last week. On the domestic front, the Bolsheviks closing the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and instead, using the Third Congress of Soviets as the founding congress of a new Soviet government. Then on the foreign front, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, which, as humiliating as it was, left that newly founded Soviet regime with international recognition and sovereign borders.

With those two elements in place, we move from the rising up and seizing power phase to the consolidating and expanding power phase. So as we leave behind the Revolution of 1917 on account of it, well, not being 1917 anymore, we also move from revolution to civil war. From here on out, action is not going to be defined by sporadic street fighting involving a couple thousand armed partisans, but by armies numbering in the millions, waging full-scale war against each other. This war would involve not just every single nationality in what was now the former Russian empire, but also every major European power, as well as the United States and Japan. They all engaged each other in multiple major theaters of operation and dozens of individual fronts, from Poland to the Pacific, and from the White Sea to the Black Sea. It is an insanely large and confusing conflict and a complete treatment of the Russian Civil War could easily fill a hundred, hundred and fifty episodes all on its own. And while we’re not going to do that, I also don’t want to just shut it down and walk away in the spring of 1918 and say, oh, the revolution of 1917 is over goodbye. Because the contingency of civil war still looms over everything. The story of the Russian Revolution is not over until the Civil War is over, and as the old saying goes, the revolution’s not over til the Red Army wins.

The final point I want to make on all this is that I have to say that though we call it the Russian Civil War, that’s not really an accurate description. This conflict involves at least a half dozen major wars of independence between various nationalities and the Russian state; it involves international conflicts among these groups as they jockeyed with each other for territory and influence; it also involved intra-national conflicts, which are themselves simply localized civil wars in class wars and ethnic conflicts. So though the post-Revolution of 1917 and post-World War I conflicts in the former Russian empire all fall under the single heading the Russian Civil War, we are talking about dozens of conflicts drawn over multiple intersecting lines, nationality, religion, class, culture, ideology, and politics. And really what this is, is a giant international conflict taking place within the boundaries of the former Russian empire, and what will become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

After the Red Army wins.

We’ll start today with a bit of business that helps further mark the transition from the Revolution of 1917 period to the Civil War period. On March 6th, 1918, the Bolsheviks met for what they reckoned was their seventh party Congress. They reckoned it was their seventh party Congress because they continued to lay claim to the mantle of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party had held their very first and very tiny Congress in 1898, in which we talked about all the way back in episode 10.26. That Congress was held even before young Lenin, Krupskaya, and Martov had even returned from their Siberian exile.

Now, mostly the seventh party Congress debated the controversial treaty of Brest-Litovsk. And though Lenin convinced the Congress to ratify the treaty after intense debate, the Left Communists who opposed the treaty would come back in force in the summer of 1918 to restate their case by other means. But what this seventh party Congress is mostly known for is voting to officially rebrand themselves. The party would no longer be known as the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, but instead the Russian Communist Party. This is the moment in history when the communists become the Communists. It also introduced a more sharply defined ideological divide between socialists and communists in left wing movements throughout the world. The former tended to distance themselves from the emerging Soviet regime in Russia, while the latter fully embraced it. For our immediate purposes here, it means that we now call the Bolsheviks, the Communists. Now it’s a near complete continuity of leadership organization and ideology from Bolsheviks to Communists, as evidenced most obviously by the fact that they’re still calling this their Seventh Party Congress, an old thing just being renamed, rather than the First Party Congress have a brand new thing being born. But still. The transition from the Revolution of 1917 phase to the Civil War phase — and beyond — is helpfully marked by the fact that we stopped talking about Bolsheviks and start talking about Communists. And from here on out, I will be pretty interchangeably using the terms Communists and Soviets and Reds to describe one side in the emerging Civil War.

Now the other big thing that slips in here is that as soon as the party Congress broke up, Lenin and the Communists decided to move the Soviet government from Petrograd to Moscow. The German armies were sitting just 150 miles from Petrograd, and despite the recent peace treaty, it was not at all clear the Germans weren’t just going to keep advancing and overthrow the Soviet government. So on the night of March the 10th, 1980, Lenin did what everyone had made such a huge deal out of Kerensky trying to do back in October. Lenin, Krupskaya , Lenin’s sisters, and about 40 close aides and secretaries secretly boarded a train in the middle of the night bound for Moscow. Shortly thereafter, a second train departed with the rest of the peoples’ commissars aboard, carrying as many files and papers as they could cram into the railroad cars. After nearly 200 years of western- facing St. Petersburg/Petrograd serving as the capital of Russia, the government was returning to Moscow. It is a great historical irony that it was a bunch of hyper westernized political radicals who were the ones to finally ditch western-facing Petrograd and return to Moscow, the ancient seat of medieval Muscovite despotism, but Lenin was a practical guy. At the moment Moscow was flat out safer. It was much deeper in the heart of territory the Soviet government now laid sovereign claim to, and it was a much further distance from all the armies aiming to unseat them. When they arrived in Moscow, the government installed themselves in the Kremlin, which remains the seed of the Russian government to this very day.

With the Soviet government to the Russian communists now installed in Moscow, I want to move on to the real object of today’s episode: embarking on a tour of that one third of the now increasingly former Russian empire that was directly impacted by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Because these territories are going to become major theaters in the Russian Civil War. Now, the theory underlying the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was that Russia’s former minority nationalities would have the right to independence, autonomy, and self-determination. In the negotiations, the Central Powers had positioned themselves — at least abstractly — as the liberator’s of these territories. Meanwhile, Trotsky and the Russia negotiators said, this is no problem for us because we declared the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia back in November. Lenin and Trotsky both repeatedly said, yeah, we have no problem with the independence, autonomy, and self-determination of the former subject peoples of the tsar, but it’s not going to be that simple, is it? No, of course not. It’s never that simple, because in a situation like this competing groups of leaders and governments and institutions are each going to claim to speak on behalf of their respective nations. So who do we listen to? Who gets to make that claim? Embedded in the answer to these questions is the explanation for why wars of independence are always civil wars at the same time.

So we will start in the northwest in Finland. Finland was a late comer to the Russian empire. It had only been brought into the fold in 1809 during the heyday of Napoleon and Alexander the first. Finland was only joined to Russia in personal union with the tsars, who in Finland raised not in their capacity a tsar of Russia, but as grand duke of Finland. Because of this, the Finns had always had a great deal of local autonomy, and they were one of the few parts of the Russian empire with an elected parliament. In the late 1890s, Tsar Nicholas had tried to carry the ultra conservative ideology of orthodoxy nationality and autocracy into Finland with an aggressive Russification policy meant to break traditional Finnish autonomy. It massively backfired and tended to drive all Finns, whatever region or class they happen to be in, towards the dream of independence. During the revolutionary upheavals of both 1905 and 1917, the Finns were always angling to break away from the Russian tsar. And as we have seen, anti-tsarist elements always found influential support from Finnish officials, who were happy to use their autonomous rights to allow wanted enemies of the tsar to set up shop just over the border, roughly a hundred miles from Petrograd.

Economically and politically the Finns were far more advanced than their Russian neighbors. Their industrial working class was a much bigger proportion of the population, with some 500,000 workers in a country of just 3 million people. In their 1916 elections Finnish socialists won an outright majority in their parliament, much to the consternation of the old aristocracy and the commercial bourgeoisie. When the February Revolution hit, all Finnish factions were united in assuming independence was on the way. But the October Revolution split those factions into two bitterly divided camps, the Reds and the Whites, the two colors that would define the massive post-1917 conflict throughout the Eurasian continent. In mid-November the Finnish workers, the Reds, launched a massive general strike to push their leaders towards a declaration of independence, as well as the demand that independent Finland be a workers’ democracy, not a bourgeois democracy. But as had happened with the SRs and the Mensheviks over in Russia, the leadership of the Finnish Socialist Party were more circumspect and cautious than the rank and file. Instead of following the lead of the Bolsheviks and using the November general strike to seize power, the Finnish socialists instead endorsed a unity government dominated by bourgeois and nationalist leaders. This government then officially declared independence on December 6th, 1970. Those bourgeois and nationalist elements, the Whites, were terrified of the effectiveness and implications of the general strike that had been staged by the workers and the socialists, the Reds. The government built up defensive forces and clearly signaled the possible necessity of a dictatorship to keep the workers in line. Pushed from their rank and file below and threatened from above, the Finnish socialists belatedly launched a political uprising in mid January, 1918. They overthrew the existing parliament, and formed an all-socialist government to lead what they would dub the People’s Republic of Finland. In short order, they control just about every city in the country. The ousted coalition of Whites, meanwhile — that is, the wealthier bourgeoisie, aristocratic and nationalist elements — regrouped and mobilized forces to defend the traditional parliament and its government.

When the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, it radically altered the trajectory of the brewing civil war in Finland. With the Russians pledging not to interfere, the Red Finns lost their most potent ally. Meanwhile, within days of the treaty, the White Finns invited the kaiser to send his troops in to help them overthrow the Reds. 20,000 Germans disembarked in early April, and set about capturing key coastal cities like Helsinki. Meanwhile, a White army raised up in the interior marched south and defeated the larger but less disciplined Red forces in the middle of April. As a harbinger of things to come everywhere, the victorious Whites unleashed a punitive terror in the wake of their victory. The Whites summarily executed about 10,000 Reds and herded another 80,000 into concentration camps. Over the next several months, another 11,000 Red prisoners died as a result of the deplorable conditions in these camps. Now, this is not to say the Reds were not brutal in the times and places where they had the upper hand, and throughout the Russian Civil War, wherever it was being waged, White terrors and Red terrors would follow victories. It became the new brutal norm. After all of this incredibly bitter fighting though, Finland now has a White government, backed up by the armies of the Central Powers.

South of Finland, the people of the Baltic states had no opportunity for the kind of class war like the one unfolding to their north. German armies had long since pushed their way in to occupy the region, the German landowning class of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who only made up 10% of the population, but owned most of the land, were the primary beneficiaries of the shift from Russian military hegemony to German military hegemony. After the peace treaty, the Baltic states were set to become nominally independent, but given the German occupation, independence from Russia didn’t really mean independence in any meaningful way. There was even talk about bringing the Baltic states into a greater German reich once Germany won the war. But as will happen in all the territories we discussed today, if you think the triumphant advance of the Central Powers after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk altered the political dynamic in eastern Europe in the spring of 1918, well, just wait until the fall of 1918, when the Central Powers collapse in defeat.

It was a similar story further south in Belarus. They too were now mostly occupied by the Germans, who had advanced and captured Minsk after the Russians had stalled too long signing the terms of the treaty. While under German occupation, Belarusian leaders declared independence on March 25th and formed what they called the Belarusian Democratic Republic. But like their Baltic neighbors to the north and Ukrainian neighbors to the south, the Belarusians were in a state of occupied suspended animation until the end of World War I, when all hell was going to break loose across Eastern Europe.

If we keep going south, we return to Ukraine, which we’ve already talked about because it was the largest and most important to the former Russian provinces. Ukraine was huge and fertile, and the Central Powers considered their resources and food absolutely vital to their own national interests. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers sent in somewhere between 200 and 250,000 soldiers to secure control of the country. They easily evicted the small force of Red Guards who had taken control of Kiev at the end of January, and they re-installed the Rada, who then invited the central powers to just keep marching all through March and April, until they enveloped and garrisoned the whole of Ukraine. The Ukrainians had promised to deliver 2 million tons of grain, 180,000 tons of meat, 30,000 sheep, and 40,000 tons of sugar. It should come as no surprise to learn that these foreign occupying forces, whose main task was extracting food from the Ukrainian peasantry, were pretty much hated by everyone in Ukraine. As the occupation continued, the Central Powers grew tired of the leaders of the Rada. Despite the inflammatory rhetoric being used by the Russian Communists that the Rada were a bunch of bourgeois capitalist stooges, they were in fact entirely socialist, almost all of them Ukrainian SRs. After being re-installed in Kiev by the Central Powers, the Rada set about constructing a worker and peasant friendly socialist state, which rather rankled both the old Ukrainian elite and the occupying military powers. On April 29th, Ukrainian General Pavlo Skoropadskyi staged a coup d’etat with the backing of the Central Powers. Overthrowing the socialist Rada, Skoropadskyi donned the ancient moniker of the Ukrainian leader, the Hetman, in an attempt to tap into some kind of deep well of traditional Ukrainian national sentiment. He never won much support outside the German military establishment though, so he’s not going to last long when the Central Powers collapse in November.

Now, as we head east out of Ukraine, we should be heading into southern Russia, but for structural reasons, I want to skip that area and head directly to the Caucasus, where we find Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Representing the Southern outskirts of the Russian empire, they had been on the front line to the war against the Turks. But unlike other regions in the Russian empire, where there was a good size Russian population, especially in the major urban areas, the Russian population down in the Caucuses was only about 5%. So, thanks to the physical distance from the center of Russia and the tiny minority of Russians living among them, there had always been a strong independent ethnic identity down here among the Georgians and the Armenians and the Azerbaijani. As the Russian army at the front disintegrated and returned home, the trains were often targeted by locals, hoping to strip them of weapons, ammunition, coats, boots, and whatever else they might be carrying. But although the people of the Caucuses were not exactly russofiles and they expected autonomy in any post-revolution world, they were not at the moment rushing headlong towards total independence. The local Christian populations were worried about their proximity to the Muslim Turks, and the long history of ethnic and religious conflict. The Armenian genocide had only happened a couple of years earlier. But all that said, the October Revolution was not well received by the region. As we discussed, when we introduced young Stalin in episode 10.44, Georgia was one of the few areas where the Mensheviks enjoyed a real base of popular support. Stalin’s gang of Bolsheviks had been treated as an obnoxious band of misfits causing trouble for the prevailing dominance of the Mensheviks. So the October Revolution was greeted with a great deal of hostility. Most of the leaders were still Mensheviks who considered the October revolution a catastrophe. They quickly set up an anti-Bolshevik trans-Caucasian government which united Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan under Menshevik and SR leadership that dubbed itself the Trans-Caucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and they declared independence on April 22nd. The one area outside their control was a pretty critical area: the Baku oil fields. The workers of the oil fields had been heavily bolshevized, and after the October Revolution set themselves up as a Soviet in alliance with the Soviet regime up in Petrograd and then Moscow. But unfortunately they were isolated, and would spend several months under siege by their anti-Soviet neighbors.

So with that, let’s return to the Cossack regions of southern Russia, which as we mentioned in episode 10.76, was the origin point for what would become the White armies of the Civil War. The Cossacks were long considered the most aggressively pro tsarist nationality in the empire. They enjoyed all kinds of special privileges in exchange for their ferocious and unwavering military support. The Cossack population down around the Don River numbered about a million and a half. This group was able to threaten critical mines and factories in the region, block the rail line to the Caucuses and especially those Baku oil fields, and they could strike west into Ukraine. Lenin and the Soviet leadership naturally considered these Cossacks to be the most dangerous threat to their regime. And they had set up the leader of the Don Cossacks — General Alexey Kaledin — as a major reactionary boogeyman. He was one of the three Ks of counterrevolution along with Kerensky and Kornilov.

To combat this threat, Lenin ordered armed attachments into the region in November 1917. These forces were led by Vladimir Antonov, the guy who took the Winter Palace during the October revolution, and Nikolai Moravia, the guy who led the defense of Petrograd at the little Battle of Pulkovo. Now, General Kaledin absolutely tried to form a resistance army to the Bolsheviks, but it was a much tougher sell than anyone on either side expected. Many of the younger Cossacks had spent years serving on the front lines of World War I. They were either sick of fighting entirely or had been radicalized by their experience and actually supported the Soviet government. There was also a divide between the major cities of the region and the countryside. So for example, in Rostov, the largest city in the Don region, in the Constituent Assembly elections, they voted 38% Bolshevik. Finally, it was not at all clear in these first few months after the October Revolution that there was any reason to resist the Bolsheviks. They issued the Decree on Land, the Decree on Nationalities, the Decree on Peace. What exactly do we need to be resisting here?

So the fighting is such that unfolded over the winter of 1917- 1918 was mostly small detachments of Red Guards arriving in cities by train and installing pro Soviet authorities. Unable to convince his people to fight back, General. Kaledin grew despondent and shot himself in the heart on January 29th.

Now the Soviet leaders were not the only ones who had assumed the Cossacks would form the center of resistance to the Bolsheviks. As I noted in episode 10.76, anti-Bolshevik army officers identified the Don Cossack area as the safest place to organize a resistance. At the forefront of this was General Mikael Alekseyev, who had served as chief of staff of the Russian army throughout most of the war. In early November, Alekseyev arrived at the regional capital, Novocherkassk, to organize a counter-revolution. In late December he called for volunteers to flock to the White banner to oppose the Red Soviets. So this is the origin point of the Volunteer Army, which is at the moment also called interchangeably, the Alekseyev organization. But after Alekseyev put out his call for volunteers, the results were… comical. Only a few thousand even responded, and those who did were invariably senior officers. So not unlike those émigré armies who gathered around the comte d’Artois in 1792, the Volunteer Army was all officers and no men. Like, they literally didn’t have any privates. But one thing I must say: these were not ultra royalist reactionaries hoping to re-install Tsar Nicholas. That wasn’t really the point. Nearly all the senior officers of the Volunteer Army had stayed in service after the tsar’s abdication, and by now they accepted the verdict of the February Revolution. Mostly, the Volunteer Army would run on a kind of apolitical code of military honor that was hostile to feckless politicians of all shapes and sizes, and for all their coming military successes, their undoing would be an apolitical failure to offer any kind of tangible vision for the future. They may have been very good military officers, but if you’re going to win a civil war, you need at least a few politicians.

The inner circle of the Volunteer Army came from the officers who were involved in the Kornilov affair. General Kornilov and his comrades regrouped in the Don Cossack region after making their way through hostile red territory, often by literally putting on disguises. Once there, Alekseyev and Kornilov roughly divided up the organizational. With Alekseyev acting as something of a political chief, and Kornilov acting as the military chief. Though the two were united in their hostility to the Bolsheviks, Alekseyev was an aristocratic officer of the old school nobility, while Kornilov was a salt of the earth provincial, with family ties to the Cossacks who had risen through the ranks on merit. The two constantly butted heads and intruded on each other’s alleged spheres of influence.

After the new year, the small Volunteer Army established its headquarters in Rostov, which as I said, was the biggest city in the region. But they had neither the manpower nor the resources to resist the influx of Red Guards coming down from the north. With the Red swarming most of the cities, General Kornilov decided they were in no position to make a stand. On February 22nd, 1918, the day before Rostov fell to the Reds, Kornilov led about 4,000 men out into the frozen steppes. This began what is called the Ice March, one of the most dramatic and romanticized chapters of the Russian Civil War.

General Anton Denikin, Kornilov’s second in command, said, “we went from the dark night and spiritual slavery to unknown wandering in search of the bluebird.” With all the cities and railroads controlled by the Reds, the little Volunteer White Army had to avoid essentially all urban areas and railroad stations. They wandered through the frozen wilderness of February and March, south into the Cuban region, trying to find any place of refuge. After seven weeks just kind of adrift in the wilderness, they finally reached what is today Krasnodar, now the capital of what the Reds had organized into the Cuban Soviet. Kornilov, fed up with the Ice March and eager to take action, brushed off the advice of his staff and launched an attack on the city on April 10th. Days of intense fighting, followed until April 13th, when an artillery shell blasted the farmhouse where General Kornilov had made his headquarters. It blew him up and buried his body under the rubble.

General Denikin assumed command and ordered a withdrawal, recommending the Ice March for another four weeks as the army headed back north. When word reached Moscow that Kornilov was dead, there was jubilant celebration. It was the end of the three Ks of counterrevolution. Kerensky had long since fled west into permanent exile, Kaledin shot himself, and Kornilov was now buried under a blown up farmhouse. “With this news,” Lenin announced, “it can be said with certainty that in the main, the civil war has ended.” It was rare for Lenin to miss the mark so spectacularly, but man, did he miss the mark spectacularly.

General Denikin did his best to hold the Volunteer Army together as they continued wandering through the frozen steppes, but as they returned to the Don Cossack region after 11 weeks in the wilderness, they found circumstances very much changed. The Red leaders who had taken possession of the cities over the winter had made themselves obnoxious to the local population with aggressive requisitioning. The Red Guards had been enough to capture the cities from a largely passive population, but they were not nearly strong enough to withstand fall on popular revolt. And full on popular revolt was now starting. The aggressive requisitioning had given everyone the answer to the question, why should we bother fighting the Bolsheviks? As General Denikin and the Volunteer Army returned to the region around Rostov and Novocherkassk, the local population was now more than ready to flock to the White banner. On top of that, they could also now count on the Central Powers who were pushing their armies in through Southern Ukraine. Together, these forces started clearing out the Reds in early May 1918. On May 6th, anti-Soviet Cossacks recaptured Novocherkassk; on May 8th, the Central Powers captured Rostov. By this point, we can say that the whole region has been basically cleared of Red forces. And what was left of those Red forces marched 250 miles east, where they re-rally at Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad, and which is now called Volgograd. There on the banks of the lower Volga River, they would form the nucleus of what will become the Red Army’s famous 10th Army. But we’ll get into all that later.

By the spring of 1918, the Soviet government in Moscow was facing setbacks on all fronts. All of that territory they had lost in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was occupied by the Central Powers. Down in the south, they were facing a major uprising from the Cossacks and the White Volunteer Army. They more or less did not have any control whatsoever over the Trans-Caucasus. Faced with all this, they were going to have to radically reimagine their own military structure.

But, we’re going to start next week by leaping far, far to the east, because for everything we have talked about today, there is an argument to be made that the Russian Civil War doesn’t really start until May 14th, 1918, with the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.78: Neither War nor Peace

Last week we left off in Brest-Litovsk on January the fifth, 1918, with the Central Powers unrolling a radically re-imagined map of Eastern Europe depicting the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, and telling the Russian negotiating team, accept this map as the basis of peace or else. As this map represented abject capitulation to the Central Powers, Russian Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky knew it could have explosive political implications for the Bolsheviks back home. He told the Central Powers he would have to speak directly to his government, and later that day, boarded a train to return to Petrograd.

Meanwhile, on that same afternoon of January 5th, 1918, his comrades were dealing with another matter that could have explosive political implications. This was the day, the long awaited Constituent Assembly, promised ever since the moment Nicholas abdicated the throne, finally convened. It was finally, finally time for a democratically elected assembly of the nation to write a new post-revolutionary constitution for Russia. More immediately, this might very well spell the end of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik party. There was a halfway decent chance that by the time Trotsky got back to Petrograd, he would no longer be commissar of foreign affairs. There may even be a warrant out for his arrest.

When the election results for the Constituent Assembly were announced in December, the frustrated rivals of the Bolsheviks thrilled at the knowledge that they would finally be able to oust Lenin’s unnatural government. The right SRs would control the largest block of votes, and they ran their printing presses night and day pumping out pamphlets, placards, newspapers, and leaflets, all trumpeting the slogan, all power to the Constituent Assembly. This was meant to replace and overcome the old slogan co-opted by the Bolsheviks, all power to the Soviets. The right SRs also sent activists into the trenches and to the barracks and the factories to talk up the Constituent Assembly as the sacred culmination of the revolution. But for all the right SRs talk about defending the Constituent Assembly, all they would do is talk about defending the Constituent Assembly. When militant members of the party showed the SR Central Committee their plan to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, the central committee forbade the plot. When about 10,000 SR-aligned soldiers in Petrograd volunteered to stage an arm demonstration coinciding with the opening of the Constituent Assembly — to remind the Bolsheviks they weren’t the only ones who knew how to use a machine gun — the SR Central Committee rejected the offer. No guns, no violence. They believed the universally recognized sanctity of the constituent assembly would be all the protection it needed. And besides, civil war among the socialists would only benefit the counter-revolution. This latter point may well have been true, but it led the right SRs and their allies to unilaterally disarm on the eve of a major political showdown. When the SR regiments were told they could only demonstrate if they came out unarmed, they told the messenger, “Are you making fun of us comrade? You are asking us to a demonstration, but tell us to come without weapons. And the Bolsheviks? Are they little children? They will for sure fire at unarmed people. And we, are we supposed to open our mouths and give them our heads for targets? Or will you order us to run like rabbits?” If they were deprived of the means of fighting back, they would not come out at all. And so when the time came, they did not come out at all.

The Bolsheviks on the other hand, obviously had no scruples about coming out under arms. On January the third, Lenin’s government placed Petrograd under martial law. They prohibited public assemblies, and issued proclamations ordering soldiers to stay in their barracks and workers to stay in their factories. On January 5th, the day that Constituent Assembly opened, an SR delegate described the scene as he approached the Tauride Palace. The closer one approached, the fewer pedestrians were seen, and the more soldiers, Red Army men, and sailors. They were armed to the teeth, guns slung over the shoulder, bombs, grenades, and bullets in front and on the side, everywhere, everywhere that could be attached or inserted. The entire square in front of the Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, and field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell mell. The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment, getting ready either to defend itself or to attack.

Opposed to this clanking Bolshevik encampment was an SR-organized street demonstration under strict orders: no guns, no violence. Now perhaps as many as 50,000 people turned out for this demonstration, though, that is the high side of the estimate. Whatever the number was, though, it was less than the organizers had hoped for. They were also disappointed by the crowd’s composition. It was almost entirely middle-class professionals, basically the educated white collar types who had been on strike since the October Revolution. There were no workers. There were no common soldiers. It was not exactly a march of the masses that the SRs envisioned. As the demonstrators approached the neighborhood of the Tauride Palace, they encountered armed soldiers operating under the flag of martial law.

In at least two separate incidents, the soldiers opened fire on the unarmed procession, scattering them chaotically, and killing somewhere between 10 and 20 people. For all that it happened in 1917, this was actually the first time Russian soldiers had fired on unarmed demonstrators since the February Revolution. There was some brief hope among the SRs and the professional middle classes that this new Bloody Sunday would finally, fatally discredit the Bolsheviks; that the nation would rise in outrage against Lenin and his murderous thugs, revealed to be no different than the tsar and his Cossacks.

But, uh, here’s the thing: nobody cared. Nobody is going to care about any of this.

Meanwhile, inside the Tauride Palace, 463 deputies assembled for the opening session, roughly half the total number elected. Of those in the hall, there were 259 right SRs, 136 Bolsheviks, and 48 left SRs. This gave the right SRs, for the moment, an outright majority. Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik Central Committee were on hand to direct what they reasonably believed to be an incredibly precarious moment for their government — a government they had self-enshrined back in October. Given the SR majority, the venerable Victor Chernov was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly.

But from the beginning, the session was unruly. The Bolsheviks were by now masters of vocal and physical disruption: whenever non-Bolshevik speakers rose, Bolshevik deputies jeered, hooted, booed and interrupted. The hall was also full of armed soldiers who were there to ‘provide security’ — all of them actively sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. What’s more, the soldiers had gotten into the vodka at a welcome banquet for delegates and they drank continuously for the next 12 hours. If they heard things they didn’t like, or saw people they didn’t like, they would point their guns at them, for drunken and menacing amusement.

Lenin’s strategy for the constituent assembly was to introduce a poison pill as soon as possible. This poison pill was a document called The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses. The very first article stated, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. All power, centrally and locally, is vested in the Soviets.” it then proceeded through short bullets, ratifying everything the Bolsheviks had done since October, and concluding with the statement, “The constituent assembly considers that now power must be vested wholly and entirely in the working people and their authorized representatives, the Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. Supporting Soviet power and the decrees of the council of peoples commissars, the Constituent Assembly considers that its own task is confined to establishing the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.”

If the Constituent Assembly approved this document, it meant they were abdicating their right to craft their own constitution. It simply handed all sovereign legitimacy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had taken control of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers and Peasants’ Deputies. As Lenin expected, the SR majority defeated this motion 237 to 136. And with this done, the Bolsheviks declared that the Constituent Assembly was controlled by counter-revolutionary enemies of the Soviet, and staged a walkout. All of this was going a hundred percent according to plan, and the Bolshevik Central Committee convened in another room in the Tauride Palace. While Chernov and the SRs gave long-winded speeches in the main assembly hall, the Bolshevik leaders drafted a proclamation, dissolving the Constituent Assembly. This done, Lenin then issued instructions to the soldiers guarding the palace: don’t use force against any of the delegates. Don’t prevent anyone from leaving, but absolutely do not allow any new people in the building.

The session continued all night, but finally, at four o’clock in the morning of what was now January, the sixth, an armed sailor strode up to the Tribune just as Victor Chernov was in the middle of approving the confiscation of land without confiscation. The sailor unceremoniously interrupted Chernov and told him to stop talking and shut it down for the night. Chernov spent about twenty minutes trying to keep things going — and he had the support of his fellow delegates, but he did not have the support of the armed and drunken soldiers filling the assembly hall, shouting, “Enough, enough,” and “Down with Chernov,” So the delegates voted to adjourn.

Technically the SRs adjourned the constituent assembly until 5:00 PM. But when they left, the guards locked up the building and then blocked anyone trying to get in. Later that morning, Pravda published the government decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly. They justified this by saying “The right Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assembly a most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow, and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by force of the working classes, which is essential in the interest of emancipation from exploitation. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism, which certain unidentified groups have already begun. It is obvious that under such circumstances, the remaining part of the constituent assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.”

Now, it didn’t really matter that this is kind of the opposite of what the SR Central Committee had been doing over the last several weeks. Yes, they wanted a government enshrined by the Constituent Assembly to replace the Soviet government led by Lenin — but they were absolutely and explicitly trying to dampen down calls for violence. But like I said, that didn’t matter. And after a single session, lasting just about 12 hours, the long awaited Constituent Assembly never reconvened. That was it. It was done.

Now you might be asking yourself, how on earth can Lenin and the Bolsheviks get away with this? Hasn’t everyone been waiting for the Constituent Assembly since March? Didn’t most of the voters vote against the Bolsheviks? How can they just brazenly shut down the assembly without triggering like a mass uprising?

Well, here’s the thing: by January, 1918, the vast majority of Russians, including all of those tens of millions of voters, didn’t really care about the Constituent Assembly. At the local level, it was regarded as some far off assembly of elite intellectuals doing god knows what. The Decree on Peace satisfied the soldiers and sailors. The regulation on worker control satisfied urban labor. The Decree on Land was all the rural peasants had ever wanted. And remember too, for all of these groups, their local Soviets were the one political institution that continued to have real legitimacy. They were not far away assemblies of elite intellectuals, but local assemblies, composed of their own people. So when the news arrived that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved because they opposed Soviet power — which is, after all, what Lenin had set them up to do — well, then who needs them? Who cares? All power to the Soviets.

On top of all that, Lenin was ready with the great alternative to the Constituent Assembly. On January 10th, the executive committee of the Soviets convened the Third All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, deliberately convened at that moment to act as the popular alternative to what was now portrayed as a nefariously anti-Soviet Constituent Assembly. They also convened a Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, composed almost entirely now of Bolshevik and left SR delegates. Those delegates voted on January 13 to merge with the Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, which also just so happened to be composed almost entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. Once these two congresses merged, they became the single All Russian Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’ Deputies, and they claimed the mantle of legitimate popular sovereignty.

It would not be unreasonable to call this Congress the founding of the Soviet Union. The Congress overwhelmingly approved the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited Peoples, whose first article was, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a republic of soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants’ deputies.” The second article then said, “The Russian Soviet republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations as a federation of Soviet national republics.” And though there would be a few nomenclature shifts along the way, this is really the origin point to the Soviet Union, and why it’s called the Soviet Union. It also laid the permanent foundation of Russian communism. The Congress abolished private ownership of land, granted the Supreme Economic Council authority to convert factories, mines, railways, and other means of production and transport into state property, consolidated all banks into a single state institution. As a general statement of political and economic ideology, they said their fundamental aim was “… to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes, to mercilessly crush the resistance of the exploiters, to establish a socialist organization of society, and to achieve the victory of socialism in all countries.”

As this auspicious Soviet Congress wrapped up Lenin, addressed them: “Comrades,” he said, “before the Third Congress of Soviets closes, we must establish with complete impartiality the momentous part it has had to play in the history of the international revolution and of mankind. There are incontestable grounds for saying that the Third Congress of Soviets has opened a new epoch in world history, and there is growing awareness of it significance in these times of world revolution. It has consolidated the organization of the new state power which was created by the October Revolution, and has projected the lines of future socialist construction for the whole world, for the working people of all countries. The new system of the socialist Soviet Republic as a federation of free republics of the different nations inhabiting Russia has been finally accepted in this country in the sphere of domestic politics.”

But as Lenin and his government were set to embark on this new epoch in world history, after apparently winning the political war at home, they faced a looming threat from abroad that might tend to turn this from an epoch into a tiny blip. The armies of the Central Power were massed on the Russian border, representing the or else if the Russians did not sign the terms of the treaty Trotsky brought back with him from Brest-Litovsk. And so we now turn our attention from domestic politics to foreign affairs.

Just days after successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly, a group of about eighty Bolshevik leaders convened to discuss the terms of the peace. Three factions emerged from this discussion. The smallest was led by Lenin, who advocated signing the terms, now, without delay or argument. Lenin’s read on the situation was the Russian army was in no position to fight. He said, “There is no doubt that it will be a shameful peace, but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.” For the moment, he said they needed to focus on ensuring the revolution survived in Russia. “Germany has only just now pregnant with revolution,” he said, “but we have already given birth to a completely healthy baby.” Besides, he said, “The bourgeoisie has to be throttled, and for that, we need both hands free.” In Lenin’s opinion resuming the war with Germany would be absolutely catastrophic.

But Lenin once again found himself opposed by a majority of his own party. Most Bolsheviks favored turning this imperialist war into a revolutionary war, to do as the Jacobins had done in 1792, and call upon the people to defend the revolution, and then march off and crushed the fragile old powers of Europe. This faction was led most passionately by Nikolai Bukharin, who had joined the party as a teenager after the Revolution of 1905. After years of loyal service to the party in exile, Bukharin became one of the most influential political leaders in Moscow in 1917, and he directed the Bolshevik takeover of Moscow in the midst of the October Revolution. As a reward for this, he was now editor of Pravda. Bukharin was also now the leading voice of what would be called the left communists, who organized around total opposition to peace with the Central Powers, and the immediate declaration of revolutionary war to the death.

In between Lenin and Bukharin was Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky. He concurred with Lenin that the Russian army was an absolutely no position to fight a war, but he was also acutely aware that if the Bolsheviks did not prove their hostile independence from German imperialism, and shut down rumors, that they were just a bunch of paid German agents, the revolutionary project both at home and abroad would be wrecked. So Trotsky formulated a novel slogan: neither war nor peace. The Russians would reject the German terms, and then simply announce that so far as they were concerned, the war was over. The inner circle of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party was wary of both Lenin’s demand for peace at almost any price and Bukharin’s call for revolutionary war, and so they voted to endorse Trotsky’s diplomatic novelty, neither war nor peace.

So Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk and the talks resumed on January 15. Trotsky went right back to trying to play for time with all the rhetorical stalling he could muster, hoping against hope the German proletariat would rise up and make all of this a moot point. But by now, even the patiently tolerant Baron Von Kuhlman was getting extremely annoyed at the stalling. Finally, on January 27th, the Baron received a telegram from the kaiser demanding action. “This must be ended as soon as possible,” the kaiser wrote. “Trotsky must sign by 8:00 PM tomorrow without procrastination peace on our terms. In the event of refusal or attempts to procrastination and other pretexts, the negotiations are broken off at eight o’clock on the night of January 28th, and the armistice will be terminated.” That same day at another negotiating table in Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers negotiated a peace with representatives of the Ukrainian Rada, now recognized as the independent Republic of Ukraine. In exchange for peace and recognition, the Rada pledged massive shipments of grain to feed the famished populations of Germany and Austria. They also gave permission for the armies of the Central Powers to enter Ukraine, which was pretty important, because on that same day, a small army of Red Guards led by Moravia — the guy who led the defense of Petrograd at the battle of Pulkovo — pushed its way into Kiev and took control of the city on behalf of a Bolshevik aligned Ukrainian soviet, which denounced the rod has claim to political legitimacy. Civil war in Ukraine was now well underway, and both sides would need all the help they could get.

