The armistice of 1918 brought no peace in Russia. During
the early years of the twentieth century, Russia entered
the Industrial Revolution. As elsewhere, it was a
wrenching experience, marked by rapid social change
and political unrest. Demonstrations during the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904 –1905 forced the tsar to agree to political
reforms (including the creation of Russia’s first legislative
assembly, the Duma) that for the first time limited
his supreme authority. For a brief time, radicals harbored
hopes that revolution was imminent, but the monarchy
survived, though shaken, and the nation entered a brief
period of relative stability.
Marxism made its first appearance in the Russian environment
in the 1880s. Early Marxists were aware of the
primitive conditions in their country and asked Karl
Marx himself for advice. The Russian proletariat was oppressed—
indeed, brutalized—but small in numbers and
unsophisticated. Could agrarian Russia make the transition
to socialism without an intervening stage of capitalism?
Marx, who always showed more flexibility than the
rigid determinism of his system suggested, replied that it
was possible that Russia could avoid the capitalist stage
by building on the communal traditions of the Russian
village, known as the mir.
But as Russian Marxism evolved, its leaders turned
more toward Marxist orthodoxy. Founding member
George Plekhanov saw signs in the early stages of the Industrial
Revolution that Russia would follow the classic
pattern. He predicted, however, that the weak Russian
bourgeoisie would be unable to consolidate its power,
thus opening the door for a rapid advance from the capitalist
to the socialist stage of the revolution. In 1898,
Plekhanov’s Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP) held its first congress.
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, a
new force entered the Russian Marxist movement in the
figure of Vladimir Ulyanov, later to be known as Lenin.
Initially radicalized by the execution of his older brother
for terrorism in 1886, he became a revolutionary and a
member of Plekhanov’s RSDLP. Like Plekhanov, Lenin
believed in the revolution, but he was a man in a hurry.
Whereas Plekhanov wanted to prepare patiently for revolution
by education and mass work, Lenin wanted to
build up the party rapidly as a vanguard instrument to galvanize
the masses and spur the workers to revolt. In a
pamphlet titled “What Is to Be Done?” he proposed the
transformation of the RSDLP into a compact and highly
disciplined group of professional revolutionaries that
would not merely ride the crest of the revolutionary wave
but would unleash the storm clouds of revolt.
At the Second National Congress of the RSDLP, held
in 1903 in Brussels and London, Lenin’s ideas were supported
by a majority of the delegates (thus the historical
term Bolsheviks, or “majorityites,” for his followers). His
victory was short-lived, however, and for the next decade,
Lenin, living in exile, was a brooding figure on the fringe
of the Russian revolutionary movement, which was now
dominated by the Mensheviks (“minorityites”), who opposed
Lenin’s single-minded pursuit of violent revolution.
World War I broke the trajectory of Russia’s economic
growth and laid the foundation for the collapse of the
old order. There is a supreme irony in this fact, for Tsar
Nicholas II appeared almost to welcome war with Germany
as a means of uniting the people behind their sovereign.
In fact, war often erodes the underpinnings of a
declining political system and hastens its demise. This
was certainly the case with Russia.
After stirring victories in the early stages of the war,
news from the battlefield turned increasingly grim as
poorly armed Russian soldiers were slaughtered by the
modern armies of the kaiser. The conscription of peasants
from the countryside caused food prices to rise and led, by
late 1916, to periodic bread shortages in the major cities.
Workers grew increasingly restive at the wartime schedule
of long hours with low pay and joined army deserters
in angry marches through the capital of Saint Petersburg
(now renamed Petrograd).
It was a classic scenario for revolution—discontent in
the big cities fueled by mutinous troops streaming home
from the battlefield and a rising level of lawlessness in rural
areas as angry peasants seized land and burned the
manor houses of the wealthy. Even the urban middle
class, always a bellwether on the political scene, grew impatient
with the economic crisis and the bad news from
the front and began to question the competence of the
tsar and his advisers. In late February 1917, government
troops fired at demonstrators in the streets of the capital
and killed several. An angry mob marched to the Duma,
where restive delegates demanded the resignation of the
tsar’s cabinet.
Nicholas II had never wanted to share the supreme
power he had inherited with the throne. After a brief period
of hesitation, he abdicated, leaving a vacuum that
was quickly seized by leading elements in the Duma, who
formed a provisional government to steer Russia through
the crisis. On the left, reformist and radical political parties—
including the Social Revolutionaries (the legal
successors of the outlawed terrorist organization Narodnaya
Volya) and the two wings of the RSDLP, the Mensheviks
and the Bolsheviks—cooperated in creating a
shadow government called the Saint Petersburg Soviet.
This shadow government supported the provisional government
in pursuing the war but attempted to compel it
to grant economic and social reforms that would benefit
the masses.
The so-called February Revolution of 1917 had forced
the collapse of the monarchy, but it showed little promise
of solving the deeper problems that had led Russia to
the brink of civil war. Finally convinced that a real social
revolution was at hand, Lenin returned from exile in
Switzerland in April and, on his arrival in Petrograd, laid
out a program for his followers: all power to the soviets
(locally elected government councils), an end to the war,
and the distribution of land to poor peasants. But Lenin’s
April Theses were too radical even for his fellow Bolsheviks,
and his demands were ignored by other leaders, who
continued to cooperate with the provisional government
while attempting to push it to the left.
World History
