The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Russian Revolution 9781350243132, 9781350243163, 9781350243149

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

ii

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Edited by Geoffrey Swain and Charlotte Alston Michael Hickey Boris Kolonitskii Franziska Schedewie

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Geoffrey Swain, Charlotte Alston, Michael Hickey, Boris Kolonitskii and Franziska Schedewie, 2023 Geoffrey Swain, Charlotte Alston, Michael Hickey, Boris Kolonitskii and Franziska Schedewie have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover image: Kostudijew Russian Empire, February Revolution, 12th March, 1917 (© akg-images / Alamy) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the copyright material. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to such material or the rights holder. We would be pleased to rectify any omissions in subsequent editions of this publication should they be drawn to our attention. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-4313-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-4314-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-4315-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

L ist

of

I llustrations 

Introduction

viii 1

Part I  Political Crises 1

Public organizations and the Duma crisis Peter Waldron, University of East Anglia

9

2

The February Revolution: Above and below Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, University of California, Santa Barbara

25

3

Liberalism and the rule of law Ian D. Thatcher, University of Ulster

39

4

Wartime logistics and the Provisional Government Anthony J. Heywood, University of Aberdeen

55

5

The October Revolution: Soviet power and socialist government Sally A. Boniece, Frostburg University

75

6

The early Soviet government, 1917–23 Lara Douds, University of Northumbria

91

Part II  Politicians and Parties 7

Alexander Kerensky and the Kerenshchina Boris Kolonitskii, European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences

109

8

Dreaming about Democratic Russia: Viktor Chernov in 1917 Hannu Immonen, Research Fellow Emeritus at the Academy of Finland

125

9

Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 Barbara C. Allen, La Salle University

139

10

Non-Bolshevik internationalists in war and revolution Lutz Häfner, University of Bielefeld

155

11

The anarchists: ‘Manual workers of the revolution’ and the beginning of the Civil War Dmitrii Ivanov, European University at St Petersburg



169

vi

CONTENTS

Part III  Social Groups 12

Working for a workers’ constitution Nikolai Mikhailov, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg

187

13

Peasants in the Russian Revolution: Adaption, anxiety, action Peter Fraunholtz, Northeastern University

209

14

Soldiers: The democratization and disintegration of the army Konstantin A. Tarasov, High School of Economics, St Petersburg, Research fellow of the St Petersburg Institute of History of the ­Russian Academy of Sciences

223

15

The lower middle strata and revolution Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University

239

16

The ‘revolution from above’: Tsarist elites and the revolutionary process 257 Matthew Rendle, University of Exeter

Part IV  Identities 17

Russia’s revolutions in 1917: What’s gender got to do with it? Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Brandeis University

271

18

Masculinity in 1917 Siobhán Hearne, University of Durham

283

19

Childhood and youth in the Russian Revolution Elizabeth White, University of the West of England, Bristol

297

20

Culture and revolution: Destruction, creation and preservation in the decade after the revolution Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal, University of Heidelberg



311

Part V  Regions and Peoples 21

The revolution and the provincial press Franziska Schedewie and Dennis Dierks, University of Jena

323

22

The revolution in Smolensk province Michael C. Hickey, Bloomsburg University

339

23

1917 on the Volga Sarah Badcock, University of Nottingham

361

24

The Ukrainian revolution in 1917: Successful failure Nataliya Kibita, University of Edinburgh

375

25

Revolution in Turkestan, 1916–20 Gero Fedtke, University of Jena

391

CONTENTS

vii

Part VI  Civil War 26

The Civil War: An overview Evan Mawdsley, University of Glasgow

409

27

The Red home front: Building the early Soviet order, 1918–21 Murray Frame, University of Dundee

427

28

The White home front Nikolaus Katzer, German Historical Institute, Moscow

443

29

The Bolsheviks and world revolution Geoffrey Swain, University of Glasgow

457

30

Epilogue: The revolution in 1921 Charlotte Alston, Northumbria University

473

N otes S elect E nglish L anguage B ibliography I ndex

485 624 632

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 18.1 ‘For the honour, glory, and prosperity of our great Homeland …’ 18.2 ‘The Fatherland is in danger, the blood that we shed demands a war until victory. Comrade soldiers, to the trenches immediately! Return Lenin to Wilhelm!’

289

294

Tables 4.1

Wagons loaded (excluding tankers) on Russia’s Railway Network, January–February 1916 and January–February 1917 4.2 Ministers of Ways of Communication under the Provisional ­Government, 1917 4.3 Food deliveries to army stores at the fighting fronts, ­November 1915–November 1917 21.1 Newspaper and journal distribution, according to the entries in ­Periodicheskaia pechat‘ v Rossii v 1917 godu. Bibliograficheskii ­ukazatel’

59 69 71

331

Introduction GEOFFREY SWAIN, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

In his personal record of 1917, the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov recalled the first weeks of revolution with these words. The revolution had spread like wildfire over the whole face of Russia. From all parts there came hundreds and thousands of reports about the upheaval that had taken place easily, instantaneously, and painlessly, sprinkled with living water the oppressed and stagnant masses of the people and called them to life. Telegrams spoke of the ‘recognition’ or ‘adherence’ of the troops (together with the officers), peasants, civil servants, bourgeoisie, and people of all kinds… In the twinkling of an eye soviets formed everywhere, of course unmethodically and with no astute philosophizing. But they were organizations, points of support for the democracy and the revolution… Probably hundreds of mass-meetings and organized assemblies took place in Petersburg every day.1 Three months later things were more organized, but popular democracy still stood to the fore. Morgan Philips Price, the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian but writing on this occasion for the radical newspaper Common Sense, reported on the opening of the First Congress of Soviets in early June. From the workshops, the trenches and the battlefield over 700 delegates of organized revolutionary democracy have gathered together for the constructive work that lies ahead… They came in groups, bearing with them the mark of the regions whence they hailed. One room was filled by a jolly gang of Little Russians [Ukrainians], who immediately got their accordion going round with their samovar. In another room there was a group of soldiers from the garrisons in Turkestan, in another some dark-eyed people from the Caucasus. There were bulky soldiers from the ranks and serious-looking officers from the trenches; there were artisans from the Moscow factories and mining representatives from the Don. But it was not long before the raw national materials had worked up into the political finished article. On the next day they began to split up into their party sections – the SRs in one room, the Bolsheviks in another, and the Mensheviks in another.2 A further six months on and the scene would be very different, as Russia descended into civil war. By then ‘bourgeois’ democracy had been discarded when the