Meanwhile, back at the Russian negotiating table, Trotsky came back on January the 28th to respond to the final final ultimatum. Almost everybody expected him to just sign the treaty, there was nothing else for him to do. But instead, Trotsky carried his program of neither war nor peace to its logical and somewhat absurd conclusion: he said Russia would not sign the ignoble terms as presented by the Central Powers, and they would not be an accomplice to the dismemberment and destruction of the Russian Empire.

So would they go back to fighting?

No, absolutely not. Trotsky announced to a stunned audience, “We are demobilizing our army. We refuse to sign a peace based on annexations. We declared that the state of war between the central empires and Russia is at an end.” The war was over, but there would be no peace treaty. Baron von Kühlmann exclaimed, “This is unheard of!” but there was nothing he could actually do in that moment. Trotsky and the rest of his negotiating team got on the train and left.

Now as the German leaders huddled to figure out how to respond to this, I must stop briefly here and insert every historians’ favorite Soviet decree. On January the 25th, 1918 Pravda announced a new policy that would take effect at the end of the month. This decree read:

In order to establish in Russia the same way of counting time as used by almost all civilized people, the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars decrees the introduction of the new calendar into lay use after the end of the month of January of this year. Accordingly, one, the first day after 31 January of this year is to be counted not as the 1st of February, but as the 14th of February. The second day counted as the 15th, and so on.

That’s right. This is the moment Russia drops the Julian calendar and adopts the Gregorian calendar. So they went from January 31st, 1918 to February 14th, 1918, and that was that. From here on out, there will be no more triple cross checking different sources and books to make sure the proper dating chronology is being followed. From here on out, all dates everywhere will be the same. Thank god. Long live the revolution.

While the calendars were unifying, the kaiser got his advisors together. Though nobody wanted to resume the war against the Russians, Hindenburg and Ludendorff told the kaiser that all of their plans for a final campaign in the west in the spring of 1918 required the absolute guarantee the Russian army was finished, and it required access to Ukrainian agriculture. They couldn’t afford to fight on the eastern front, but they also couldn’t afford not to fight on the eastern front. So on February 17th, 1918 of the now blessedly unified calendar, the Central Powers launched an offensive campaign against Russia. The Germans advanced from west to east; the Austrians moved from southwest to northeast; the Turks move from south to north; all of them advancing rapidly through territory undefended by any army. One German commander remarked at the outset of this campaign, “This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced. It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, and trains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event, the charm of novelty.”

With an unstoppable invasion now under way, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened on February 18th, and Lenin finally secured a one vote majority for his motion to sign the peace treaty right now, immediately, no more delays. The deciding vote came from Trotsky. Neither war nor peace had now run its course, and peace was the only viable option left. Lenin transmitted Russia’s surrender without delay, but then the Central Powers just ignored him. They did not respond. Their armies simply kept advancing. In the north German armies entered Lavonia; in the center, enemy forces entered Minsk and Pskov; in the south, Austrian, Hungarian, and Turkish armies kept pushing into Russian territory. This went on for days and days and days without them ever acknowledging the Russian willingness to sign the peace treaty. With the total envelopment of Russia now on the table, Lenin finally admitted they might have no choice but to fight back. On February 22nd, the government published a decree under the headline, “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger.” Point one announced a sort of Russian levée en masse, declaring, ” The country’s entire manpower and resources are placed entirely at the service of revolutionary defense.” This levée en masse called for a scorched earth defensive war waged by all Russians everywhere. It hearkened back to the great patriotic war against Napoleon. Workers and peasants were ordered to engage in all manner of sabotage and self destruction to deny the invaders access to food resources or industrial technology. After calling for mass labor efforts to build trenches, defenses and fortifications, point six of the decree said, “These battalions are to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women, under the supervision of Red Guards. Those who resist are to be shot.” Then the eighth and final point read, “Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be shot on the spot.”

These two points, making summary execution the first, last, and final punishment for hindering the defense of the revolution, gave the recently established Cheka the legal mechanism they would use to mercilessly defend the Soviet government going forward. It can also reasonably said to mark the beginning of the coming Red Terror.

In the midst of this now declared national emergency, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks also reached out to the Allies, to see if they might be interested in supporting them. And unlike the Decree on Peace, which the Allies ignored, the British and French responded very quickly that they were absolutely willing to give whatever monetary and material aid necessary to help Lenin’s government fight the Central Powers and keep the eastern front of the war alive. Like I said before, at this point, any ideological or clash of civilization-style considerations were absolutely irrelevant to the decision-makers of the Allied Powers. They were willing to support anybody who promised to keep Russia in the war. For his part, Lenin was certainly not going to let ideological purity get in the way of access to vital resources to defend the Soviet government. Caught up in other business, Lenin voted in favor of accepting allied aid in absentia, writing a note to Trotsky that read, “Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” But all of this became irrelevant that same day. The Germans transmitted new terms on February 23rd, which were far harsher than they had been in December. And though Bukharin, the left Bolsheviks, and the left SRs wanted to keep fighting Lenin, convinced the majority of the Central Committee that they needed to sign whatever the Germans put in front of them. Right now. Or it would be the end of all of them.

So, a Russian delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk on March the first — and I should mention that Trotsky resigned as commissar of foreign affairs so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to sign this ignoble piece. When the team arrived, they announced that they would sign whatever the Central Powers put in front of them, a kind of final protest to prove that they were doing this with a bayonet to their throat and a gun to their head. But this time, it was the Central Powers who stalled, and while they kept the Russians waiting, their armies entered Kiev, and evicted the small force of Soviet Red Guards. Finally, on March the third, 1918, the Russian Soviet Republic and the representatives of the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

It was a doozy of a treaty. With the stroke of a pen, the Russians renounced 750,000 square miles, abandoning essentially all territory Russia had acquired since the 1600s. They renounced all claims to Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Transcaucasia, all of which would become either nominally independent states under German protection, or in many cases directly annexed into the German Empire. This amounted to roughly a third of the total population of the Russian Empire, a third of their most productive agricultural land, a quarter of their industrial capacity, a quarter of their railroad tracks, and three quarters of their coal and iron deposits. The treaty also granted German national special economic exemptions inside of Russia, leaving German owned property exempt from any nationalization efforts on the part of the Soviet government. This I should mention immediately led to a massive sell-off of Russian owned property, industry factories, and estates to German buyers, turning Russia overnight into something of a colony of German capital.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk probably saved the Soviet government, but it did so at an almost unfathomable cost. Right, left, and center, all howled upon reading the terms of one of the most pathetically abject capitulations in the history of modern diplomacy. It of course infuriated patriots and nationalists, as it surrendered a gobsmacking amount of wealth land in people to the Germans. It also infuriated the growing coalition of left communists, who believed Lenin had treacherously sold out the international proletariat, extinguished all hopes for worldwide revolutionary, and turned Russia into an exploited colony of German imperialism. The treaty would in time cause the permanent rupture of the Bolsheviks and the left SRs, who hated the treaty with every fiber of their being. But for Lenin, however ignoble the treaty, however pathetic the treaty, it was a necessary treaty. It was necessary both for the sake of the Soviet socialist government, but also for global socialist revolution. In response to critics from the left, Lenin could point out the simple fact that while they called for a levée en masse, the people were not actually willing to take up arms. The peace might be unpopular among the political leadership, but war was even more unpopular among the masses. And for all its negative aspects, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had one unmistakable virtue: the Soviet government was left in tact. The revolutionary baby was not smothered in the crib. Between the Third Congress of the Soviets enshrining what amounts to a Soviet constitution, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the Soviet government won international recognition, Lenin believed he had a small but fertile plot where the seed of future worldwide socialist revolution could be planted, tended, and sewed.

But, before they could export their produce abroad, they must first harvest it at home.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.77: Brest-Litovsk

We need to start this week with a couple of short corrections. First, I’m not quite sure how I did this, but it was General Krymov who was with Kerensky at the Battle of Pulkovo. I said it was some guy named General Krilov, who — there is no General Krilov. That was just some mistaken mishmash of sounds I made because there are so many generals in the Russian civil war whose name starts with K: Kornilov, Kaledin, Krymov, Kolchak. It’s not a big thing, but I completely invented a general named Krilov, he didn’t exist.

The second thing is, speaking of one of those K generals: Nikolai Krylenko was an ensign when he became commander and chief of the Russian army, not a lieutenant, so again, it was Ensign Krylenko who became commander in chief of the Russian army, not Lieutenant Krylenko. Sorry about that. I get things wrong sometimes.

Now we spent the last two episodes on the Bolshevik’s initial consolidation of power on the home front. This week, we are going to turn our attention to what was happening on the war front. What did the October Revolution mean for Russia’s place in the great war? And beyond that, what did it mean for their standing among the other great powers. And what we will find today, is that as the old stately Quadrille continued to swirl around to polite classical music with everyone wearing tuxedos and sequins, the Bolsheviks are about to come charging onto the dance floor like they’re diving into a mosh pit. And while technically it was a kind of dance, they were also there to just kind of, y’know, trash the scene.

So let’s go back to the night of October 26th. I remember the very first thing the Bolsheviks did after seizing power: issue the Decree on Peace. The Bolsheviks had been the anti-war party going back so long it was arguably the single most distinguishing feature about them going all the way back to 1914. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the most cohesive block in the Zimmerwald left, and they consistently attacked the war as nothing more than a small greedy clique of capitalist imperialists feeding the people of Europe into a meat grinder.

What Lenin wanted to do was reorient the war, to stop make it peoples fighting against peoples, and instead, make it the people rising up to overthrow their common enemy, the ruling classes of Europe. Lenin wanted to turn foreign war into civil war. And a huge amount of Bolshevik strategy, tactics and ideology rested on the belif that World War I represented the final crisis of the old world of capitalism, and from its ashes would be born a new world of socialism. Now that they held power in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks plan to strike out boldly to bring their international socialist dreams to fruition. But, they got off to a rocky and sometimes comical start. Trotsky took over the foreign office as commissar of foreign faced with the consequences of the white collar strike that had greeted the October Revolution none of the functionaries, bureaucrats or clerks who staffed the ministry office showed up for work. Trotsky had trouble tracking down the people who had the keys to the doors and the safes of the building. Now he responded to these insulting hitches with a kind of breezy disdain. Trotsky said that one of the consequences of the revolution would be an end to all this old style European diplomacy where fat cats congregated behind closed doors and treated the people of the world as expendable and exploitable ponds over brandy and cigars. “What sort of diplomatic work will we be doing, anyway?” Trotsky said. “I shall issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then shut up shop.”

But despite this posturing, it was going to be a wee bit more complicated than all that. On November 9th, the Soviet government transmitted the Decree on Peace to all the other belligerent powers, inviting everyone to take it as the starting point for a general peace. But if you will recall, it also aimed itself over the head of the governments of Europe and spoke directly to the people. Lenin had very few illusions about the response from the other powers. “The proposal of peace will be met with resistance on the part of the imperialist governments,” he said. ” We don’t fool ourselves on that score. But we hope that revolution will soon break out in the belligerent countries and that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England, and Germany.”

By issuing this call to all the belligerent powers, Lenin was also engaging in a little bit of public relations work. Because while Lenin did not expect the governments of France or Britain to respond favorably, he absolutely expected the Central Powers to jump at the chance to sign a peace treaty with Russia. One of the things that had dogged Lenin and the Bolsheviks for all of 1917 was the accusation that they were a bunch of paid German agents, that they had been delivered to Petrograd in a German train car with instructions to wreck Russia from the inside. Now, Lenin did absolutely take from the kaiser what the kaiser offered in 1917: logistical and monetary support. But Lenin is not a German agent.

It is, however, somewhat of a creative puzzle to imagine how exactly Lenin could have behaved differently if he was a German agent. Because after returning to Russia, he spent every waking moment attacking the legitimacy of the provisional government, denouncing the war, and fomenting an atmosphere of chaos. All of this culminated with an armed seizure of power, with their very first decree being a call for the Russian army to stop fighting the Germans. I mean, back in Berlin, the decision to put Lenin on a train in March 1917 was looking like the single best decision they had made since the war began.

To help paper over this German agent narrative, Lenin issued a call for a general peace, so that when the allies inevitably rejected this call, he could move to direct negotiations with the Central Powers without making it look like he was just a puppet dancing for its masters. And the Russians never failed to mention that the other powers were always welcome to join the peace talks at any time.

But the Allied Powers were not biting, and as much as Berlin and Vienna thrilled at the events of October, Paris and London were a gast policy towards Russia was to keep Russia in the war. Hell, it was French foreign policy going all the way back to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 that French national security depended on keeping a massive Russian army pinning down Germany’s east flank. You might remember that when Nicholas and Alexandra appeared personally responsible for Russian wartime dysfunction, France and Britain were very quick to shrug their shoulders at the overthrow of the monarchy and recognize the provisional government within a matter of days.

Not so much for the Bolsheviks in October. France and Britain did not recognize Lenin’s government, and in fact in the days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the allied governments directed most of their diplomatic recognition to General Dukhonin at Russian military headquarters.

As events unfolded over the next several months and years, Russia’s now former allies would have ideological and political reasons for opposing the Bolshevik regime, but in late 1917, their interest was in supporting anyone who would keep Russia in the war, and Lenin and his government very much did not appear to be those people. With the Allies literally not responding to the offer of a general peace, Trotsky cabled the central powers on November 14, indicating Russian willingness to deal with them directly. As you can imagine, the Bolshevik seizure of power was something of a miracle for the Germans and Austrians and Turks. No less than the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were both themselves tottering on the brink of total collapse, while the Germans saw an opportunity to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat come the spring of 1918. If they signed a treaty with the Russians to shut down the eastern front of the war, they could pour men guns and material into one last decisive offensive in the west. And the Germans were themselves in desperate straits and things looked pretty terrible, both at home and abroad, including the depressing reality that the United States had just joined France and Britain.

But there was still time to sneak in a knockout blow before American weight became decisive. But the Germans absolutely needed the Russians out of the war, or they were done for. So the Central Powers cabled their willingness to negotiate an armistice, followed by a formal peace treaty. They invited a Russian delegation to come to Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German army in what is now Belarus. Brest-Litovsk was a bombed out shell of itself, with only the former military fortress still standing. But the fact that the talks went on there spoke volumes for the military realities underlying the talks. The June Offensive had resulted in the Germans advancing hundreds of miles. They presently occupied large chunks of Russian territory in Poland and up in the Baltic. The German army stood poised to capture Petrograd, which was absolutely a huge background crisis that drove events towards the October Revolution. That the Russian delegation had to come to German military headquarters to work out a peace rather than mutually agreeing to a neutral location spoke volumes for how much this was effectively the Russians coming to surrender.

The Bolshevik delegation left Petrograd for Brest-Litovsk on November 18th. The head negotiator was a guy named Aldolph Joffe, a former Menshevik and friend of Trotsky’s who had wholeheartedly embraced radical Bolshevism after returning from Siberian exile after the February Revolution. Also on the negotiating team was Kamenev, who was welcomed back into the Bolshevik fold after realizing that he kept resigning in protest from the winning team. Lenin and the others led him back into the inner circle, but would forever bring up his October episode when they wanted to rub his face in the fact that Kamenev had spent those crucial days in October trying to derail them from their date with historical destiny.

But though it looked like the Russian delegation was coming hat in hand to beg for peace at Brest-Litovsk, they were not there to just surrender and sign peace at any price. They planned to use the negotiations as a platform to spread revolutionary gospel. And they very visibly positioned themselves as a completely new political animal on the world stage, one that represented the people, not just the ruling class. Though their principle negotiators were intellectuals, they also brought as equal members of their negotiating team, a soldier, a sailor, a worker, a peasant, and a woman. Now the woman on the team was a left SR named Anastasia Bitsenko, who was famous for assassinating the former minister of war in November 1905. She shot him dead at point blank range in the home of the governor of Saratov, who you might remember, was Peter Stolypin. Bitsenko spent more than a decade in Siberian exile before coming home after the February Revolution. Having a terrorist assassin sitting amidst the Russian negotiators certainly signaled that this was not the, uh, same old negotiating team everyone was used to.

There’s also a great story about the peasant delegate, a guy called Roman Stashkov. As the negotiating team was on their way to the train station, Joffe and Kamenev realized they had forgotten to secure a peasant delegate. Then they saw this old peasant walking on the side of the road, and they pulled over and offered him a ride. When he got in, they quizzed the perplexed old man about his politics. When he said he was an SR like everyone in his village, they said, come with us to Brest-Litovsk to make peace with the Germans. Now, he was understandably reluctant, but they offered him a chunk of cash to overcome his doubts and off he went, as the newly minted plenipotentiary representative of the Russian peasants.

The conference formerly began on November the 20th, with this motley array of scruffy Russian revolutionaries seated across the table from a phalanx of aristocratic old world diplomats and generals. The leader of the central powers negotiating team was German foreign secretary Baron von Kühlmann. Kühlmann was worldly, cultured, polite, and just the prototypical European diplomat. He also fancied himself something of a self-styled expert on Russia. While negotiating from a position of strength, Kühlmann believed his job was to provide language and terms that would allow the Russians to sign an honorable peace. He was convinced Germany was done for if the two-front war continued, but also convinced that if the Germans came off as punitive or vindictive towards the Russians, it would maybe drive the Russians back into arms, and almost certainly convince France and Britain to fight to the last man.

Seated beside the German foreign minister was the Austrian foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, who was acutely aware that catastrophe loomed over the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and they absolutely could not go on fighting the Russians. He was there to make sure the Russian signed a peace treaty on whatever terms got them to sign a peace treaty.

Beside both of them was General Max Hoffman, chief of staff of Germany’s armies on the eastern front, who had just overseen the capture of Riga. He was there to make sure the Russians understood they had lost the war and were in no position to bargain.

The two teams quickly agreed to a temporary ceasefire, as a prelude to a more stable armistice, as a prelude to an official peace treaty. But as negotiations commenced at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky finally got the safes open at the Russian foreign ministry, and proceeded to publish all the secret terms of all the secret treaties the tsar’s government had signed with France and Britain. Things like Russia being promised Constantinople and hegemony over the Balkans. That the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires would be dismembered. That France and Britain’s imperial projects would be protected and expanded.

All of this made Russia, France and Britain looked pretty bad. But Trotsky published these terms along with a note to the peoples of the world who would read all about this in their local newspaper. Trotsky said, “The bourgeois politicians and newspapers of Germany and Austria Hungary will no doubt seize upon the published documents and will try to represent the diplomatic work of the central empires in a favorable light. Such an attempt is fordoomed to failure, and this for two reasons. In the first place, we intend in a short time to present at the bar of public opinion a series of secret documents which amply illustrate the diplomatic methods of the central empires; in the second place, and this is most important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as international as those of imperialistic plunder. When the German proletariat by revolutionary means gets access to the secrets of the chancelleries of its government, it will discover documents in them of just the same character as those we are about to publish. It is to be hoped that this will happen at an early date.”

So this is basically an open call from the Russian foreign minister for the German people to rise up and overthrow the head of state of an empire he is currently in peace negotiations with. This is well outside of established diplomatic protocol. But though the publication of the secret treaty sent a wave of heartburn through the capitals of Europe, it did not derail the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk, because both sides needed a peace. On December 2nd, the two sides agreed to a month long armistice. Now for the Russians, signing the armistice was simply giving official designation to an already existing reality that was far beyond the control of their negotiators or their government. Since the October Revolution — and really for all of 1917 — the Russian military had been undergoing what one might call self-demobilization: Russian soldiers were simply quitting and going home. Now that they had the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land in hand, the mostly peasant soldiers were just going home. They were pushed by a desire to get as far away from the trenches as possible, and pulled by the promise of radical land redistribution back in their home villages. So the Russian empire was just disintegrating. An American observer said that when it came to the Russian government needing to sign a peace, it was “indeed urgent and active, but it was much the case of a man blowing with his breath in the same direction with a full grown natural tornado.”

The Russian army was going home, and even if Lenin and Trotsky wanted to keep fighting, there was no way they could have made that army keep fighting. Lenin considered peace essential to the long-term stability of his regime. If he tried to keep the Russian army in the field, he said, “the peasant army unbearably exhausted by the war will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”

But though the Russians needed a piece because they didn’t really have an army to continue the war, the Bolshevik negotiators were not in Brest-Litovsk to sign peace at any price. The main sticking point was what to do about the territory currently occupied by the armies of the Central Powers. The Bolshevik government had issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of russia just a few weeks earlier, which promised everyone autonomy and self-determination. The Bolshevik negotiators at Brest-Litovsk insisted that peace with Germany meant the mutual evacuation of all occupied territories on all sides, and recognition of the right of all peoples to determine their own fates. And though the immediate sticking point was territory in Poland and the Baltic, the biggest issue loomed just in the background: Ukraine.

Ukraine was a vital importance to the Russian Empire. Ukrainians made up the single largest block of non-Russians in the empire, just about 30 million people, making them a majority of the population in a half-dozen provinces down in the southwestern corner of the empire. More importantly, Ukraine accounted for like 75% of all the coal produced in the Russian Empire, 66% of its iron ore, 75% of its magnesium, 66% of its salt, 80% of its sugar, and 90% of all wheat exports. It was a vital part of the Russian Empire’s economy, and for all the talk about autonomy and self-determination, both the Russians and Germans saw Ukraine as a vital part of their post-war economies. The Germans had been cultivating Ukrainian separatists since the beginning of the war, hoping to turn a nominally independent Ukraine into a German client state. After the February Revolution, a group of Ukrainian leaders formed what they called the Rada. Self-appointing themselves as the legitimate leaders of Ukraine, they spent the next six months and occasionally hostile relations with the various Russian provisional governments. In fact, one of the proximate causes for the Kadets quitting Kerensky’s government over the summer was that Kerensky recognized the legitimacy of the Rada’s authority in Ukraine. Now that the Bolsheviks were in charge, the wheel of revolution turned again. And with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia in hand, the Rada prepared to declare independence.

But, not so fast. While Lenin and Trotsky very publicly proclaimed that they had no problem with the people of Ukraine charting their own destiny, the self-organized Rada wasn’t necessarily the true voice of the people. And while the countryside was almost universally Ukrainian, the cities and larger towns were very much more ethnically mixed. The population of Kiev for instance, was actually a majority Russian and Jewish. The government in Petrograd was not thrilled with reports it received that the Rada was allowing free passage of officers, men, and volunteers moving towards the Cossack regions to join what was fast becoming the anti-Bolshevik White Armies.

On December 3rd, Lenin issued a manifesto to the Ukrainian people with an ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada. It opened, “The Council of People’s Commissars, the socialist government of Russia, reaffirms that the right to self determination belongs to all nations oppressed by tsarism and the great Russian bourgeoisie, up to and including the right of these nations to secede from Russia. Accordingly, we, the Council of People’s Commissars, recognize the people’s Ukrainian republic, and its right to secede from Russia or enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic on federal or similar relations between them.”

Okay. So what exactly is the problem here? The problem was the Rada, who Lenin then rattled off a bunch of charges against, including:

“The Rada has been extending support to the Kadet-Kaledin plot and revolt against Soviet power. The Rada has allowed its territory to be crossed by troops on their way to Kaledin, but has refused transit to any anti-Kaledin troops.” Because of this, Lenin said, “… even if the Rada had received full formal recognition as the uncontested organ of supreme state power of an independent bourgeois Ukrainian republic, we would have been forced to declare war on it without any hesitation, because of its attitude of unexampled betrayal of the revolution.”

Then he issued the ultimatum:

“In the event, no satisfactory answer is received to these questions within 48 hours, the Council of People’s Commissars will deem the Rada to be in a state of open war with the Soviet power in Russia and the Ukraine.”

Lenin would not receive a satisfactory answer from the Rada within 48 hours, but Germany promptly issued an invitation to the Ukrainian Rada to send representatives to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate the recognition of an independent Ukraine, and a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers. Ukraine was now a theater of the blossoming Russian civil war.

Meanwhile, at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were growing impatient and very suspicious of Russian intentions. On December 13th, the Russian government proudly proclaimed their allocation of 2 million rubles to create and spread revolutionary propaganda throughout Europe. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Russian goal was to stall long enough for revolutions in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere to render the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk totally moot. On December 21st, the Executive Committee of the Soviet issued a public statement for worldwide consumption.

It said, “The joint meeting appeals to you, workers of Germany, you to whom the predatory aims of German imperialism are as alien as the aggressive aspirations of Russian imperialism are to us. You should support in every way the struggle of the Russian people for a just and universal peace. For three years now, the people have been shedding blood on all fronts, but neither victory nor defeat have brought nearer the longed for peace. Only the will of the peoples can compel the imperialists of all countries to conclude a democratic peace.”

Then they broadened their appeal beyond just the Germans:

“Workers of France, Britain, and Italy, peoples of blood-soaked Serbia and ravaged Belgium! You too should raise your voice. Let your governments know that you are no longer willing to shed blood for annexationist aims alien to you. We do not want a piece that would sanctify the old injustices, forge new chains, and burden the working people with the grievous consequences of the war. We want a peace of the peoples, a democratic peace, a just peace. And we shall secure such a peace only when the peoples of all countries dictate its terms by their revolutionary struggles.”

So this was the new style of Russian diplomacy: calling on the peoples of the world to overthrow their governments.

With the leaders in Germany getting increasingly impatient, quite correctly recognizing the Russian negotiators simply stalling for time until revolution broke out in Berlin, they leaned on Baron von Kühlmann to press harder for a final treaty. To resist this pressure, Lenin sent Trotsky to take over negotiations personally, telling Trotsky before he left, “we need someone to do the delaying, and you will do it better than anybody. String out the talks until there is a revolution in Germany, or as long as possible.”

Trotsky’s arrival at Brest-Litovsk was his arrival on the world stage as an international figure. He spent most of his life as an incredibly obscure radical intellectual, activist, and journalist. He had earned himself enormous celebrity inside Russia as the dynamic face and voice of Bolshevism, but it was here at Brest-Litovsk that he really came to the attention of the international press, who were all on hand to cover the momentous negotiations.

Trotsky absolutely reveled in the opportunity to cross rhetorical swords with the high and mighty representatives of the old world aristocracy, who were used to dealing with men of the same class, breedings, and manners as themselves, not scruffy exiled revolutionaries who spent their formative years couch surfing through the underground of Europe. Trotsky turned all of his talents up to 11, and dazzled the packed house of diplomats and observers with his undeniably brilliant oratorical and intellectual skills. Baron Von Kühlmann, for his part, seemed content to let Trotsky lead the discussion through a variety of philosophical digressions, including long abstract debates about the nature of self-determination, a monologue on the basic tenants of Marxism, and pointed demands to investigate the meaning of practically every word in the draft of the treaty. On December 30th, for instance, Trotsky amused the audience by demanding that the stock phrase about the two parties living in peace and friendship be amended. “I would take the liberty to propose that the second phrase,” Trotsky said, mentioning the bit about friendship, “be deleted. It’s thoroughly conventional ornamental style does not correspond, so it seems, to the dry business-like sense of the document. Such declarations copied from one diplomatic document into another have never yet characterized the real relations between states.” He did not want to be friends with the Germans, he wanted peace with the Germans, and that was very different.

He also continued to object to the German plan to keep occupying captured territory, demanding instead, the total evacuation and renunciation of any plans for permanent annexation. Baron von Kühlmann appears to have let all of this go on because he remained convinced that this was just the Russians allowing themselves to rationalize and endorse the final terms of the treaty, which Kühlmann still expected to dramatically favor Germany. But his political masters back in Berlin, Ludendorff and Hindenburg especially, were getting awfully testy, and they prevailed upon the kaiser to demand his majesty’s negotiators skip to the end of the page, and issue an ultimatum.

At the negotiating table, General Hoffman voiced this frustration on behalf of the German military: “The Russian delegation has spoken as if it represented a victorious invader of our country. I should like to remind its members the facts point to the contrary. Victorious German troops are on Russian soil. I should further like to say that the Russian delegation demands that we should recognize the right of self-determination in a form and on a scale which its own government does not recognize. German supreme command thinks it necessary to repudiate it interference in the affairs of the occupied areas.” Hoffman said bluntly there would be no further negotiations about any evacuation. The Germans would keep what they had won. The German armies were not going anywhere.

Trotsky tried to dance around a little bit more, but on January the fifth, 1918, the other side had had enough. General Hoffman rolled out a map, which he said would be the basis of all future relations between Germany and Russia. It laid out new borders between Germany and Russia, and what it showed was the effective dismemberment of the Russian Empire. It would leave Germany much, much stronger and Russia, much, much weaker. Hoffman’s point, of course, was at the Bolsheviks may have won their little revolution, but they had lost the war, and it was time for them to quit stalling and admit it. Trotsky’s theatrical may have dazzled, but they were no match for the material and military reality of the situation. The Russian army was in a state of acute disintegration. For all their own internal problems, the Central Powers had been humoring the Russians. They could steamroll the eastern front anytime they wanted, and now that threat was on the table. Trotsky was told, accept this, or we will advance. Trotsky took this ultimatum and said, look, I cannot accept this at the moment. I have to go home and confer with my government. The testy Central Power negotiators allowed this final delay, but they were now prepared to resume the war.

Next week, we will recombine our narratives, and look at the massive and potentially fatal dilemmas facing Lenin’s government at home and abroad, because back in Petrograd on that very same January 5th, 1918, a long awaited constituent assembly finally convened. With its majority of delegates likely hostile to the Bolsheviks, they posed just as much of a threat to Lenin as the Germans, who were themselves gearing up to invade further if their demands were not met.

It would appear that though the Bolsheviks had survived longer than anyone expected, there was very little chance they would survive the winter.

 

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~dramatic music swells~

Episode 10.67: Liberty or Victory

Last time we covered the Bolsheviks’ first week in power, a week most of their enemies and rivals assumed would not be their first week in power, but their only week in power. But the Bolsheviks issued a flurry a proclamations explicitly crafted to win mass popular support while they fended off what turned out to be a pretty feeble political and military counter attack.

As we also saw, however, while the Bolshevik government in Petrograd publicly chased the legitimising power of mass popularity, they also laid the groundwork for a highly centralized one party state, so that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become synonymous with the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks.

Now, because so many of the dramatic event shaking the world have taken place in Petrograd, that is where we have been spending a lot of time. But let’s be real: we’re talking about a couple of thousand hardcore Bolshevik party members backed up by tens of thousands of sympathetic Red Guards, soldiers, and sailors in one single city. But the Russian Empire was quite literally the largest political landmass on earth, stretching from Helsinki to Vladivostok, from Archangel to Tbilisi. The total population was somewhere north of 120 million people, encompassing more than two dozen nationalities. Successfully taking over an assembly hall at the Smolny Institute in downtown Petrograd starts to look awfully small compared to that context. Now this is why the Bolsheviks knew it was so vital to do everything in the name of the Soviets. Because after six months of war, chaos, disappointment and disillusionment, since the February Revolution, the Soviets as an institution were probably the one thing left in the Russian empire that had any political legitimacy at all. There were local Soviets scattered everywhere, hundreds of them. Inside army garrisons and naval bases, factories and mines, big cities, small towns, tiny villages — each of those local Soviets enjoyed a great deal of local support. And so when word spread, either by telegraph or railroad or word of mouth, that the October Revolution stood for All Power to the Soviets, the news was greeted with enthusiasm.

Now, none of this was about people cheering the ascendancy of the Bolshevik party, mind you. It was about cheering the ascendancy of the Soviets, especially as news of the October Revolution in Petrograd was often accompanied by news of the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, the new worker regulations, and the Declaration of Rights for National Minorities. The October Revolution appeared to mean that the Russian Empire would finally undergo a real political and social revolution. It stood for mass empowerment and individual rights and dignity, replacing the hated centralized bureaucracy with its secret political police and huge military apparatus only serving a tiny clique of out of touch officials.

[Stares in foreshadowing.]

But though the verdict of the October Revolution was initially accepted, it was hardly uncontested. The most immediate example was in Moscow. As soon as Moscow learned of the events of October 25th, political leaders split into two hostile camps, with the Bolsheviks on one side, and a coalition of SRs, Mensheviks, moderate socialists, Kadets and army officers on the other. Inner Moscow turned into a war zone during the last week of October, as both sides raised armed attachments to fight for control of the city. This street fighting in Moscow, along with the little battle of Pulkovo outside Petrograd we talked about last week, count as the first shots of the Russian Civil War. And both ended almost the same way: just as the Cossacks were surrendering outside Petrograd on October 31st, the Bolshevik dominated Moscow Soviet went on the offensive and declared victory the following day. The two biggest and most important cities in the empire were now in the Bolshevik Soviet camp, but only after expending a lot of bullets and a lot of artillery.

There were a couple of other big regions that resisted the Bolsheviks and Petrograd — one of them, Ukraine, I’m going to set aside until next week, because that requires more discussion and ties more directly to post-October Russia’s relationship with the rest of the world, which we’re going to talk about next week — but another was the Cossack regions in the south along the lower Don River. This area would become the original home base of the White Armies, which were already well on their way to being formed in November 1917. For centuries, the Cossacks had enjoyed semi-autonomy and special privileges from the tsar in exchange for their fearsome military service. And because of that long history of service to the tsar, the Cossacks were a major boogeyman for the Russian socialists and revolutionaries. And specifically, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks made plans to seize power in October 1917, they harped on the counter-revolutionary threat posed by Cossack general Alexei Kaledin.

Kaledin had been implicated in the Kornilov Affair, but then he refused an order to resign, and instead headed back to his home territory, where he sat at the head of three armies and dared anyone to tell him what to do. Bolshevik newspapers in the fall and winter of 1917 consistently raised the spectre of the three Ks of counterrevolution: Kerensky, Kornilov, and Kaledin.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that after the October Revolution, the Cossacks had little loyalty for either the deposed tsar or Alexander Kerensky, but they were absolutely opposed to the Bolshevik seizure of power, and their homeland would become a safe haven for all those who shared that opposition. And, their homeland would be the ground within which the first white flags would be planted.

Another small but vital center of resistance that the Bolsheviks knew they would have to snuff out immediately was the general staff of the army. When the October Revolution hit, the Russian army was led by Commander in Chief Nikolai Dukhonin. He was a 40 year old former quartermaster who Kerensky had appointed commander in chief in the wake of the Kornilov Affair, and — don’t worry about him too much, he’s not going to be around for more than a couple of minutes. After Kerensky and Kornilov failed to recapture Petrograd on October 30, which we talked about last week, Dukhonin signaled that the general staff intended to resist the Bolsheviks. But I’m sure you can guess what happened when he told his soldiers to get ready to march on Petrograd: yeah, nobody listened. The Decree on Peace was enormously popular with the men, they were all done fighting, and they were certainly not going to fight against a government that promised to end the war.

The Bolsheviks briefly tolerated General Dukhonin, but on November 9th, lenin ordered him to begin negotiations with his German counterparts for an immediate armistice. When Dukhonin refused, Lenin relieved him of command and replaced him with Lieutenant Nikolai Krylenko, veteran of the Bolshevik military organization, delegate to the second Congress of Soviets, one of the trio of commissars in the government responsible for military affairs, and now, commander in chief of the Russian army.

