Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution.

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LENIN AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

Could the Bolshevik Revolution have taken place without the participation of the founder and perpetual leader of the Bolsheviks? Really, the question seems too silly to ask. Lenin's fingerprints are all over the October insurrection. However, it is not logically inconceivable that a popular uprising could have taken place against the Provisional Government without the aid of Lenin or his party. It will be contended in this chapter that such an uprising was, if not inevitable, then certainly very probable. This will be shown through the use of the model developed in chapter one. The analysis presented in this chapter will proceed through two steps, corresponding to the two questions raised by the model.

First it will be shown that there was a strong popular demand for many of the policies which the Bolsheviks were to incorporate into their programme. Some of the groups making these demands (especially the soldiers and sailors) were armed, and were concentrated in the vicinity of Petrograd and, to a smaller degree, Moscow. These groups were, therefore, both ideally situated to launch a coup d'etat in order to achieve their goals, and entirely willing to do so. They lacked only a "vanguard" to coordinate their efforts.

According to the model developed in Chapter One, these groups could be expected to search out, support, and in a sense actually "create" a leadership which would champion their views.

The remarkable rise in Bolshevik support between the February and October revolutions, it will be argued, was due primarily to the capable manner in which Lenin established his party as the primary voice for the demands of these groups. In so doing he pre-empted other potential leaders from this role. This is hardly a revolutionary new viewpoint on the reasons for the rising popularity of the Bolsheviks, but it is critical to the argument which follows. There was a genuine need, in the Russia of 1917, for a party to represent the popular desire for bread, peace and land. There was, thus, a political vacuum to be filled. Lenin and the Bolsheviks certainly filled this vacuum very effectively, but Lenin was by no stretch of the imagination the only individual capable of playing the role of spokesman for the groups which his party represented. Nor, indeed, was he the only individual willing to fulfil this role. However, his dynamism in his chosen role ensured that he would gather the Bolshevik standard most of the other prominent groups and individuals who supported these goals. In so doing, the potential leadership qualities of these other individuals were, perhaps, obscured.

Corresponding to the second question asked in the model, it will be shown that Lenin faced an open field, full of potential competitors for the reins of power. He occupied no state office, and thus was unprotected from competition. At any rate, his own abrupt seizure of power from Kerensky demonstrates that the occupation of state office was a small enough protection in those turbulent days. Lenin did occupy an important party office, which did amount to a small advantage, but it will be argued here that this advantage was not decisive. To this end, evidence will be presented that the support of Lenin's own party was largely predicated upon Lenin's pursuit of the broad course of action which he did in fact take. So too, it will be maintained, was the support of many of the individuals who joined forces with the Bolsheviks in 1917.

The answer to the first question consists of an examination of each of the three broad groups of society (the soldiers and sailors, the urban working class and the peasantry) to whom the Bolsheviks appealed in 1917. In each case it can be shown that the group in question was a powerful and useful ally. In each case Lenin carefully identified his party with the professed interests of these groups, to great effect. Statistical evidence can easily be provided which demonstrates that the Bolshevik popularity grew as a result (if not actually proportion to) this increasing unity of interest between the party and the groups to which it was appealing. In view of the fact that no attempt is being made to present new factual evidence, and that the arguments presented in the first part of the chapter are already widely accepted, these arguments can be made in a fairly cursory manner. No attempt will be made to list all the groups and sub-groups to which Bolshevik appeals were made, nor to exhaustively consider all the subtleties of the policies towards the groups which are being reviewed.

Russia had become, following the February Revolution, a rather freeform and freewheeling multi-party democracy. Indeed, stuffed full as it now was with committees and councils, Russia had developed an overabundance of democracy. While the mechanics of the new Russian system were quite unique, at least some of the aspects of the new society were rather like those of any multi-party democracy. The newly liberated and politically conscious public was for the most part unencumbered by any coherent political ideology, and saw politics as a mechanism for achieving specific limited material goals, rather than the restructuring of the whole of society. These goals differed from group to group, and as in any complex society there were many groups, each hoping to swing public policy in a direction favourable to its own interests.

For example, workers at the armaments factories in Tula were in favour, as a rule, of continuing the war effort against the Germans, or at least of maintaining a state of armed preparedness, despite the economy's inability to support either of these two options. In early 1918 they strongly opposed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk because they feared that its disarmament provisions might include the shutting of their plants, and might thereby cost them their jobs. These factories thus became a receptive target for Menshevik agitation, and remained strongly anti-Bolshevik.