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Constituent Assembly was dispersed on 6 January 1918, and ‘soviet’ democracy was already withering on the vine as the Bolsheviks discovered that any version of democracy meant sharing power with those parties which did not match their ideological convictions. By early 1919, the Bolshevik dictatorship was firmly established, and the civil war was at its height. By the end of the civil war, not only was the Bolshevik Party the only source of political authority, but the Politburo had established centralized control over the rank and file; the system that would operate until 1991 was in place. The Bolsheviks refused to share power with other socialist parties and insisted on a dictatorship because they had a purpose: they were seeking to implement the ideas of Marx and Engels about establishing a future, communist, class-less society. The writer Maxim Gorky summed it up well in one of the ‘untimely thoughts’ he published on 20 November 1917, less than a fortnight after the Bolshevik Revolution. The working class cannot fail to understand that Lenin is only performing a certain experiment on their skin and on their blood, that he is striving to push the revolutionary mood of the proletariat to its furthest extreme and see – what will come of this? Of course, he does not believe in the possibility of the victory of the proletariat in Russia under the present conditions, but he is hoping for a miracle. The working class should know that miracles do not occur in real life, that they are to expect hunger, complete disorder in industry, disruption of transportation and protracted bloody anarchy followed by a no less bloody and gloomy reaction.3 Lenin was indeed hoping for a miracle, that the revolution in Russia would become a revolution throughout Europe, and that other, advanced industrial countries would support Russia in the work of building a socialist future. There were times during the civil war when this seemed possible, but as Charlotte Alston notes in her concluding contribution to this volume, Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 that ‘so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia’. Lenin’s miracle cure of world revolution was on hold, and the Bolshevik vision of socialism could only be built through continued dictatorship. Bolshevik rule in Russia would inspire and terrify in equal measure for the next seventy-four years. The politics of the twentieth century would be dominated by those trying to spread communism and those trying to prevent its spread: Hitler’s monstrous war against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ only served to increase the number of countries which declared their loyalty to Leninism, but none was from the industrially advanced world. In the end Soviet Russia, for all its achievements, would prove to be built on sand. As Gorky wrote, miracles do not occur in real life. The state, which was founded on ideological commitment, lost its ideology. If Russian youngsters in the 1960s wanted to reform communism, by the 1990s they were simply tired of communism and had no loyalty to an economic system which could build ballistic missiles but not deliver consumer goods. They were tired of waiting for miracles. It was inevitable that a state which defined itself by an ideology, would find its history being written in ideological terms. Both the Bolsheviks and their opponents, Charlotte Alston points out, stressed that what happened in October 1917 was a

INTRODUCTION

3

well-planned coup by the Bolshevik Party, and for too many years historians debated whether this was a good or a bad thing, rather than asking whether it was actually an accurate interpretation of what took place. A century after the end of the Russian Civil War and thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is time to look at the Russian Revolution dispassionately. In 2021, Chris Read, Britain’s leading historian of revolutionary Russia, wrote a historiographical overview of the works published to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Playing with the words of John Reed, whose classic book Ten Days That Shook the World was one of the earliest first-hand accounts of the revolution, Read wrote about ‘ten months which no longer shake the world’. He noted that what was missing in current history writing was the sense of a popular revolution, ‘“ordinary” people consciously pursuing their own interests’.4 This handbook hopefully will do something to capture that sense of a popular revolution which Sukhanov and Philips Price described so well, the excitement and enthusiasm which so characterized the spring 1917, not just in Petrograd but across the whole empire as the news of the revolution was spread by the provincial press. The aim of this handbook is to bring together a collection of essays which offer a comprehensive picture of the Russian Revolution in the light of contemporary scholarship, by drawing on the work of researchers from Britain, Europe, the United States and Russia itself. Many of the essays are written by established experts in the field, but others are the work of up-and-coming scholars. All are based on recent research and taken together they offer a reference point for any student wishing to know more about the events and significance of Russia in 1917, one of the key turning points in world history. Definitions of what to include in a ‘comprehensive picture’ may differ, but the editors followed a clear logic when selecting the subject matter for analysis and their decision to group the essays within six sections. The section Political Crises covers the main political developments during 1917–18. The Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917 is not seen as an end point, rather there is a broader time-scale to the transfer of political power, pushing the story firmly into the initial Soviet period when parties other than the Bolsheviks still mattered, and the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Politburo had not been firmly established. Peter Waldron begins with the Duma crisis which developed during the First World War and reached a climax as 1917 began. The public organizations established during the course of the war had become too powerful to dissolve, even though they openly defied the Tsar. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa then takes us through the events of the February Revolution, exploring the interrelationship between leaders and led. The popular insurgency provided the colour on the canvass, but it was the Duma Committee which painted the final picture. Next Ian Thatcher explores the disillusionment of the liberals, as they discovered that the rule of law was not so easy to establish. In the end, the Provisional Government could not guarantee the operation of its own laws. It is a truism that if the Provisional Government could have launched a successful offensive in summer 1917, the outcome of Russia’s revolution would have been very different. Anthony Heywood explores the never-ending crisis of wartime logistics, drawing the stark conclusion that, for all its efforts, the Provisional Government

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

could only offer the population a second hungry winter. Sally Boniece then explores the beneficiaries of that hunger, the parties which came to power as the events of October unfolded. She focuses not simply on the Bolshevik seizure of power, but their need to forge an alliance with the political voice of the peasantry, the Left SRs. Finally, Lara Douds considers the evolution of the Soviet regime, the end of coalition politics and the development of government through the Bolshevik Party’s Politburo. The section Politicians and Parties focuses on three of the key political players, as well as on some of the lesser studied political parties. It opens with Boris Kolonitskii’s study of ‘the darling of the revolution’, Alexander Kerensky. The personification of the revolution in February, its great enforcer over the summer, by the autumn he was hated in equal measure by those of both Left and Right. Viktor Chernov led revolutionary Russia’s biggest political party, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the party which won the elections to the Constituent Assembly. As Hannu Immonen shows, although the SRs experienced splits and divisions during the revolutionary year, Chernov was still an active figure in the first months after October, reasserting the influence of his party. Lenin was the undoubted victor of 1917, moulding the Bolshevik Party to his will. Barbara Allen details the growing confidence of the Bolshevik Party and Lenin’s determination to press ahead with armed insurrection. Before one-party rule and the hegemony of the Politburo were finally established during the course of the civil war, other ‘internationalist’ parties could influence events. Lutz Häfner explores the fate of these other parties on the left, sometimes in alliance with the Bolsheviks, sometimes opposing them. Then, Dmitrii Ivanov considers the role of the Anarchists. Although small in number, they were among the most committed revolutionaries, actively supporting the Bolshevik seizure of power and taking a leading role in defending the Soviet regime against its earliest opponents. The section Social Groups considers the impact of 1917 on workers, peasants, soldiers, the lower middle strata and the old elites, groups which both supported and opposed the revolution. Nikolai Mikhailov discusses the role of workers and what he sees as their perpetual struggle to establish a ‘workers’ constitution’ aided by the Bolsheviks but ultimately frustrated by them too. Peter Fraunholtz considers the peasantry, whose desire for land made them impatient with the Provisional Government. As peasants seized land and gibed at handing over their grain, the Provisional Government increasingly resorted to force in its confrontations with them. Konstantin Tarasov considers the soldiers, as the army democratized and then disintegrated. The committee structures associated with democratization were soon seen as both oppressive and pro-war by a soldiery favouring peace. The re-election of the committees opened up opportunities for the Bolsheviks and their internationalist allies. Daniel Orlovsky shows how the lower middle strata played a key role both in the early days of the revolution, and as the Bolsheviks prepared to take power. Matthew Rendle discusses the élites of the old regime, their willingness to accept the revolution and their ability to use the new freedoms to start defending their own interests, actions perceived by others as counterrevolutionary.