As Lenin dispatched Krylenko to take over at headquarters, Lenin issued a radio appeal to the soldiers, encouraging them to take the matter of revolutionary peace into their own hands. “Soldiers,” he said, “the cause of peace is in your hands. You cannot let the counter-revolutionary general sabotage the great work of peace. You will place them under guard in order to prevent lynchings, which are unworthy of the revolutionary army, and to ensure that they will not escape the tribunal which awaits them. You will observe the strictest revolutionary and military order. The frontline regiments are immediately to elect delegates to begin formal negotiations with the enemy for an armistice. The Council of People’s Commissars authorizes you to do this. Inform us by every means possible the progress of negotations. The Council of People’s Commissars alone has the authority to sign the final armistice.”

With Krylenko on the way, General Dukhonin and the rest of the sitting general staff tried to depart for the relative safety of Kiev, but their own men blocked them from leaving on November 18th. Meanwhile, old General Kornilov and his host of loyal officers had just been sitting around nearby under the loosest of house arrests since September. On November 19th, they all just got on their horses and rode away. They headed towards the Don Cossack region, where they would form the senior officer corps of a volunteer army to fight the Bolsheviks. Among those riding away with Kornilov was the notoriously antisemitic right-wing general, Anton Denikin.

The next day, Krylenko arrived at headquarters with a detachment of Red Guards and armed sailors. General Dukhonin met him at the station, but was placed under arrest by his own men. Not exactly listening to Lenin’s literal words, but certainly taking matters into their own hands, the soldiers bayoneted Dukhonin to death right there at the train station.

Now, next week, we’re going to talk about the external results of the October Revolution and follow the peace talks with the central powers at Brest-Litovsk, but today we are going to stay with the internal dynamics, because we are finally approaching something that has been dangled out in front of everybody’s nose since the February Revolution: the constituent assembly.

As we talked about way back in Episode 10.63, a constituent assembly had been promised on the very day Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne. The provisional part of the provisional government was because they were supposed to be merely caretakers until the convening of the constituent assembly. But then, it just kept getting delayed. Now, partly the delay was caused by a kind of overly judicious sloth from the people who were supposed to be running the elections, but partly, it was because there was an unstated assumption that the constituent assembly should not be convened until after Russia had won the war. When Kerensky’s June offensive failed, which was supposed to be the moment Russia went off and won the war, everyone just seemed to freeze like deer in the headlights. The Bolsheviks were able to make great political use of the delay, and as we noted in Episode 10.73, on the eve of launching their insurrectionary coup, one of their publicly stated planks was guaranteeing the constituent assembly would finally be convened as promised.

When they took power, the Bolsheviks felt obligated to live up to their word. One of the earliest decrees that came out of that first week in power said that the elections for the constituent assembly, which were now scheduled for mid-November, would go ahead as planned without alteration or delay. Now, Lenin of course was personally not on board with that at all. He argued in favor of either manipulating the electoral system to ensure the Bolsheviks and their left-SR allies held a voting majority, or just abandoning the whole thing entirely. But he was out voted on the Bolshevik Central Committee, as everyone else thought it would be political suicide to try to manipulate or cancel something that had been promised for so long, and which had been so immediately promised by the Bolsheviks. For opponents and rivals of the Bolsheviks, the constituent assembly was being set up as something of a final boss that they could count on to crush the insurgent Bolshevik dictatorship. It was taken for granted the Bolsheviks would not win anywhere close to a majority of the seats, so the Bolshevik adventure would last until the constituent assembly convened, whereupon the voting majorities in that constituent assembly would draft a new constitution. At a minimum, the Bolsheviks would have to accept the status of junior partners in any future government, and if they did not accept that, then they could go to the dustbin of history.

The SRs in particular believed the constituent assembly would solve everything, and that the Bolsheviks wouldn’t dare try to overthrow a truly democratic assembly of the nation. One SR said of his comrades, “They thought the constituent assembly was protected by some vague power. The great people of Russia would not permit any profanation of the noblest ideal which had sprung from the revolution.” But just to be sure, they formed the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, composed mostly of that same collection of SRs, Mensheviks, intellectuals, and municipal officials who had been actively opposing the Bolsheviks since October 25th.

Elections to the constituent assembly unfolded over the last two weeks of November 1917. They were held on the basis of universal suffrage — truly universal suffrage. All adults were allowed to vote, both men and women. Now down the road, the Soviets would sometimes imply women won the right to vote as a result of the socialist revolution, but we should be clear that women were granted the right to vote in the electoral law of July 20th, back when Lenin was still settling into hiding in Finland. All told, about 45 million people voted. It was a huge turnout given the circumstances. It was nothing less than the single largest election in Russian history to date.

The official results would not be announced until the end of September, but the picture soon became very clear: of the 767 seats elected from the 74 districts that we have data from, the vast majority of the electorate voted socialist of one stripe or another. Something like 75 to 80% of the total votes went to socialist parties. The liberal Kadets, once the leading political party in Russia, won just four and a half percent of the vote, for a grand total of 16 seats. The Kadets could not even muster more than a quarter of the vote in the cities where they were supposed to be strongest. So, one thing for sure that we can take away from all this is that in the fall of 1917, there was no right-wing block, nor even a progressive liberal block. Everyone voted socialist. We also do not find among the vast Russian peasantry, as we did find among the French and German peasants after 1848, any hint of forming a conservative base for reactionary neo-absolutism. The Russian peasants were radical socialists, and more than anything else, they were voting for the radical redistribution of land.

But that leaves us to disentangle that socialist vote, because we know that not all socialists are the same. As anticipated, the SRs won 17 million votes or about 37% of the total, netting them 324 seats. They would form the largest single block in the assembly. The SRs had been the party of the peasants from the beginning, and they were the best known party out in the villages, and they feel that the best known candidates out in the villages. They were also joined by Ukrainian SRs running in their own territory as their own party — the Ukrainian SRs won 12% of the total vote, and 110 seats, pushing the SR delegation right to the threshold of an outright majority. But complicating things is that after October, the right SRs and the left SRs have broken into rival camps. Now, in many places, the party lists were drawn up before this split became real, and there’s a huge amount of ongoing debate among historians about how much the voting peasants were aware of the split. It seems like in some places there were rival lists presented to the voters, and in other places not. So though the SRs were the largest single party, it is not clear at all how their individual members would vote. I should also say that it does seem very clear that whether the peasants were voting right SR or left SR or just for any SR, the peasants are voting for radical redistribution of land. That’s what they want.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks won 10 million votes, or 23% of the total, netting them 183 seats. This was simultaneously an incredible advance for a party that had been an unknown fringe minority on the verge of extinction just a few months earlier, but also, obviously, it is a big problem for a party claiming to speak on behalf of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviks had basically zero connection to the peasants, and they collected all their votes from the urban parts of central Russia. The further you got from the city centers and the further you got from the center of Russia, support for the Bolsheviks tapered off rapidly. Lenin took some solace in the fact that his party did very well in key military garrisons: in army units in central and western Russia, the Bolsheviks were clearing 60% of the vote. In the Moscow and Petrograd garrisons, they were winning 80% of the vote. All told, about 5 million soldiers voted, and the SRs and Bolsheviks wound up running neck and neck with each other, each taking about 40% of the vote.

I should mention before we move on here that the Mensheviks are dead. All told, they’re going to win 3% of the total vote, just a handful of seats, and not unlike the imperial general staff, they wind up looking like a group of generals without an army.

As the picture of the electoral results started to clarify, the Bolsheviks were left with a choice. As they entered the constituent assembly as a minority faction, if they failed to win enough votes for their preferred policies, would they accept the verdict of the assembly win or lose, even if it meant giving up power? They did not have long to decide. But I should say that whenever the possibility of the Bolshevik government shutting the assembly down entirely, the SR Victor Chernov said, “They wouldn’t dare.”

While the elections unfolded, a missing pillar of Soviet authority convened. That oh so all important Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies had been just that: a congress of soviets of workers and soldiers’ deputies. The peasant soviets did not take part in it. As an organizational institution, the Congress of Peasant Soviets, dominated by SRs, protested the convening of the Second All-Russian Congress, and refused to send delegates. One wonders how history might have been changed if those peasant SR delegates had shown up in Petrograd instead of turning up their noses. It’s entirely possible the Bolsheviks would not have had enough votes to push through what they pushed through on the night of October 25th, which I guess we’ll just file under history is made by those who show up.

On November 26th, a new Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies convened in Petrograd. Before this Peasant Congress convened, the Bolsheviks and their left SR allies managed to alter the rules of representation to the Peasant Congress, adding slates of delegates from local military garrisons, which were more properly represented by the Soviets of Soldiers’ Deputies, but since they were heavily Bolshevized, Lenin pushed through a rule change to pack in as many Bolsheviks as possible. And as we just discussed, it’s not like there were any actual peasant Bolsheviks to call on. The Congress was a chaotic mess from the start: Bolsheviks and left SRs were by now experts at tactical disruption, yelling, hooting, heckling, and physically pushing their way on stage if they didn’t like what was being said. One of the main points of contention at the present Congress was the constituent assembly. Lenin himself delivered a speech to the Congress where he floated the notion that really, when you think about it, there’s no need for a constituent assembly, because the Soviets are already a higher form of democracy. In response, Victor Chernov put forward a resolution that said, “The Congress believes that the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’ Deputies, as the ideological and political guides of the masses, should be strong combat points of the revolution standing guard over the conquest of peasants and workers. With such legislative creativity, the constituent assembly must translate into life the aspirations of the masses, as expressed by the Soviets. In consequence, the Congress protests against the attempts of individual groups to put the Soviet and the constituent assembly against one another.” With Lenin clearly aiming to do just that, the Congress approved Chernov’s resolution by a vote of 362 to 321. But with the left SR leader Maria Spiridonova chairing the Congress, the Bolsheviks convinced her to set this vote aside. This brought the Peasant Congress to a crashing halt. The right SRs walked out and reconvened elsewhere, declaring themselves the legitimate Peasant Congress, while those they had left behind, merely an illegitimate rump. The Bolsheviks and left SRs who had been left behind said exactly the same thing. The matter was ultimately settled by the power of, well, power. The Bolshevik and left SR Congress approved a slate of delegates to go off and join the executive committee of Soviets that they had formed after the October Revolution, that would be a precursor to calling for a third All Russian Congress of Soviets, this one of workers, soldiers, and peasant deputies, which would indeed be set up as an alternative to the constituent assembly. And the reason that worked, the reason all of that was considered legitimate, is because the Bolsheviks won.

And indeed Lenin and the Bolsheviks are playing to win. On December 1st, just after the constituent assembly elections ended, the Bolshevik government straight up outlawed the Kadet Party — not a prescription of individual Kadets, but a blanket ban on the party. Lenin still believed that as the party of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the Kadets represented a major threat, particularly if they were able to link with the reactionary elements in the military. Lenin, in fact, referred to them in public as the Kadet-Kaledin party, that is, the Cossack general setting up white armies down in the south.

Just as with the press censorship decree, Lenin was assailed for his attack on civil liberties. Those liberties were supposed to be one of the cornerstones of any post revolutionary regime. We overthrew tsarist tyranny in part because of all the censorship and political controls, remember? And here you are simply putting all of that back into place. Lenin’s old friend Maxim Gorky, who I should mention Lenin still allowed to publish, attacked the criminalization of the Kadets as fundamentally incompatible with political liberty. Even the left SRs who were on the verge of joining Lenin’s government protested against his actions. But Lenin didn’t care. Political victory was far more important to him than something so trifling as political liberty.

Then on December 5th, Lenin and the Bolshevik government took another step towards ensuring liberty did not interfere with victory. In a secret decree, they did not even make public, they abolished the Military Revolutionary Committee, and repurposed its constituent parts to create a new paramilitary apparatus with a far more all-encompassing mission to protect the revolution. The new group was called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage Under the Council of People’s Commissars. But since that is quite a mouthful, this group became known — when its existence became known by its shorthand name, the Cheka.

The Cheka would be run by its own separate committee that did not answer to the Executive Committee of the Soviets, nor even really to the government itself. It was just its own independent institution dedicated entirely to fighting counterrevolution. They were above, below, outside, and between the law. So, just as the tsar had his Okhrana, the Bolsheviks would have the Cheka. The new boss was starting to look an awful lot like the old boss.

The Bolsheviks then spent the rest of December consolidating as much political and economic power as they could. The initial decrees they issued had mostly been about securing popular support, whether those decrees were Bolshevik party policy or not. But in the weeks that followed, they embarked upon what was clearly their preferred project of centralization and nationalization of economic functions. On December the fifth, they created the Supreme Council for the National Economy to Coordinate, Manage, and Control Economic Production. Its leadership included the economic commissars of industry, food, agriculture, finance, and transport. On December 11th, the government created a commissar of public education who would remove childhood education from the hands of the church, and put it in the hands of the central state apparatus. On December 14th, they issued a decree giving the state a complete monopoly on banking. All private banking operations would be combined under a single state operation. And while they promised to preserve and protect individual savings accounts, they also authorized the immediate confiscation of any bullion they found. Then they moved on to major industry. On December 16th, the government confiscated the Russo-Belgian Metal Company, and on December 18th, the main electrical company. That same day, they abolished the open market for rent and living accommodations in all cities as a precursor to fixed rents, that would not be exploitable by landlords, who would soon be deprived of their property anyway. On December 24th, the famous Putilov Iron Works were taken over and nationalized.

Taken together, we see here a clear path for the Bolsheviks replacing the chaotic exploitation of capitalism with rational central planning. That was the plan anyway.

By the time we get to these later decrees, however, the government was no longer composed entirely of Bolsheviks. Having successfully worked together since October, and with the split between right SRs and left SRs irrepairable, especially after the breakdown of the Peasant Congress, the left SRs entered negotiations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks to join the government. The Bolsheviks of course retained their majority, but the left SRs were given important seats. As the SRs were the party of peasant socialism, they were given the Commissariat of Agriculture. They were also given pretty key roles for the internal governing of the empire, and left SRs now took over the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the Interior — excuse me, Commissariat. They also got the more minor seats of posts and telegraphs, and local self-government. They were also given seats on the committee in charge of the Cheka, so they could at least keep an eye on what the Bolsheviks were up to. When this merger was confirmed on December 12th, everyone just chilled out, right? After all, the big bad thing the Bolsheviks had done was not enter into a coalition with other socialist parties, right? Well, that’s over. Bolsheviks and SRs are now together in a coalition government. So everything is cool now, right?

Maybe not so much.

That same day, Lenin issued a set of theses regarding the coming constituent assembly. Knowing that the Bolsheviks had only won a quarter of the seats, Lenin spent 19 bullet points arguing that because the Soviets represented the only form of democracy that would ensure the proper transition to socialism, the constituent assembly better tread very carefully. Lenin made some fairly specious claims about the voting system for the constituent assembly being unfair, even though his own party had approved the system, but then he issued a fairly stark ultimatum. Lenin said, “That if the constituent assembly opposes Soviet power, it is condemned to inevitable political death. The interests of the revolution take precedence over the formal rights of the constituent assembly.”

So Lenin is once again very happy to just say out loud exactly what he’s planning to do. Victor Chernov and the other SRs were convinced Lenin wouldn’t dare move on something as sacred as the constituent assembly, as if they had never met Lenin before in their lives.

Next week, however, we will not move directly to everyone apparently meeting Lenin for the first time, because next week, we also have to start talking about what the Bolshevik revolution means for Russia’s place inside the war, and inside the world. They had promised peace without annexation or indemnity, and Lenin and Trotsky meant to secure an immediate armistice, and then permanent peace on those terms as quickly as possible.

The problem, of course, was what happens if immediate peace, and peace without annexation and indemnity, are simply incompatible.

 

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Episode 10.14: The Tsar Liberator

On a very superficial level, the Russian Empire got through the period between the Decemberist Revolt of 1825 and the Revolutions of 1848 in pretty good shape. The long reign of Nicholas the First had been book-ended by the easy smothering of liberal revolutionary aspirations. And in the case of 1848, this was accompanied by a rousing display of Russia’s final boss style military might in Hungary. So one might be tempted to think this was proof that the imperial regime was strong, both at home and abroad. Except if you scratch the surface even a little bit, you found the Russian Empire was its own Potemkin village. Politically, the appointment of military officers to run ministries they didn’t really understand led first to inefficiency and incompetence, then outright graft and corruption, because even with the Third Section running around out there, follow through on directives and oversight of lower officials could be appallingly bad, a fact taken advantage of at nearly every level of government.

Economically, Russia was not following the industrialization path being blazed in the west, and they were falling further behind by the day. Most of all, the Russian Empire was hampered by the archaic institution of serfdom, which defined the social, economic and legal slavery of something like a third of the population. This is what you would get a glimpse of if you scratched the surface of the Russian Empire around 1850. Now, what if you took a scrub brush and really went to town? Well, you would get to see the whole thing laid bare, and we call that scrub brush, the Crimean War.

 We touched on the Crimean War at the beginning of Series Eight, because it was now Emperor Napoleon the Third’s first big foray into international affairs after declaring himself Emperor Napoleon the Third. The proximate causes and blow by blow of the Crimean War are not important for us here today. What is important, is the consequences for Russia, because the Crimean War was a complete disaster and a humiliating defeat. The war itself began in 1853, and saw Britain and France supporting the Ottoman Empire against Russia, making this the first full blown great power conflict since the treaty of Vienna. And though the Russian soldiers themselves fought valiantly and the siege of Sevastopol was endured with a kind of grim courage, the Crimean War signaled the arrival of modern industrial warfare to Europe, and Russia found itself fatally unprepared to fight in this new world. As it turns out its military, government, economy, all were in an appalling state. When the Russian Empire came into direct conflict with the military and economic strength of Britain and France, a systemic stagnant rot was revealed. The scrub brush of the Crimean War exposed it for all to see.

The failure of the Russian army in the Crimean War was especially ironic given Tsar Nicholas’s own presentation of himself and his empire as essentially a military dictatorship. The army and navy occupied pride of place in the budget. The peacetime army was somewhere between 800,000 and a million men. Military officers were so trusted they ran the civilian government too. Nicholas insisted on smartly dressed, well-drilled and firmly disciplined regiments that were ready to show off their spit-polished sharpness and parades and demonstrations. But the army was a microcosm of the general problems of the empire. Yes, its budget was massive, but it was bloated. The officer corps had settled into lethargic corruption. They were skimming off the top, cooking the books, pocketing pay. There was graft and corruption on the supply chain, providing the food and clothes and boots and weapons for the soldiers. Expenditures were bled from a million little pinpricks. Meanwhile, the common soldiers were all unhappy conscripts serving twenty-five year hitches, often suffering the consequences of being badly supplied by corrupt agents. And then, when they finally got into a real fight with real great powers, they lacked for everything: their weapons were outdated; there were no railroads to speak of; the high command was stuck in the past strategically; the field officers were stuck in the past tactically; their parade drills counted for nothing when the shooting started. Tsar Nicholas lived just long enough to see his beloved army collapse under the weight of 25 years of corrupt stagnation. He died in February 1855, just before the final surrender in the Crimean War came, refusing treatment for what turned out to be fatal pneumonia. One can only guess why he refused treatment.

This left the Russian Empire to his 36 year old son Alexander, who now assumed the imperial throne as Emperor Alexander. The second Alexander was born in 1818 after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So unlike his father, he was not forged in the furnace of desperate life and death, military campaigns. He grew up in a time of peace. Alexander was also seven years old when his father became tsar and he himself became heir to the throne. So again, unlike his father, Alexander was raised with the understanding that his education and life experience must be directed towards preparing him to one day assume command of the empire. This left him in a better position, I think, to evaluate the empire he was inheriting, to have already thought a lot about what he was going to do when he inherited the throne, the kinds of changes he would make, the kind of ruler he would like to be, the kind of ruler the empire needed him to be. The fact that he became emperor just as Russia was enduring a humiliation at the hands of Britain and France only confirmed ideas that were floating around in his head. Russia needed to grapple with reality at this moment, Russia was on the brink of not being a great power. So for the sake of national honor, the wellbeing of its people, the strength of the empire and the legitimacy of the Romanov dynasty, Russia was going to have to be dragged out of the past and into the present. Otherwise there would be no future. So Alexander came to power prepared to implement the largest and most consequential set of social and political reforms Russia had seen since Peter the Great and one could argue that these reforms would be even more consequential, because they would impact more than just the elite of that first Russia we talked about when we discussed the Decembrists, it would affect that other mass that was the other Russia: the majority of Russia. Alexander was going to do what no tsar before him had dared to do: he was going to free the serfs.

As we noted in Episode 10.9, serfdom had taken final, permanent legal route in Russia by the end of the 1500s. And since that day, reform minded ministers and intellectuals had pondered how to liberate them. Generation after generation concluded it was too difficult, too complicated, too dangerous. Serfdom is terrible, it’s frankly an embarrassment, but now is not the right time. Most recently, Alexander the First had considered emancipating the serfs early in his reign, but then dropped it. Nicholas the First was personally opposed to serfdom, but also judged emancipation to be too dangerous, a shock to the imperial order. For the enlightened leadership, the empire serfdom was one of those classic conundrums, you have a problem, you know what the solution is, but you are frankly more afraid of the solution than you are of the problem. The fear in this case was that emancipation would precipitate one of the two great types of rebellion Russian history is so familiar with: the palace coup and the peasant revolt. In these manifested fears, the palace coup would be led by reactionary nobles who did not want to lose their property. The peasant revolt would be led by a wild mob drunk on heretofore unknown liberty. But Alexander the Second now proposed that the problem was indeed scarier than any proposed solution. That unless Russia freed itself from these medieval shackles, they could no longer compete economically and politically and militarily with the west. And perhaps even scarier, emancipation was going to come eventually, it was inevitable. And the threat of revolution caused by freeing the serfs was nothing compared to the threat of revolution by not freeing the serfs. So in March of 1856, Alexander addressed the nobility in Moscow and told them, we have to do it. He said, “My intention is to abolish serfdom. You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below.”

This announcement, understandably caused an uproar amongst the nobility. But for the moment, all Alexander was saying is, this is what I want to do, this is what we’re going to do, now let’s figure out how to do it. So in January of 1857, Alexander created a committee staff by reformist ministers to study the question. Emancipation had the tsar’s personal blessing, but there were still a lot of conservative interference out there, so at the beginning these deliberations and in secret behind closed doors. But freeing the serfs could not be done entirely in secret behind closed doors. Opinion was going to have to be solicited. And so at the end of 1857, a memo went out to provincial governors asking them to make suggestions how to best implement emancipation in their own districts. The memo to the provincial governors was published out in the open, so educated members of the community debated the idea amongst themselves. And the government truly wanted to hear educated opinion on this matter, and so censorship was loosened up a bit to facilitate something resembling a public debate that would forge a national consensus about how to enact this great, but no doubt highly disruptive, reform.

So, what we’re looking at here is an empire between 60 and 70 million people, with maybe a hundred thousand of those owning pretty much all the land, and owning about a third of all the people. There were 23 million privately owned serfs. Now, unlike forms of ancient slavery, and modern western chattel slavery, where you take people from their homes and relocate them somewhere else, serfdom was a legal status that had fallen upon the population of Russian peasants who themselves had not moved. So the basic social and economic relations of production at the village level remained essentially unchanged. And those relations had a uniquely Russian character. For example, the village, called the mir, was not a collection of individuals who owned individual property. The village controlled property collectively, and they doled it out to be worked in strips to the families of the village. And this didn’t change with the arrival of serfdom. Now, of course, the landed gentry, the nobles, now owned the land, you just worked it, but the village was still the one doling out who worked what specific strip. What changed was everyone’s legal status. You could not leave your home without the lord’s permission. You couldn’t get married without the lord’s permission. You were obligated to provides all kinds of service for the lord. You were no longer a free person. You were a number in a ledger book of the lord’s personally owned property to be bought and sold along with the land upon which you lived. But the day to day rhythms of village life remained pretty much the same.

So if the emperor has just said, we’re going to abolish serfdom, what is that going to look like in practice? Are we just going to change the legal status of the people, but leave the land itself still owned by the nobility? Or when we free the serfs, do we also need to give them some land to legally own and work for themselves? Otherwise they might just become sharecroppers or day laborers, and you’ve hardly done anything for them at all. And if you do emancipate the serfs with land, how much land do they get? Who does the land go to? Are we going to keep the ancient form of collective ownership to have the village now own land as a whole collective? Or are we going to go a step further and wipe that out too, and hand out parcels to be owned by individuals? And if this all sounds a little bit familiar, it’s because we just talked all about these same issues when we talked about the Mexican Revolution, it’s the same deal. Every possible proposal had its defenders and critics, and five years were spent trying to come up with a plan that would both satisfy the gentry who were about to lose their serfs and maybe some of their land, and the serfs themselves who were about to be pushed out into the big world as free people and who would need the means to at least survive. And since the reformers in charge of pushing emancipation were not themselves social revolutionaries, how do we go about doing this while maintaining the basic social order intact? Because the main idea here is to head off a social revolution, not cause one.

Finally, after endless rounds of acrimonious fighting, Tsar Alexander felt he had a package in hand that he could take a chance on. The serfs would be freed. And when they were freed, they would also be given land. There was just no other way to do it. So the tsar sat down and signed an emancipation decree dated February the 19th, 1861. The government let this momentous proclamation sink in among the educated classes for a few weeks before it started being read aloud in churches across Russia to a bewildered and sometimes disbelieving population of now… freed serfs? Did, did he just say we’re free?

Depending on who you ask, the emancipation of the serfs was either the single most momentous piece of social legislation in the history of Russia, or it was not worth the paper it was printed on. So how do you have those two massively contrasting takes on this thing? Well, as always, the devil is in the details.

So what are the details of actual emancipation? First, despite all the fears in the corridors of power, emancipation came with some unrest, but in the grand scheme of things, the response was surprisingly muted. Emancipation did not automatically unleash the furies. But the abolition of serfdom did mean that the peasants were now free people, they were not anyone’s property, it meant what it said. They were no longer inked into the ledgers of an accounting of a lord’s personal wealth. They were free to marry without permission, conduct trade without permission, they could sue and be sued. They now enjoyed liberty and all the rights, such as they were, that went with personhood, not propertyhood. This is all great stuff. But Alexander had to balance this against the understandable anger of those who have just watched their property become people. There had to be some kind of balancing compensation, strings were going to have to be attached. The nobles were not going to swallow it any other way. Someone was going to have to pay the price for the serfs freedom, and as it turned out, that price was going to be paid by the now ex-serfs themselves.

So first starting in 1861, there would be a two-year transition period to ease everyone into this new legal arrangement, where the serfs would still owe essentially the same services to the nobles that they had been bound to provide for generations. So right off the bat, nothing changes for like two years. The second, while each individual now had legal freedom, the social and economic relations of production often changed very little. Because the tsar’s final decision was that it would be best to keep communal village ownership in place. That which had proceeded serfdom would continue after the demise of serfdom. And when the nobility handed over a portion of their estates, it went to the village collectively, who would continue to dole it out to be worked by individual families. Now, I am speaking broadly here, there were exceptions in status and rollout and implementation, and some free peasants were better off than others, and they did start building their own private portfolios of land, and there was private ownership of land, but generally speaking, post-emancipation life was very similar to pre-emancipation life, and it revolved around collective ownership by villages. The villages managed the land collectively, and as an individual or a family, you were still bound to adhere by their collective decisions.

But that’s not really bad. I mean, that was just their way of life. And if any of them thought about it at all, most peasants probably preferred it that way. It was at the very least the way it had always been done. But the worst part of emancipation was that to put through the mass transfer of so much land from the nobility to these villages, the tsar agreed that the landed gentry had to be compensated. Because on the one hand, Alexander is here trying to avoid peasant revolt and social revolution, but he also has to simultaneously avoid those pesky palace coups. And confiscating the nobility’s land at gunpoint and saying, thanks, see you later, was a good way to invite one of those pesky palace coups.

So part of the emancipation package was a thing called redemption payments. Redemption payments worked like this: the state determined an amount to be paid to compensate a noble for what they had just been ordered to surrender both in people and in land. Then, the state paid the noble one large lump sum that amounted to 75% of the agreed-to amount, right now, today, here you go.

Okay. You with me so far? Good.

But does the state want to be on the hook for that lump sum payment? Hell no, the empire’s financial situation is terrible. So what they decided was that the money should come from the freed serfs themselves. They were the ones benefiting, they should be the ones to pay. So this lump sum, the state paid out was put down in the books as a loan, provided by the state, for the villages, who would then repay this friendly loan in annual installments for the next 49 years at 6% interest.

But wait, there’s more. The state did not actually fork over a literal pile of money to each and every noble, because most of those nobles at this point were themselves deep in debt, thanks to decades and even centuries of profligate spendthriftery. So the lump sum quote unquote paid to the nobles often went towards paying down those debts that the nobles themselves had contracted from the state or from state connected banks. The money that changed hands was not money at all, it took the form of writing down existing loans. So, if you think about it, what is happening here is that the state is going to get paid back for the loans previously taken out by the nobles. It’s just that those loan payments have now been transferred to the peasants, and the loan would be paid off in annual installments for 49 years, at 6% interest.

It turns out you can put a price on freedom.

But still, it took everyone a little while to put all this together. Emancipation is still a huge and momentous moment in Russian history. Serfdom has been abolished forever and Alexander the Second gets to happily be hailed as the tsar liberator, long live the tsar liberator.

But this was only the beginning of Alexander’s reform project. Liberating the serfs was a huge deal, but it was not the whole ballgame. So a few years after emancipation came two more major reforms we need to talk about. The first was political. A decree in 1864 created a new assembly at the provincial and district level called the zemstvo. That’s probably right. Zemstvo. The function of the zemstvos was to act alongside and augment the work of agents of the central bureaucracy with a particular focus on local needs and infrastructure, right. Road, bridges, schools, doctors and hospitals, things of local concern. The big innovation here is that members of the zemstvo would be elected, introducing a heretofore practically unknown element of democracy into the administration of the Russian Empire. And it was meant, at least in part, to be an additional salve to the egos of the now massively dispossessed and de-surfed nobility, because these new assemblies would give them a voice, and a sense of being invited into the process.

But the zemstvo had administrative capacities, it had no real political power. If there was a conflict with the central bureaucracy, there was no conflict at all. The central bureaucracy had all the power. Nonetheless, the zemstvos, by virtue of their very existence, introduced elections, a representative body for discussion and debate among educated people, a forum for local civic engagement, and it thus brought together people who wanted to civically engage. And if you have a group of civic minded, educated professionals who want to debate local issues, you tended to be liberal in outlook. And so the zemstvos themselves tended to take on a general liberal flavor. Now they were never going to challenge the government for power — they had no power — but they were giving a generation some practice in democratic politics and maybe a sense of comradery if and when further down the road, further reforms decided to empower them further.

Now the other great reform we need to talk about was the complete overhauling of the court system. The laws of Russia had been compiled and recompiled over the years. Most recently in 1835 in a project overseen by a rehabilitated Mikhail Speransky. But the empire had never suffered from an excess of the rule of law. Lawyering was not a well-articulated profession, and the courts suffered from myriad problems. There were untrained judges, the trials were closed, they were not open to the public, they accepted written testimony only. There was no chance for an accused to confront witnesses, and at the end of the day the courts were subservient to the executive branch, they were not independent. The whole thing was kind of a bad joke.

So at the same moment in 1864, after years of study, the government rolled out a bold leap forward that gave Russia overnight practically the most progressive legal system in Europe. This new system would have adversarial trials, where the defendant would get a lawyer and could call witnesses. These trials would be open to the public to ensure accountability. There would be better training for judges who, once appointed, could only be removed for specific misconduct, not just, oh, you didn’t do what we wanted you to do. The state, meanwhile was now obligated to actually present a case, with evidence and everything, in order to secure a conviction.

But before we go too far, there are a couple of points we need to keep in mind. First, these reforms did not sink down to the village level where traditional village courts would still handle all civil cases and most minor criminal cases, and they used their own local traditions of justice, which were mostly based on comparing and contrasting the reputation of accuser and accused. So they’re not included in any of this. Second, state agents would very quickly find it frustrating that they had to bring people to trial in court because of the aforementioned case I have to make in evidence I have to produce, and they would soon discover that the Ministry of the Interior, for example, had the authority to just expel people from a city or province by fiat. And this was a practice that would soon become known as administrative exile, which got around the pesky courts, and still allowed the state to punish and exile those they just knew were guilty of something bad, even if they literally could not prove it in court

So the first decade of Tsar Alexander the Second’s reign goes down in the history books as the period of great reform, capital G capital R Great Reform. The serfs were emancipated, there are new elected assemblies, there’s an entirely new judicial apparatus. And Alexander was hailed as a visionary leader, a truly great father to his people. He was the Tsar Liberator. But in the years to come, discord began to creep in. When the expectations created by this era of great reform started to go unmet. When a village discovered that practically the whole produce of the land they now owned had to go to making redemption payments. When middle-class intellectuals who gathered in the zemstvo were let down by how little power they actually had. When the new progressive court system naturally led people to believe the rule of law was here to stay, and instead they found the state constantly skirting the rule of law, undermining it and outright ignoring it.

And there was a growing class of educated Russians, especially young educated Russians, who were disillusioned when the tsar stopped the process of Great Reform, rather than continuing on to what they thought was its logical conclusion, the promulgation of a constitution. If this is what the future looks like, they said, it looks a lot like the past. And among those who were disillusioned and disappointed by these unmet expectations, we find the first of a new generation of social revolutionaries who will propel events towards 1905 and then 1917. They said to themselves, long live the Tsar Liberator?

No.

For Russia to be free, truly free, the tsar must die.

 

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Episode 10.75: the People’s Commissars

So last time we finally reached zero hour. The Bolsheviks have now come to power. But as I said at the end of last week, it was only in retrospect that we know how important the events of October 1917 were to the history of Russia and the history of the world. Lots of people at the time, including a fair number of Bolsheviks, did not think the Bolsheviks had the personnel, the support, the talent, the wherewithal, or the popularity to actually survive in power. The American journalist John Reed, observing things from the wings and the days after October 25th, said, “… the bourgeoisie lay low abiding its hour, which could not be far off.” That the Bolsheviks would remain in power longer than three days never occurred to anybody, except perhaps to Lenin, Trotsky, the Petrograd workers and the simpler soldiers.

The Bolsheviks took power with the support of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, workers, and Red Guards in Petrograd. But they claimed that power on behalf of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the millions of Russians it allegedly represented. Bolshevik speeches and proclamations emphasized that they spoke on behalf of the workers, soldiers, and peasants of the empire in their many millions. But this did not exactly line up with reality. Most people in the Russian Empire, frankly, had never heard of such a thing as a Bolshevik. As we talked about two episodes back though, Lenin and Trotsky did not much care that they did not command an actual popular majority in October 1917. They believed that the seizure of power itself, and more importantly, how they wielded the power they had seized, would earn them all the popular support they would ever need. So they spent their first days in power issuing bold decrees designed to win the support of four critical groups: the peasants, the soldiers, the workers, and the minority nationality groups. The February Revolution had given each of these four groups hopes and dreams and ambitions, which had been stymied, put off, and delayed by the fundamentally ineffective provisional government. The Bolsheviks believed that if they delivered on the promises of the revolution, there was no reason to believe they would not become the most popular political party. Those four groups, after all, made up the vast majority of the population of the Russian Empire.

The Second Congress of Soviets reconvened on the evening of October 26th, now shed of the SRs and Mensheviks who had walked out the day before, and composed entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. They got right to work. The first thing, above all, was the question of peace. So to immediately win over all those soldiers and sailors out there, the Congress of Soviets approved The Decree on Peace, which called for, and I’m quoting here: “Immediate peace without annexations, i.e., without the seizure of foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation of foreign nations, and without indemnities.”

The decree also said, “The government considers it the greatest crime against humanity to continue this war over the issues of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop the war on the terms indicated…”

Until such a peace was signed, the decree said, “The government proposes an immediate armistice to the governments and peoples of all belligerent countries.”