Another, better known interest group of the revolutionary period was the railway workers' union. There were over one million railway workers in Russia at the time of the revolution. From March 1917 onwards, they were represented by "Vikzhel" (the acronym for the All-Russian Executive Committee of Railway Workers). Wartime Russia was dependent upon the railroads for most troop movements and for food supplies to the two capitals. Vikzhel used this tremendous dependency as a lever by which to advance its members' interests. In economic matters, the railwaymen were concerned with improving or at least maintaining their standard of living. In the economic disorder of revolutionary Russia, this meant fighting perpetually with the Provisional Government over pay, but also demanding (and winning) the right for Vikzhel members to have the "first claim" to food supplies, once military needs had been covered. Politically, Vikzhel sought a stable environment in which it could maintain the privileged position which its members had gained after the February Revolution. While it mouthed the usual revolutionary epithets, Vikzhel did everything possible to maintain the status quo. One of the reasons why the Kornilov Revolt was derailed in August was that the railway men refused to transport the general's troops. The day after the Bolshevik insurrection, Vikzhel declared that it would assume control of the railways until a coalition government consisting of all socialist parties was established. This would have meant returning as closely to the pre-October status quo, as seemed possible, except that the liberals (for whom the railway workers had no special affection) and Kerensky would have been excluded from government. On October 29, a further statement was issued which is revealing of the railwaymen's basic concern with stability:

A people that is opposed to the death penalty as a means of justice, and is rejecting war as a method of settling international disputes, cannot accept civil war as a means to end internal quarrels. Every civil war leads straight to counter-revolution and is advantageous only to the enemy of the people. In order to guard the liberty of the country and to save the revolution, the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Railwaymen has, from the very beginning of this civil strife, assumed a strictly neutral attitude and has declared that the only way to obtain internal peace is by forming a homogeneous ministry, made up of the Socialist parties, from the Bolsheviks to the Socialists-Populists inclusive.

        

Faced with the prospect of food supplies to Petrograd being cut off, the Bolsheviks consented to negotiate with Vikzhel, although not, it would seem, in particularly good faith. The union maintained itself in a position of considerable strength for several months following the Bolshevik seizure of power, but was eventually supplanted by legislation which gave control of each rail line to a soviet representing the workers on that line. The Bolshevik government was thus able to draw the railwaymen away from Vikzhel by "outbidding" it: offering the workers a deal so sweet that it destroyed the raison d'etre of Vikzhel. This, combined with a few carefully placed and limited measures of repression, destroyed the union.

What the examples of Vikzhel and the Tula arms workers show is that in the absence of any strong sense of unifying national purpose such as there had been right after war was declared in 1914, it had become critically important for any aspiring Russian leader to appeal to the material interests of the various groups which made up Russian society, and particularly to those groups in positions of power. The urban masses wanted bread, the soldiers wanted peace, and the peasantry sought land redistribution. Thus, the genius of Lenin's slogan "Bread, Peace and Land" is the way in which he sought to appeal to the specific demands of each of these three groups. Like the best party leaders in any multi-party system, Lenin was building a coalition of interest groups. These groups would provide his basis of support when the Bolsheviks made their grab for power in October.

The aspirations of each of the groups to which Lenin made his appeal will be examined in turn. The soldiers and sailors are the first and probably the most important of these groups. The forces which carried out the insurrection on October 24-25 consisted largely of soldiers and sailors posted in and around Petrograd.

At the time of the February Revolution there were between 215,000 and 300,000 men in the Petrograd garrison. By October this number had declined to around 150,000, because more men had been transferred to the front than back from it. A further 100,000 men were garrisoned in and around Moscow, and 32,000 soldiers and sailors were stationed at Kronstadt. For the most part the men of the garrisons were either over or under age, or else recovering from wounds. They were mostly peasant in background and thus many of them were familiar with and supportive of the ideological programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Their real loyalty, however, as Robert Daniels has observed, was to whomever would keep them from being shipped to the front.

There was every reason for the soldiers to resist. Already by 1917 up to two million men had died fighting the Central Powers. Moreover, it was no longer clear what the soldiers were fighting for. The war aims of the Provisional Government were singularly unclear. The collapse, after only two days of fighting, of the June Kerensky offensive made it painfully obvious that the war could not be won by military means. By the time of the October Revolution, even someone as closely linked to the Provisional Government as Alexander Verkhovsky, the minister of war, could conclude that the situation was hopeless, and that the only way of keeping the army strong enough to suppress internal disruptions would beto enter immediately into peace negotiations with the Germans. Speaking at a secret conference of the committees of Foreign Affairs and of National Defense, the minister gave details of the disastrous state of the army:

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An army of nine and one-half million men cannot be supported by the country.... According to the data of the Minister of Food....the utmost we are able to support is seven million. These figures are indisputable. On the Northern front famine conditions are already in evidence and the soldiers' rations have been reduced to one and one-half pounds. Furthermore, we can neither shoe nor clothe the army. On account of the decrease in the productivity of labor after the revolution and the lack of raw material the output of footwear has fallen off to one-half of the output of ...

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