INTRODUCTION

5

Gender is the first issue addressed in the section Identities. Rochelle Ruthchild reminds us that no account of 1917 can be complete without an examination of the role played by women, not only because a women’s demonstration started the February Revolution but because women forced female enfranchisement onto the revolutionaries’ agenda and then participated in elections with as much if not more enthusiasm than men. Siobhán Hearne then explores the impact of 1917 on changing understandings of masculinity. Although the Bolsheviks were keen to abolish the patriarchal family, the communist ethos remained implicitly coded as masculine and masculine identity was firmly linked to military service. Elizabeth White moves the discussion to the question of the impact of 1917 on childhood. She considers the new children’s rights and experimental education, alongside the terrible problem of civil war orphans. Finally, Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal considers the role of the artist in developing a new revolutionary culture. Was the aim of the revolution to destroy the old bourgeois culture and create a new proletarian one, to preserve all cultural artefacts for the benefit of posterity, or was Bolshevik cultural policy an ad hoc mix of iconoclasm and the prevention of destruction? Much of the best research on the Russian Revolution undertaken in recent years had been into regional studies of the revolution, while the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of newly independent states had prompted a plethora of new national histories describing the brief emergence of new nations during 1917–18, before their later incorporation, often unwillingly, into the Soviet Union. Being ‘comprehensive’ in these circumstances was a challenge for the editors when planning the section Regions and Peoples. To give a flavour of this mountain of research, it was decided to focus on just three aspects, felt to be significant and symptomatic: a new source base for regional studies, two local studies from strategically important yet very different parts of Russia, and two studies of those emerging nations most closely tied to Russia. Franziska Schedewie and Dennis Dierks show just how vibrant the regional press was in 1917, bringing the debates of the capital, and its heroes and heroines, to every corner of the Russian Empire. Next Michael Hickey explores the impact of the revolution in Smolensk province, in the west of Russia, showing, among other things, how long after October the local Bolsheviks were dependent in this region on political allies. Sarah Badcock considers the situation on the Volga, to the east of Moscow, where land hunger meant that peasants were determined to seize land, whatever the Provisional Government might say; and they would do it by fair means or foul. Nataliya Kibita explores the revolution in Ukraine, considering how national and social revolution became entwined and led to contradictory outcomes. The national revolution failed, but the social revolution succeeded. Gero Fedtke considers the revolutionary events in Turkestan, which predated those in Russia. These saw the revolutionaries challenged by their chauvinistic colonial attitudes and uncertain how to engage with the indigenous Muslim community. The section on The Civil War represents even more of a compromise engineered by the editors. In many ways, the civil war is a subject in its own right, and yet it emerges directly from the revolution, and the new revolutionary state was not fully established until the civil war was over. Not to include the civil war in this handbook would mean stopping the story in December 1917, or even, arguably,

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

in April 1917 since it was during that month’s demonstrations that some Kadets and some Bolsheviks first took pot shots at each other. The editors’ solution to this dilemma was to ask Evan Mawdsley, whose study of the civil war has served as a benchmark for many years, to write an essay offering an overview of the fighting. With this context established, four essays follow. Murray Frame gives an account of the Red home front, and the steady centralization of power and militarization of society as the war progressed. Nikolaus Katzer looks at the White home front and the difficulties the Bolsheviks’ opponents faced in establishing unity and constructing a viable state: the result was a permanent sense of insecurity behind White lines. Geoffrey Swain then addresses the question of world revolution, for there were moments during the civil war when that Bolshevik dream came a little closer to reality. Finally, Charlotte Alston reflects on the state of the revolution by 1921, once the fighting was over and the Bolshevik state established. Translations were the work of the individual authors, with the following exceptions: Eve Rosenhaft translated the essay by Nikolaus Katzer, Dmitrii Ivanov that by Boris Kolonitskii and Diana Swain that by Nikolai Mikhailov. Work on the essays presented here was largely undertaken during the height of the Covid crisis, when universities had to adapt overnight to online teaching and research libraries were closed. I would like to thank the authors involved for staying the course and seeing the handbook through to completion.

PART ONE

Political Crises

8

CHAPTER ONE

Public organizations and the Duma crisis PETER WALDRON, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

When the Russian monarchy came to an end at the beginning of March 1917, Prince Georgii L’vov became the first prime minister of the new Provisional Government that took power in the wake of Nicholas II’s abdication. L’vov had been a member of the short-lived First Duma that was elected early in 1906, but he was not nominated for election to the Second Duma and played no further part in Russian parliamentary politics.1 Even though leading figures from the Fourth Duma that had sat right through the war years played a central role in pushing the Tsar towards renouncing the throne, it was L’vov who took the premiership in March 1917.2 His role during the First World War had been as chairman of the Zemstvo Union, the organization that brought together the elected councils from Russia’s provinces and districts founded with the aim of providing aid to Russia’s wounded troops. The revolution that dislodged Nicholas II also represented a failure for Russia’s Duma: it proved unable to capitalize on its position as the elected national parliamentary body and to establish itself as the successor to the Tsar. This chapter will discuss how the Duma became marginalized during the war years and analyse why the existing parliamentary institutions were unable to emerge as central players in the political crises that gripped Russia as the war developed. But parallel to the Duma’s failure to build on its position as Russia’s sole nationally elected legislative body, public organizations emerged as a social and political force during the war years. Russian local government  – the zemstvo and municipal dumas  – took advantage of the disarray of both central government and the Russian parliament to expand its influence and power, while elements of Russian private industry united to try to support the war effort through war-industries committees. The second focus of the chapter will be this increasing impact of autonomous organizations in a state which had traditionally placed very tight limits on the activity of groups that were independent of government. The failure of the Russian parliamentary system was mirrored by an expansion in the significance of organizations that drew their influence from a wider social sphere. Writing on Russia’s experience of the First World War has been shaped by the coming to power of the Bolsheviks less than nine months after the fall of the Tsar.

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

For the Soviet regime, the First World War and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty were merely an inevitable part of the march towards the socialist revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in October 1917. With rare exceptions,3 Soviet history gave the war years from 1914 only cursory treatment, instead tracing the roots of revolution back from October 1917 and focussing overwhelmingly on the elements in the Russian past that provided the Soviet regime with legitimacy. The Russian liberals who formed the core of the Provisional Government that came to power in March 1917 and who had played a crucial role in the public organizations that came to prominence during the war were consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’ and discussed merely as insubstantial obstacles on the way to the Bolshevik seizure of power. During the Cold War, Western historical writing too was shaped by the Soviet experience: access to archives in the Soviet Union was stringently controlled by the state and the focus of much Western writing too was on the Bolsheviks and the nature of their regime. Some scholars succeeded in transcending the conventional boundaries of writing on the history of early twentieth-century Russia,4 but it was only really with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Russia’s First World War began to receive proper scholarly attention. Russian historians were freed of the ideological constraints imposed by the Soviet regime and, with much greater access to archives, scholars from around the world were able to discuss the war years as a discrete set of events, rather than just as a prelude to the revolutions of 1917. The centenary of the outbreak of the war provided a powerful impetus to reassess Russia’s wartime experience, with the publication of major pieces of writing and collections of documents that have illuminated hitherto unexplored areas.5 The unevenness of historical writing on the war years presents challenges, with some areas of this very deeply textured period having received sustained scrutiny only since the 1990s, but the wealth of source materials now available provides scope for real historical enquiry.