So the decree on peace was aimed at that most vital of constituencies: all the soldiers and sailors out there who were sick of fighting and sick of dying. The Bolsheviks had always been the anti-war party, and now that they had a chance to end the war, they planned to end the war. But the decree on peace also said, “Our appeal must be addressed both to the governments and to the peoples. We cannot ignore the governments for that would delay the possibility of concluding peace, and the people’s government dare not do that, but we have no right not to appeal to the peoples at the same time.” The Bolsheviks, remember I see themselves as the spear tip of a European-wide proletarian revolution, and they planned to encourage the people of Europe to follow their lead if their respective governments refused to end the war.

 The second major decree on the night of October 26th was The Decree on Land, meant to win the support of the peasantry. The Decree on Land offered the sweeping transfer of property to the peasant villages. It was a four point plan that was brief and to the point, and so I’ll just go through it.

 One: landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation.

Two: the landed estates, as also crown, monastery, and church lands, with all their livestock, implements, buildings, and everything pertaining thereto, shall be placed at the disposal of land committees and Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies pending the convocation of the constituent assembly.

Three: all damaged to confiscated property, which henceforth belongs to the whole people, is proclaimed a grave crime to be punished by the revolutionary courts. The Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies shall take all necessary measures to assure the observance of the strictest order during the confiscation of the landed estates to determine the size of estates, and the particular estates subject to confiscation; to draw up exact inventories of all property confiscated; and to protect in the strictest revolutionary way all agricultural enterprises transferred to the people, with all buildings, implements, livestock, stocks of produce, et cetera.

 Four: the following peasant mandate shall serve everywhere to guide the implementation of the great land reforms until a final decision on the latter is taken by the constituent assembly.

Now, a couple of notes on this. First, this is not the Bolshevik land program. Lenin was a staunch believer in nationalization and consolidation. He had never advocated local peasant committees taking direct possession of the land, which was the program outlined in the Decree on Land. One outraged SR said, “Ah, the land decree, it is our decree. It is the Socialist Revolutionary program intact. My party framed that policy after the most careful compilation of the wishes of the peasants themselves.” Asked how he felt about the Bolsheviks, putting this out there under their own name, he said, “It is an outrage.”

But Lenin didn’t care about being doctrinaire at the moment, even about his own doctrines. The Bolsheviks needed to secure what they had never had: mass support of the peasantry. So, they announced a program that embodied everything the peasants wanted: local control over the former large estates in their area. When challenged that land decree was not in keeping with his own nationalization program, Lenin said, “That is unimportant. As a democratic government, we cannot simply ignore the wishes of the popular masses, even if we are in disagreement with them.” At a session of the Petrograd Soviet a few days later, Lenin would say, “The SRs charge us with stealing their land program. If that was so we bow to them. It is good enough for us.”

The Bolsheviks enacting the SR program may have rankled the SRs, but for Lenin, that was their problem. Not his. When the SRs held power in the provisional government and in the Soviet, they had refused to enact their very popular land program. And this was part of the Bolshevik pitch, that other parties do nothing while we act. Now. Immediately, without apology or hesitation. That was the Bolshevik way.

The last thing to come out of this session of the Soviet Congress was the formation of a new government. Thanks to the right SRs and Mensheviks walking out of the Congress the day before, and the left SRs declining to participate, the Congress approved a government made entirely of Bolshevik party members. Declining to call themselves ministers in order to break with the past, they dubbed themselves, the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin became chairman of the council at the insistence of the Bolshevik Central Committee, who were not interested in the chief not being directly on the hook for the consequences of the thing he had so relentlessly pushed them to do, which was seize power. Lenin tried to make Trotsky minister of the interior, but Trotsky begged off, saying the Russian people would not accept a jew in that position.

“Of what importance are such trifles”, Lenin asked. Trotsky replied, “There are still a good many fools left.”

To which Lenin scoffed, “Surely we don’t step with fools.”

But Trotsky said, “Sometimes one has to make allowances for stupidity.”

Instead, Trotsky took over as commissar of foreign affairs, a role which probably better suited him anyway. I won’t bore you with the whole list of names except to note that at the bottom, the Georgian Joseph Stalin was made chairman of nationality affairs.

With a new government in place, and a couple of sweeping decrees proclaimed, the Second Congress finished its work by electing a standing executive council of about 150 members to serve as the sovereign host of Lenin’s new government. In theory, the government would be answerable to this executive committee of the Soviet, but this executive committee of the Soviet was of course chaired by the Bolshevik Kamenev, composed of a super majority of Bolshevik members, with a minority faction of left SRs. With this work done, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviet closed up shop on October 27th, having existed for just about 48 hours, serving mainly as the midwife of a regime composed entirely of revolutionary Bolsheviks.

In the chaotic atmosphere of the next few weeks, the Bolsheviks improvised their way through a minefield that everyone assumed would blow them up. And because they needed to improvise a course through this minefield, they did not put a lot of stock in the formalities of legislation. After the Second Congress formally dissolved, decrees would simply be published, signed by Lenin or some other commissar, most of them aspirational because frankly the Bolsheviks didn’t have the means to implement most of what they were announcing. On October 27th, for example, the Bolsheviks made their pitch for the third of the four groups they needed to win over, with their draft regulations on worker control. It was an eight point plan that started, “Workers control over the production, storage, purchase, and sale of all products and raw materials shall be introduced in all industrial. commercial, banking, agricultural and other enterprises.” So henceforth worker committees, were supposed to have the final say over what was going on in their workplace, not managers, and not owners. The regulations further said, “The decisions of the elected representatives of the workers and office employees are binding upon the owners of enterprises, and may be annulled only by trade unions and their congresses.” The regulations also said, “The elected representatives shall be given access to all books and documents and to all warehouses and stocks of materials, instruments, and products without exception.” So this is all very Marxist. The regulations are putting the means of production in the hands of the proletariat. But if you read between the lines, it’s also an admission the Bolsheviks don’t really have the ability to embark on anything more ambitious than simply telling the workers to take control of their own factories and manage their own affairs for themselves.

And that same day, Lenin issued another decree, not aimed at winning support, but on silencing dissent. It was a decree concerning the press. It said, “In the trying critical period of the revolution and the days that immediately followed it, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee was compelled to take a number of measures against the counter-revolutionary press of different shades.” It further said, “Everyone knows that the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapon of the bourgeoisie, especially at the crucial moment when the new power, the power of workers and peasants, is only affirming itself. It was impossible to leave this weapon wholly in the hands of the enemy. For in such moments, it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns.” The decree then laid out three criteria that would justify the government shutting down a journal or a newspaper:

One, if they call for open resistance or insubordination to the workers and peasants government.

Two, sow sedition through demonstrably slanderous, distortion of facts.

Three, instigate actions of an obviously criminal, i.e., criminally punishable nature.

This decree sent howls through the opposition. And even protests from people who were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, because they all quite rightly feared that the Bolsheviks would apply this criteria however they wanted, and simply shut down anyone who opposed them.

As the Bolsheviks flooded Petrograd with these decrees and proclamations, they were met by a very hostile and very vocal opposition — there’s a reason Lenin was trying to shut their presses down. The rivals and enemies of the Bolsheviks gathered to ensure the nascent regime was smothered in its grotesque infancy. The core of this group was the 300 or so demonstrators who had been threatened with a good spanking when they tried to go to the Winter Palace on the night of October 25th. They were leading members of the Petrograd municipal Duma, nearly all of whom were SRs, including the mayor of the city. The delegates who had walked out of the Soviet Congress, representatives from another assembly that we’re going to talk about next week, which is the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, plus leaders of the Union of Government Employees and other professional unions, and then just also random SRs and Mensheviks. Their position was that whatever was going on over at the Smolny Institute was neither valid nor legitimate. In fact, their claim was that the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets had never, in fact, convened, that what was going on over there was simply a private assembly of Bolsheviks. They all gathered at the assembly hall of the municipal Duma, and declared themselves to be the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution. They believed they represented the true spirit of legal democracy against a criminal gang of Bolsheviks. Among other things, the Committee of Salvation put out a call for workers to strike, particularly white collar professionals, functionaries, bureaucrats, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The educated professional middle classes of Petrograd did not support the Bolshevik insurrection, and this call to strike was heeded in force. When Bolshevik commissars tried to take over leadership of the various ministries, they found the offices empty. But not just deserted, also in many cases trashed; typewriters destroyed, funds, files, documents, and records were destroyed or disappeared. The few workers who showed up at the central telegraph agency refuse to transmit commissar dispatches. Both private and state banks were closed, and the Bolshevik struggled to find anyone who would cash checks or provide funds. In the communist telling of all this, it’s an example of the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries nefariously sabotaging the people’s government. But all of these people opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power — they thought it was illegal. And they responded by playing by the same rules as Lenin: do what it takes to win. History has shown time and again that strikes are a good way to get your way. They knew they were indispensable cogs, not just in the machinery of state, but in the machinery of society. There’s nothing particularly nefarious about the white collar strike unless you think that only one side should be allowed to play for keeps while everyone else has to just roll over. They wrecked havoc with the Bolsheviks ability to run the country in the early days of their rule, which was entirely the point.

As the Bolsheviks grappled with this generally frustrating work stoppage, they also faced a more acute threat. The railway workers union led, primarily by Mensheviks and SRs, threatened to go on strike unless the Bolsheviks agreed to form a coalition government with the other socialist parties. Now, this was a real threat that had to be taken seriously. The railroads were the vital artery of the whole empire. Everyone remembered that it was their strike in 1905 that had brought Nicholas to his knees. They told the Bolsheviks, either come negotiate with the other parties under our auspices, or we will go on strike. The Bolsheviks could not afford to ignore this threat, so they sent Kamenev over to represent them, while Lenin and Trotsky focused on the looming military threat from Kerensky that we’re going to talk about here in a second. Kamenev was of course the Bolshevik most against his own party’s recent behavior and most in favor of cross-party coalition. But when he received their terms, even he was shocked by how extreme the demands were:

First, all troops must be placed under the authority of the municipal Duma.

Second, all workers must be disarmed and Kerensky’s forces must be allowed to enter the city.

Third, all arrested persons released and

Four, dissolve the MRC.

This was not coalition or compromise, this was a demand for the total capitulation of the Bolsheviks. The demand from the other parties was essentially that they repudiate everything that they had done, and give away everything that they had gained. The reason the terms were so one-sided was because the members of the Committee of Salvation did not believe the Bolsheviks would last the week. What military forces they had at their disposal — the MRC, the Red Guards, and the workers generally — were currently in the midst of succumbing to an epidemic of mass drunkenness. With the revolution of soldiers and workers now in full swing, the wine sellers of Petrograd were raided with enthusiastic abandon. Workers got wasted. Soldiers got wasted. Sailors got wasted. Men got wasted, women got wasted, everyone got wasted Anatov, the MRC leader who had arrested the provisional government on the night of October 25th, noticed the problem right away. The problem was particularly serious with the sellers at the Winter Palace, he said. One regiment, which had been put in charge of guarding them, got drunk and became quite useless. Another regiment went the same way. This pattern repeated for the next several days, and several weeks, and several months. Those who were supposed to guard or destroy caches of booze just drank it down, and then sold off the excess to waiting crowds. Let’s drink the Romanov leftovers was the order of the day. There were also plenty of rumors and anecdotes out there that mass quantities of booze were just suddenly appearing out of the blue, possibly supplied by the enemies of the Bolsheviks to keep the workers and soldiers on a fatal bender.

With the Bolsheviks grappling with all this inside Petrograd, they also had to deal with a great hammer looming over everything. Alexander Kerensky had slipped out of Petrograd on the afternoon of October 25th and gone to Pskov, where Nicholas had signed his abdication. Once there, he tried to rally troops to help him retake the capital from the criminal Bolsheviks. He also issued his own flurry of grandiose proclamations, reiterating his authority and rejecting any claim that he had been driven out of power. But here’s the rub, and this remains the rub of the whole thing: no one responded to this call. No one wanted to fight for Kerensky. The only person he could convince was General Pyotr Krasnov a right-wing ally of Kornilov, and the commander of the third cavalry corps, which was the same corp that had been dispatched to Petrograd a few months earlier during the Kornilov Affair. The men of this corp had no love for Kerensky, who they felt betrayed the honorable Kornilov, and caused the death of their esteemed commander, who you will recall from the end of that episode, shot himself in the heart. But though the men were standoffish, General Krasnov agreed to put them at the disposal of Kerensky. They marched first from Pskov to Gatchina, about 40 miles southwest of Petrograd, and then on October 28th, moved forward to Tsarskoye Selo on the outskirts of the city. Kerensky tried to win over the troops there, but most of them were either neutral or pro Bolshevik. They were certainly not going to fight for Kerensky.

In the meantime, not knowing exactly what forces Kerensky would be able to muster, the Bolsheviks scrambled to defend Petrograd. They tracked down a couple of regular army colonels willing to oversee the artillery placed on the Pulkovo Heights defending the southwest approach to the city. Unable to find anyone more reliable, Lenin tapped Colonel Mikhail Muravyov, an adventurous and ambitious officer known to have previously taken somewhat gleeful part in the suppression of the Bolsheviks back in July. But Muravyov swore he was more than happy to go blast the hell out of Kerensky, and without a better option, Lenin and Trotsky gave him command — although, Trotsky would also be on hand to oversee things, plus Muravyov was assigned a couple of political minders, with orders to put a bullet in his brain if he so much as hinted at betrayal. They then managed to order, rally, and harangue about 10,000 soldiers in the MRC chain of command. They were ordered to dig in on the Pulkovo Heights to defend the revolution.

Meanwhile, inside Petrograd, the Committee of Salvation was doing their part to instigate an uprising on the inside that would support Kerensky and Krasnov’s invasion from the outside. On October 27th, they issued a call to the citizens and soldiers of Petrograd: “Arm to resist the mad adventurers of the Bolshevik MRC. We call on all loyal troops of the revolution to assemble at the Nikolai Military College and unite around the Committee of Public Salvation.”

But here’s the thing. No one came. All the Committee of Salvation managed to do was incite a couple of hundred military cadets to briefly launch a little revolt, taking over a military installation and the telephone exchange. These cadets were quickly suppressed and forced to surrender by MRC forces. But no one else heeded the call. The dynamic inside the Petrograd Garrison remained what it had been from the start: the vast majority were neutral, the rest, pro Bolshevik. For all their pretensions to representing popular democracy against a tiny clique trying to seize power in an unpopular coup d’etat, the Committee of Salvation had to confront the fact that while it was true the Bolsheviks only had a very little bit of active support in the streets, they themselves had none at all. In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king, and in October 1917, the Bolsheviks were the one eyed kings of Petrograd.

Until October 30th, though, it did really look like the Bolshevik adventure was not going to last a week. That was the day Kerensky and Krasnov put their force of about a thousand Cossacks in motion. When they set out, they believed they would be toasting victory in the reclaimed Winter Palace, and the Bolsheviks would all be dead or in hiding. But then something very unexpected happened. As the Cossacks approached the Pulkovo Heights on the outskirts of the city, the artillery under Muravyov and Trotsky started lobbing shells, blowing the Cossacks to pieces, forcing them to retreat and leaving hundreds dead on the field. They had absolutely not expected stubborn resistance. They had not expected any resistance at all. Kerensky and Krasnov retreated back to Gatchina. The men were furious. Having only reluctantly gone into battle, they were now done, angrier than ever so many of their comrades laid dead on Kerensky’s worthless behalf. Now surrounded by sullen and angry soldiers, and with rumors swirling, the men planned to offer Kerensky to the troops in Petrograd in exchange for Lenin, Kerensky contemplated suicide. But a small group of loyal SRs managed to break him out of headquarters by having Kerensky don a sailor’s uniform and aviator glasses so nobody would recognize him. Escaping from the army that was supposed to be restoring him to power, Kerensky will spend the next several months on the run, lurking in the vicinity of Petrograd on the assumption that Bolsheviks couldn’t possibly maintain their hold on power forever. And he got out just in time. The Third Cavalry Corps surrendered on October 31st, and handed General Krasnov over to the Bolsheviks.

The little battle of Pulkovo upended the political situation inside Petrograd. The Committee of Salvation had been high handed with the Bolsheviks on the assumption that they would be pretty quickly dispatched by a superior military force. But with the surrender of the Third Cavalry Corps, no such force now existed. The Committee of Salvation modified their terms for a coalition, but Lenin and Trotsky now had no interest in giving even an inch. Why should they? Even the leaders of the railway workers union now hesitated to pull the trigger on their threatened strike. They were no longer sure they could even get their workers to go along with it. Feeling their powerbase solidified, the Bolshevik government continued issuing decrees, and on November 2nd, they announced a big one aimed at securing the support of the fourth of those four important groups we talked about at the beginning of the show.

Bidding for the support of the minority nationalities in the empire, Lenin and Chairman of Nationality Affairs Stalin, issued a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. This declaration opened:

The October Revolution of the workman and peasants began under the common banner of emancipation. The peasants are being emancipated from the power of the landowners, for there is no longer the landowner’s property right in the land. It has been abolished. The soldiers and sailors are being emancipated from the power of autocratic generals, for generals will henceforth be elected and subject to recall. The working men are being emancipated from the whims and arbitrary will of the capitalists, for henceforth, there will be established the control of the workers over mills and factories. Everything living and capable of life is being emancipated from the hateful shackles. There remain only the peoples of Russia, who have suffered and are suffering oppression and arbitrariness, and who’s emancipation must immediately begin, whose liberation must be effected resolutely and definitely.”

The decree then announced a four point program.

One, the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.

To the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state.

Three, the abolition of any and all national and national religious privileges and disabilities.

Four, the free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.

Like all the other decrees we’ve talked about today, this appeared to be a renunciation of centralized domination. All the dreams of liberation and self-determination were wholeheartedly being embraced. Even if the empire itself continued, and it was not entirely clear that it would, it would certainly be some kind of confederation of autonomous peoples.

When we take all the decrees issued by the Bolsheviks in their first week on the job, a very clear program emerges, and it was emphasized in the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia when it talked about emancipation, emancipation, emancipation, workers peasants, and minority nationalities were all told the future of Russia would be radically decentralized, and emphasizing at every point local self direction. The local village and the individual factory committee would wield most of the power. Minority nationality groups would be completely autonomous. It was an inverted power structure that was practically drawn straight out of the pages of the anarchists.

But while these decrees proliferated in the streets, Lenin and the Bolsheviks simultaneously crafted the foundation of the opposite of all that, a highly centralized one party dictatorship. Well, not all the Bolsheviks. Kamenev and his faction still believed they needed to enter some kind of coalition government with the other socialist parties in order to survive. Kamenev also doubled as chairman of the executive committee of the Soviet and so had to deal directly with the left SR members of that executive committee, who were growing very concerned Lenin and his fellow commissars were just issuing decrees without debate or even consultation. One left SR said in a session, “Accountability and strict order in detail are mandatory not only for bourgeois government. Let us not play on words and cover up our mistakes and blunders with a separate odious word. Proletarian government, which is in its essence popular, must also allow controls over itself. This hasty cooking of decrees, which not only frequently abound in your additional omissions, are often illiterate, leading to still greater confusion of the situation.”

Opposing a move towards a government composed only of Bolsheviks that unilaterally issued decrees that were often vague and didn’t make a lot of sense, Kamenev and a half dozen other commissars resigned their government also their leading positions in the Soviet Executive Committee, and their spots on the Bolshevik Central Committee. On November 6th, they published a statement defending themselves that said:

“We believe that it is necessary to form a socialist government, including all the parties of the Soviet. Only such a government can assure the fruits of the heroic struggle of the working class and the revolutionary army in the October and November days. We believe that a government which has exclusively Bolshevik can maintain power only by political methods of terror. The Council of People’s Commissars is starting on this road. We cannot follow it.”

These were prophetic words, and a warning echoed by all of Lenin’s critics going all the way back to the original Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. That at heart, he was nothing but an iron-willed authoritarian.

But even as Lenin is very clearly setting up a system whereby he and the other Bolshevik commissars could issue decrees rubber stamped by the Bolshevik dominated Soviet executive committee, all acting under Bolshevik party discipline, and that in retrospect, all of the decrees we talked about today might be taken as nakedly cynical ploys to lull the masses to sleep, it’s not at all clear at this point — at least not in my reading — that Lenin didn’t think the masses would follow the party, and that they would all go forward together, destroying the machinery of the bourgeois state, and building a new world of worker and peasant power. That all of these decrees weren’t just temporary emergency expedience necessary to secure the decisive transition towards the dictatorship of the proletariat in the classic Marxist sense. That for the first time in history, the majority would wield power.

But next week, theory and fantasy will begin to meet reality. The long delayed elections to the constituent assembly began in mid November, and the Bolshevik government would very soon have to grapple with the threat posed not only by Kerensky or Cossacks, white collar workers on strike, boardwalk capitalists and angry liberals, but the voters of Russia.

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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Episode 10.74: The Great October Socialist Revolution

So here we are, everything we’ve been building to for the last, I dunno, zillion episodes. On the list of great moments in revolutionary history, the Bolshevik Uprising of October 1917 is right there with the Fall of the Bastille in July 1789 at the center of the inner circle. And those two events certainly serve as temporal bookends defining what, in retrospect this here Revolutions podcast has been all about. But it’s not like we’re anywhere close to being finished, because just as with the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, the October Revolution only becomes recognized as the epicenter of a historical earthquake because of what came after. Lots of times throughout history, a capital city has been rocked by riots, uprisings, and street violence to no great permanent effect. The existing government refines its footing and life goes on. But sometimes, tumultuous events spanning just a few calendar days change the course of human history, as happened both in July 1789 and October 1917. So while we have been building to this moment, the rest of the Revolutions podcast will chronicle the struggle of the Bolsheviks to make October 1917 the beginning of a world historical earthquake rather than a forgotten flash in the pan. But it will also chronicle those revolutionaries who struggled against the Bolshevik vision of revolution, because that too is the story of the Russian Revolution.

In the last week of October 1917, the air in Petrograd was thick with anticipation. As we discussed at length last time, everyone knew the Bolsheviks were planning an uprising to coincide with the convening of the second All Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25th. It was really just a matter of how events were going to play out: whether the Bolsheviks would win or lose, not whether they would try. And a leading Menshevik told American journalist John Reed, “Well, perhaps the Bolsheviks can seize power, but they won’t be able to hold it for more than three days. They haven’t the men to run a government. Perhaps it’s a good thing to let them try. That will finish them.”

Alexander Kerensky, meanwhile, didn’t think they’d even make it that far. When he got word on the night of October 23rd that the Bolshevik dominated military revolutionary committee had backed down from its claim to veto power over all military orders in Petrograd, Kerensky took it as a sign that he could safely launch a preemptive strike and snuff out the Bolshevik coup before it even began. Kerensky ordered a loyal detachment of soldiers — mostly Kadets from a military academy — to seize and destroy the Bolshevik presses. In the predawn hours of October 24th, 1917, these soldiers pushed their way into the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashed up the joint, and placed a standing guard at the front door. To give this attack the veneer of legitimacy, Kerensky also ordered two extreme right-wing newspapers s shut down. But given the timing, it was obvious to everyone that this was aimed squarely at the left, and squarely at the Bolsheviks.

Kerensky’s decision to strike first gave the Bolshevik leaders exactly the pretense they needed to frame their actions as a defense of the revolution. In October 1917, Bolshevik leaders owned many different hats that they could take on and off as the situation necessitated. Trotsky, for example, was simultaneously a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, president of the Petrograd Soviet, and a leading member of the Military Revolutionary Committee. With his political party under attack, he could don the cap of the leader of the Petrograd Soviet, and frame Kerensky’s actions as an attack on free speech. When guards were dispatched to open the Bolshevik presses, Trotsky said it was because, “The Soviet workers and soldiers’ deputies can not tolerate suppression of the free word.” Then, donning the cap of leader of the MRC, he sent out orders to everyone recently incorporated into their chain of command. “Directive Number One,” the order read, “the Petrograd Soviet is in direct danger. You are hereby directed to bring your regiment to battle readiness. Any procrastination or interference in executing this order will be considered a betrayal of the revolution.” Across the city, soldiers started mobilizing. The attachment sent to the Bolshevik newspaper offices easily pushed aside the Kadets standing guard, and by 9:00 AM, the Bolshevik newspaper was back up and running. It should come as no surprise to any of you out there that no soldiers were sent to reopen the two right-wing papers in the name of freedom of freedom of speech.

As all of this unfolded, Kerensky hustled over to the Mariinsky Palace, where the Pre-Parliament was holding a session. He delivered a speech to ensure their support for his actions against the Bolsheviks. He got up and addressed them, saying, “I will cite here the most characteristic passage from a whole series of articles published by Ulyanov Lenin, a state criminal who is in hiding and who we are trying to find. The state criminal has invited the proletariat and the Petrograd garrison to repeat the experience of July, and insists upon the immediate necessity of an armed uprising.” Kerensky then quoted from Lenin’s open letter to his comrades that we talked about last week that very much advocated immediate, armed insurrection. Having made a pretty clear cut case that the Bolsheviks were planning to overthrow the government, Kerensky left the Pre-Parliament to debate the exact wording of their support for him. Then he headed back to the Winter Palace to orchestrate what he believed would be the final blows against Lenin and his gang of criminals.

But before we go on, let’s just remember that Kerensky’s government and this Pre-Parliament are not exactly paradigms of sovereign legitimacy. As we discussed two episodes back, the hastily arranged democratic conference in mid-September — itself not particularly legitimate — had explicitly rejected the formation of the present government. Facing this rejection, a self-appointed committee of Mensheviks, SRs, progressives, and liberals had then engaged in freelance negotiations with each other to select a slate of ministers of their choosing. The Pre-Parliament, meanwhile, was an assembly of leaders from various parties also self-appointed, and which Kerensky’ newly inaugurated government then proceeded to reject the authority of anyway.

So, for all the quite accurate accounts of the Bolsheviks using the Soviet to claim popular sovereignty they didn’t really deserve, it’s not like Kerensky, his government, or this Pre-Parliament were that much different. And this I think is something Lenin understood very well; that the contest of October 1917 should not be understood as a legitimate government being attacked by an illegitimate usurper, but instead, as two irreconcilable political factions making equally contrived claims to popular sovereignty locked in a death match that only one could emerge from. And moreover, this was a contest that could only be won by force. Later in the day on October 24th, Lenin hastily scrawled a note to his comrades saying, “The situation is critical in the extreme. To delay the uprising would be fatal. With all my might, I urge my comrades to realize that everything now hangs by a thread. That we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses, even congresses of soviets, but exclusively by the struggle of armed people. We must at all costs this very evening, this very night, arrest the government. We must not wait. We may lose everything. The government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs.”

Kerensky certainly understood the contest in these terms. He absolutely believed he commanded a vastly superior force to the Bolsheviks, which is why he welcomed such a confrontation. After leaving the Pre-Parliament, he ordered his loyal forces to secure the four critical bridges across the Neva River linking the Bolshevik stronghold in the Viborg district in the north to the center of the city where all the key government buildings sat. At his immediate disposal were the Kadets from an officer’s school, a regiment of soldiers mounted on bicycles, a few Cossacks, and the Women’s Death Battalion, a unit of hyper-patriotic women formed at the outset of the June Offensive. They had been meant to simply be a showpiece of Kerensky’s new democratic army, but they had fought with notable commitment during his fail offensive. Even as the men mostly sat on their hands, got drunk, or deserted. Detachments from the Women’s Death Battalion set up pickets at the Winter Palace, and around key bridges in Petrograd.

But right from the outset, it became clear Kerensky had dramatically underestimated his strength. The great poet, playwright, and novelist Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary on October 24th, “Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.” The small number of forces loyal to the government could only secure two of the bridges across the Neva. Companies loyal to the MRC on the other hand, cheered on by angry crowds, won control of the other two. But mostly, most people were just neutral. The vast majority of soldiers, sailors, and civilians in Petrograd took no part whatsoever in the showdown between the government and the Bolsheviks. They merely observed events with detached curiosity and waited to find out who won.

To help turn curious onlookers into active supporters, the Bolsheviks did everything in their power to frame their actions as a defense of Petrograd and of the revolution. Everything they did was in the name of the Soviet, carried out by its military defense force, the Military Revolutionary Committee. Operating out of the Smolny Institute, home of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky drove this point home over and over again, telling everyone, This is defense, comrades. This is defense.”

Left SR members of the MRC issued a press release saying, “Contrary to all rumors and reports, this was not a proactive insurrection. All actions were instead exclusively for defense.”

The Bolshevik’s newspaper, now back up and running, flooded the streets with proclamations. “Soldiers! Workers! Citizens! A stroke of high treason is being contemplated against the Petrograd Soviet. The campaign of the counter-revolutionists is being directed against the All- Russian Congress of Soviets on the Eve of its opening, against the Constituent Assembly, against the people. The Petrograd Soviet is guarding the revolution. The Military Revolutionary Committee is directing the repulse of the conspirators’ attack.”

This was then followed by a further decree from the MRC telling everybody to be on high alert and follow orders. This defensive operation then moved to take key strategic locations in Petrograd. A unit under MRC orders took the main telegraph office. Later that evening, MRC units took over the main newswire of the city, allowing them to control information coming into and going out of the capital. The Bolsheviks also had lots of partisan comrades in the ranks of the Baltic Fleet stationed in Helsinki. Word came over the wire to launch ships to Petrograd to defend the Soviet and the revolution. These sailors began preparing at once.

There was not really any active fighting on October 24th, and the political leaders in Petrograd argued over how to resolve the crisis. At 8:30 that night, the Pre-Parliament reconvened for a turbulent session. SRs and Mensheviks managed to carry a motion to create a committee of public safety, composing leaders of all parties, to try to avert open war between the Bolsheviks and the government. But when two Mensheviks leaders hustled over to the Winter Palace to work out the details with Kerensky, they found him consumed in a rapid cycle manic depressive episode. He alternated rapidly between doom-laden fatalism and defiant optimism that he was about to achieve his most brilliant triumph. Kerensky’s boasting that he alone could save the revolution did not fill anyone else with a great deal of confidence.

At the Smolny Institute, all the socialist and revolutionary parties convened for a massive non-stop debate. The riotous assembly was frequently interrupted by catcalls. Heckling, cheering, booing, and sometimes they were so much noise speakers could not be heard over the din. These debates pitted Trotsky and the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and SR leaders who were still on the executive committee of the Soviet, who everyone knew would be replaced as soon as the Second Congress of Soviets formerly convened the following afternoon. The arguments of these right-leaning Mensheviks and SRs was that launching an insurrection was disastrously premature, and would invite fatal counterrevolution. “The masses are sick and exhausted,” one Mensheviks leader said. “They have no interest in the revolution. If the Bolsheviks start anything, that will be the end of the revolution. The counter-revolutionists are waiting for the Bolsheviks to begin riots and massacres.” Another invoke the Marxist theories that they were all ostensibly adherents of. Engels and Marx said the proletariat had no right to take power until it was ready for it,” he said. ” In a bourgeois revolution like this, the seizure of power by the masses means the tragic end of the Revolution. Trotsky, as a Social Democratic theorist, is himself opposed to what he is now advocating.”

But what we know is that Trotsky has by now a well-developed theory of permanent revolution and no longer has any truck with the kind of fastidiously pedantic readings of historical materialism the Mensheviks were now insisting on. “The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries conquered the Kadets,” Trotsky replied, “and then when they got power, they gave it to the Kadets. They tell you that you have no right to make an insurrection. Insurrection the right of all revolutionists! When the downtrodden masses revolt, it is their right. “

Old Julius Martov, meanwhile, leading his handful of left-leaning Menshevik internationalists, was not explicitly hostile to Bolshevik goals, but instead to Bolshevik tactics. Martov rose and said, “The internationalists are not opposed to the transmission of power to the democracy” — and by that he meant the Soviets — “but they disapprove of the methods of the Bolsheviks. This is not the moment to seize power.”

As this rowdy and turbulent assembly unfolded, Lenin himself arrived at the Smolny Institute to make sure his comrades did not listen to his old friend Martov, or abandon the tactics that were going to see this thing through to the end. Arriving in disguise, because he was, after all, a state criminal and a wanted man, Lenin arrived to find a whirling cacophony of activity: soldiers, sailors, workers, onlookers, Red Guards and party delegates all running around shouting at each other. Out in front of the building, crowds gathered and various armed units attempted to maintain order on a very chilly night, lit and heated by perpetual bonfires. Lenin was briefly refused admittance to the Smolny Institute because he had no pass, but the general unmanageability of the growing crowd allowed him to slip his way in. Once inside the building, he made a beeline for Room 36, where the Bolsheviks made their party headquarters. Once inside the room, he pushed his comrades to stand firm. This was their moment. A failure to see this thing through would have far more fatal consequences than backing down.

Trotsky thoroughly agreed, and he, Lenin, and other members of the Central Committee made plans to move decisively from defense to offense. They poured over maps of the city, making plans to seize more strategic points, culminating with the capture of the Winter Palace and arrest of the provisional government. According to Lenin, this had to be done by noon, the following day, as the Second Congress of Soviets was set to convene at two o’clock. This congress needed to be presented with a fait accompli, not a possible course of action to be debated. They also drafted a list for a new government to take the place of the old provisional government — full of Bolsheviks, of course. As they got to work on this, they decided they didn’t want to call themselves ministers anymore, as it carried the taint of the old regime, the old ways, and the old world. Trotsky suggested they call themselves people’s commissars, and Lenin said, “Yes, that’s very good. It smells terribly of revolution.”

In the small hours of October 25th, 1917, MRC units fanned out across the city, easily capturing the Palace of Engineers, the central post office, several train stations, the telegraph exchange, and the electrical station, whereupon they cut power to all government buildings, but the Smolny Institute. They also took over the state bank. The regiment guarding the bank had previously voted to remain neutral in any political conflict, and so when the MRC showed up and said, why don’t you guys take off, those guys… just took off. When you tally up the raw numbers, it’s true that only a fraction of the Petrograd Garrison was committed to the Bolsheviks, but that fraction positively dwarfed those willing to fight and die for Kerensky’s government, and that was really all that mattered. Adding to this Bolshevik force — excuse me, MRC force — sailors at the Kronstadt Naval base received orders to depart for the city center at once. But even more dramatically, the battleship Aurora, crewed by radicals and docked at the Petrograd ship, sailed their ship up the Neva River to put it in position to fire on the Winter Palace.

With everyone and everything set to converge on the Winter Palace at noon, around mid-morning, the Bolsheviks flooded the street of Petrograd with an explosive and somewhat premature declaration addressed to the citizens of Russia. It announced in big bold letters:

“:The provisional government has been deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison.

 The cause for which the people have fought, namely the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers’ control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power — this cause has been secured.

Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers, and peasants!”

By this point, Kerensky realized how badly he had overestimated his strength in Petrograd, and arranged to get the heck out of town. He remained undaunted, of course, and like Nicholas and Alexandra before him, remained convinced that while this handful of malcontents may have the upper hand in the capital, the Bolsheviks hardly commanded the entire army, navy, or resources of the Russian Empire. But further establishing his very thin base of support in Petrograd, Kerensky’s staff could not immediately deliver vehicles to get him out of town. They had to scrounge around and procure two automobiles, one of which they jacked from the American embassy. When Kerensky sped out of Petrograd around 11:00 AM, he was in a car waving the American flag and boasting diplomatic plates, blowing through checkpoints without even bothering to slow down. Most people didn’t even know Kerensky had left the capital, and they spent the whole day believing the looming showdown at the Winter Palace was going to end with his arrest.