THE DUMA DURING THE WAR At the start of November 1916, Russia’s Fourth Duma convened in Petrograd for its first sitting since late June. The Duma’s wartime sittings had been significantly truncated in comparison to its pre-war activity: during the first year of the war, it had sat for only four days and even the longer Duma session that began in the summer of 1915 contained only sixty sittings.6 For Russia’s government, the Duma presented a source of potential – and, indeed, real – opposition to its handling of the war and ministers wanted to minimize opportunities for parliament to express opinions that were critical of the Tsarist regime. But by autumn 1916 and after more than two years of war, with little sign that Russia’s fortunes were improving, many Duma members were in no mood to remain quiet. Sensing the mood, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, B. V. Sturmer, decided against making a speech at the opening of the new Duma session on 1 November,7 so that the sitting was dominated by a speech from the leader of the liberal Kadet party, Pavel Miliukov. Recognized as the most prominent of Russia’s liberal politicians, Miliukov delivered a devastating attack on the government. Listing a catalogue of accusations against

ORGANIZATIONS AND THE DUMA CRISIS

11

the government, Miliukov asked repeatedly if the cause of each of the regime’s failings was ‘stupidity or treason’? In particular, he drew unfavourable comparisons between the way in which the other allied powers had approached sustaining political and social support for the war and the deep divisions that had developed in Russia, divisions that Miliukov placed firmly at the door of the Tsarist government. ‘The government persists in claiming that organizing the country means organizing a revolution, and deliberately prefers chaos and disorganization’, he declared, before going on to attack Protopopov, the recently appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, for his part in the government’s work.8 Miliukov’s speech was greeted with huge and excited enthusiasm by the majority of Duma members: only the Right remained silent. His intention in accusing the government of acting treasonously was to again make the opposition’s case that they should play a full part in the war effort, but Miliukov’s barbs directed at Protopopov – who had previously been the Duma’s senior vice-president and a member of the moderate Octobrist party – had a different aim. Miliukov wanted to stress that it should be for the Duma opposition – the Progressive Bloc that had come into being in the summer of 1915 – to determine the nature of a new cabinet, rather than for the Tsarist regime to try to pick off individual Duma members and persuade them to hold government office.9 The anger obvious in Miliukov’s speech and the frustration that he displayed at Protopopov’s appointment were evidence of deeper problems besetting the Duma. The Duma had been recalled for just a single day at the start of the war in July 1914 to offer patriotic support and to vote for finance to support the war effort, and then did not meet again until the end of January 1915. That winter sitting lasted only three days, and the Duma continued to voice its support for the government, voting to approve the budget with even the potentially most vigorous critics of the regime – the Mensheviks and Trudoviks – abstaining rather than casting votes against funding for the war and thus appearing unpatriotic.10 The willingness of the Duma to offer such sustained support to the government changed significantly during the summer of 1915 as German armies swept eastwards, forcing Russia’s troops to retreat along a very wide front. The great industrial city of Riga came close to being taken by the Germans in August, with more than 2 million refugees leaving their homes in the western areas of the Russian empire by late 1915.11 It was evident that the government was failing to resist the German advance and that this lack of military success was having an impact on Russian society more widely.12 Moderate political and social opinion turned quickly against the government, with demands for changes in policy that would help improve Russia’s fortunes against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Central to these demands were calls for the Tsarist regime to include figures from liberal and moderate opinion in the government, and there were signs in the spring of 1915 that the Tsar and his advisers had taken some heed of these demands. Some of the most conservative ministers in the government were replaced with more moderate men: Vladimir Sukhomlinov, the long-serving minister of war, was removed and his place taken by General Aleksei Polivanov, a much more popular figure.13 Three further ministers followed Sukhomlinov into retirement in the following weeks, and the more liberal men who now occupied ministerial positions – with the agriculture minister A.V. Krivoshein

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at their head – had some confidence that they were making headway. The Duma was scheduled to be recalled in mid-July, and it appeared as if the scene was being prepared for a more united approach to the war effort.14 This expectation proved very quickly to be optimistic. When Duma members convened in Petrograd for its first sitting on July 19 the atmosphere was febrile, with the continuing German military advances placing pressure on the government. The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Ivan Goremykin, addressed the opening session of the Duma on July 19 and attempted to head off criticism of the conduct of the war by calling for political parties to unite behind the government to bring the war to a victorious conclusion.15 But Goremykin’s failure to make further moves towards the majority of the Duma parties merely accentuated Duma members’ overwhelming suspicion of the government and the government’s calls for unity fell on unreceptive ears. The Duma parties found themselves, however, in a quandary: they were in full support of Russia’s war effort, but the majority of members believed that the government was incapable of bringing the war to a successful conclusion and there were immediate calls from the Duma for a ‘responsible ministry’ – a government that was answerable to the Duma.16 An overwhelming majority of Duma members voted to have the outgoing war minister, Sukhomlinov, prosecuted for his part in the military calamity that had befallen Russia, with the moderate-right deputy, Ivan Polovtsov, accusing Sukhomlinov of being ‘a criminal who deceived everybody about our readiness for the terrible struggle’.17 Some Duma members recognized the danger that this confrontational approach posed to the Duma itself: Miliukov persuaded the Kadet party not to support the explicit call made by the Progressist party for a responsible ministry, instead voting for the Nationalists’ formula of ‘a ministry enjoying national confidence’.18 Russian politics was deeply unstable in the summer of 1915: within two weeks of the Duma reassembling there were rumours that it would rapidly be prorogued, while the more moderate government ministers, led by Krivoshein, were still attempting to find some common cause with the Duma.19 Duma politicians were divided between those who wanted to make an all-out assault on the government’s handling of the war and those who believed that this would be counter-productive and bring about the rapid dissolution of the Duma. By August 1915, with Warsaw falling to the Germans and shortages of armaments still plaguing Russia’s armies, a majority of Duma members formed the Progressive Bloc, demanding ‘the formation of a united government, composed of people who have the confidence of the country’ and an end to the distrust of public initiative that had led to disunity between different social classes and nationalities.20 Bringing together the Kadets, Progressists and leftleaning members of the moderate Octobrists, together with some of the Nationalist party, the Bloc succeeded in uniting close to 60 per cent of the Duma’s members. It put forward a programme of legislation that reflected the priorities that Russia’s liberals had pursued since the establishment of the Duma in the upheavals of 1905, but the government had no intention of calmly conceding to the Bloc’s demands. Goremykin met some of the moderate members of the Bloc to attempt to prise them away from the group, even while Krivoshein was continuing to encourage the Kadets in their pursuit of a change of government.21 The political situation was made more

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difficult by the Tsar who, faced with Russia’s continuing military defeat, decided to himself take on the role of Commander-in-Chief. The Council of Ministers was deeply opposed to Nicholas II’s decision and, in an unprecedented move, eight of its members wrote to the Tsar to try to dissuade him from taking this step.  The ministers emphasized the ‘direst consequences’ that would threaten Russian and the Romanov dynasty if the Tsar took direct control of Russia’s armies, but their appeal fell on stony ground.22 Nicholas’s decision gave a clear indication about the nature of Russia’s political landscape even as its armies were being driven back by the Germans: the Tsar retained the final say when fundamental decisions were being taken. His instincts, motivated by innate and intense conservatism together with a strong sense of duty, ensured that Nicholas would side with his aged – and equally conservative – prime minister, Goremykin, when the two discussed the position of the Duma with its newly formed Progressive Bloc. Writing to the Empress after meeting Goremykin at headquarters on August 30, the Tsar noted that ‘my will is now strong and my brain sounder than before my departure [from Petrograd]’ so that, instead of making any move towards meeting the demands made by the Progressive Bloc, the Duma was to be prorogued. The Duma session ended on September 2, leaving the Progressive Bloc without a forum where they could voice their opinions. The Tsar completed the demonstration of his authority by summoning the members of the Council of Ministers to a meeting at headquarters in Mogilev two weeks later, where he wrote to his wife that ‘I told them my opinion sternly to their faces’.23 Over the next few months, six of the ministers who had signed the letter to the Tsar were dismissed.

THE HERITAGE OF 1905 The attempt by the Duma in summer 1915 to advance its own position failed. Russia’s parliament had no means of imposing its opinions on the government, and the regime was easily able to prorogue the Duma and prevent it from meeting. While the introduction of an elected national parliament after the tumult of 1905 represented a major change to the way in which Russia was governed, the structure of the parliamentary system continued to give the Tsarist government a decisive say in the governance of the empire. The 1905 October manifesto that created the Duma appeared to establish it as a single parliamentary body that could exercise significant power but, as the Tsarist regime regained control of the empire in the spring of 1906, the Duma’s powers were significantly circumscribed. The existing consultative State Council was transformed into a second legislative chamber, with half its members appointed by the Tsar and half elected by interest and corporate groups such as the nobility, universities and business. Lastly, the Tsar was given the final say in the legislative process, so that all three elements – Duma, State Council and Tsar  – had to agree before a bill could become law. From the very start of Russia’s new constitutional arrangements, it was clear that the Duma was to play a subservient role in the politics of the empire after 1905. The State Council had been structured to ensure a permanent and substantial conservative majority, while Nicholas II himself was deeply suspicious of reform and wanted to preserve Russia’s autocratic regime intact.

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For those in the centre and on the left of Russian politics, the establishment of the Duma was to be only the beginning of a wider process of reform, and the first elections to the Duma in spring 1906 produced a substantial majority for the liberal left, with the Kadets and Trudoviki between them gaining close to 300 of the 497 seats in the Duma.24 When the Duma met at the end of April 1906, it was thus dominated by parties who wanted to use the new parliamentary system to bring about major change to the Russian empire. The Duma majority wanted to bring about fundamental land reform and to expand civil rights significantly, both areas where the government – also headed in 1906 by Goremykin – was absolutely opposed to making reform. The tensions between Duma and government proved to be so intense that the regime dissolved the Duma after little more than two months. New elections to a Second Duma produced a body that was equally radical and, even with a less intransigent prime minister in the newly appointed Petr Stolypin, government and Duma remained at odds with each other. The Second Duma lasted only four months before it too was dissolved. The government was so frustrated with the opinions advanced by the First and Second Dumas that, when it dissolved the Second Duma, its only solution to the problem was to unilaterally change the electoral law. This action served to damage relations with parties on the left and liberal wings even further, since it was unconstitutional as legislation now required the approval of the new parliamentary institutions. The new electoral law of 3 June 1907 achieved the government’s aim of ensuring a more pliant Duma, by reducing the representation given to the peasantry and enhancing the position of the provincial and essentially conservative nobility. When the Third Duma met in November 1907, the Kadets saw their representation halved and the radical Trudovik party’s 104 members in the Second Duma were reduced to a rump of only ten. The largest single party in the Third Duma was the moderate Octobrists: they comprised more than one-third of the Duma’s membership and this appeared to offer the promise of a more stable parliamentary system.25 While the Third Duma that met in November 1907 lasted its full five-year term, its influence proved to be limited. The parliamentary structure established after 1905 separated government and Duma, so that there was no governing party in the Duma and thus the government had little direct method of influencing debates. No party in the Duma was under any imperative to see a bill approved for, as there was no governing party, a party’s position did not depend on its ability to see a piece of legislation successfully through parliament. This gave political parties no stake in the success of the new legislature and allowed them to adopt attitudes that were highly critical of the government, with little fear that this would have repercussions for them. The political parties had no power to lose by opposing or delaying government bills, while the government had little leverage – other than dissolution – that it could exert over the Duma. Stolypin proposed a major series of reforms after he took office as prime minister in 1906 but, without any ability to propel his legislation through the Duma, it became bogged down and came to nothing.26 The institutional structures introduced in 1905 failed to meet the expectations of the Russian liberals who had pressed so hard for constitutional change: they quickly found themselves pushed to the margins of the legislative process and had no means

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of gaining real influence. The government had shown in 1906 how it was prepared to deal with opposition when, after the dissolution of the First Duma, many of the Kadet party deputies travelled the short distance to Vyborg in autonomous Finland to issue a manifesto calling for a campaign of civil disobedience to protest against the government’s decision. The government responded to the Vyborg manifesto with equal vigour, closing down Kadet clubs, dismissing party members from government service and prosecuting the signatories of the manifesto. This final move had severe consequences for the Kadet party, since the 230 accused were disqualified from standing from election to the Second Duma. When the case eventually came to court, 166 Kadets were found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment and were permanently prohibited from taking part in political activities.27 A decade later, the experience of the government’s reaction to the Vyborg manifesto still rankled with the Kadets. Relations between the Tsarist regime and the parties on the left of Russian politics had remained difficult through 1905 and its aftermath. Stolypin had attempted to take some steps to reduce tension, but the failure of his reform programme and his assassination in 1911 ended that opportunity. His replacement as prime minister, the colourless Vladimir Kokovtsov, did little to disturb the stalemate that existed between government and Duma and, even before the outbreak of war in 1914 and Russia’s military reverses, it was evident that the parliamentary structures introduced in 1905 were failing. Encouraged by its success in restoring authority across the empire after the rebellions of 1905, the Tsarist regime saw increasingly little need to engage constructively with the Duma and instead Nicholas II and his conservative ministers and advisers believed that they could return to their traditional autocratic model of ruling Russia.28 The political situation that Russia’s Duma parliamentarians faced when war broke out in 1914 was thus rooted in close to a decade of mutual mistrust and sometimes open opposition between Duma and government. The institutional structures that had come into existence at the end of 1905 had provided a constitutional framework that satisfied neither government nor Russia’s political parties: the revitalized autocracy saw the Duma as an irritant that needed to be neutralized. The effective coup d’état of June 1907 when the government changed the Duma electoral law to reduce the number of liberal and left deputies showed that it was the Tsarist regime that continued to hold the whip hand politically and that Russia’s new political parties had little means of influencing the overall direction of development. By 1914, the government believed that it had reduced the Duma to a sideshow in political terms: the regime continued to exercise power with few limitations on its authority. Russia’s political parties recognized the restricted framework within which the Duma operated, but there was little that they could do to enhance their power or that of the Duma as a whole. The gulf that existed between the Tsarist state and significant elements of Russian society was institutionalized in the Duma and, when war broke out in summer 1914, the government recalled the Duma for just a single day on 26 July. This extraordinary session was intended to demonstrate national unity and the day began with the Duma and State Council both hearing an address from the Tsar in the Winter Palace. The Duma was then addressed by a trio of ministers: Goremykin, Sazonov, the Minister