But just as everything looked like it was going to be settled decisively in the next 60 to 90 minutes, a somewhat absurd comedy of errors unfolded that dragged out events for more than 12 hours. The commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress, situated just across the river from the Winter Palace, was supposed to issue an ultimatum to the provisional government inside the Winter Palace saying surrender or face artillery bombardment. But when the soldiers prepared this artillery bombardment, they discovered the guns on the side of the fortress facing the palace were in complete disrepair. So, the noon deadline came and went without ultimatum or incident. It took several hours for the garrison to haul up new guns, and it was only after these guns were put into position that the soldiers realized these guns took a different kind of ammunition; a kind of ammunition they did not have. This led to several more hours of delay. Meanwhile, the Battleship Aurora sat anchored menacingly, but it didn’t have any ammunition at all. The ship had been undergoing repairs, and all they had on hand were blanks. So hours just ticked by without anything. happening One Bolshevik in the Smolny Institute recalled, “Lenin was beside himself with agitated rage, and said he was like, a lion in a cage. He was ready to shoot us.”

The delays at the Winter Palace necessitated stalling the official opening of the Second Congress of Soviets, originally scheduled for 2:00 PM. Lenin was terrified that if the congress convened before the provisional government was arrested, the congress would start debating the issue, which would be fatal for his plans. So, with more than 650 delegates just kind of milling around the building, Trotsky preempted access to the main assembly room by calling an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet. Once gaveled into session, Trotsky rose and declared, “On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the provisional government no longer exists.”

Someone in the audience shouted, “You are anticipating the will of the second Congress of Soviets!”

Trotsky retorted, “The will of the Second Congress of Soviets has already been predetermined by the fact of the workers’ and soldiers’ uprising. Now we have only to develop this triumph.”

Now, this is hardly what was going on out there in the streets. At that moment, the workers were mostly either at home or at work, while the vast majority of soldiers were standing around in consciously chosen neutrality. But then Lenin came out into the assembly to a mix of wild applause and angry cat calls. It was his first public appearance since that brief and unenthusiastic speech he had given in the midst of the July Days, Lenin announced the beginning of a new era for Russia, and ended by calling out, “Long live the world socialist revolution!”

The Mensheviks and the SRs in the hall were furious at the sheer audacity of the Bolsheviks making these wildly outrageous claims. They were nakedly stalling the opening of the Second Congress, a congress the Bolsheviks themselves had so relentlessly demanded. They were claiming the government was overthrown when in point of fact the government was sitting untouched in the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik coup on behalf of the Soviet was proclaimed, but it was not achieved, not by a long shot.

To the credit of the remaining ministers in the Winter Palace, they refused to just surrender. Even after they belatedly discovered Kerensky had ditched them, they understood his departure to be in the name of raising reinforcements to come save them. So despite the frequent demands that they surrender, each time they replied they would rather die than give in. But this was really not the case for their would-be defenders. At the outset of October 25th, there were perhaps 3000 armed guards in and around the Winter Palace — artillery school Kadets, some Cossack horsemen, the women of the Women’s Death Battalion — but over the course of the day, guards had been deserting left and right, some individually, some in whole groups. The ministers of the provisional government may have been ready to die, but there were very few people willing to die for them. By the end, there were maybe 300 armed guards left inside. Security at the palace was not tight. And famously, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and a handful of others just kinda walked through an open door, and during the long afternoon of waiting, they wandered around the palace, checking things out, interviewed people, tried to get an interview with Kerensky, but couldn’t, because Kerensky wasn’t there. After they left, they walked around the city center and witnessed the reality of the day: on this most auspicious of days, what would in the future be dubbed, the Great October Socialist Revolution, most of the population of Petrograd was just kind of going about its business. The restaurants weren’t closed, so they grabbed some dinner. The only notice taken of the Great October Socialist Revolution was the waiter moving them to an inner ballroom, away from the front windows, in case of gunfire. Other than that, dinner was fine.

When they got out, Reed and Bryant and the others wandered around. A few blocks away, reed said, “We could see the trams, the crowds, the lighted shop-windows, and the electric signs of the moving-picture shows — life going on as usual. We had tickets to the ballet at the Marinsky Theatre — all the theaters were open — but it was too exciting out of doors….”

But it’s not that people were ignorant of what was happening, just they weren’t really participating. “Up the Nevsky,” he reported, “the whole city seemed to be out promenading. On every corner, immense crowds were massed around a core of hot discussion. Pickets of a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets lounged at street crossings, red-faced old men and fur coats shook their fists at them, smartly dressed women screamed epithets: the soldiers argued feebly with embarrassed grins….”

Meanwhile, at the Peter and Paul fortress, there was one final debacle. They were supposed to signal the final assault of the Winter Palace by raising a red lantern. The problem was, they couldn’t find a red lantern. The commander had to go digging around in the basement, and even when he found one, he and his men found it nearly impossible to fit it to the flagpole as instructed. But finally, at about 9:40 PM, one of the guns of the Aurora blasted a deafening roar. The entire city heard it, but almost nobody knew it was only a blank, least of all the ministers inside the Winter Palace, who dove for cover. After the blast from the Aurora, the guns from the Peter and Paul fortress opened up, firing maybe 30 to 35 shots. Most of these shots fell harmlessly in the river or exploded before impact. But it made for quite a show despite doing very little damage. With shelling now, finally audible at the Smolny Institute, signaling the imminent arrest of the provisional government, the Bolsheviks finally allowed the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. There were 670 delegates assembled for this congress, 300 of them Bolsheviks, 193 SRs — with more than half of those being left SRs ready to caucus with the Bolsheviks — 68 Mensheviks, and 14 Menshevik internationalists like Julius Martov. The rest of the delegates were unaffiliated with any party.

Now it goes without saying that the Bolshevik proportion of delegates in the room that night was not a reflection of how much support they actually commanded throughout the Russian Empire. But even their outsized proportions only netted them a strong plurality, rather than an outright majority. And they still needed the left SRs to support them. The previous executive committee, which had been in place since June, now gave way to a new executive reflecting the number of delegates in the room that night. 14 Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Alexandra Kollontai, plus seven left SRs, including their leader, Maria Spiridonova. The Mensheviks were allotted seats, but refused them. They refused to cooperate with what they said was an illegitimate power grab. But though there was a lot of anger at Bolshevik tactics in the room, Bolshevik objectives were actually commanding quite a bit of support. Practically everyone in the room agreed the provisional government was not legitimate. They agreed the Soviet needed to claim power and use it as a base of an all-socialist government who would govern until the constituent assembly was called. The policies of that government would be immediate peace, immediate land transfers to the peasants, immediate worker control of the factories. This is basically just the Bolshevik program. The only subtle distinction is that most delegates, including most of the rank and file Bolshevik delegates, assumed that this government would be a unity coalition representing all the socialist parties — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs. Martov put forward a motion calling for exactly that, and despite some very vocal pushback from the Bolshevik leadership, this motion carried nearly unanimously. The sense of this Second Congress of Soviets was that the government needed to be a government of all the socialist parties, not just the Bolsheviks. But rather than go into coalition with the Bolsheviks, the right SRs and Mensheviks, still furious that their behavior,

and honestly believing that the Bolsheviks were leading the revolution to its destruction, announced their intention to leave the congress and march down to the Winter Palace, where they would intervene to save the provisional goverment.

But this walkout simply guaranteed ultimate Bolshevik victory. The Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, who wrote one of the vital Revolutionary memoirs, later lamented, “We completely untied the Bolsheviks’ hands, making them ministers of the whole situation and yielding to them, the whole arena of the revolution. A struggle at the congress for a united democratic front might have had some success, but by leaving the congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the soviet, of the masses, and of the revolution. By our own irrational decision, we assured the victory of Lenin’s whole line.”

And to add insult to injury, their dramatic demonstration at the Winter Palace never happened. The delegates who quit the congress joined representatives from the Petrograd municipal Duma, including the mayor of Petrograd, and formed a column of about 300 people heading towards the Winter Palace. John Reed, Louise Bryant, and their group happened to encounter this procession about a block away from the Smolny Institute. There, they ran into an MRC checkpoint manned by some armed sailors, and Reed recorded one of the most infamous incidents of October 25th. One of the soldiers yelled at these demonstrators, “I have orders not to let anybody go to the Winter Palace.”

Then the mayor of Petrograd stepped up and said, “We are unarmed, but we are going to the Winter Palace.” He dramatically said, “Shoot us if you want to, we’re ready to die.”

The soldier said, “No, I can’t allow you to pass.”

So another demonstrator said, “What will you do if we go forward? Will you shoot?”

The sailor said, “No, I’m not going to shoot people who haven’t any guns. We won’t shoot Russian people.”

So the mayor said,” We will go forward, and what can you do?”

At this point, another sailor, very irritated, took over negotiations. He said, “We will spank you. And then, if necessary, we will shoot you too. Go home now and leave us in peace.”

Flummoxed, but not willing to force the issue, this processional march to the Winter Palace was called off. All the demonstrators turned around and left.

Back in the Smolny Institute. Martov was still trying to effect a compromise. He put forward a motion criticizing the Bolsheviks for preempting the will of the congress before it had a chance to decide for itself what it wanted to do, but he still called for an inter-party negotiation to form a broadly inclusive socialist government. But after the walkout of the Mensheviks and the SRs, his call for compromise and coalition landed with far less enthusiasm than it had just a few hours earlier. In response to Martov’s motion, Trotsky mounted the tribune and eviscerated the compromise position.

“A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification. What has happened is an insurrection, not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious.”

Now, all of this is extremely debatable, but his last point really landed home:

“Now we are told renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask, with whom are we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us, or who are making this proposal? But after all, we had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made as between two equal sides. By the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, who may are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie see fit. No. Here, no compromise is possible. To those who have left, and to those who tell us to do this, we must say you are miserable, bankrupts, your role is played out, go where you want to go: into the dustbin of history.”

At this, Martov stood up and said, “well, then I will leave.” A delegate blocked his way and said, “And we had thought that Martov at least would remain with us.” Martov said, “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”

And then he left.

Now this is a pretty heavy moment. Remember, Lenin and Martov go back more than 20 years, to when they were just baby revolutionaries together. They had stayed up all night talking on their last night before being exiled to Siberia in 1896. They had started Iskra together, to fight against the economists and revisionists and reformists who would turn revolutionary Marxism into mere trade unionism. Their feud, which was at the heart of the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split, was as much personal as it was ideological. Martov was initially more upset at Lenin’s callous personality than his political tactics, and even now. At this late hour on the moment of achieving what they had both been aiming for their whole lives — a socialist revolution in Russia — Martov ultimately could not abide Lenin’s personality, or his methods, or his tactics, and he quit. He walked out of the congress, and into the dustbin of history. Lenin made no effort to stop Martov, or turn him around or make him change his mind, but in the thick of the coming chaos, he would do everything he could to ensure Martov survived, and from his position as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Lenin made sure Martov’s medical bills were paid after Martov resigned himself to a life of bitter exile. In the summer of 1921, Lenin reflected on his regrets. The biggest: “It is a pity Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he was. Such a pure man.

At two o’clock in the morning on what was now technically October 26th, 1917, MRC forces stormed the Winter Palace. Well, stormed is a bit of an overstatement. A mix of Red Guards, regular soldiers, armed sailors, and some random angry bystanders, entered the palace while blasting away with their guns. Bullets ricocheted off walls and shattered the last remaining windows, but nobody was really fighting back, so there were very few casualties. To the extent that anything of note took place during the storming of the Winter Palace, it was simply that people started looting the palace, and were only stopped when officers of the MRC called out that this was the people’s palace now, stop looting from the people.

 Vlaidimir Antonov, secretary of the Bolshevik military organization, led a detachment of armed men into the room where the last remaining members of the provisional government sat waiting. When he entered, he said, “I inform all of you members of the provisional government, you are under arrest.” Whether they were actually willing to die or not is irrelevant; Antonov was not there to kill them. Then he led the ministers out of the palace and through an angry crowd who very nearly lynched them, but Antonov refused to let any harm come to them, and they were safely deposited in cells in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they would wait for… what? No one knew.

By three o’clock in the morning word had come back to the Smolny Institute that the Winter Palace had fallen and the government was under arrest. This new set off absolute bedlam. Practically everyone who opposed the insurrection had long since departed. A few Menshevik internationalists tried to insist on a coalition of government of socialists, but what had been possible a few hours earlier, even unanimously supported, was now rejected out of hand. At 5:00 AM, they approved a proclamation Lenin drafted to the Russian people in the name of the Soviet, announcing grandiosely — and somewhat aspirationally:

“Backed by the will of the vast majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants, backed by the victorious uprising of the workers and the garrison, which has taken place in Petrograd, the Congress takes power into its own hands. The provisional government has been overthrown. The majority of the members of the provisional government are already under arrest.”

They further announced the policies they hoped would give this narrow insurrectionary coup a broad base of support.

“The Soviet government will propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will secure the transfer of the land of the landed proprietors, the crown, and the monasteries to the peasant communities without compensation. It will protect the rights of the soldiers by introducing complete democracy in the army. It will establish workers’ control over production. It will ensure the convocation of the constituent assembly at the time appointed. It will see to it that bread is supplied to the cities and prime necessities to the villages. It will guarantee all the nations inhabiting Russia the genuine right to self-determination.”

This was the basis of the Bolshevik revolutionary program. The proclamation ended by calling on the people to remain ever vigilant against the forces of counter-revolution who were now surely gathering in strength. It said:

“The Kornilov men, Kerensky, and others are attempting to bring troops against Petrograd. Several detachments, whom Kerensky has moved by deceiving them, have come over to the side of the insurgent people. Soldiers, actively resist Kerensky the Kornilovite! Be on your guard. Railwaymen, hold up all troop trains dispatched by Kerensky against Petrograd. Soldiers, workers in factory and office, the fate of the revolution and the fate of the democratic peace is in your hands. Long live the revolution!”

Then the Congress of Soviets adjourned this session. Only time would tell if these tumultuous days in October 1917 were the epicenter of a historical earthquake or a flash in the pan. I think the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you about it, and you’re sitting there listening to me talk about it more than a hundred years later, is maybe all the answer we need.

It’s pretty well proof that whatever else it was, or was not, the October Revolution was quite a historical earthquake.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.73: Zeno’s Revolution

Okay we’re back. All is well, just hit a crazy streak of busy times and some rotten luck. The event in LA went great though, and I can’t wait to do more of those in the future. And I must also plug that this Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021, I will be doing an online book talk with Dr. Faith Hillis, University of Chicago professor of Russian history. But this is not about my book, this time. I will be the interviewer. Dr. Hillis wrote a really great book called Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s. If you have any interest at all in the Russian Revolution — and folks, if you’re listening to this, that’s you — please, by all means tune in. It’ll be a deep dive on the lives of everyone living in those Russian colonies scattered across Europe that served as embryos for the Russian Revolution. The event is in partnership with the New York Public Library, and I will drop a link to it in the show notes, but please do come out, Dr. Hillis is great, the book is great, and it’ll be a great night.

Now last time, we ended with the Bolshevik’s momentous decision on the night of October 10th, 1917, to stage an armed coup d’etat. What I want to talk about today is what happened in the two weeks after this decision was made, but before they actually went through with it. Because it would be very easy to just glide from one to the other, and skip over the fact that one of the most famous armed coups in history was by no means a forgone conclusion. These two weeks where a high wire act of tension, setbacks, and conflict, not just among the Bolsheviks and their various rivals, but among the Bolsheviks themselves.

Our loose guide for this week’s episode is an old friend, the American journalist John Reed. Reed has already made an appearance on the podcast because as you will recall, in 1913, he embedded himself with Pancho Villa, and wrote a series of newspaper dispatches from the Mexican Revolution collected and published as a book the following year called insurgent Mexico — which if you haven’t read Insurgent Mexico, by all means go read it.

 But Reed is far more famous for his other book about being in the chaotic thick of revolution, 10 Days That Shook the World, his eyewitness account of the October Revolution. Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, a fellow journalist and political activist, came to Russia to report on the ongoing revolutionary upheavals, and they arrived in Petrograd just after the Kornilov Affair. Bryant wrote her own account of their experience called Six Months in Russia, but Reed’s is a real tour de force of political journalism. It’s crammed to the hilt with direct quotes and long excerpts from papers and pamphlets and speeches, making it one of the indispensable first person accounts of the October Revolution in any language. Reed also had access to the principle players, and was, for example, in the last small group of reporters to interview Alexander Kerensky before the fall of the Winter Palace. So I highly recommend everybody read 10 Days That Shook the World, and if you do read it, you’ll recognize where I’m pulling most of the direct quotes from this week’s episode. Now Reed and Bryant were there to just generally kick around and report on events in Russia. They did not know that those events were building towards the October Revolution.

Now, by the second week of October, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party at least knew that they were building towards a revolution. Now, in retrospect, their decision is often portrayed as merely a ruthless will to power from a tiny clique of revolutionaries who represented no one but themselves. But Lenin’s plan did not call for like a dozen people to slip into the Winter Palace and declare themselves the new government without any popular support at all. Lenin was always critical of such Blanquist methods, which in the Russian tradition was expressed by the old People’s Will-style vanguardism. Lenin always believed that the people should be behind them, and would be behind them once they got going. In an open letter to his vacillating comrades, Lenin said the masses were presently in a state of nervous tension, and if they were not necessarily calling for an immediate insurrection, the very active insurrection would snap them into focus, and cause them to enthusiastically coalesce around the Bolsheviks.

He wrote: “… a firm party line, its unyielding resolve, is also a mood creating factor, particularly at the sharpest revolutionary moments.”

Lenin’s position was that the Bolsheviks could not and should not wait until they became the most popular party in Russia before launching a coup, because the very fact of launching the coup is what was going to make them the most popular party in Russia. Lenin believed the people were desperate for clear and decisive leadership, and that’s what he planned to give them.

But to achieve this, a Bolshevik coup had to be for something. And indeed it was. In the fall of 1917, the party had a positive platform aimed at delivering what the people desired, as well as a negative program, aimed at preventing what the people feared. The Bolsheviks hammered both sides of this program in the lead up to the coup. The positive side was encapsulated in a party editorial from October 4th, 1917 that ended with a clear, direct, and uncompromising five point platform:

1. All power to the Soviets, both in the capital and in the provinces.
2. Immediate truce on all fronts, and honest peace between peoples.
3. Landlord estate to the peasants, without compensation.
4. Worker control of industrial production.
5. A faithfully and honestly elected constituent assembly.

So as the Bolsheviks drove towards power, this is what they were saying they were going to do with their power, and they were consciously ticking off each of the major constituencies they needed to win over. For the soldiers, peace. Now. Immediately. For the peasants land, now. Immediately. For the workers control of the factories, now, immediately. They promised no more delays hesitations or convoluted justifications. They promise to do away with the hypocritical and contradictory nonsense that had been floated by the liberals and the Mensheviks and the SRs since February. So for Lenin, it didn’t matter then in October 1917, the Bolsheviks didn’t technically have like any supporters among the peasantry who formed the mass majority of Russia. Who cares? When the Bolsheviks take power, we will transfer land from the large estates to the peasants, and voila, all the peasants will love us.

But if those were the desires to be fulfilled, what about the fears to be prevented? This was mostly aimed at the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, who the Bolsheviks needed to make their move. As we discussed last time, Kerensky gave the Bolsheviks a huge gift by floating the idea of evacuating Petrograd and letting the German sack it, and remember, the German to just a couple of hundred miles away at this point. The population of Petrograd understandably freaked out, and the Bolsheviks enthusiastically hammered the idea that the capitalists and the provisional government were basically in league with the kaiser. The Bolsheviks were also helped mightily by intemperate public remarks that confirmed the most exaggerated accusations. Mikhail Rodzianko, the old chairman of the state Duma, the first leader of the first provisional executive committee after the resignation of the tsar? He was quoted as saying, “Petrograd is in danger. I say to myself, let God take care of Petrograd. They fear that if Petrograd is lost, the central revolutionary organization will be destroyed. To that, I answer that I rejoice when all these organizations are destroyed, for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia.”

With quotes like this, floating around, it wasn’t hard to paint a picture that the liberals and capitalists and their agents in the provisional government were downright eager to toss the people of Petrograd to the Germans. The only thing that could save them was a self organized military apparatus by the people and for the people. Like, say, the recently formed military revolutionary committee.

The other fear of the Bolsheviks played on was that if the Germans didn’t sack Petrograd, then it would probably be some counterrevolutionary alliance of military officers, gangs of Black Hundreds, cossacks, and street thugs taking another shot at a Kornilov-style military coup. Rumors of such a coup swirled in the capital in the fall of 1917, and the Bolsheviks did everything they could to amplify and exaggerate the threat.

Trotsky said, “In essence, our strategy was offensive. We prepared to assault the government. But our agitation rested on the claim that the enemy was getting ready to disperse the Congress of Soviets, and it was necessary mercilessly to repulse them.”

Stalin later said, “The revolution — that is, the Bolshevik party — disguised its offensive actions behind a smoke screen of defenses in order to make it easier to attract into its orbit uncertain hesitating elements.”

Though the party had decided to go on offense, they knew it would only really work if it was sold as defense. And that’s exactly how they set about selling themselves: not as a self-interested clique making a power grab, but as the defenders of Petrograd and the revolution.

That the Bolsheviks were now plotting and insurrection was an open secret. People absolutely knew what was going on. On October 12th, one daily paper said, “There is definite evidence that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming out on October 20th. That is, to coincide with the convening of the second All Russian Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks themselves had called for. A right-wing paper prophesized, “The vile and bloody events of July three to five were only a rehearsal.” A Menshevik paper tried to derail the proposed coup by publishing a story allegedly revealing the details of the secret Bolshevik plan, including maps of their likely targets. Maxine Gorky, a former friend, ally, and sympathizer of Lenin, who had since drifted into a sort of intellectualized middle ground between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, urged the Bolshevik leaders to deny rumors of an insurrection, though he did agree that they were being pushed into this by the looming threat of counterrevolution. The military section of the SRs, on the other hand, thought the forces of counterrevolution would only be triggered if such an insurrection was launched. They issued a statement telling their members to stay home and not listen to dangerous hotheads. They said, “Counter-revolutionary plotters are planning to take advantage of this insurrection to destroy the revolution, open the front to Wilhelm, and wreck the constituent assembly. Stick stubbornly to your posts. Do not come out.” my point, though, is that in mid-October 1917, the Bolshevik coup was not flying under the radar. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Now this raises the obvious question: why didn’t the government do anything about it? Well, here’s the thing. Far from being alarmed by the thought of a Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky and his fellow ministers were positively giddy at the idea, because they were sure they’d be able to put it down without breaking a sweat. One of Kerensky’s ministers said, “If the Bolsheviks act, we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscesses will be extracted once and for all.” Kerensky himself. Infamously said, “I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising. I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.” To the British ambassador George Buchanan, Kerensky said, “I only wish the Bolsheviks would come out, and I will put them down.” He didn’t want to stop Lenin — he was begging for Lenin to carry his feeble party out into the open, where Kerensky could destroy them.

Kerensky and his fellow ministers were not the only ones who thought that would be the end result of an attempted coup. Plenty of rank and file Bolsheviks believed it too, and I’m not just talking about dissenting central committee members like Zinoviev and Kamenev. On October 15, the executive committee of the Petrograd Bolsheviks met with representatives from the Bolshevik military organization, and they all shared extreme skepticism at the central committee’s plan. They nodded along with a memo drafted by Zinoviev and Kamenev saying immediate insurrection was far too risky a gambit. The prevailing mood of hesitancy inside the military organization thus makes October the reverse of July. Back in July, Lenin and the central committee said an uprising was premature, while the defiantly optimistic military organization marched out into the streets anyway. Now, here in October, it’s the military organization leaders trying to dissuade Lenin and the central committee from doing something rash. Their attitude was, we’re not ready and we’re not sure that the people will turn out. Yes, they’ll come out if the second Congress of Soviets calls them, but for the Bolsheviks alone? They won’t.

The dissent from party leaders who were just below the central committee on the Bolshevik org chart just goes to further show that, as we’ve seen many times, despite typical portrayals of the Bolshevik party as some kind of hyper disciplined dictatorial extension of Lenin’s will, that’s never how they worked in practice. Sure, Lenin exerted a great deal of influence on the party. He exerted more individual influence than any other individual leader of any other party. But that is hardly the same as everybody doing what Lenin said all the time. All through the revolution, the Bolsheviks were constantly at odds with each other over strategy, tactics, theory, timing, means, and ends. Different sections and committees disagreed with each other. The Moscow committee wasn’t on the same page as the Petrograd committee. Rank and file agents would just go off and do their own thing, often ignoring the central committee entirely. Orders going from the top down were not followed. Demands coming from the bottom up forced the leaders to alter their plans. Now maybe they were a more cohesive herd of cats than any other party, but they were still mostly a herd of cats, as is evidenced by Lenin being more or less on the verge of a stroke every waking moment of his life.

But though there was an awful lot of pushback, Lenin and the central committee refuse to change course. On October 16th, the Bolshevik central committee held another meeting to grapple with the fact that lots of party members were extremely skeptical. At this meeting. Lenin stood on one side, while Zinoviev and Kamenev stood on the other. These were the three longest tenured Bolsheviks in the room, and they couldn’t agree on what to do. Kamenev thought the whole thing was a bad idea. Not only was an insurrection too risky, it was pointless. Kamenev believed that the party was well on its way to winning majorities in both the second Congress of the Soviet and the constituent assembly. So why do something incredibly risky like stage an armed uprising when the party was just weeks away from peacefully winning majorities? Zinoviev put forward a compromise motion saying that, at a minimum, the party must delay any armed uprising until the second Congress of the Soviets convened. The almost uniform word coming up from the streets was that the people would turn out if this Soviet called them out, but not the Bolshevik party alone. This motion was defeated. Lenin then put forward a counter motion reaffirming the October 10 decision to stage an insurrection as soon as practicable, though it did not yet set a firm time or date. That motion carried almost unanimously. Kamenev promptly resigned from the central committee, freeing him from the rules that prohibited central committee members from airing their disagreements publicly, exactly what Lenin had threatened to do a few weeks earlier when the central committee seemed hell bent on not staging an insurrection.

The following day, the executive committee of the national Soviet organization, still dominated by Mensheviks and SRs, announced that the second Congress of the Soviets would be delayed until October 25th. They knew what the Bolsheviks were up to, and they were trying to stall long enough to allow more Mensheviks and SR delegates to get to Petrograd so they would not lose control of the Soviet organization to the Bolsheviks. But it also gave the Bolsheviks a vital few extra days to prepare. And as they prepared, again, they are not really concealing themselves. On October 17th, Lenin published an open letter to his comrades where he invoked the image of the Soviet being a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government. This was a common metaphor used to illustrate the Soviet role in the dual power system, that they didn’t need to wield power themselves, because they were a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government, who would then do whatever they said. Lenin said, this revolver is useless if the leaders of the Soviet refuse to pull the trigger. He said:

If it is to be a revolver ‘with cartridges,’ this cannot mean anything but technical preparation for an uprising; the cartridges have to be procured, the revolver has to be loaded — and cartridges alone will not be enough.

Either…. openly renounce the slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ or start the uprising.

There is no middle course.

Lenin also debunked the notion that they should wait until the counter-revolution struck before making their own move. “What if the Kornilovites of the second draft will have learned a thing or two?” he asked. “What if they wait for hunger riots to begin, for the front to be broken through, for Petrograd to be surrendered, before they begin? What then?”

“… there is no objective way out and can be none except a dictatorship of the Kornilovites or a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

So Lenin wasn’t even bothering to hide his intentions here, and what’s more, he’s lifting the curtain on the whole anything we do will merely be defensive thing, because he’s quite openly saying, we can’t wait for them to strike first. We have to strike first. The best defense is a good offense. The only defense is a good offense.

Over the next few days, the Bolshevik coup was the talk of Petrograd, but people weren’t exactly eager to get involved. The military organization of the SRs in Petrograd voted to remain neutral in any coming Bolshevik insurrection. They would neither rise with the Bolsheviks nor help the government put them down. They would wait on the sidelines. But they did warn their members to be on the lookout for a full-on right-wing coup, which was also expected at practically any moment. They send out a circular to members warning them to be fully prepared for the merciless suppression, possible assaults by the Black Hundreds, pogromists, and counter-revolutionaries. On October 19th, the leaders of the garrison of the all-important Peter and Paul Fortress voted against joining any Bolshevik insurrection.

With reports like this in hand, Alexander Kerensky, his optimism was fully cemented. The intelligence coming into him indicated only a small number of soldiers were actually with the Bolsheviks. And he wasn’t wrong about that. There were something like 160,000 soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd, with another 85,000 in the general area. Of those, only a small fraction were actively participating in the coup. At most, the number was in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. The vast majority of the soldiers clearly wanted no part of it. But here, kerensky made a fatal miscalculation. His brief time in the Winter Palace appears to have infected him with the same fatal case of blinkered myopia that took down Nicholas and Alexandra. Kerensky was convinced he was only threatened by a small group of malcontents, and that the vast majority of Russians were still with him. Kerensky took the small number of Bolshevik diehards to mean that those soldiers who declined to participate would defend his government. And boy, did he misread that. They didn’t plan to defend his government, they planned to sit on the sidelines and watch. They weren’t going to fight for Lenin, but they also sure as hell were not going to fight for Kerensky either.

More than anything, a mood of chaotic, noisy, bustling, and increasingly paranoid anticipation saturated Petrograd. And to set the scene, I’m just going to hand the reigns over to John Reed and let him describe what he saw in this final week: “Petrograd presented a curious spectacle in those days,” he wrote.

In the factories, the committee rooms were filled with stacks of rifles. Couriers came and went, and the Red Guard drilled. In all the barracks, meetings every day, and all night long, interminable hot arguments. On the streets, the crowds thickened towards a gloomy evening, pouring in slow voluble tides up and down the Nevsky, fighting for the newspapers. Holdups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk down side streets… one afternoon, I saw a crowd of several hundred people beat and trampled to death a soldier caught stealing… Mysterious individuals circulated around the shivering women who waited in queue, long cold hours for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply — and that while the people starved, Soviet members lived luxuriously.

At Smoley, there were strict guards at the doors and the outer gates demanding everyone’s pass. The committee-rooms buzzed and hummed all day and all night, hundreds of soldiers and workmen slept on the floor, wherever they could find room. Upstairs in the great hall a thousand people crowded to the uproarious sessions of the Petrograd Soviet…

[…]

And in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under gray skies rushing faster and faster towards — what?

On October 21st, the military revolutionary committee held a conference of representatives from the garrisons of Petrograd in order to coordinate what was ostensibly a municipal defense force, but which everyone well knew was a Bolshevik led military apparatus. The delegates in the room, many of them, members of the Bolshevik military organization, passed a resolution calling on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to take power. Then, they set about ensuring that when the Congress of Soviets met, that the MRC would wield ultimate military authority in the capital. They sent a delegation to the ranking officer of the Petrograd military district, delivering a message that henceforth, soldiers in the garrison would only follow orders counter signed by the MRC, The officer scoffed, and said, I don’t recognize your delegation, your committee, or your orders. You have no authority here whatsoever.

This delegation then returned to MRC headquarters and announced that the regular chain of command military officers had rejected their authority. So they drafted a resolution and promulgated it on the morning of October 22nd. It read, “The headquarters of the Petrograd military district refuse to recognize the MRC. In doing so, the headquarters break with the revolutionary garrison of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies. The headquarters becomes a direct weapon of counter-revolutionary force.” Then, they staked a very bold claim to military power: “The protection of revolutionary order from counter-revolutionary attacks rests with the revolutionary soldiers directed by the MRC. No directives to the garrison not signed by the MRC should be considered valid.” They finished this by saying, “The revolution is in danger. Long live the revolutionary garrison.”

With this statement, they proclaimed their ultimate authority over all military decisions in Petrograd, and further said that any orders that contradicted the MRC was ipso facto an active counter revolution.

This declaration was issued early on October 22nd, and there was a plausible belief that there may be a major confrontation that very afternoon. October 22nd had been declared a day for celebrating the Petrograd Soviet, and there were lots of banquets and rallies and speeches planned. But it was also the anniversary of Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, which was itself an annual nationalistic celebration. Conservative elements in the army indicated they planned to observe this celebration with parades of their own.

But as the day progressed, the energy in Petrograd was predominantly left-wing, not right-wing. Trotsky gave an electrifying speech at an opera house reminding everyone of how great things would be once the Soviet took power for itself. Soviet power was destined not only to put an end to the sufferings in the trenches, he thundered, it would provide land and stop internal disorder.

“The Soviet government will give everything the country has to the poor and the soldiers at the front. You, bourgeois, own two coats? Give one to the soldier freezing in the trenches. You have warm boots? Stay at home. Your boots are needed by a worker.”

People applauded rapturously. Trotsky called, “We will defend the cause of the workers and the peasants to the last drop of blood. Who will join us?” Everyone cheered, and raised their hands.

There was no great confrontation on October 22nd, and the following day, the MRC finished appointing their commissars, nearly all of whom doubled as members of the Bolshevik military organization. The mood of the city now shifted decisively in the direction of hoping the second Congress of Soviets declared itself the seat of a new national government, backed by the arms of the MRC. As most of the members of the Bolshevik Party had hoped, they were succeeding at organizing their coup under the popular legitimising banner of Soviet authority. On the afternoon of October 23rd, a group of MRC commissars went to the Peter and Paul Fortress to convince them to join the MRC chain of command. The commander of the fortress relented to demands to hold a democratic assembly of his soldiers. Once gathered, the men were harangued by Mensheviks and SRs imploring them to stay in the regular chain of command and not join insurrectionary hotheads, whose hot headedness would lead them all to their doom. Meanwhile, the MRC commissars, most of them Bolsheviks, said join us or Petrograd will fall, either to the Germans or to the counterrevolution. Trotsky arrived and gave a speech urging the Garrison to join with the MRC and defend the revolution. At 8:00 PM, they voted. Everyone who wanted to join the MRC moved to the left, everyone who wanted to maintain the status quo moved to the right. Nearly every soldier moved left. The MRC. And by extension, the Bolshevik Party now controlled the Peter and Paul Fortress, along with its huge cache of weapons and ammunition, and its direct line of sight on the Winter Palace, where Alexander Kerensky lived, worked, and, apparently, prayed for the Bolsheviks to take their best shot.

That night, John Reed headed to the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet. He reported:

In the hall. I ran into some of the minor Bolshevik leaders. One showed me a revolver. “The game is on,” he said, and his face was pale. “Whether we move or not, the other side knows it must finish us or be finished.”

Reed then witnessed a speech by Trotsky.

“We are asked if we intend to come out,” Trotsky said. “I can give a clear answer to that question. The Petrograd Soviet feels that at last the moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviet. The transfer of government will be accomplished by the All Russian Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on those who wish to interfere with the All Russian Congress. We feel that our government entrusted to the personnel of the provisional cabinet is a pitiless and helpless government, which only awaits the sweep of the broom of history to give way to a really popular government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, Even now, today. We hope that the All Russian Congress will take into its hands that power and authority which rests upon the organized freedom of the people. If, however, the government wants to utilize the short period it is expected to live — twenty-four, forty eight, or seventy-two hours — to attack us, then we shall answer with counter-attacks, blow for blow, steel for iron!”

So this is pretty heavy stuff. But then, later that same night, with everything so clearly moving in a decisive direction, there was an unexpected flinch from the Bolsheviks and the MRC. The senior officer of the Petrograd military district invited them to engage in further talks over who had veto over what orders. Maybe an arrangement could be worked out. The Bolshevik leadership made a calculated decision to withdraw their unilateral claim to military authority, probably because they were not quite ready to make their move, and they didn’t want to spark something they couldn’t control. So they backed down. Or at least, they seemed to back down. Which was quite enough to convince Alexander Kerensky that he had the Bolsheviks right where he wanted them. This was a signal the Bolsheviks did not actually believe they were strong enough to back up their big talk. As soon as he heard the news, Kerensky issued orders to strike, giving the Bolsheviks exactly the attack they needed to claim that they were launching a counter attack. The revolution was in danger. Petrograd must be saved.