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of Foreign Affairs, and Bark, Minister of Finance and the Duma’s members then stood to hear its chairman, Mikhail Rodzianko, read the Tsar’s declaration of war. This was followed by loud cheering and, after calls by Duma deputies, the singing of the national anthem. A series of speeches from Duma deputies supporting the war effort were each greeted by applause and the session concluded with a unanimous vote in favour of approving the government’s proposals to raise funding for the war, along with two further spontaneous renditions of the national anthem.29 But, this apparent display of national unity by Duma and government was not enough to persuade the regime to allow the Duma to continue to meet normally. Confident in its ability to successfully wage war, the regime saw no need to cultivate relations with the Duma: its members were despatched home and the Duma did not meet again for six months.

THE ZEMSTVO AND MUNICIPAL COUNCILS The war with Germany and Austria-Hungary did not, however, turn out to be the immediate triumph that the Tsarist regime expected. Russia’s armies were overwhelmed by Germany in East Prussia in August and September 1914, crashing to catastrophic defeats at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. The commander of Russian troops at Tannenberg, General Alexander Samsonov, committed suicide when faced with the scale of the defeat. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed and wounded, and it very quickly became obvious that Russian military planning had failed to anticipate how to deal with such large numbers of casualties. The head of the General Staff’s evacuation section wrote that The institutions of the internal evacuation organizations are however, completely unprepared to receive and accommodate casualties: distribution and regional evacuation points have not been set up; hospitals have not been organized; medical and other staff have not been selected and assigned to appropriate locations; the war ministry does not have proper hospitals for the long-term care of the wounded and the mobilization plans include no provision to establish or staff such institutions.30 In these circumstances, with trains full of wounded men arriving each day at Moscow’s railway stations and the evident inability of the government to act, Russian local government took the initiative in providing proper care for casualties. The relationship between central and local government in the Russian empire had been difficult since elected local bodies had been first introduced as part of Alexander II’s reforms in the 1860s and 1870s. The Tsarist regime was determined to circumscribe the power of the zemstvo  – elected local councils established in 1864 in Russia’s provinces and districts  – and of the municipal councils set up in 1870 to ensure that they remained local bodies, without any role in national government.31 For the St Petersburg regime, local government performed useful and vital functions in areas such as education, health and the provision and maintenance of local infrastructure, and each of Russia’s last three Tsars was deeply resistant to local government evolving into any form of national organization. This stance

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became increasingly difficult to defend over the decades as local government became more deeply embedded in the fabric of Russia, and zemstvo and municipal council members increasingly made the case for some form of elected national assembly. The campaigns during 1904 and 1905 for national popular representation had zemstvo and municipal council members at their heart and, during the Russo-Japanese war, the zemstvo had been instrumental in providing assistance to Russia’s armies and their wounded.32 Russian local government was thus eager and ready to play a part in the work of assisting the wounded in the first months of the war in 1914 and, given the unpreparedness of the government itself, the regime had no choice but to accept the help offered by local government institutions. The zemstvo and municipal councils lost no time in establishing national organizations to coordinate their help for the wounded. The All-Russian Zemstvo Union was established on 30 July 1914, with municipal councils setting up the Union of Towns at a meeting in Moscow of representatives from forty-four councils on August 8 and 9. The chairman of the Moscow city council, Viktor Brianskii, gave a speech in which he committed Russia’s towns and cities to the struggle against Germany and Austria-Hungary, declaring that Russia is living through a moment of great historical significance, requiring the full exercise of all our strength. A centuries-old quarrel is being resolved, the question of the superiority of the Slavs or the Teutons, and this issue must be settled once and for all. Victory must be total and the Slavs must be victorious, since only they are able to bring Europe permanent and durable peace.33 The intention of both the zemstvo and the city councils in the summer of 1914 was to offer urgent assistance to the army in dealing with the wave of casualties that Russia’s armies were experiencing and the full title of the new national zemstvo organization  – The All-Russian Zemstvo Union for Aid to Sick and Wounded Soldiers  – reflected this. In the first months of the war, these new organizations concentrated on establishing an infrastructure that could relieve the pressure on the military by transporting the wounded away from the frontline and setting up hospitals where soldiers could be treated. The two unions equipped hospital trains, established – often makeshift – hospitals in Russia’s towns and cities and recruited medical and nursing staff to work in them.34 Faced with a situation that the Russian military could not cope with on their own, the government had no option but to acquiesce in the extensive work in support of Russia’s troops that local government took on itself in the summer and autumn of 1914. This extended to providing very significant funding for the local government organizations and facilitating their work in general. There was considerable reluctance among the government to allow the zemstvo and municipal councils to play such a significant role on the national stage: in September 1914, the Union of Towns requested permission to hold a national congress and the Ministry of Internal Affairs grudgingly agreed, while stipulating that a congress must restrict itself to discussing matters within its direct area of competence and that it must not stray into other topics, including the wider issues of aid to soldiers’ families.35 The government was also deeply concerned about the apparent financial independence of the two unions, recognizing that the

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very considerable resources being allocated by the regime to the two unions could provide them with an opportunity to extend their influence beyond their stated aim of providing aid to the wounded. An attempt to place the unions’ finances under the direct control of the State Comptroller was rejected by the Council of Ministers in November 1914, allowing the two unions to operate with a very significant degree of autonomy right through the war years.36 The zemstvo and municipal councils were able to gain such substantial authority so rapidly because they played a vital, national humanitarian role. The failure of the government itself to provide proper care for Russia’s wounded meant that the unions’ willingness to step in and help the Russian war effort gave them immediate and significant credibility. Within ten days of the formation of the Zemstvo Union, its chairman Prince L’vov met Nicholas II and the Tsar expressed his gratitude for the work that the zemstvo was undertaking, following this with a personal visit to zemstvo warehouses in Moscow.37 In March 1915 L’vov again met the Tsar, this time discussing the readiness of the zemstvo to deal with the threat of outbreaks of infectious diseases.38 Nicholas II was prepared to offer his approval for the work of the two local government organization as they demonstrated their patriotic commitment to Russia’s war effort and, by the end of 1914, the government had become dependent on these public organizations to provide care for the wounded. But the disorganization of Russia’s military, together with the unions’ desire to extend their influence, enabled the two organizations to expand their activity significantly. L’vov wrote in January 1915 that ‘the zemstvo union, initially intending to restrict its activity to the evacuation [of troops] has, by force of necessity, been drawn in to a whole range of measures, closely associated with military activity right at the front’,39 but this was only part of the story. The experience that local government organizations had gained in the decades since their establishment nearly half a century earlier had provided the zemstvo and municipal councils with the expertise to provide a very wide range of services to the population and, in the disorganized situation of an unsuccessful war, the two unions perceived an opportunity to expand their influence at the expense of central government. By early 1915, the unions had taken on a very wide range of work that brought them into contact with the population as a whole. They sourced and distributed clothing to the wounded and – more significantly – to serving troops and provided financial and other assistance to soldiers’ families. In areas close to the front line the unions took on the role of providing basic services to Russia’s armies: they established bathing stations, barber shops and boot-repair shops for the soldiers, organized field post offices, set idle sawmills to work to provide timber for trenches, inoculated troops against cholera and typhoid, organized workshops to repair harnesses and rifles and provided gasmasks for Russia’s soldiers. In the summer of 1915, the unions opened retail shops to supply soldiers with goods at reasonable prices. They also extended their work to interact with the civilian population of the areas where they were stationed and provided assistance to refugees who had fled from the frontline areas of western Russia.40 The presence of medical staff in an area meant that the local population gravitated towards them for treatment: zemstvo field detachments quickly offered medical services to the population. Dental work

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was an important part of their efforts, as was the treatment of infectious diseases, motivated partly by a need to try to prevent them from reaching Russia’s troops. But the field detachments found that they could not confine themselves to medical work: food was often in short supply in areas close to the front line and field detachments found that hungry local people would queue in the hope of being fed. Organizing large-scale soup kitchens became an important part of their work. They also played a part in maintaining public health by ensuring that wells were clean and repairing water supply systems.41 The weakness of Russia’s central government, together with the experience and enthusiasm of the local government organizations, allowed the two unions to come into contact with many millions of ordinary Russians and to enhance their reputation among the population as a whole.

WAR INDUSTRIES COMMITTEE Local government was not the only part of Russian society that offered its help to the state as it became clear that the war effort was faltering. Russian industry too embraced the patriotic mood that characterized Russian society at the start of the war, with the journal of the Association of Trade and Industry proclaiming in September 1914 that ‘it is impossible to doubt for one minute that Russia will cope with this war and all its difficult economic consequences more easily than any other nation’.42 But it quickly became clear that Russia’s armies were suffering from a severe shortage of armaments, especially artillery shells. Russia was unable to itself produce sufficient shells and other armaments, while imports from abroad were difficult to obtain. Bernard Pares, Britain’s official observer to the Russian army during the war and a prominent supporter of Russia, noted in May 1915 that Russia could only win ‘if it can be given anything like fair conditions; in a word, the Germans should be met on their own ground, that of heavy and more numerous artillery’.43 Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaveich, the commander of Russia’s armies, wrote to Krivoshein at the beginning of August that ‘the reason for these [military] failures is not … people but the lack of shells, rifles, cartridges’.44 This was a convenient excuse for the Russian high command to deploy, since it had some truth to it, but more importantly it diverted attention away from more fundamental failings that could be laid at the door of Russia’s military leadership.45 This shortage of equipment, however, gave Russia’s industrialists the opportunity to try to exert influence over the government. In May 1915, the regime conceded the establishment of a Special Council, initially to discuss military supply, that would include some representatives of Russia’s defence industries.46 By late August, as the situation at the front had failed to improve, the remit of this body was widened to deal with the war as a whole and its members were drawn from the State Council and the Duma, as well as including the chairmen of both the Zemstvo Union and the Union of Towns. At the same time as the Special Council was being formed, the Association of Trade and Industry’s congress in May 1915 gave birth to a War-Industries Committee to ‘organise the untapped power of Russian industry to meet the needs of the state’s defence’.47 The driving force behind the establishment of the committee was one of the most prominent Moscow businessmen, P. P. Riabushinksii, and the committee, along with its subsidiary local

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bodies in Russia’s towns and provinces, was intended to transform the procurement of material for the war effort by efficiently co-ordinating Russian industry.48 The genesis of the war-industries committee – and its local subsidiaries stemmed – from the same phenomenon as the local government unions: the failure of the Tsarist state to organize the national war effort effectively. But the war-industries committee did not encounter such an easy environment in which to operate as the zemstvo and municipal councils had done: central government was even more suspicious of its activities than it had been of the local government unions at their inception a year earlier. The war ministry feared that the war-industries committee was assuming the role of an autonomous ministry of munitions and that it was taking ‘an extremely liberal understanding of its rights and obligations’.49 When Alexander Guchkov, the chairman of the war-industries committee and a former chairman of the Duma, wrote to Goremykin early in August 1915 giving the committee’s view that there needed to be a change in course by the government, Goremykin noted to the Council of Ministers that ‘the letter, both in substance and tone, is so impolite that I have no intention of answering’. The Minister of Communications, Rukhlov, commented that ‘Guchkov is turning his committee into some kind of second government’ and the ministers recognized that the war-industries committee was attracting a group of adherents who had not been involved with the local government unions during the previous year.50 The war-industries committee also faced problems in dealing with some of Russia’s biggest suppliers of equipment to the military. Businesses such as the huge Putilov works in Petrograd, which produced artillery and other supplies, had long-standing relationships with the war ministry and the government and resented the intrusion of the war-industries committee into their established business practices. The committee was dominated by Moscow industrialists and this further distanced it from Petrograd-based businesses, a rift that was deepened by the inclusion of workers’ groups representatives on the committee.51 While the committee had some success in acting as a conduit between the war ministry and Russian industry  – generating some 400m roubles of orders by February 1917  – it did not dominate the military procurement landscape and the aspiration of the February 1916 war-industries committee’s congress to ‘obtain more and more orders’ was doomed to failure.52

MOVING TO OPPOSITION While the two local government unions and the war-industries committee had differing levels of success in making their influence felt across Russian society, they both experienced deep frustration when dealing with the Tsarist government. For the Zemstvo Union and the Union of Towns, it was the incompetence of the Russian state that had been exposed by the crisis of wartime and the increasing role that the two unions took on in providing services both to the military and to the wider Russian population that deepened their suspicion of the government’s competence. The war-industries committee found itself stymied in its attempts to play a commanding role in the processes of supplying Russia’s armies, with the government proving able to circumscribe the committee’s activities and prevent it