Next week, we will all wake up on the morning of October the 24th, 1917, and shake the world.

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.13: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality

Before we get started this week, I want to remind you, or maybe you just haven’t heard yet, but I will be at the Sound Education conference at Harvard, which runs from October the 9th to the 12th, so that takes place just about a month from now. If you produce an educational podcast or want to start an educational podcast or just like educational podcasts and you want to come hang out with us, it’s going to be a great deal of fun, with tons of sessions and talks and get togethers. I will be doing my talk, What is the Point of All This, as well as doing a joint session with the great Robin Pearson, who picked up the standard I dropped when I finished the history of Rome, and he kept going with the History of Byzantium. Registration is open and you can check it out at soundeducation.fm, and I will also put a link in the show notes and I, uh, hope to see you all there.

Now last time, we finally did our long overdue episode about the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825, a supremely abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs that went about as badly as an abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs could have gone.

This week, we will continue to cover events that dovetail with material we covered in series six on the July Revolution, and then move on through to events that would fit alongside series seven, on the revolutions of 1848, revolutions which of course convulsed so much of western and central Europe, but did not convulse Russia. Instead, Russia would emerge as something of the gendarme of Europe, helping the Austrian smash the last redoubts of Hungarian national independence in the summer of 1849.

So the failure of the Decemberists meant that the new emperor of Russia was now 29-year-old Nicholas the First. Although Nicholas was technically the younger brother of the now deceased Alexander, he was of a different generation — I mean, he was practically young enough to have been Alexander’s son. Nicholas was born in 1796 when their grandmother Catherine was about to keel over dead, and Alexander was already 19 years old. So unlike Alexander, who was raised in a broadly Enlightenment intellectual and cultural milieu, Nicholas came of age in a very different time, in a time marked not by philosophy and rational progress, but by war and the titanic struggle against Napoleon.

Nicholas was inducted into the army early, and was completely stamped by military life. His formative years were spent in the great patriotic wars against the French. He was not yet 16 years old when Napoleon invaded Russia, not yet 20, for the battle of Waterloo. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Nicholas prepared to settle into a permanent career in the army. And there was almost no thought given to the unlikely chance that he might be emperor himself one day. Tsar Alexander was still young, and after him would come Konstantin, and both would surely have sons, who would push Nicholas even further back in the line of succession.

Accounts differ about what exactly Nicholas knew about his older brother Konstantin’s plan to pre-abdicate the throne. By some accounts, Nicholas was completely blindsided in 1825; others say that he knew everything; others that he knew some of the story, but maybe not all of the story. But his actions in 1825 certainly hint at a young man who seemed very confused and caught off guard by the shocking news of Alexander’s death, and he certainly contributed mightily to the situation when he swore his oath to Konstantin, rather than saying, right, I now am the emperor. But, we covered all that last time.

So now it’s January 1826 and Nicholas, 29 years old, is secure on the throne. So what kind of emperor is he going to be? Well, he was hardly prepared for the job in experience or training, which isn’t his fault — no one had prepared him to rule. He had not prepared himself to rule. It seemed like such a remote possibility. So he followed the path he knew best, and he resolved to do his duty as a soldier. And not to exaggerate things, but that’s about as far as he got.

 As I said, Nicholas was absolutely stamped by a military way of thinking. He was not much impressed with civilian politicians or ministers or bureaucrats. He did not trust his independent and possibly seditious nobility. He would run his government not through normal ministerial channels, but through a personal chancellery, composed almost entirely of high ranking military officers. And as the years went by, all future appointments at nearly every administrative bureau or department inside the normal ministerial channels went to a military officer, even if they weren’t qualified or knew anything about the department they were supposed to be running. Nicholas believed that military men were simply better able to make decisions quicker and more efficiently. He in fact tended to believe that the army was the perfect model for a well-run society. It emphasized service, duty, obedience, rational order, and a unified single purpose. These were virtues that Nicholas believed in, and at the top of any such society must be the commander in chief, the tsar, the emperor. His job was to be strong and decisive. Nicholas was not plagued by the intellectual vacillations of Alexander, which took him this way, and then that. And no description of Nicholas is complete without words like ‘iron will’ and ‘unbending resolve.’ He never doubted that his role as God’s chosen emperor was to be the stern and protective father of his children.

The other thing that marked Nicholas besides the military was the Decembrist Revolt that opened his reign — that had tried to prevent his reign. Even as the years and then decades passed, the memory of that revolt still haunted his imagination. Nicholas knew that there had to be more dissenters and seditious freethinkers lurking around out there. So to combat this ever-present menace to good order — and his life — in 1826, Nicholas created what was dubbed the Third Section of the chancellery. The Third Section was a political secret police, and the forerunner to the even more infamous Okhrana which, I promise you, we will be talking a lot more about. This special Third Section was answerable directly to the tsar, and run by the trusted Alexander von Benckendorff from 1826 until his death in 1844.

The job of the Third Section was to know whatever the regime needed to know in order to nip treason in the bud. And treason could come from anywhere: obviously secret political societies, like the Decemberists, but also heretical religious sects, students and professors at the universities, ambitious nobles, corrupt bureaucrats, all the way down to servants and staff and peasants.

The Third Section was never that big, starting with a small staff of just 16 permanent agents and about 300 gendarme officers at their disposal. But their psychological reach was immense. It was well known now that the walls had ears, informers were everywhere, that the person sitting next to you might be a spy. Loose talk around the proverbial water cooler might get back to agents of the dreaded Third Section, and the next thing you know, it’s a midnight arrest, and a one-way ticket to Siberia. Basically the creation of the Third Section in 1826 meant that the Russian Empire became infused with a vague omnipresent paranoia. But the reputation of the Third Section was always greater than its real size, or its record. In the mid 1830s, they had about 1600 individuals under regular surveillance, but mostly among the nobility and high level bureaucrats. They never had the resources to penetrate much deeper than that. So when the revolutionaries started coming out of the lower classes, the Third Section would prove to be mostly deaf and blind.

While the Third Section grappled with domestic enemies, Nicholas’s beloved army grappled with Russia’s foreign enemies, and right out of the gates, they faced about five years of continuous fighting down on the southern border. First, the Persians launched in attempt in 1826, to avenge their losses in the Caucasus, starting a war which lasted until 1828, and which resulted only in the Russians solidifying their position, and securing permanent hold on Georgia and Armenia.

Then there was the problem of the Ottoman Empire, and what is called in western histories of 19th century international diplomacy, the Eastern Question. But for the Russians, it was a southern question: basically, what to do with the increasingly dysfunctional and faltering Ottoman apparatus. Russia was under pressure from Christians and the Balkans and in Greece to help them throw off the Turkish yoke. But since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Russian policy had been to keep the Ottomans weak, but intact, and fighting a war with them might hasten their collapse. This would allow the British or the French to advance their own Mediterranean ambitions, which was a far worse proposition than dealing with the Ottomans. So under Alexander, the Russians had held off, for example, getting tangled up in the War of Greek Independence, but now things changed. Nicholas signed a protocol with the British where they pledged to mediate an end to the conflict and secure Greek autonomy. The Ottomans rejected this. So, in 1827, when a new Turkish fleet sailed for Greece, Russia’s navy joined with an allied fleet that successfully sent that Turkish fleet to the bottom of the sea. This act enraged the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1828, leading the Russians to march south through the Balkans and practically to the gates of Istanbul. But the point here again was to maintain a weak but intact Ottoman empire, not like conquer them and annex their domains. And so a treaty in 1833 helped maintain the basic status quo, though Greece now secured its independence, and Russia claimed additional territory around the Danube, and rights to a sort of protectorate around Moldavia and Wallachia.

Of greater personal concern to Nicholas through these years, though, was the return of revolution to France, because in July of 1830, that’s right, the barricades went up and the Bourbons came down. Again. A true believer in conservative royalist legitimacy, Nicholas was shocked to discover that Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans had consented to be the benefactor of rabble rising up and tossing out a rightful king. This was especially shocking because Nicholas and Louis Philippe had been personal friends. Nicholas had stayed with the Orléans family in Paris in 1815, and he took the ascension of now King Louis Philippe as a personal betrayal.

When events in France then threatened to spread east, first into Belgium, and then later that summer creeping into Poland, Nicholas’s emissaries told the other crown heads of Europe, we stand at the ready to assist you. But the new July monarchy supported the Belgians breaking away, and the Prussians and British didn’t want to make a huge issue out of it, and so they didn’t. We covered all of this in Episode 6.8B by the way. But then the 1830 movements hit the kingdom of Poland over the winter, which was that constitutional monarchy set up by the treaty of Vienna, and where Nicholas now rained out of the King of Poland. Now he had never liked the constitutional scheme, had been working steadily since he became King of Poland to erode the liberties and rights of his Polish subjects. This was increasingly intolerable, and so partly inspired by events in Paris, the Poles went into revolt in January, 1831. The tsar needed no permission or allies to act in his own domains, the Russian army stormed in, crushed the uprising, and more or less abolished the constitution, and converted those Polish lands into little more than a mere province of the Russian Empire.

But though he was a military autocrat with a fairly unimaginative belief in traditional legitimacy, nicholas was not totally insensible to the fact that he was living in a world very different from his medieval forebears, and educated Russians might need something more than obey your father if revolution was going to be avoided in the future. So Nicholas was open to listening to his enlightened and worldly minister of education, Sergey Uvarov. In 1833, Uvarov sent a circular memo to staff of the education ministry outlining the principles that should guide the further development of the state education system. And here, he introduced a triad that became official imperial ideology basically until 1917: orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. Or, what is called the policy of Official Nationality.

To take them in order, orthodoxy means the Orthodox Church, which had going all the way back to the princes of Moscow, been politically subservient to the monarchy, and mostly there to prop up the ruler, that was their political role. This new official policy of orthodoxy, though, was meant further to roll back a lot of the innovations that had been introduced into the church during the reigns of Peter and then Catherine. They wanted to take Orthodox Christianity back to its traditional roots, beliefs, and practices, untainted by western ideas.

The second part of the triad was the most important: autocracy. The emperor was the tsar, the father of his children. They obeyed him and he protected them. That was the relationship. This relationship was consecrated by God and could have no intermediary go-between like a constitution.

Then finally, there is nationality, which is a little bit trickier. This is not the same as the nationalism we’ve been talking about in other series in the show, this is about firmly rooting orthodoxy and autocracy in its Russian character, history, and traditions, rather than, say, whatever Catherine had been up to while she stayed up late reading Montesquieu. Official Nationality also tended to exalt an idealized Russian peasant as the simple, good, and loyal foundation of society. And in fact, part of the educational policy of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality was to not educate the peasants, in order to keep them pure and unspoiled by the atheistic and egotistical heresies coming out of the West.

This Official Nationality was not in itself a threat to the tsar, as nationalism was about to become a threat to the dynastic rulers in Germany and Italy and Hungary, because the tsar became the living embodiment of the nation. It was instead a kind of way to capture that nascent national spirit and redirect it, not down towards the people, but up towards the tsar. Official Nationality also recognized the special role of the Russians as the founder of the now multi-ethnic Russian Empire. So Russian language and culture and character would naturally dominate, even if ethnic minority groups would all enjoy equal civil rights — except for the two and a half million jews. Of course. It’s always except for the jews.

So orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality became the ruling ideology for the rest of the century. This also comes around as one tsar, one church, one language — faith, tsar, and fatherland — and it sought to place the tsar, the emperor, at the top and center of Russian life. And deviations from this could lead to a knock on the door from the Third Section.

But despite all this creeping conservative repression and the spread of orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality, fresh new ideas couldn’t be stamped out entirely. And while overt politics became increasingly off limits, if you had any kind of sense of self preservation, there were other outlets: for example, literature and philosophy. And this is the era when German philosophy, for example, really starts getting gobbled up by the students of Moscow. One group especially gathered around a young poet philosopher named Nikolai Stankevich in the early 1830s, and among other things, the Stankevich circle started studying and discussing Kant and Schiller, Ficte and Hegel. Now they were under Third Section surveillance practically the whole time, but they kept their activity strictly intellectual. Stankevich himself tragically died of tuberculosis in 1840 at the age of just 26, but the circle he founded had a long lasting impact. Young Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin were in that mix by the mid 1830s, but by then this small cadre of Russian intellectuals were already drifting into two competing camps: the westernizers, and the slavophiles.

The debates between the westernizers and the slavophiles, which would define this generation of Russian intellectual life, recapitulated in modern language the debates that have been going on since Peter the Great. Basically, should Russia’s future be defined by looking outward towards Europe, or inward towards itself? As their name suggests, the westernizers were the heirs of Peter and Catherine and the Decemberists. They continued to hammer the theme that Russia was backward, Russia was behind. They ridiculed the ignorant superstitions of the Orthodox Church. They chafed under the tyrannical paternalism of the emperor. Russia needed to fully embrace reason, science, liberal politics, and economic progress in order to keep pace with their neighbors in the west. The leading light of the westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s was a guy named Vissarion Belinsky, and he spread his message from his place as the preeminent Russian literary critic of the day. Going all in on Hegel, Belinsky believed that Hegel’s conclusion that existence was attempting to resolve towards a great idea, and that idea was freedom, and that freedom had already arrived in the west, Belinsky concluded that Russia must be on a similar track, they were just further back and they needed to catch up. Progress had to be made, it was almost a cosmic imperative.

Now, on the other side was a group who thought this whole westernizer obsession was an exercise in unnecessary self-loathing, and these guys were the slavophiles. Russia was not European. Russia should not try to be European. Sitting astride Europe in the West and Asia in the East, Russia was its own unique and great thing, and if they wanted progress — if such a thing was even desirable — they needed to build from their own history and traditions. And in this, at least, they fit in with Official Nationality. They had nothing but criticism for the west. Western Christianity was terrible, protestantism was greedy and egotistical, Catholicism was greedy and power hungry. Neither was concerned with true religion or the soul. As for these so-called progressive ideas that had come out of the west, look at what they had wrought: nothing but revolution, war, and chaos. One day, people start reading Voltaire and Diderot in Paris, and the next thing you know, Moscow is burning to the ground.

And what really chafed them was the sheer egotism of Europe, its obsessive narcissistic focus on the individual. The slavophiles believed that the greatness of Russian and Slavic culture was the emphasis on communal society, and they themselves emphasize this concept of Sobornost, a spiritual community of many people living together, jointly. That when people got together, they should not rush to identify what traits make them different from each other, but what traits they share in common: that was the basis of a real harmonious and healthy community, rather than the destructive conflict of all against all that, yes, may turn out a few more linen shirts, but does nothing for the spiritual wellbeing of a society. Many of the slavophiles were romantic conservatives, but they were not slavishly into despotism or anything, many of them wanted some kind of representative assembly. They just wanted it rooted in ancient Russian tradition, not like Montesquieu in the Houses of Parliament.

Now, I’m not going to render judgment on this debate, most sides make pretty good points, but if you look at the technological capacity of the Russian Empire during this period, one must conclude that something was happening in the west that was not happening in the east. This was a material fact, whatever one moral and philosophical conditions. The UK was well on its way towards an industrial society, fueled by coal and transported by railroad. So were in the Netherlands and Belgium in the Rhineland; France would soon follow. Something was happening that you could not just wave away and say, that’s not for us. And even Nicholas did not want to wave it all away. He commissioned the first 16 miles of railroad track connecting downtown St. Petersburg to the suburbs, and that was finished in 1837. Then, the emperor took a personal interest in building the rail line that would link St. Petersburg to Moscow, and he overcame conservative resistance to complete the project between 1842 and 1851. But in an empire that was literally millions of square miles, by the end of Nicholas ‘s reign, only hundreds of miles of railroad track existed. And we are now heading into that chapter of the world civ textbook where economic capacity is practically synonymous with number of miles of railroad track. In this, Russia objectively lacked behind.

In terms of manufacturing, there was some move towards using serf workers and managers to start some kind of industrial production, but this was all very small, and starting fitfully, and it was still inhibited by both a lack of investment capital and a workforce that was legally unable to leave their homes. The problem of serfdom was ever present. And Nicholas himself personally disliked serfdom, and he would have abolished it by fiat if he thought he could, but he was convinced that it would lead to one of the two types of rebellion that Russian history was so familiar with: the peasant revolt and the palace coup. If not managed right, emancipation could get out of hand and lead to a peasant uprising like Pugachev’s Rebellion or angry nobles would be pissed that they had just lost all their serfs, and they would engineer the overthrow of Nicholas; it had happened to his father, it had happened to his grandfather. And so he left the serfs in their bondage, and the Russian economy stagnated.

This brings up to within shouting distance of 1848. Like western and central Europe, Russia was not doing so hot in the mid 1840s, though the symptoms were not exactly the same. The Russians were dealing with a cholera outbreak and unseasonably dry weather that caused fires and bad harvests, but they were a geographic and economic step removed from the sharp economic downturn of the hungry forties. They were not so dependent on the potato to feed themselves and they were not so shaken by the problem of urban unemployment when the business recession hit. As for their literate and potentially revolutionary intellectual liberals, those guys were entirely nascent and not at all primed for a revolution.

When the shocking news of the February Revolution in Paris reached St. Petersburg, the tsar wasted no time. And if you remember from our episode on the Spectre of the French Revolution, Nicholas was among those for whom a new French Republic could only mean one thing: war in Europe. He immediately ordered full mobilization of the army and navy, and he now envisioned himself repeating the great deeds of his brother from 1812 to 1815, and he sent word to Vienna and Berlin and London, we must move quickly to surround and isolate revolutionary France. But then more shocking news came in: London was going to go along with the second Republic and they would provide no money for a new anti French coalition. Then more shocking news: Vienna was captured by barricade building radicals. In Berlin, the King of Prussia crawled away on his belly and promised a constitution. Budapest was falling into the hands of student nationalists. Nicholas couldn’t believe it. Instead of surrounding and isolating France with the powers of legitimate autocracy, Russia was the one now surrounded and isolated by revolutionary liberalism, they were now practically the last bastion of legitimate autocracy. The tsar then personally composed and circulated a manifesto, declaring Russia’s intention to fight all of this to the death.

Internally, there was much less immediate threat in St. Petersburg and Moscow that they would go the way of Vienna and Berlin and Paris, though the Third Section was working overtime. Censorship kept almost all news out of the west away from casual eyes, and those who did know what was happening were afraid of making any sudden moves. Certainly there was no organized group to prepare a revolution against the tsar, and so it did not happen. The closest thing the Third Section found to a revolutionary society was a literary group organized around Mikhail Petrashevsky. Most of these guys were younger and lower born than previous free thinkers and intellectual distance of the Stankevich circle. But they had been subversively reading the latest in political and economic thought, and when they discovered Charles Fourier, they were like, right, I guess what we’re called is: socialists.

Among them was a young writer of some promise named Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Third Section planted spies among the Petrashevsky group, and though there was some loose talk of fomenting some kind of rebellion, in the end, they were mostly busted for simply reading material that had been banned by the censors. In April, 1849, they were all rounded up and subjected to months of interrogation and then military trials. Forty men were eventually sentenced to death, but this death sentence was calculated trauma. After being taken to the place of execution and lined up as if they were going to be shot, the tsar delivered eight last minute stay of execution. The death sentences were planned, and the execution staged to traumatize the men and get them in the mood for a little love for the tsar to spring forth from their grateful hearts. Dostoevsky was among this forty, and he spent the next four years in exile.

Now out in western and central Europe, we know how the revolutions of 1848 progressed. With the springtime of the peoples giving way to a summer of feverish confusion, followed by the darkening autumn of reaction. And despite Nicholas’s bellicose hostility to the revolutions, Russia itself did not attempt to force it to will upon the other great powers. And it was suspected in some corners of the Kremlin that the Russian army was actually in no shape to force its will upon the other great powers. So Nicholas mostly watched from the sideline with approval as Prague and Berlin and Vienna and Milan slowly came back under the hands of their rightful rulers.

But if you remember from the very end of series seven, episodes 7.31 and 7.32, the kingdom of Hungary, what some were now calling the republic of Hungary, remained a revolutionary Inferno of nationalism and liberalism. And it was here that Russia could finally play a role. After the abdication of Emperor Ferdinand and the ascension of a new teenage Austrian emperor Franz Joseph in December of 1848, the new Austrian emperor secretly traveled to Warsaw for a personal meeting with Tsar Nicholas in May of 1849, where he frankly admitted in person what had been discussed in correspondence between the two powers: Austria could not reconquer Hungary alone. They needed Russian help.

Now Russia had already been sucked into the conflict on the eastern edges of Hungary but now they poured in by the hundreds of thousands, and that last pocket of revolutionary lava that had poured east from the initial eruption in Paris the year before finally hit a wall that was the Russian army. Within weeks, the job was finished and Tsar Nicholas could take satisfying credit for helping end of the great revolutionary menace. And so that menace had been held off, for at least one more day.

But Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and the future leaders of the First International are now out there. They were dealt a depressing setback, but they would never admit a final defeat. And next week, Russia will grapple with the aftermath of 1848. And even more importantly, the aftermath of the disastrous Crimean War, which exposed the technological backwardness of the so recently triumphant Russian army, there would be no holding back the modern world. It was coming, whether the leaders of the Russian Empire wanted it to or not, and they were going to have to deal with it.

And one issue, one massive issue that had been put off for so long, now finally had to be dealt with: the serfs were going to have to be freed.

 

 

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Episode 10.72: The Decision

I want to begin this week by thanking everybody for coming out to the little midwest tour. It was a great week, I had tons of fun meeting everybody and signing books. Hope to do it again in the future. Hope to do many more of these in the future. And speaking of, if you’re down in southern California, remember I will be in Pasadena on Wednesday, October 27th for a full book talk event. Not just signing, but actually getting up on stage and giving a presentation. This will be the first time I will address a live audience in more than two years, so I am really looking forward to that, and I hope to see everybody there.

We ended last time with the democratic conference of mid-September 1917. This improvised assembly was supposed to legitimize a new coalition government of socialists and liberals under Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky in the wake of the Kornilov Affair. But instead, the conference wrapped up having simultaneously endorsed and rejected the idea of a coalition. Given this utterly incoherent result, the leading organizers of the democratic conference improvised again. On September 20th, they announced the formation of what they called the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, but which everybody else calls the Pre-Parliament. This Pre-Parliament was initially composed of 313 members, with each faction represented at the democratic conference receiving a similar share of delegates at this new assembly, which they were just making up out of thin air on the spot.

As I mentioned at the end of last week’s episode, Kerensky’s new government was meant to answer to this new assembly until the convening of the constituent assembly in November. Hence it being dubbed the Pre-Parliament. But in the subsequent inter-party negotiations to format government, the liberals refused to join unless this Pre-Parliament was recast as merely an advisory council with no genuine authority at all. The right SRs and Mensheviks leaders acquiesced.

So on September 25th, Alexander Kerensky inaugurated a new, new government answerable basically to no one but Kerensky himself. Kerensky now continued to enjoy a fantasy version of reality, where he was in the final stages of consolidating power, like a Russian Bonaparte. He had bested Kornilov. He had evicted the Soviet from the Tauride Palace and banished them to the Smolny Institute. And then he treated the right-leaning socialists as if they needed him more than he needed them. One of the first things his new government did was unilaterally augment the Pre-Parliament, adding 150 more delegates, all of them from the land owning and business owning bourgeoisie. This humiliated Kerensky’s socialist partners and discredited them further in the eyes of the workers, the peasants, the soldiers, and the sailors, whom they allegedly represented. Now Kerensky was in just enough of a bubble at this point that he really believed he was on the verge of, like, winning the Russian Revolution. All he had to do was hold on with this new government for about six weeks until the constituent assembly convened.

He would not even make it four.

Kerensky had gone into the same imperial bubble that captured and destroyed Nicholas and Alexandra. Because things were not going well out there. In September 1917, the Russian Empire was collapsing into chaos. Incredibly, the scarcity and inflation crisis that had gotten all of this going back in February was now even worse. The various provisional governments simply continued to print paper money, 400 million rubles in April, 700 million in June, over a billion in July. Prices quadrupled even above the highs that drove the Romanovs out of power in February. 500 factories had shut down during the summer months, leaving close to a hundred thousand out of work. Scarcity of necessary goods was still endemic in all urban areas, as the political and economic system remained utterly dysfunctional. Inflation, scarcity, and unemployment created a crisis atmosphere. Workers organized and staged strikes regularly. In the major urban centers, crime and lawlessness were indisputably on the rise as criminals and gangs just roamed free. Kerensky’s government had basically no dependable forces willing to impose order on its behalf.

It was just as bad out in the countryside. Peasants who had been waiting with growing frustration and impatience for the provisional government to endorse the transfer of landed estates to peasant ownership now lost their cool completely. Even when the arch SR Victor Chernov was serving as minister of agriculture, it had been nothing but foot dragging, empty promises and delays. Then Chernov had been ousted from the government during the Kornilov Affair, and there seemed no hope at all that the government would do the one thing the peasants had been demanding all along:,give us the land. For them, that was the only part of the revolution that really mattered. Completely fed up, they just started taking it. Around September, there was a wave of violent attacks in rural areas as peasants mobbed, manor houses, looted the premises, and then burn the place to the ground. The villages, many now boasting their own little local soviets, unilaterally claimed ownership over the estates, carrying not one whit what the authorities said. Kerensky’s government issued stern prohibitions on the seizures, but just like in the cities, his government had no force capable of backing up the stern pronouncements. In any given local area, the preponderance of force was held by the villagers themselves, thanks in large part to all those hundreds of thousands of deserting soldiers who were returning to their home villages armed and radicalized.

The increasingly nonexistent power and legitimacy of Kerensky and the provisional government fueled the fortunes most especially of the Bolshevik party. The positions that had hurt them in February — stiff opposition to the war, constant denunciations of the provisional government, and demands for all power to the Soviet — now propelled them forward towards October. As the Mensheviks and SR leadership compromised and discredited themselves, rank and file party members defected in droves to the ranks of the Bolsheviks, who offered clear and simple slogans, offering a welcome alternative to the feeble dithering of the right-leaning socialist leaders. In the countryside, the message was peace, land and freedom. In the cities, it was peace, bread, and freedom. On September 19, the Bolshevik party secured a majority inside the Moscow Soviet. Then on September 25th, the same day Kerensky announced his new government, the Bolsheviks cemented a voting majority inside the Petrograd Soviet. The vote to create a new executive leadership council for the capital Soviet resulted in one Menshevik, two SRs, and four Bolsheviks. This executive committee, with an outright Bolshevik majority, promptly voted to make Leon Trotsky president of the Petrograd Soviet. He was now able to speak not just as a charismatic Bolshevik party leader, but as president of the Petrograd Soviet, with all the implied legitimacy authority, and power that came with it.

So heading into October 1917, the central committee of the Bolsheviks were riding high, especially after they believed that their party might have been destroyed back in July. Their fortunes had now reversed completely, and they believed that both time and history were on their side. All they needed to do now is keep striding forward, and they would surely emerge as the majority party in Russia in no time at all.

But during these same weeks, the head of their party, Lenin, still in hiding in Finland after the July Days, was slowly going out of his mind, because while he believed history was on their side, time was not. In fact, time was running out. Fast.

The central committee had established a stable courier service to and from the chief, and Lenin was able to read newspapers from Petrograd the same day they were printed, and then send back letters, essays, and editorials commenting on events. From about the second week of September, 1917, Lenin hammered the point that if they did not act before the constituent assembly convened, it would be too late. That while the Bolshevik ranks were growing, they would almost certainly wind up a marginal minority faction in the coming constituent assembly, undercutting any claim to represent the voice and the will of the people of Russia. He was furious with the central committee for participating in the democratic conference, granting recognition to a manipulated farce organized by their enemies and rivals. Lenin believed passionately and bluntly that given the circumstances — the growing chaos, the non-existent legitimacy of the government, plus the looming possibility that the bourgeoisie and the philistine right-leaning socialists might reconsolidate their hold on power at the coming constituent assembly — the Bolshevik party needed to seize power. By force. Immediately. Without hesitation or scruples.

In Lenin’s mind, the Bolshevik party represented the only true path to socialist revolution. This was something at least abstractly all of his comrades in the central committee agreed with. It’s why they believed the Bolshevik party was superior to all the other parties. Lenin said they must not miss this opportunity. If they were weak or passive, then all would be lost. On September 12th, he wrote a scathing essay titled the Bolsheviks Must Take Power. Two days later, he penned an article called Marxism and Insurrection, which was a defense of armed uprisings, not as a betrayal of Marx’s principles, but action Marx and Engels themselves believed to be a vital and unavoidable component of socialist revolution. When the democratic conference wrapped up, Lenin wrote a piece called Heroes of Fraud and Mistakes of the Bolsheviks. He attacked his comrades on the central committee for their plodding, peaceful, and passive conduct. He meant for it to be published in the party newspaper. And Lenin was absolutely volcanic with rage when the central committee took a pair of scissors to Lenin’s editorial, publishing it under the truncated headline, Heroes of of Fraud, and cutting out his attacks on the Bolshevik leadership. Now convinced that his comrades in the central committee would blow this opportunity if Lenin was not there to personally lead them, he made plans to quit Finland and return to Petrograd.

But all that said, it’s not like Lenin’s comrades were entirely idle or passive, nor that they were especially burdened with constitutional scruples, nor that they even opposed the idea of an armed coup d’etat. It was mostly about the when and the how, not the can we or should we .The day after Trotsky became president of the Petrograd Soviet, he started advocating for a second all Russian Congress of Soviets. The first such Congress of Soviets had been held back in June, and we talked about it briefly in episode 10.68. This is when the Mensheviks and SRs formed an overwhelming majority of both delegates and leaders, and when they rejected the idea of the Soviets taking power from the provisional government and declared that no party out there thought we should take power right now, Lenin called out from the floor, “There is one party.” Remember that? Well, now that party is in charge of the Petrograd Soviet, and very much still wants to seize power.

So you’re going to have to stick with me for a sec, because we do need to untangle something so that all of this makes sense. The first Congress of Soviets in June had elected a standing executive committee to permanently represent all the Soviets. This executive committee was of course packed with Mensheviks and SRs, and it was now the last bastion of their waning influence. This executive committee stood as a major obstacle to the rising power of the Bolsheviks. So when I say that the Bolsheviks now controlled the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, that is true, but that is different from this still standing executive committee of the Soviets writ large, who remained the same Mensheviks and SRs who had been elected back in June.

Got it? Cool.

The Bolsheviks, now able to speak with the voice of the Petrograd Soviet, demanded this larger executive committee call for a second congress. The stated reason for this was that with the constituent assembly on the way, all the Soviets needed to come together to hammer out a legislative and constitutional platform that they could all agree on and then take to the constituent assembly. The unstated reason was it the Bolsheviks plan to dominate this second Congress and get all of their guys elected to a new central executive council, turning the Soviets into an operational wing of the Bolshevik party so that the abstract slogan all power to the Soviets would now mean, in concrete terms, all power to the Bolsheviks. The leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs knew exactly what the Bolsheviks were up to, but Trotsky said if they didn’t start sending out invitations for a second congress, that the Petrograd Soviet would use their prestige and moral authority to just do it themselves. The Bolsheviks got their way. Invitation started going out for a second all Russian Congress of Soviets to be held on October 20th, 1917.

Meanwhile, Lenin moved from his remote hideout in Finland to a district much closer to the border, and very close to Petrograd. This way, he would be able to wield more decisive influence over his comrades. He was incensed that the central committee was centering his view that they should no longer wait for anything, that the party now, right now, should launch an armed coup d’etat. From this space, he sent an essay to the central committee, headlined The Crisis Has Matured. It laid out a case that with the Bolshevik standing for peace, land, and freedom, that if they seize power right now, neither the army, nor the navy, nor the peasants would make a move against them.

In a confidential sixth section of this essay, he blasted his colleagues for hesitation. He ended by saying, “In view of the fact that the central committee has even left unanswered the persistent demands I had been making for such a policy ever since the beginning of the democratic conference, in view of the fact that the central organ is deleting from my articles all references to such glaring errors on the part of the Bolsheviks as the shameful decision to participate in the Pre-Parliament, the admission of Mensheviks to the presidium of the Soviet, etc., etc. — I am compelled to regard this as a ‘subtle’ hint at the unwillingness of the Central Committee even to consider this question, a subtle hint that I should keep my mouth shut, and as a proposal for me to retire.

“I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hear by do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the rank and file of the Party and at the Party Congress,”

This resignation, however, was simply a threat to demonstrate how serious he was. Mostly, he made preparations to move back to Petrograd and convince everyone not to blow it.

Lenin’s case that all the pieces were falling into place, thanks to fortuitous events on the war front, which resulted in a gift wrapped package delivered right to the Bolsheviks’ doorstep. Now, even though the war against the Austrians in the southwest, and against the Turks in the south, had both settled into a mutual pacivity as all sides presently stood on the brink of total collapse, the Germans in the northwest still posed a major threat. They had captured Riga at the end of August and forced the Russian army to fall back. Then on September 28th, the Germans launched a naval operation into the Gulf of Riga aimed at capturing three strategic islands, which, if captured, would allow the Germans to ferry their armies around behind the newly dugout Russian defensive line, in effect, giving them an unobstructed straight road to Petrograd.

The government responded by making plans to evacuate the city. On October 4th, Kerensky and his government unanimously agreed to abandon Petrograd and withdraw to the safety of Moscow. All government ministries, departments, and personnel would evacuate the capital. They also made plans to relocate as much of the city’s heavy industrial capacity deeper into the interior. During these meetings, it was also decided that the Soviets would be treated as merely private institutions, not covered by any state of evacuation plan. The Soviet’s decision to stay or leave Petrograd would be entirely their own, but they would be entirely on their own.

On October six, all these plans were leaked to the press and the leaders of the Soviet — all of them — Mensheviks, Bolshevik, and SRs — flipped their lids. There was by now a growing consensus among Socialist of all stripes that Kerensky was actively preparing to sacrifice red Petrograd to the Germans. That while the provisional government may lack the force to bring left wing radicals to heel, the German army did not. In this scenario, Kerensky abandoning Petrograd to a German sack was not a painful but necessary strategy in the face of dire wartime emergency, but a welcome opportunity to have the Kaiser crush the radical left and the Soviets, allowing Kerensky to safely consolidate a new base of power in Moscow. The leaders of the Soviet announced that the Soviet did not endorse an evacuation, and anyone who participated would be doing so in direct opposition to the Soviet. And as their voice carried far more weight than the provisional government did with the rank and file soldiers and the workers in the city, Kerensky and his fellow ministers now had to reckon with going through with an evacuation no one would help them carry out, and in fact might result in them all getting lynched if they tried to go through with it.

In a session of the Pre-Parliament held on October 7th, which was scheduled to talk about the evacuation, Trotsky gave a fiery speech hammering on these themes. Trotsky issued a blistering denunciation of the government, which mostly fell on deaf ears in a hall packed with moderates and liberals and members of the bourgeoisie, but which he knew would resonate in the streets. He declared, “The idea of surrendering the revolutionary capital to German troops was a natural link in a general policy designed to promote counter-revolutionary conspiracy.” He went on to say, “With this government of treason to the people and with this council of counter-revolutionary connivance we have nothing in common. In withdrawing from the council, we summon the workers, soldiers, and peasants of all Russia to be on their guard and to be courageous. Petrograd is in danger. The revolution is in danger. The people are in danger.” Then, he led the small Bolshevik delegation out of the hall and into the streets.

And that brings us directly to the gift-wrapped package delivered right to the Bolsheviks doorstep. With all components of the Soviet leadership, as well as the workers and soldiers and sailors in the city, deeply concerned that the provisional government was about to abandon them to the slaughter, the Petrograd Soviet convened on October 9th, and voted to take the defensive Petrograd into their own hands. They created what was soon dubbed the Military revolutionary Committee, or the MRC. The MRC functioned just like the committee of struggle against counter-revolution had functioned during the last days of the Kornilov Affair. The committee would organize, lead, and coordinate armed soldiers and workers. Now, nothing had changed organization remained the largest and most disciplined armed force in the city. And all those tens of thousands of workers who had been armed and led by the Bolsheviks back in August? Well, they now simply returned to a state of ready alert. These forces were of course all co-opted by the MRC, and became the main pillar of their operations. So, the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party is now operating, for all intents and purposes, as the officially sanctioned armed forces of Petrograd, charged with complete authority over the security and defense of the capital. In a final deft maneuver, Trotsky had language inserted into the motion creating the MRC that they were to defend Petrograd both against the external threat of the Germans, but also the internal threat of counterrevolution, which will of course be defined however the Bolshevik see fit. Trotsky later called the creation of the Soviet MRC the dry revolution or the silent revolution, and he said that when it was done, the Bolsheviks were already three quarters if not nine tenths of the way to victory.

All of these pieces fell into place just in time for Lenin to return to Petrograd, to meet with his comrades for one of the most consequential committee meetings in world history. On October 10th, 1917, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party met to hash out some major strategic and tactical questions. There were 21 total members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but on this evening, only 12 were able to attend. Among those in the room were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev Stalin, and Alexandra Kollontai. Also, a funny looking dude dressed up to look like an old Lutheran priest, who was wearing an ill fitting wig atop his head: Lenin.

This meeting was ironically held in the home of a prominent Menshevik leader named Nikolai Tsukanov. The reason they were able to meet there was that the apartment also happened to be the home of a long time Bolshevik loyalist named Galina Flakserman, who just so happened to be Tsukanov’s wife, revealing with domestic simplicity just how gray the party differences were among all these socialists. Flakserman encouraged her husband to just go ahead and sleep at his office that night, which was a perfectly normal thing for him to do, and which he very much insisted he do on this particular evening. This allowed the parlor of a leading Menshevik to be used to plot Bolshevik revolution. This incredibly important meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee lasted for eight hours. It was the first time Lenin had seen most of his comrades in person since the July Days, and he gave an impassioned defense for the idea that the time for an insurrectionary coup d’etat was now. Among other things, he believed that the Bolsheviks would only have to hold their ground for a matter of months, because Lenin was convinced that European-wide proletarian revolution was on the verge of breaking out, so the Bolsheviks would not have to stand alone for long. Pretty soon every major power in Europe would be run by proletarian comrades.

Trotsky and five others in the room were mostly in agreement with Lenin that the time for interaction was at hand, and that the pieces were in place to do it, and that they would probably be successful. But against Lenin, Trotsky insisted that they wait until the convening of the second congress of the Soviet, which was set for October 20th. People were not going to support a straight up Bolshevik coup. It absolutely had to be done while speaking with the voice of the Soviet. But this was not a difference over whether to do it at all, it was just a matter of, do we do it now, or like, a week from now?

Two members of the central committee, however, disagreed entirely with the plan. These were two of Lenin’s longstanding lieutenants, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kamenev In particular had been pushing for a peaceful reconciliation with the other socialist parties. He did not believe the Bolsheviks were strong enough at the moment to do things on their own. But he also simultaneously believed that in the coming constituent assembly elections that the Bolsheviks would probably actually win something like a third of the seats. This, combined with their expected domination of the congress of Soviets, would give the Bolsheviks a clear trajectory to power without risking everything on an armed coup. Both of them also believed that Lenin’s opinion, which had been seconded by Trotsky, that European-wide revolution was on the verge of breaking out was altogether too optimistic. Kamenev finally said, “Comrade Lenin’s plan means to stake on one card the fate not only of our party, but the fate of Russia and world revolution. The whole thing would ultimately be disastrously counterproductive, and even foolish given how well things were going for the party. Zinoviev agreed with all of this, and further added that if they tried and failed, this time, it wouldn’t be like the July days. This time, we will all be shot.

And the thing is neither of them were wrong about any of this. Lenin was asking them to stake everything on one card. When they described the risks and potential consequences, they were absolutely correct. Lenin’s rejoinder was simple: yes, I’m asking you to stake everything on one card. Yes, the risks are enormous. But guess what? I think we can win. And in fact, not playing this card right now would be the riskiest gambit of all, because we may never get another window like this ever again.

After eight hours of debate, the 12 members took a vote. They voted 10 to 2 to begin immediate preparations for an armed coup d’etat. Kamenev and Zinoviev obviously, being the two “no” votes.

Lenin then scribbled an informal resolution inside of an exercise book for a child, because no other paper was readily at hand. This resolution states:

The central committee recognizes the international position of the Russian revolution ( the revolt in the German navy, which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of a world socialist revolution; the threat of peace by the imperialists; with the object of strangling the revolution in Russia) as well as the military situation, the inducible decision of the Russian bourgeoisie and Kerensky and company to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, and the fact that the proletarian party has gained a majority in the Soviets — all this, taken in conjunction with the peasant revolt in the swing of popular confidence towards our Party (the elections in Moscow) and, finally, the obvious preparations being made for a second Kornilov revolt (the withdraw the troops in Petrograd, the dispatches of Cossacks to Petrograd the circling of Minsky the Cossacks, etc.) — all of this places the armed uprising on the order of the day.

Considering therefore that an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe, the central committee instructs all Party organizations to be guided accordingly, and to dismiss and decide all practical questions (the Congress of Soviets of the Northern region (the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the action of our people in Moscow and Minsk, etc.) from this point of view.

This resolution was the beginning of the Bolshevik coup. They departed each other’s company on the morning of October 11th, having resolved to stake everything on Lenin’s one card. And as was noted in literally every single book I read about this meeting, this is one of those moments in history where the will and choices of a single man really do change the course of history. Absent Lenin’s impassioned, angry, manipulative, persuasive, domineering, clear-eyed, and somewhat harebrained case that the Bolsheviks could stage a coup, it is entirely likely that the party would have let the moment slip by.

But they did not. And next week, they will launch their coup to alter the course of history, turning the dial from February to October.

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Episode 10.12: The Decemberists

So we get to start this week by doing a little roundup of errors. It’s never easy to quickly race through a thousand years of history, and I have stumbled in a few places over the last few episodes. Like last week, for example, as many of you pointed out, I said that Moscow was the capital of Russia, which of course it was not the capital of Russia. We know that the capital of Russia was St Petersburg. Second, I said that tsarevitch was the title for the heir to the throne, and this is also not true; the proper title for the air to the throne was tsesarevich.

And while we’re here, I also want to make clear that Peter the Great changed the official title of the ruler of the Russian Empire from tsar to a more modernized adaptation of the word emperor. So calling the rulers of the Russian empire tsars is technically an informal designation, but the usage is so widespread that I am just going to roll with it and often use tsar and emperor interchangeably. Meanwhile, a few people have told me that two episodes back, I fell too credulously for some of Empress Catherine’s own debunked propaganda. The historical consensus is that her son Paul, the future Tsar Paul the First, was indeed the son of her husband Peter the Third, not one of her lovers. She strongly implied in her memoirs that the father was one of her lovers, rather than her long since overthrown and dead husband, but that was just Katherine being Katherine. So I’m going to go back and rerecord those bits and then people will come along later and say, why are you starting the episode like this? You never made those mistakes. Well, yes I did.

And then finally pronunciation is always going to be a work in progress. It’s always a work in progress. So if you come around to correct my pronunciation, I am listening, it will get better. I usually go from, ugh, to, eh, over the course of a series.

And while we’re here not yet getting started, and because this is the first episode where actual specific dates are important, we do need to talk about the calendar problem. As a part of his modernization/westernization efforts, Peter the Great ditched Russia’s old calendar and decreed that starting January, the first 1700 Russia would adopt the Julian calendar. But of course by then, western Europe was switching over to the Gregorian calendar, creating a running date discrepancy for the next 200 years or so. Now the Russian calendar is going to change again over the course of this very series, because the Bolsheviks would adopt the recording calendar beginning in 1918. So this means that when we talk about Russian history between 1700 and 1918, there is a difference between the contemporaneous Russian date of an event and the date as it lands on the Gregorian calendar. Russian dates tend to arrive about 12 days earlier than their European counterparts. So in the history books, you will see dates marked as either OS or NS meaning old style and new style so that is clear what date is being referred to. This means that everyone working in the era gets to decide for themselves which dating system they would like to use. And I am going to follow along from the notion that I would like to mark the date as the actors themselves understood them. If Lenin is looking at a calendar, I want to talk about the calendar Lenin is looking at, not some retconned revised calendar. So I will be using the old style dates until the big switch comes in 1918 and thereafter use the new style. Now there are pros and cons both ways, but the big thing this gets us is that the February Revolution will still take place in February, rather than March, and the October revolution will take place in October, rather than November, and most importantly, we will be talking about the dates as the Russian participants themselves understood them. Now, either way, the Decemberists, who we’re going to talk about today, would still be the Decemberists, but this is the first episode we’ve come to where a play-by-play of events require specific dating, and I just want to let you know that from here on out, we are on the old style Julian calendar.

Okay, with all that said, let’s finally get to it.

Now, events from last week’s episode, coincided with events from the end of series three on the French Revolution. Well today’s episode would fit alongside events that we covered in series five, on Spanish American independence, series six on the July monarchy, and now that I look at it, some of the early episodes of series seven on 1848, because today’s events fit right in with the run of liberal revolutions that erupted around 1820. And if you listen to all that, talk about revolts and mutinies and revolutions in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and said to yourself, you know, when that jerk Duncan gets to Russia, we better get a whole damn episode about the Decemberists, well, here we are: a whole damn episode about the Decemberists.

So, the origin of the Decemberist revolt of 1825 lies in the great patriotic war to expel Napoleon from Russia in 1812, and the subsequent campaigns that carried the Russian army all the way to the Champs-Élysées. Young officers from the cream of the Russian nobility, well-educated and fluent in French and often German, experienced the rest of Europe, some of them for the first time. They mingled and drank with fellow allied officers. They saw how other people lived. They literally dined in the cafes of Paris. And by the time they were dining in the cafes of Paris, they were pretty fired up with victorious pride. It was the Russians who had broken Napoleon where everyone else had failed. Considering themselves, the liberators of Europe, they expected to bring a sense of political liberation and economic progress with them back to Russia, I mean, how could they not?And when they returned home full of pride, new ideas, and grand expectations, they found that Russia was still just the same. And they were frankly ashamed by what they saw. As one future Decembrist put it, why did we free Europe to put chains on ourselves?

One of the biggest points of shame was the realization that Russia was really two Russias. There was one Russia that these young noble officers were a part of: wealthy and educated Russia. Based in St. Petersburg, facing Europe, speaking French to each other. The other Russia was the mass of common peasants: backwards. Illiterate, most of them serfs bound to the land, and considered little better than slaves. The officers who would form the core of the Decemberists were appalled by this division. The patriotic war of 1812 and the March to Paris would not have been possible without the sacrifice, suffering, and bravery of the common Russian peasant. They had all been brothers, sisters, and comrades in this great struggle, and here they were, being sent home to a life of enslavement, and here we are, being encouraged to go back to treating them like dogs rather than fellow Russians. They thought this cruel, inhumane, and not a little bit ungrateful. So the emancipation of the serfs became one of the two most important goals for our future Decemberists.

 But emancipation was not strictly a humanitarian project. Our young liberal officers saw the economic and material progress in the Rhineland and in France, and recognized that Russia would never be able to follow their lead if they still clung to the institution of serfdom. serfdom prevented the population from moving away from mere subsistence agriculture. The budding modern industry our young Russian officers had seen in the west was possible because new manufacturing businesses were able to draw in free peasants to be workers. But this simple ability to physically move from one place to another was legally impossible in Russia. And then beyond all that, there was the fact that the two Russias were divided between a wealthy aristocracy and a dirt poor peasantry, there practically was no middle-class to speak of. No one to be the productive engine of a new economy, nobody to be the consumer class for the products of such a new economy. So in the minds of our liberal officers, the emancipated serfs, free to move and to grow and to pursue their own lives, would become the core of a future Russian middle class. And thus, freed from ancient bondage, would help propel the Russian economy into the modern age.

Now, all of this was then married to a belief that political liberalism was the great motivating spirit of the times. Because they did not want to just liberate the serfs, they wanted to make everyone equal, and that meant abolishing not just serfdom, but aristocracy. To make the two Russias one Russia, free and equal in rights. So on the political front, this brings us to the other most important demand of the Decemberists: constitutional government. An end to the humiliation of absolutism, where life was governed by the whims of an emperor, not the rights of free people who deserve dignity and respect. And if you remember from our episodes on 1848, that was one of the big political questions: constitution. Do you have one or not? In Russia, they did not.

Now early on, there was no reason to doubt that a constitution would eventually arrive in Russia. Tsar Alexander’s liberal sympathies were well-known: he ruled the Finns as a constitutional monarch; he insisted that the defeated French get a constitution — or at least a charter of government — and after the Treaty of Vienna, he signed on to rule the new kingdom of Poland as a constitutional monarch, so surely Russia itself would be next. But what will wind up driving the Decembrists more than anything else as the years went by was a sense of dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations, and bitter disappointment that it did not go that way.

It started to not go that way, right away. As we’ve previously discussed, in September of 1815 Tsar Alexander led the other great powers of Europe into signing the Holy Alliance, wherein they agreed to rule Europe on the basis of justice, love, and peace, with Chancellor Metternich, who would soon enough have Tsar Alexander’s ear, making sure that the opposite of justice, love, and peace was understood to be liberalism, secularism, and constitutions.

But still. Our young liberal officers came back to Russia in 1815 and 1816 full of hope and energy. Many of them joined Masonic lodges, where social equality and enlightened progress were the order of the day. But for a smaller group, Masonry was not enough, and in early 1816, six of these young comrades got together and founded something they dubbed the Union of Salvation, and later the Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. Now, I am intentionally avoiding, overwhelming you with a bunch of random names that you’re just going to forget anyway, so let’s not worry about the random list of names you’re just going to forget anyway.

Now the concrete platform of these guys is a bit murky, but for sure we know that they want a constitutional government and the abolition of serfdom, that’s what they believe they were organizing to achieve. Now to keep their discussion secret and to give this all an air of romance and mystery, they borrowed oaths and rituals and practices from the Freemasons, from the German League of Virtue and from the Italian Carbonari. The Union of Salvation eventually grew to just over 30 members, with the most important recruit being a guy whose name I am going to give you, that is Pavel Pestel, who would prove to be one of the most radical and influential of the Decemberists.

After kind of floundering around and not achieving much, they decided in 1818 to fold the Union of Salvation, and rebrand themselves the Union of Welfare, or Union of Prosperity, depending on which translation you prefer. This new society was meant to be more out in the open, and it pretended to have no political agenda at all. It was just a club encouraging social improvement and four relatively innocuous spheres: philanthropy, education, justice, and economic progress. And plenty of the members who joined the Union of Welfare only ever heard about that outer program. But there was an inner political program that still aimed to force through some kind of constitutional government, emancipate the serfs, and Institute a bunch of political, economic, and social reforms. Among the inner members who did know the score, there were always arguments about whether a constitutional monarchy was good enough, or whether they were going to have to go the full republic. Were they’re going to be able to work with the Romanovs? Could they trust them, or would the Imperial family have to be, uh, liquidated?

But as conspiratorial and secretive as they were, there were still a general sense among these guys that they were the future, that the tsar was likely sympathetic to at least their more modest aims, and what they were really preparing themselves for was to be the future leaders of a reborn Russia.

But around 1820, they started becoming very disillusioned. It had now been five years since they had all defeated Napoleon together and things were not just stuck in the mud, they seem to be going backwards. The tsar’s personal liberalism was nowhere evident, a constitution, nowhere on the horizon. Then, when the liberal revolutions in Spain and Italy broke out, Tsar Alexander was firmly in Metternich’s camp saying we need to crush them, how can I help? The tsar was soon pledging a hundred thousand Russian troops to back up the Austrians in Italy, he offered to send 150,000 more tramping across Europe to suppress the Spanish liberals. And even when their Orthodox co-religionists in Greece rose up against their old enemy the Ottoman Empire, the tsar was persuaded by Metternich not to get involved. It was starting to feel like the tsar was maybe not their secret friend so much as a major obstacle in their way.

This conservative turn started to be felt at home as well, and a reactionary grip seemed to be tightening around Russia. Universities fell under conservative control, students and professors were watched, censorship of journals and books increased. In the army and this growing reactionary attitude turned its attention on the elite Semenovsky Regiment in 1820. Many of the leaders of the union Of Salvation and the successor Union of Welfare were in this regiment, and in addition to its reputation for bravery and valor, it was also known for embracing the alleged liberal spirit of the times. The government now viewed them with suspicion. So in 1820, the well liked commander was replaced with a hard nosed German who brought back draconian discipline and previously abolished corporal punishment. A company inside the regiment protested the new rules, and they were arrested as a group. So, then the whole regiment protested, which led to even more arrests. Soon enough, the suspect officers of the regiment were dispersed to other garrisons, with many of the key actors in the coming Decembrist revolt winding up down South in Ukraine.

After the Semenovsky Regiment incident, the inner circle leaders of the Union of Welfare got together for a conference in Moscow in 1821 and voted to disband. But this was purely for show. In the increasingly reactionary climate, they wanted to first, throw the government off their trail; and second, ditch all the members of the Union of Welfare they considered to be unreliable, either because they were suspected of being government spies, or because they were not actually committed to the real program. But those who were actually committed to the real program regrouped into two camps that were soon dubbed the Southern Society and the Northern Society. And you will sometimes see them called the Southern Society of the Decemberists, but remember: the December part hasn’t happened yet. They have no idea that in the future, we are going to call them all the Decemberists.

After this split, the two societies developed on parallel but still distinct tracks. The Southern Society was based in the Ukrainian garrison town of Tulchyn, and as I said, some of the Semenovsky officers wound up down there and they were joined by Pavel Pestel, now the leading light of the whole operation. The men in the South tended to be more radical; they were avowedly Republican, they were more open to the idea of regicide as a necessity. Meanwhile, the Northern Society was based in St. Petersburg, and those guys were of a standard liberal, noble variety. They were more into reform, and insisting that constitutional monarchism was a necessity that Russia wasn’t ready for a republic, that they could work with the tsar, they didn’t have to just put a bullet in his brain. Now, I don’t want to overstate this distinction between North and South, because every one of the Decemberists had their own version of the program. There were regicide inclined republicans in the North, and cautious reformers in the South. But in general, there was this split. Radical republicans in the Southern Society, moderate constitutional monarchists in the Northern Society.

So the Northern and Southern Societies stayed in touch and debated tactics and strategy, and were trying to iron out their differences, because they were starting to look at the summer of 1826 as a good time to make a move, do something. But then in the late fall of 1825, they were hit, along with the rest of Russia, with the shocking news that Tsar Alexander was dead.

Now Alexander was by no means an old man. He was still in his late forties. But his personality had gone a bit sour and peculiar of late. In the mid 1820s, he was more withdrawn, he was suspicious of things and people, he was turning inward towards his personal piety. He was maybe getting over the hassle of being tsar. In the fall of 1825, his wife, the Empress Elizabeth, got very sick and needed to take a trip down south for her health, and Alexander resolved to join her. But after spending some time together on the Sea of Azov, Alexander headed for a solo tour of the Crimea, and there became very sick with a sudden onset of typhus. After suffering for a number of days, Tsar Alexander the First succumbed on November the 19th, 1825. He was not yet 50 years old, and had been tsar for 24 years. The sudden death of the relatively young tsar gave birth to a persistent legend that he actually faked his own death and went off to become a pious hermit in Siberia named Feodor Kuzmich, attempting to atone for the death of his father, which, according to this legend, he was racked with guilt over.

Now, that’s of course crazy, but even crazier is what happened next for real. Alexander and Elizabeth had no legitimate children of their own, so by the law of succession, Alexander’s brother Konstantin was next in line. Konstantin, at that moment, was in Warsaw serving as viceroy of the kingdom of Poland. But unbeknownst to practically everyone, Konstantin had already renounced his right to succeed the throne. By 1823, there were letters signed by the tsar sealed in cathedral vaults attesting to this, but very few people knew about it, and it’s still an open question to this day who knew what when. Alexander’s sudden death left no time for a proper handling of this delicate pre-abdication by Konstantin, and the trouble really started when the next oldest brother, Nicholas, who was in St. Petersburg and now meant to be tsar, swore an oath to Emperor Konstantin and had other officers and state ministers do the same. So this created two weeks of confusion as Konstantin adamantly swore that he would not rule, and Nicholas saying everybody sworn an oath and I’m not going to take power unless I get assurances I won’t be stabbed in the back because somebody thinks I’m trying to usurp the throne. This two week interregnum is absolutely run through with factional maneuvering and hidden motives at court, but the upshot is that we have these two possible heirs, neither of whom seem to want to be tsar, and both of them are trying to swear an oath of allegiance to the other. In the midst of this confused interregnum, the members of the Northern Society, who were all high ranking officers of the guard and very well-informed about what was going on, decided, this is it. We may not be totally ready, but this is our chance, we have to take our shot. When word went round that Nicholas had finally decided to step up to the plate and he had resolved to get everyone to swear a new oath to him on December the 14th, our guys decided they needed to step up to the plate too.

One of the leaders, a poet, publisher, and former soldier named Kondraty Ryleyev, did not think they had much of a chance, but he was fired up by the idea of romantic martyrdom, that in their heroic deaths they would inspire future generations. He wrote, “An upheaval is essential. The tactics of revolution may be summed up in two words: to dare. If we come to grief, our failure will serve as a lesson to those who come after us.”

And so it would.

On December the 14th, 1825, the as of this moment rebel officers led 3000 men out into Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The stated reason was a refusal to swear the new oath to Nicholas, but the deeper aim was to use this moment of political confusion to force the state to accept constitutional government, legal equality, and in time, the abolition of serfdom, dreams they had dreamed for the last 10 years.

But this was an aborted revolt from the get-go. The officers had elected a stalwart and dependable comrade named Prince Troubetzkoy to be their leader. He had been around since the founding of the Union of Salvation all the way back in 1816. But Troubetzkoy straight up chickened out, he lost his nerve and didn’t show up. So the rebels out in Senate Square were a bit rudderless. Then the other army regiments that they expected to follow in their daring lead just never showed up. So as it turned out, the 3000 rebels in Senate Square were not the crest of a swelling wave so much as an isolated puddle, standing cold and alone and quickly freezing into ice. Soon enough, 9,000 loyal troops lined up against them, but neither side took any action. Then as the day progressed, civilians crammed in to get a look at what was going on as civilians so often do, and all that was going on so far was some chants of “Konstantin” and “constitution” from the rebel ranks.

Around noon, the new Emperor Nicholas, now ready to be emperor, personally came down to try to work things out peacefully. And he sent out the well like General Miloradovich out to address the rebels and convince them to lay down their arms. But in the midst of his speech, one of the more radical Decembrist officers shot him dead, which changed the mood quite a bit. The tsar ordered a cavalry charge to clear the square, but the horses slipped in the icy cobblestone and they had to retreat in disarray. Then around 4:00 PM with the last sunrise already disappearing, the tsar, frustrated, ordered artillery to fire grapeshot. Firing grapeshot into the packed square scattered the rebels, but it also killed a lot of soldiers and civilians pretty indiscriminately. Some of the soldiers and officers regrouped on the frozen Neva River, but further artillery bombarded the river, breaking the ice, killing a few men instantly, and drowning the rest. By nightfall, it was all over. Somewhere around 1200 people, civilians and soldiers, laid dead. The Decemberists of the Northern Society had taken their shot, and they had missed.

But wait, you say, there is still a Southern Society, right? And indeed there is, but it’s not going to go much better for them. Pavel Pestel had been arrested as a precautionary measure on December the 13th, and then it took almost two weeks for the men in the south to even learn about events in St. Petersburg. This news came in the midst of a flurry of arrest warrants, and so everyone realized their days as secret conspirators was over. It was now either insurrection or bust. On December the 29th, they were able to turn out about a thousand men, but they never got any bigger than that. And the next few days played out a lot like Hecker’s uprising played out in southern Germany in 1848 if you remember all that. The southern Decembrists were cut off from any other support, and with the authorities moving in fast, the southern rebels hesitated, then marched this way, and then that way, and after a few days had little to show for all this but increasing demoralization and a bunch of desertions. On January the third, 1826, they ran into a patrol loyal to the government who happened to have some artillery, and after a few artillery blasts, the rebel Decembrists were scattered, they were wounded, or they laid dead. In short order, 869 rebels surrendered, and a few scattered suicides added to the death toll. And that was the end — the real end, the final end — of the Decembrist revolt.

Once order was restored, tsar Nicholas convened an inquiry to get to the bottom of all this. Arrests and interrogations led to more arrests and more interrogations. Papers were seized and studied. They cast a wide net, bringing in intellectuals and sympathetic friends who themselves had nothing to do with the actual attempted military coup of December 1825, including the great Russian poet Pushkin, who had contact with, and whose work was enthusiastically read by, many of the conspirators.

But this was not necessarily kangaroo court justice and then just mass indiscriminate executions. Evidence and testimony were heard. Degrees of complicity were established. The common soldiers who were involved in all this were either sent off to fight in the Caucasus, or they were exiled to Siberia depending on the enthusiasm with which they had participated in the insurrection. Many of them were flogged, some of them flogged to death. Of the officers, 121 men were finally tried and convicted. Of those, 85 were sentenced to exile and hard labor in Siberia. 36 were sentenced to death. But the new emperor, wanting to start his reign with some clemency, commuted almost all the death sentences to hard labor and exile in Siberia and ordered the actual hanging of only five men, including the aforementioned Pavel Pestel, and Kondraty Ryleyev. And here even Ryleyev’s romantic death wish was on full display, and he begged to be the only man to die for the cause, a noble romantic martyr. But the tsar did not take him up on the offer.

When the five men were hanged on July the 13th, 1826, the first time they were dropped through the scaffold, three of the ropes broke, and Ryleyev allegedly barked, “Unhappy country, where they don’t even know how to hang you.”

He was properly hanged just a few minutes later.

Everyone else was then shipped off to Siberia and official discussion of the revolt of December 1825 ceased. The Decemberists soon turned into half forgotten legends. As I said at the beginning of the show, in terms of wider European history, the Russian Decemberists fit right into the mix of the liberal revolutionaries in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece. They all represent a certain spirit of the times, and any discussion of this epoch must include the Decemberists. In terms of specifically Russian history, they act as a bridge between the two types of rebellion that Russian history is already well acquainted with: the palace coup on the one hand and the peasant revolt on the other. The Decemberists married the goals of a peasant revolt with the methods of a military palace coup. They absolutely wanted more than to just place their man on the throne, but they also never dreamed of inviting the people to join them. So it was somehow neither a palace coup nor a peasant revolt, but it was also both. And then finally, in terms of our purpose here of trying to explain the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and before that 1905, well, those guys knew all about what it happened with the Decemberists, despite official suppression of information, and those guys had their theory about why the Decembers had failed. About how maybe the Decembers had erred in trying to lead a people’s revolution without inviting the people to join them.

So we will pick up the story next time and finish our survey of Russian history with the imperial regime trying to figure out how to square the two Russias without inviting a revolution, especially given the great revolution of 1848, which swept right up to their doorstep and which the imperial regime helped decisively crush. But we will tell that story in two weeks, because even though I accidentally just took an unscheduled week off, my scheduled week off is still coming up, I’m flying back to France from the United States in a few days. So when we come back, we will catch up Russian history to the point where Marx and Engels and Bakunin and the rest of that first generation of hardcore social revolutionaries are running around, and we’ll get our first glimpse of what the tsars will try to do to forever and ever, at least for one more day, keep them at bay.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Episode 10.11: War And Peace

So first of all, a thousand apologies for not getting an episode out last week. We are back in the United States for all of August, and I got the first episode out no problem, but in that second week, we were in Seattle and Portland, and I just didn’t have as much time to work as I was planning. I have, however, now settled on a farm in east central Illinois, so I’ll be good to go from here on out. No more interruptions, no more delays, and I really do apologize.

Our extended background coverage of Russian history that we’ve been doing over the past few episodes has in part been about setting up the Russian Revolution, obviously, but it has also been about filling in some of the gaps in the Revolutions podcast. Russia has been lurking in the background of many of our previous series. They were there at the end of our series on the French Revolution. They were a big part of the conservative reaction to the liberal and national revolutions of the 1820s and 1830s that we talked about in our episodes on the July Revolution. They played a huge role in stamping out the Revolutions of 1848. But I have just sort of kept them lurking in the background. So part of what I’m up to over here is filling in some gaps, explaining the Russian angle on events that we’ve already covered. And if I had some file on my computer called, say, The Great Revolution where I cut and paste all the material I have written for the podcast into a single document arranged in strict chronological order, the material from these next three episodes would be inserted back amidst stuff that I wrote years ago. So this week’s episode would find a home back with blocks of text from late series three, next week’s episode would go along with events I talked about in series six, and the episode after that with events I talked about in series seven. Meanwhile, episodes 10.9 and 10.10 would be pasted back under a chapter heading called something like Pre Seven Years War. I mean, if such a file existed, I mean.

So really getting back to it now, we wrapped up two weeks ago with the advent of the French Revolution. Now for the leaders of the Russian Empire, the French Revolution was a troubling development and led to a turn away from the long-standing embrace of the French Enlightenment that had been fostered by Catherine the Great. Now we know that Catherine hated the revolution and opened up her court to homeless French émigrés. But in real politic terms, France was a long ways off, and the concrete upshot of all the upheavals out west was the partitions of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia. But aside from Poland, Catherine was not really looking to get embroiled in affairs off in the west. She tended to still direct Russian ambition south, where they could pry territory away from the Ottomans around the Black Sea or from the Persians in the Caucasus. Now what Catherine would have done through the tumultuous next few years, as revolutionary France became Napoleonic France, is an interesting alternative history question, but it will remain an alternative history question, because just as an obscure French general named Napoleon Bonaparte was waging the first Italian campaign that would turn him from obscure French general into name an entire era of European history after me, Catherine the Great died in November of 1796. And that puts us right around episode 3.4 45.

The death of Catherine brought to the throne, her 42 year old son, Paul. Now in Paul’s estimation, his ascension was long overdue. Really, he felt like he should have already celebrated his 20th anniversary as emperor. Paul was eight years old when his mother conspired to overthrow his father, and it was understood at the time that Catherine would be officially serving in some regency capacity until the heir to the throne, that is Paul, came of age. But after 10 years on the throne, Catherine decided she disliked her son just about as much as she liked wielding power, and so she stalled and delayed and made no move to step aside. And she had done such an excellent job building up a base of political support for herself that nobody challenged this. She just stayed empress, even after Paul became old enough to receive his rightful inheritance. And as Catherine’s personal favor was powerful, very powerful, anyone who thought about drifting into Paul’s orbit was assured that they would be committing political suicide. So Paul spent the next 20 years mostly estranged from his mother and the imperial court in St. Petersburg. He was just off living on his own personal estate, unhappy about his marginalization, but unable to do anything about it.

Paul’s first wife Natalia died in childbirth in 1776, but his second wife, a German princess rechristened Maria Feodorovna, gave birth to 10 children over the next 20 years. The eldest was a boy named Alexander who was born in 1777. Alexander and his younger brother Konstantin, who was born two years later, had their upbringing and education monitored closely by their grandmother, Catherine, who wanted them raised in the progressive and modern manner of the European Enlightenment, and also maybe keep them away from Paul, and see if they didn’t turn out a little bit better than he did. So both boys were tutored by a Swiss French man named César de La Harpe who formerly oversaw their educations until 1795, and who then became a trusted friend and advisor to Alexander as the years went on. The thoroughly marginalized Paul, now rightly worried that his mother Catherine wanted his son Alexander to succeed her, skipping Paul entirely. And though Alexander found both his grandmother and his father to be suffocating each in their own way, whatever plans Catherine was laying to skip Paul, Alexander himself wanted no part of it. When the old empress died in November of 1796, there was no succession struggle. Paul became Tsar Paul the First, Alexander became the tsarevich, the heir to the throne.

Finally out from under his mother’s shadow, Paul was able to have it his own way, for all the good it would wind up doing him. Catherine had been very expansionist in her foreign policy, especially towards the Ottomans and Persians in the south, but Paul was critical of all that, and he actually halted plans for a further campaign south. But though early on he insisted on a less expansionist foreign policy, he also became more personally invested in what revolutionary France was up to. Specifically, it was the Egyptian expedition of the now very famous General Bonaparte that caught the tsar’s attention. Now on a personal level, Tsar Paul was angry at Bonaparte’s capture of Malta in June, 1798. Temperamentally inclined towards a kind of romantic medieval chivalry, Paul took offense at the expulsion of the Knights of Malta, and he stepped in to be their patron and benefactor after the French capture of their island. This, we talked about in episode 3.48. On the national interest level, Russia could not help but be alarmed by France, thrusting its power across the Mediterranean and directly threatening Russia’s underbelly. So as we discussed in episode 3.49 the Egyptian expedition had the nearly unthinkable effect of putting the Russians and Ottomans on the same side as they face this shared French threat. Britain made great diplomatic hay of all this, and in late 1798, Paul agreed to bring Russia into what was becoming the second coalition. We then talked about how this went in episode 3.51 in 3.52 with the legendary general Suvarov fighting one last valiant campaign in Switzerland, which was stymied by bad logistical planning and the ultimately irreconcilable cross-purposes of Austria and Russia. The way the Russian thought, Russia was concerned about defeating France, Austria was concerned about picking up more territory in Italy. Then up north, a joint British Russia invasion of the Netherlands stalled out due to weather and stiffer than expected resistance, so by early 1800, Paul decided to pull Russia out of the second coalition in a huff, and instead formed the League of Armed Neutrality with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Prussia to patrol the Baltic Sea and protect neutral shipping from the British Navy.

So this is all leading Paul in this slow hundred and 80 degree turn that was probably bringing him into alliance with France, because France was now led by First Consul Bonaparte, whose autocratic tendencies Paul felt much more comfortable with, as opposed to all the Republicans and Jacobins who haunted the nightmares of absolute monarchists everywhere.

But Paul’s real enemies were not Republicans and Jacobins, but rather unhappy French nobles. As I said, Paul’s personal worldview seemed to idealize out of date medieval chivalry, and many at court and in the army had trouble getting on board. The frustration of members of the Russian army was ratcheted up because Paul was also very much into Prussian military methods of drilling parade, dress and punishment, and he dismissed anyone from his service who went against this trend while clinging to a small clique of favorites, so a lot of very capable officers were being fired. And in short, every day he was in power. Paul seemed to have fewer friends and more enemies. There were also plenty of holdovers from Catherine’s circle who didn’t think Paul was up to the job of being tsar at all, and this reason turned towards working with the hated French Republic was very troubling. So in early 1801, the grumbling turned into active planning, but 24 year old Tsarevich Alexander was told something was up, and he indicated that he wasn’t opposed to something being up as long as his father was simply removed and not killed. That was the plan anyway.

So in March of 1801, a group of officers drank up some courage and then stormed their way into Paul’s chamber intent on forcing him to abdicate in favor of Alexander. When the tsar refused, things got rough. He was pushed, then beaten, then strangled, then trampled. After waiting a lifetime, Tsar Paul was dead after less than five years on the throne.

Alexander was mortified when he found out that his father had been killed and it would haunt him off and on for the rest of his life, but there was nothing to be done, but accept that what was done was done. Alexander became Tsar Alexander the first and he would rule Russia for the next 24 transformative years. In terms of Russia’s role in European affairs, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great may have both imported the west into Russia, but Alexander was about to export the power of Russia back into the west. And in short order, he would become convinced that he actually was the personal savior of Europe. And while Alexander and meshed Europe deeper and deeper into western affairs, Alexander himself proved to be the living embodiment of mercurial. Over the years he would shift from liberal to conservative, back to liberal, and back to conservative again. Sometimes he favored enlightened idealism, other times, a devout Christianity. Sometimes he liked strict absolutism, other times he favored constitutional government, it depended on the time and the place. Sometimes he was expansionist, sometimes he was closed up and defensive. Alexander led Russia through an age where the empire itself faced a constant identity crisis, switching friends and enemies every few years. This was a formidable and traumatic period for Russia when they were at times devastated victims, and other times the masters of Europe. These were the years of war and peace.

When Alexander came to power, he brought with him a kind of personal liberalism coupled with a reformist instinct. Initially working through a small state council of younger men that Alexander liked and trusted this younger clique of leaders took the system of departmental colleges run by committee that had been set up by Peter the Great, and converted it into a system of ministries with a single minister in charge. And those ministers could then get together and discuss empire-wide problems. This was in keeping with more modern methods of government, and Alexander was far more open to borrowing French advancements and administration than his father had ever been. Alexander’s minister reforms here in the early 19th century would prove to be the at least indirect beginning of most of the government departments that govern Russia to this very day, most of which continued to function even after the Bolsheviks hung an under new management sign on the door in 1917.

In foreign affairs, Alexander watched with a carefully neutral eyes, the War of the Second Coalition, which his father had already pulled Russia out of, gave way to the Year of Peace, and then as the Year of Peace ended with the British re-declaring war on the French in March of 1803. But Britain’s insistence of war on France now and forever did not yet move their old allies back into the fighting. This took a series of provocations by First Consul Bonaparte. The most scandalous of these was the shocking secret execution of the Duke Don d’Enghien in March of 1804. This execution is where we get Fouche’s famous quote, “that it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” The execution of the Duke really seems to have outrage the Russian aristocracy, outrage which was exacerbated a few months later when the monstrous upstart Bonaparte had the temerity to declare himself Emperor Napoleon just a few months later, I mean, who did he think he was?

After months of negotiation, the British finally convinced Alexander to bring Russia into what was becoming the third coalition in April of 1805. And then Napoleon proceeded to crown himself King of Italy in May of 1805, which I will remind you from episode 5.5 young Simone Bolivar just so happened to be in Milan at that same moment.

Anyway, all of this spooked the Austrians into joining the British and Russians and the War of the Third Coalition could really get going in earnest. But the War of the Third Coalition was a very short war, because this is just as the Grande Armée is taking its place in the annals of military history, and everything that follows will fit in alongside stuff we talked about in episode 3.54. Napoleon routed the Austrians in the Ulm campaign in the fall of 1805, and total victory was only temporarily put off by the arrival of Russian reinforcements led personally buys Tsar Alexander. Now the head of the Russian army, General Kutuzov, was wary of fighting, but Alexander insisted on bringing Napoleon to a decisive battle. And so the combined Austrian and Russian armies agreed to take advantage of what they perceived to be France’s dangerously weakened right flank, and here comes the Battle of Austerlitz. Having fallen into Napoleon’s carefully laid trap, the French crushed the Austrians and Russians. Rather than defeating the upstart Napoleon, Tsar Alexander had helped hand him his greatest victory.

The Austrians were forced to sign a punitive peace treaty in December of 1805, which paved the way for the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. Alexander and the Russians, meanwhile, were allowed to pull backwards in unmolested retreat, partly because Napoleon was hoping to eventually turn Alexander to his side.

The surrender of Austria and collapse of the Holy Roman Empire then spooked the Prussians out of their decade of neutrality, and they hopped into what became known as the Fourth Coalition a few months later, the Fourth Coalition just being the Third Coalition but swap Prussia for Austria. The resulting War of the Fourth Coalition was also very quick. The Prussians dove in too hard, too fast, and too unsupported, and they got their asses kicked in October of 1806, knocking them out of the war immediately, oopsie daisy. Tsar Alexander and the Russians then braced as Napoleon charged across Poland to the Russian frontier. The Russians managed to check the French at Eylau in February of 1807, but then they too fell to the apparently invincible might of Napoleon. In June of 1807, the Russians lost the Great battle of Friedland. Defeated, Alexander and the Russians sued for peace.

Now the thing is, Napoleon never really wanted to be fighting the Russians. I mean, hell yes, stomp up and down on the Prussians and the Austrians, but Napoleon did not see Russia as just another potential carcass for France to gorge itself upon. And so for the past several years, Napoleon had tried to break Alexander away from the allied coalition. His basic pitch was that France and Russia were simply too geographically distant to have any real conflict of interest. And so when the two emperors met for a post-war settlement at Tilsit in July of 1807, Napoleon was incredibly generous and he laid it on Alexander very thick. There’s our was quite taken with all this, he liked what Napoleon was saying about the possibility of joining forces to combat all the enemies of Christendom out in the East. And so unlike the punitive treaties Napoleon forced on Prussia and Austria, it was a treaty of mutually beneficial friendship that he offered Russia. And Alexander took him up on his offer.

Alexander agreed to basically switch sides and joined Napoleon’s continental system blockading the British. Alexander was also happy to make further war against Britain’s ally Sweden, with Finland being the reward for Russia’s efforts. France, meanwhile, agreed to give aid to Russia in her ongoing wars in the south, more on that in a minute, but despite all this friendly friendship, the seeds of future trouble were laid as Napoleon’s creation of the Duchy of Warsaw out of Polish territories really did seem to put France right on Russia’s front doorstep, and they were not so geographically distant anymore.

Now, as we also discussed in episode 3.54, Tilsit was kind of the high water mark for Napoleon. And the breakdown of his friendship with Russia would be the principle cause of his downfall. But before we get into all that, we do need to peel off and talk about the two other whole wars that Russia was fighting at the same time. As I mentioned earlier, the territorial ambitions of Russia had long looked south towards the Black Sea and the Caspian sea and 1802. In fact, just after Alexander came to power and before he ever joined the Third Coalition, the Russian army drove south into the Caucasus to snatch territory away from Persian hegemony. And at this point, we’re talking about the Qajar Empire, who had self dubbed themselves the Sublime State of Persia. The Persians naturally fought back against Russian encroachment on their northwestern border, beginning the Russo-Persian War which would last from 1802 to 1813, and which would remain an ongoing conflict all through these years, where so much of the attention was supposed to be on the Napoleonic Empire.

Then in the wake of the French victories at Austerlitz, Napoleon encouraged the Ottomans to make aggressive moves into Wallachia and Moldavia in 1806 that would bog the Russians down as Napoleon marched the War of the Fourth Coalition to its conclusion at Friedland. But after the treaty of Tilsit, the French abandoned their support for the Ottomans, so the Russo-Turkish War that began there in 1806 would just kind of continue in sporadic bursts until 1812. So in our western European-centric realm of history, we tend to think that the Napoleonic Empire must have been the sole focus of everyone’s attention, but all through these years, the tsar, his diplomats, and his soldiers were simultaneously dealing with wars down around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, both of which, I should add, would wind up very favorable for Russia.

So while all these wars continued, Napoleon was worried that his ties with Alexander were not as tight as he wanted them to be. And both emperors were kind of not living up to the promises they had made at Tilsit. So they arranged a second conference, this one in the German principality of Erfurt in September and October 1808. But this time old Tallyrand went in for his classic double dealing behind the back cross-purposes diplomacy. Now wary of Napoleon’s expansionism and the punitive settlements in central Europe, Tallyrand had resigned as foreign minister, but he was invited to Erfurt to act as a special advisor and special advise he did. Meeting secretly with Alexander, Tallyrand counseled the tsar to remain aloof to Napoleon’s overtures. Tallyrand’s hope was that without a strong Russian alliance that Napoleon would be forced to dial back his ambitions and fall into a stable balance of European power, which Tallyrand thought essential for the longterm survival of France. This special advising worked: Tallyrand successfully derailed Napoleon’s attempt to woo Alexander. And though both emperors left Erfurt with a 14 point pledge of alliance and friendship, things were getting awfully lip service-y.

Now one domestic consequence of Erfurt is another round of domestic political reform. Since coming to the throne seven years earlier, Alexander had come to rely on the son of a priest who had risen through sheer force of intellect to become first a professor of math and science, then a secretary in the foreign office, and then a close personal advisor to the tsar. And this is Mikhail Speransky.

Speransky is sometimes called the father of Russian liberalism, though it was a very autocratic brand of liberalism that he pursued. At Erfurt, he met personally with Napoleon to discuss the latest methods of French administration and Speransky left with a bunch of ideas to fit into a plan of empire-wide constitutional reform that he had been working on for years. And his big reform idea is that he wanted to introduce some kind of elective participatory government. Now what he wanted to do was create a system of dumas, or legislative assemblies. These would start at the local level, then move up to a district duma and then a provisional duma, and then an imperial duma. With the delegates to each duma electing the members who would go on to the next highest order. At the Imperial level, they would then be the lower legislative house, who would join with a reformed state council made up of about 35 highly trusted men who would act as an upper chamber for discussion and analysis of proposed laws before they reached the tsar’s desk.

Now, this all has the appearance of constitutional government, but these dumas and state council would not have any real authority of their own, they were purely advisory. But they would open up a participatory system that might be a good way to invite discussion and proposals that the tsar could accept or deny as he saw fit. Now, despite the fact that Speransky was prime minister and in many ways, practically the only minister of importance from 1809 to 1812, he was only partially successful with his reforms. The upper state council was successfully created and went into operation, but the dumas would remain an unfulfilled platform of Russian liberals for decades to come.

On the foreign front, the Russian army successfully beat the Swedish in what is called the Finnish War, and they took Finland over, and Speransky was successful in setting up post-war Finland on a constitutional basis, because it seemed wise to not try to impose tsarist absolutism on the Finns. And they were granted a constitution where the tsar would reign as a constitutional monarch. And though none of this was as of yet being imported into Russia itself, Alexander seemed fine with it, which gave heartburn to conservative Russians. They feared the tsar was getting too French, too modern, and too liberal.

Further trouble with Napoleon though changed Alexander’s posture once again. By 1810, relations between Alexander and Napoleon had devolved into a series of very cordial threats that led Alexander to decide to open Russia to neutral shipping again, opening up a huge hole in Napoleon’s continental system that was supposed to be blockading the British. With his Spanish ulcer simultaneously bleeding, Napoleon decided he still had the might to go march on Moscow and force Alexander and the Russians to submit to his will. With the looming war against France now the sole object of the tsar’s attention, Russia sought to wrap up their ongoing wars against the Turks and the Persians. In consecutive treaties in 1812 and 1813, the Russians walked away with ownership of western Moldavia and all of the Caucasus, as well as securing from the Persians exclusive rights to operate a navy in the Caspian sea, which is a major concession that often gets lost in the story of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia. But the Russians taking control of the Caspian Sea is like, a pretty big deal.

With Napoleon now massing close to half a million men on the Russian frontier, Alexander made the decision to dismiss his prime minister Speransky in an effort to consolidate the Russian nobility behind him. But the campaign strategy of Alexander’s minister of war Barclay de Tolly was not exactly designed to appeal to the ego of the Russian nobility. They were to avoid an open battle and instead just withdraw east, deeper and deeper into the heart of Russia. After Napoleon crossed the frontier in June of 1812, they allowed his army to advance at will, but at each step necessarily extending French lines of supply and communication. The strategy was so unpopular though that eventually the tsar had to sack Barclay de Tolly and appoint General Kutuzov to be the new commander in chief, but Kutuzov simply stuck with that same strategy. It was hard. It was brutal. At times it was humiliating, but it worked. Napoleon led about 450,000 men into Russia in June of 1812. They advanced and they advanced, but they did not draw the Russians into a fight until September of 1812, the battle of Borodino, just a hundred miles west of Moscow.

This was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. And at the end, it turned out to be a tactical draw. Which was a strategic disaster for the French. Although the Russians abandoned their capital with Moscow when the French army entered an occupied it for a month, Tsar Alexander refused to surrender. The Russian army then moved south, and stood ready to block any attempt by the French to go off and find food or fodder. Finally recognizing his position was hopeless, Napoleon had to retreat along the same line he had advanced. As the French departed, Moscow caught fire and was engulfed in flames. The Russians then harassed the retreating Napoleonic army along a line devoid of food and fodder through a hard early winter.

Finally, in December of 1812, the last French troops departed. Over the course of these catastrophic six months, something like 2 million soldiers and civilians died, but the Russian army had not been conquered. Napoleon had not bent them to his will. Instead Russia became the springboard from which the final campaigns to defeat Napoleon sprang.

Thanks to Russia’s great achievement of endurance, Alexander was now one of the principle pillars of the anti-Napoleon coalition. And just as Napoleon had once dragged a mass of people from west to east Alexander now dragged that same mass of people from east to west. Soon enough, they were liberating the Germans from the French yolk and the Austrians and the Prussians rejoined the war. They all kept pushing all the way back to France, crossing into French territory in January of 1814, and fighting battles on French soil for the first time in like 20 years. When Napoleon showed real signs of life in the Six Days Campaign, the Emperor Francis of Austria and King Friedrich Wilheim the Third of Prussia wanted to break off the advance, but Alexander was now convinced that he was the divine savior of Europe and it was his mission to defeat the antichrist Napoleon. Alexander’s personal Christian piety had now advanced into a kind of deep cosmic theology. Helped along by the arrival of a German baroness turned mystical evangelical named Barbara von Krüdener, who the tsar had met in Basel in the fall of 1813, and who had told him straight up, yes, that is your mission. You are the divine savior. You must defeat the antichrist. So she now traveled with the tsar and he took counsel and prayed with her frequently. This was now a holy war, at least for Alexander.

In late March 1814, the allies advanced on Paris and leading French politicians, including Tallyrand and Fouche and a recently out of retirement Marquis de Lafayette, engineered the surrender of the French capital, and demanded the abdication of Emperor Napoleon. Tallyrand handed the key of the city to Tsar Alexander.

Alexander was probably now the single most important leader in Europe. The tsar of Russia held the future of Europe in his hands. And he was lobbied from all sides to settle post-Napoleonic France and post-Napoleonic Europe this way and that. Now Alexander personally preferred to put the Duke d’Orléans, the future King Louis Philippe, onto the French throne, but he was persuaded by the British’s desire to restore the Bourbons. Now through all of this, Alexander preached peace and understanding and reconciliation, that the allies had made their war on Napoleon, not on France. He was thus mighty vexxed when Napoleon escaped from Elba and launched the Hundred Days. ‘Cause those Hundred Days saw many supposedly peace seeking and chastened French leaders hop back into a war of French aggression. It was a very different and a much harder Alexander who thus arrived back in Paris after Waterloo. And though his views would not shift overnight, he was now beginning his long turn away from enlightened liberalism and towards a reactionary conservatism.

And next week, we will see Alexander forge the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Austria, and begin to turn Russia into the power that would always seek to destroy liberalism and nationalism wherever they reared their dangerous, chaotic, and revolutionary head.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Express VPN. We’ve all had times we don’t necessarily want the things we searched for online to be tracked. In order to write a show about revolutions, I’ve spent a lot of my time looking for things online that will probably land me on a watchlist. What are the five best ways to overthrow a government? What kind of materials to use to build a barricade? That sort of thing.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.71: The Democratic Conference

Before we get going this week, I want to reiterate the special book tour announcement I dropped a couple of days ago, which I hope everybody listened to. In fact, by the time you’re listening to this, I will probably be on my way to Minneapolis to start a little signing tour through the upper Midwest. On Monday, October 11, from 4 to 6:00 PM. I will be in Minneapolis at Magers and Quinn. On Tuesday, October 12th, from 6 to 8:00 PM, I will be with Anderson’s Bookshop at Community Christian Church for a driveby signing event in Naperville. That again is Naperville, which in my regional ignorance, I casually implied was a Chicago event, but then absolutely got roasted on Twitter for implying that Naperville was Chicago — Naperville is not Chicago, lesson learned — but anyway, on Tuesday, October 12th, I will be in Naperville. Then on Wednesday, October 13, from 2 to 4:00 PM, I will be at Kismet Books in Verona, Wisconsin, which is an awesome little bookstore just south of Madison. Finally, Thursday, October 14, from 4 to 6:00 PM, I will be back at Boswell’s in Milwaukee. I look forward to this being the first of many more live events as everybody gets vaccinated and we get to move back towards a new normal. Links to info about all of these events are included in the show notes and at the website revolutionspodcast.com, or you can follow me on Twitter. There are some RSVP and ticket requirements for some of these events so please do go to the event page and do what they tell you you need to do in order to attend.

Now, speaking of these being the first of many more live events, I can actually now officially plug what the next live event is going to be: I will be doing a one-off event in Pasadena, California with Romans and book Soup on October 27th, so if you are in the LA area, you are officially notified that I will be doing a book event in Pasadena on October 27. This one will be a full book talk and signing, so it’ll be a full evening of Mike Duncan. The space itself will be socially distanced, masks will be worn, and proof of vaccination will be required to attend. I am really looking forward to that, I really do love doing these things, and I very much look forward to getting to do many more of them in the future. So, see you in Minneapolis, Naperville, Verona, or Milwaukee this week, or October 27 in Pasadena, or in the future, all the other places I hope to come to.

But getting back to it, last time we covered the Kornilov Affair, one of the great turning points of 1917. And it was a great turning point for incredibly ironic reasons. General Kornilov’s principle motivation for declaring a military dictatorship was fear of a Bolshevik insurrection, and more than anything else, his own attempt to impose that military dictatorship is what made the Bolshevik seizure of power possible. Alexander Kerensky, who was absolutely up to his eyeballs in blame for the Kornilov Affair, said later, August 27 is what made October 27 possible.

The Bolsheviks certainly recognized the massive gift they had been given, and they made the most of it, as we will spend a great deal of today discussing. But I don’t want to lose sight of Kornilov’s other stated objective, which he explicitly laid out in his declaration on August 20. He said: “I General Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, declare to each and all that I personally desire nothing but to save great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the constituent assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”

Because we cannot forget that the constituent assembly is still a thing. Now, given the ultimate result of the Revolution of 1917, it is hard to remember that from the moment Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail, the constituent assembly was meant to be the great political result of the revolution. As everyone no doubt remembers, when Grand Duke Mikhail declined the throne, he didn’t just decline the throne for all time, he said, I will become tsar only if and when a constituent assembly meets and offers me the throne. Then, he signed over power to the self-appointed provisional government on the understanding that one of their principle tasks was organizing and convening that constituent assembly. It’s why they were the provisional government. They were provisional. They were meant to be a temporary placeholder who derive their legitimacy from two directions; one running from the past to the present — that is, the chain of sovereign custody passing from Nicholas to Mikhail, and then immediately from Mihail to the provisional government — but also another source of legitimacy running backwards from the future to the present — which is to say, that one of the main sources of their legitimacy was looking forward to the fact that they would be the ones to convene a constituent assembly.

But that was all back in the first week of March, and here we are heading into September and the constituent assembly has still not been convened. And as we have seen over the past few episodes, the chain of sovereign custody has been run through multiple political blenders. The first government Mihail passed power to collapsed after eight weeks, the second government — the first coalition government of socialists and liberals — was created after negotiations with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, who had no legal, constitutional authority to speak of. That second government then collapsed leading into and out of the July days and everything had to get reshuffled again, producing a third government, the third government since February, and more than ever, a government that was simply the improvised result of negotiations with non constitutional actors: heads of political parties, the essentially self appointed leaders of the Soviet. Decisions were being made by an incredibly small group of leading Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks. And in fact, one of the main driving thrusts of the July Days was that by now the provisional government no longer had anything resembling political legitimacy, and the Soviet, which at least kind of did, just needed to take over. In terms of connecting the dots between February and October, the failure of the various provisional governments to move quickly towards a nationally elected constituent assembly is usually overshadowed by other factors, and not without good reason, but it is a major factor.

This mistake though, brings us back to the impact of the June Offensive, which also continues to loom very large as a dot connecting February to October. Because even though the failure to move quickly towards a constituent assembly was to a certain degree just not acting with any kind of urgency in getting bogged down in trifling minutia, but there was also an unstated assumption that the constituent assembly would meet after the war was over… or at least after Russia’s military position was so unassailable and secure that it would be safe to do something as momentously unprecedented as convening a national assembly, to write a new constitution for Russia. The expectation among the ministers and functionaries of these various provisional government was that the war had been a rolling debacle due entirely to the incompetence of Nicholas and Alexandra. Now that they were out of the way, the tide would surely turn.

So all through March, April, May, and June, none of them felt any great rush to hold the constituent assembly because they assumed it would be held after victory on the battlefield. And they also assumed that said victory was probably right around the corner. But then the June Offensive turned into the June and July Retreat, and the military situation went from bad to worse. So now the provisional government was caught out in no man’s land. They couldn’t keep putting off the constituent assembly until victory or peace because victory and peace were not going to be coming anytime soon. But they also were now very worried about going ahead with it because the resulting political crisis caused by the failure of the June Offensive might not be full of moderate liberal statesmen writing an orderly constitution, but angry radicals looking to turn the world upside down. But they also couldn’t put off the constituent assembly much longer because as I said, the last remaining shreds of the government’s legitimacy was still tied to the expectation that they would convene a constituent assembly. So after very, nearly being overthrown in the July Days, the provisional government started making announcements. On July 20th, they announced the electoral procedures and rules for suffrage, including the right of women both to vote and stand for election to the constituent assembly, a major victory for the feminist groups who had been so instrumental in launching the February Revolution in the first place. Then, in the second week of August, the government announced that elections would be held November 12th, and the first session of the constituent assembly would meet November 28th.

Now, this was still three very long months away, but it was officially on the calendar. And the fact that the constituent assembly was slated to meet in November was part of the reason Kornilov and Kerensky conspired to declare martial law in August. They both believed that a period of military rule might be necessary to allow the constituent assembly to meet in peace. Then once the assembly met and drafted a new constitution for Russia, military rule could be dialed back, and a new civilian government enjoying the sovereign legitimacy granted to it by this constituent assembly could come to power.

But if this is what they were trying to accomplish, the Kornilov Affair was a debacle. It was a complete failure. It left the government with almost no legitimacy to speak of. Alexander Kerensky successfully double-crossed Kornilov and induce the mass resignation of the ministry and the transfer of all executive authority into his hands, but it left him exactly nowhere. And I’m not sure I’ve actually seen a dictatorship held with such a narrow base of power. The only person I’ve written about who immediately springs to mind is Didius Julianus from the old History of Rome days. He’s the senator who was proclaimed emperor by the Praetorian Guard after winning a literal bidding war for their services after they had assassinated Emperor Pertinax. Didius Julianus was of course immediately overthrown by Septimius Severus who commanded the support of, y’know, armies and entire provinces.

In the first days of September, 1917, Kerensky was all powerful, at least on paper. He appointed a handful of ministers to lead the key ministries of state, and then they spent the next several weeks ruling by executive fiat. He spent these weeks attempting to find something, anything, anyone who would give his government even the veneer of legitimacy, but the Kornilov Affair simultaneously left Kerensky as an all-powerful dictator, but also a friendless non-entity. Each for their own reasons, neither the left nor the right, now trusted him. The officer corps of the army hated Kerensky for betraying Kornilov. The rank and file of the military hated him for conspiring with Kornilov. The question at this point was whether Kerensky, who almost nobody liked trusted or listened to anymore, could survive until the constituent assembly in November. And the answer was: no, he could not.

As we discussed last week, the main beneficiaries of the Kornilov Affair were. Ironically the very Bolshevik Party Kornilov had been trying to crush. The Bolsheviks, as we also discussed last week, had managed to escape through July and August without being completely crushed because the Mensheviks and the SRs who led the Soviet, as well as prime minister, Kerensky himself, were so worried about the threat of a counter-revolutionary coup from the right that they did not want to have any enemies to their left, especially an enemy as militant and well-armed and aggressive as the Bolsheviks were. The Kornilov Affair completed the political rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, who were now seen as the most ardent and clear-eyed defenders of the revolution. In the scramble to defend Petrograd from the forces of counterrevolution everyone had turned to the Bolsheviks to provide both generals and foot soldiers, and they delivered. Even if no fighting actually took place, the Bolsheviks were now considered the saviors of Petrograd.

Now from the very beginning, going all the way back to the original split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and then all through the Revolution of 1905, the Bolsheviks had always been the minority party. In February 1917, they probably counted no more than a few hundred active party members. But from that small nucleus, they had been growing. As we talked about in the episode on the July Days, they did very well among the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base, the workers in the Vyborg District, and major parts of the Petrograd Garrison, particularly those machine gunners. By the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks counted as many as 200,000 members across Russia. They were still not as big as the SRs, but this was absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And the Bolsheviks, as we’ve also discussed, now also benefited from the very things that had once made them such a minority party: they were the party associated with being opposed to the war. Now this had made them unpopular during periods when the war was popular, but now that the war was unpopular, it made them very, very popular. They were also the party who were most clearly and consistently in favor of the slogan, all power to the Soviets, because as the legitimacy of the provisional government just disappeared into nothingness, the Soviet as an institution and as an idea still had a lot of legitimacy in the minds of workers and sailors and soldiers, and the Bolsheviks had been the ones running around out there saying, the provisional government is illegitimate, the Soviet is legitimate, so let’s transfer all power to the Soviet. As the months went by, disillusionment with the Mensheviks and SR leadership of the Soviets drove many former supporters into the waiting ranks of the Bolsheviks. The Kornilov Affair rapidly accelerated those defections as the ongoing support from the Soviet leadership for Kerensky, his government, and the liberals was increasingly incomprehensible to people in the streets and factories and garrisons of Russia. The Bolshevik started to really gain electoral ground in municipal elections, culminating with their surprise victory in the local Moscow elections. In September of 1917. They also gained major ground in local Soviets out in the provinces, especially in industrial areas, and by September 1917, there were close to a dozen major provincial Soviets whose executive councils were dominated by Bolshevik Party members.

Now more than anything else, however, the story of politics by the fall of 1917 was less a story of rising democratic support for the Bolsheviks — which wasn’t really the case — but rather the mass proliferation of disillusionment and apathy. The huge initial burst of enthusiasm and energy in February 1917 had ultimately produced meager results. Not only did the war continue, but it continued to be defined by bloodshed and defeat. Workers were encouraged to cooperate with their bosses in the interests of keeping industry going rather than taking over industry for themselves. Out in the rural areas, peasants were seizing land, and instead of being encouraged and validated, the government was handing down proclamations telling them to knock it off. The Mensheviks and SR leaders of the Soviet continued to insist on supporting coalition government with capitalists and landowners, like, at all costs. The once raucus and excited general assemblies of the Petrograd Soviet had long since ceased meeting with any regularity. They gave way to insulated and semi-secretive committees and bureaucratic directories who were happy to speak for the people, but no longer really interested in speaking with the people. And so the people simply stopped showing up. And people stopped voting. People kind of stopped caring. It was becoming very much meet the new boss, same as the old boss, so like in those municipal elections I just talked about, yes, the Bolsheviks grew their share of the vote, but it was a larger share of a much smaller pie. Local Petrograd elections held in August, saw voter turnout decrease 30% from the spring. In Moscow, the election where the Bolsheviks finally won a majority, turnout had dropped by 50%. So a growing block of people out there were not voting for any one party or another, they were voting for apathetic disillusionment.

The Bolsheviks were well poised to take advantage of this apathetic disillusionment first and foremost because they were the one thing on the menu standing against the forces that had caused all the apathetic disillusion. For example, they did excellent work organizing on shop floors of factories because the Menshevik led factory committees that had been set up around February all continued to advocate compromise and cooperation with the bosses and the liberals and the capitalists if for no other reason than we have to win the war, which they considered to be of paramount importance. But the workers on the shop floor did not agree with those priorities. They were very interested in what the Bolsheviks had to say, which was down with the bosses, down with the liberals, down with the capitalists and down with the war. And these were in fact the very workers that the Bolsheviks successfully armed during the Kornilov Affair: workers whose patience with Mensheviks, SRs, liberals, and the provisional government was completely exhausted.

The central figure in the Bolshevik transitionq from a militant minority faction to something like a popular political party was Leon Trotsky. More than anyone else, Trotsky was the public face of Bolshevism in the fall of 1917. Which is something of a surprise, given that he had broken with Lenin and the Bolsheviks way back during the original Bolshevik/Mensheviks split in 1903, and then the two sides had spent the last 15 years lobbing potshots at each other in various émigré newspapers. But Trotsky’s alienation from Lenin had always been far more personal than political. In terms of tactics, strategy, and objectives, Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution neatly aligned with just about everything Lenin was saying. The reason he had fallen out with Lenin in the first place was because Lenin had been such a huge asshole to all of Trotsky’s friends back in 1903, and then a huge asshole to Trotsky himself in the wake of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split — though, to be sure, Trotsky gave absolutely as good as he got in these disputes, and painted his own portraits of Lenin with a brush dipped in poison.

But when everyone returned to Russia in 1917, both Trotsky and Lenin saw their interests align and they buried the hatchet. Both of them ultimately putting the political ahead of the personal. This was in marked contrast to another one of our old friends, Julius Martov. Ever since the beginning of World War I, Martov had led a leftwing Menshevik faction that was also very close to the Bolshevik position. And, here in 1917, these leftwing Mensheviks were absolutely defecting to the Bolsheviks in droves. But Martov himself couldn’t go there. He simply could not forgive Lenin’s naked opportunism, immorality, hypocrisy, and fundamental lack of political decency. Trotsky was ready to bury the hatchet; Martov was not, and he never would be.

But getting back to Trotsky, he was not even technically a member of the Bolshevik party when the July Days hit. When arrest warrants went out for the various Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky was not on the list. He had to actually write open letters to the authorities saying, hey, if you’re arresting Bolsheviks, you have to arrest me too, which, then they did. Having proven his loyalty, the Bolshevik central committee elected to bring Trotsky into the leadership while he was in prison, though it was hardly a unanimous vote. Trotsky was an arrogant egghead who had spent 15 years using his eggheaded arrogance against the Bolsheviks. Those old resentments were never going to disappear. Ever. But his talents were undeniable. And when he was released from jail shortly after the Kornilov Affair in the midst of the general rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, he put all his undeniable talents at the service of the party. Because, as it turned out, Trotsky was not just a gifted writer, thinker, and polemicist, he was also a naturally magnetic orator. In September 1917 he absolutely became the face and voice of Bolshevism. Most people had frankly never seen or heard Lenin, who had been an anonymous émigré most of his life, and who excelled at dominating backroom committee meetings but not public rallies. Trotsky could dominate those public moments. It’s hard to gauge exactly how different things would have been in October 1917 had Trotsky remained aloof from the Bolsheviks, but it is worth always keeping in mind that when many, many, many of these workers and soldiers and sailors in Petrograd thought about the Bolsheviks, they pictured Trotsky, not Lenin.

With Trotsky now taking the public lead for the Bolsheviks even inside the Soviet, which he had been invited to join after returning to Russia, the right-leaning leadership really began to feel some heat. The Bolsheviks put forward a motion opposing any coalition government with bourgeois elements. And for the first time ever, a Bolshevik motion passed the Soviet. And this was not just thanks to Bolshevik votes alone, but also left SRs and left Mensheviks defecting from their former leaders and allies. The right leaning leadership who composed the executive council threatened to resign on September 9th if the motion was not rescinded — they, after all supported coalition government — but instead of falling into line, the general assembly simply confirmed the previous vote. The Soviet would not endorse coalition government. This led to the resignation of the leadership that had been in place since February, and a new slate of men stood poised to take over. Which is exactly what the Bolsheviks were aiming for.

Realizing the Soviets were moving decisively to the left, the right SRs and right Mensheviks, increasingly divorced from the left wings of their party, scrambled a response. They still believed in a rather literal and pedantic reading of historical materialism, which clearly required the bourgeois capitalist class to take the lead in the first democratic political revolution, which would pave the way for the second socialist revolution. What this meant is even though they were all socialists, they were ideologically committed to the idea of keeping bourgeois capitalists in the government. With Kerensky meanwhile looking for something, anything, to root his own political legitimacy in, they all hit on an idea. These leaders use the last gasp of their authority inside the Soviet to convene what was called the All Russian Democratic Conference. They invited representatives not just from the Soviets that had sprouted up throughout Russia, but also from various municipal Dumas, army committees, peasant co-op groups, and an institution we have not really heard much of since February, but which is still very much in existence, the zemstvos. By broadening the number of institutions represented, the right leaning socialists hoped to create a new kind of democratic consensus which was not exclusively rooted in the Soviet who would endorse coalition government between socialists and liberals.

This hastily convened meeting took place just two weeks after the Kornilov Affair, taking place in Petrograd between September 12th and September 14th. And it was, honestly, every bit the farce at the Kornilov Affair was. The right wing of the conference — and we’re talking here business leaders and industrialists liberals, and their allies — wanted to re-endorse a coalition government of socialists and Kadets. A center bloc wanted a mix of liberals and socialists, but they wanted to exclude the Kadets, many of whom had been implicated in the Kornilov Affair. And then there was a left bloc which included of course the Bolsheviks, who wanted an all socialist government which excluded the Kadets, excluded the liberals, excluded the capitalist classes, and rooted its legitimacy entirely in the Soviet. After a great deal of arguing and speechmaking, the left wound up finding itself in the minority, and the democratic conference approved the principle of a coalition government.

But then things got absurd as they narrowed down the specifics. An amendment was passed nearly unanimously that excluded from the government anyone associated with the Kornilov Affair. Okay, so far, so good. But then there was a second amendment on whether or not to exclude the Kadet Party in its entirety. When the vote was taken, the amendment passed. No member of the Kadet Party could be invited into the coalition government. This triggered howls of anger from the right, and so then, the whole package got voted on: the initial principle of a coalition plus the specific amendments. The left and right got together and voted the whole thing down. The left, because they were opposed to any coalition with the liberals, and the right, because they were angry at the exclusion of the Kadets. So, in the end, the democratic conference wrapped up having failed miserably. It simultaneously endorsed and rejected the idea of coalition government and broke apart having achieved exactly nothing.

As the democratic conference was flailing its way to nowhere, the presiding leadership of the right SRs and right Mensheviks got together with liberals and Kadets to just ignore the votes being taken in the conference. They formed their own extraordinary committee who created what came to be called the pre-parliament. The pre-parliament was a body that was supposed to provide a kind of temporary public assembly that could assert just enough sovereignty that Kerensky could say, well, until the constituent assembly meets, my government will be rooted in this institution called the pre-parliament — which again, they’re just making up on the fly right here. But even this utterly contrived formula collapsed. The Kadet Party now placed their own terms on coalition with the right leaning socialists. They said, the pre-parliament can certainly form, and can advise the government, but in no way will the government be answerable to it. And the right-leaning socialists were so desperate to get the liberals and Kadets to join with them that they agreed to these terms. And so, Alexander Kerensky began forming a coalition government that would reign until the constituent assembly, basically approved by no one and rooted in nothing.

This is the political context we need to keep in mind as we head into Red October. And the reason we spent so much time today talking about the nature of legitimacy and sovereignty is that clearly, by October 1917, there was just none of it to speak of. As we will discuss next week, Lenin, who is still off in Finland is now absolutely going out of his mind yelling at his comrades in the central committee that now is the time to strike, now, now, now, right now, we cannot wait. If we do it now, we’re going to win. All that we will be doing is overthrowing an illegitimate government that no one supports anyway. His comrades in the central committee were incredibly skeptical, but you know what?

Lenin wasn’t wrong.