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from acquiring such extensive influence as the local government unions. But, despite the two different experiences of these public organizations, by autumn 1915 they were both moving in the same direction in their attitude to the Tsarist regime. The failure of the Duma and the Progressive Bloc to make any headway in their efforts to persuade the government to change course in the summer of 1915, together with the decision of the Tsar to take personal command of Russia’s armies, helped to push public organizations towards taking a more explicitly political stance in the autumn of 1915. The two local government unions both held congresses in early September and Nikolai Astrov, one of the more radical members of the executive committee of Union of Towns, gave a speech in which he declared that ‘the authorities are irresponsible and they fear both the country and the people’. Astrov called openly for the departure of members of a failed government and their replacement by people who could be trusted. The union’s chairman, Mikhail Chelnokov, noted that the poor situation at the front and events more widely in the country showed that the Union of Towns could no longer restrict itself solely to carrying out the specific task for which it had been established but, as citizens of Russia, its members must take a close interest in the internal and external situation of the country.53 The Zemstvo Union, meeting at the same time, resolved to seek an audience with the Tsar and to present him with an address setting out its concerns about the progress of the war and the wider issues that this raised. The address marked a significant change in the attitude of the union to the government: while the Zemstvo Union continued to stress the need for unity across Russia to deal successfully with a well-prepared enemy, it now criticized the government directly, arguing that the state had failed in its most important duty, so that the supply of material to the army and the weak organization in the rear meant that the Russian population was now paying the price for the government’s incompetence in heavy losses. The address, drafted by Prince L’vov, called for the Tsar ‘to demonstrate the greatness of the supreme power in unity with the spirit of the people’ and to restore the spiritual unity of the state that had been destroyed by the government. The Zemstvo Union called for the formation of a government that had the confidence of the Duma and was prepared to act in agreement with Russia’s parliament. L’vov requested that the Tsar meet a delegation from the Zemstvo Union to hear its views, but Nicholas II rejected the request out of hand. At a meeting with Nikolai Shcherbatov, the Minister of Internal Affairs, on 20 September 1915 the minister noted that while the Tsar appreciated the work of the two unions, he was not prepared to meet them to discuss questions that fell outside their competence. Nicholas considered that political matters should be dealt with by the government and that a meeting with Shcherbatov should suffice: the unions asked that the minister pass their written address directly to the Tsar, but Shcherbatov refused.54 The minister offered to report the union’s views to Nicholas orally: two days after the minister had met the Tsar to report he was dismissed. The regime now viewed public organizations as part of the political opposition but it could not dissolve them, given the irreplaceable work that they were carrying out in support of the war effort. The Russian state had not acquired the ability to supplant the tasks that the unions were carrying out, but it did try to prevent the public organizations from further extending their influence. After September

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1915, the government attempted to place obstacles in the way of the unions holding national congresses: in November the commander of the Moscow military district, General Mrozovskii, informed L’vov that he considered it would be inappropriate for the two unions to hold simultaneous congresses, eventually prohibiting the meetings under the terms of the martial law that governed Moscow.55 In the following month, the government attempted to gain more control over the financial affairs of the unions by requiring provincial governors to provide details of all funds the unions had received for a full audit, with the intention that audits would then be conducted every six months.56 The government allowed both unions and the war-industries committee to hold national meetings in February and March 1916, but placed them under close surveillance by the secret police. The police reported that each of the meetings had an explicitly political character and that the prevailing mood among delegates was that the current government had led Russia towards disaster and that the only means by which the situation could be saved was through the unity of popular forces. The aim of the public organizations in spring 1916, the police reported, was to establish strong national organizations across Russian society that could act to bring about political change and it noted that pressure to set up a national body to organize food supply was growing.57 The government also wanted to acquire evidence that could be used to discredit the work of public organizations. Its agents reported that, while there was much activity by local branches of the Zemstvo Union and Unions of Towns, much of it was disorganized and the huge expenditure that was being incurred produced very limited outcomes. Alongside portraying the unions as incompetent, the police also sought to tap into the widespread current of anti-Semitism by suggesting that they were dominated by Jews.58 For much of 1916, there was a stalemate in relations between public organizations and the government: without the ability to make any headway against the regime, murky discussions and plots aimed at destabilizing the regime occupied the minds of some elements of the Russian political classes.59 The skirmishing between the Tsarist regime and public organizations reached its climax at the end of 1916 when, after the government had prohibited national congresses of the two unions, members nevertheless attempted to gather in Moscow in early December. Delegates and police played cat-and-mouse with each other, as members of the unions attempted to find suitable premises to hold a meeting, only to find that the police blocked them from entering a succession of buildings in central Moscow. Eventually, it was agreed that the unions could hold a dinner at a Moscow restaurant, but on condition that there were no speeches and no resolutions passed.60 The relationship between public organizations and the government had reached an impasse. The structures of Russian politics that had been established in the wake of 1905 failed during the war years. The Duma had no means by which it could assert its own authority and its members could only fulminate in impotent rage as the Tsarist regime curtailed its sessions and ignored its demands for political change. But the web of Russian societal structures had developed sufficiently by 1914 so that, when war broke out, there were public organizations able to step forward and immediately supplant the state in providing assistance to Russia’s armies. The Zemstvo Union and Union of Towns became increasingly frustrated with the government’s conduct of

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the war during 1915 but they too were unable to make any political headway against the deeply stubborn Tsarist regime. The unions, together with the war-industries committee, had, however, acquired substantial autonomous authority by autumn 1915 and had become indispensable elements of Russia’s war effort. Millions of Russia’s troops had come into contact with the unions and their activity was visible in towns and cities across much of the empire. When the public organizations turned against the government in autumn 1915, they had as little success as the Duma in forcing direct political change. But the unions were founded on a broader social base and, while the Duma’s role shrank during the war, public organizations were able to extend their activities and influence. The regime was dependent on the unions to sustain the war effort and, despite its efforts to constrain them, the unions continued their work uninterrupted. The Duma’s reputation had been tarnished by its inability to influence the conduct of the war and, even though it was Duma politicians who played a leading part in deposing the Tsar when revolution broke out in February 1917, it should be no surprise that the leadership of the new Provisional Government fell, not to a Russian parliamentarian, but instead to the chairman of the Zemstvo Union, Prince L’vov.61

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CHAPTER TWO

The February Revolution: Above and below TSUYOSHI HASEGAWA, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Historiography of the Russian Revolution has privileged the October Revolution, downplaying the February Revolution merely as a prelude to October. But the February Revolution deserves to be examined independently and more closely than historians have hitherto treated.1 The nine days from 23 February through 3 March 1917 shook the world more than the ten days in October. It was a genuine revolution that put an end to the monarchy and ushered Russia into a liberal democracy. The examination of the revolutionary process reveals the nature of tsarist autocracy in microcosmic clarity as well as the fragility of the new revolutionary power that emerged from the revolution, and raises a question of whether the structure that existed in the tsarist regime or contingencies injected by human agencies determined the outcome.2 The February Revolution was the combination of two revolts: the revolt of masses of workers and soldiers/sailors against the regime and the revolt of the liberal elite against tsarist autocracy. The revolt of the masses provided the general framework. But the insurrection of the masses from below did not lead straight to the establishment of a revolutionary power above. There emerged during the insurrection two groups of leaders, first, leaders associated with various socialist parties, and second, liberals in the State Duma, who shared little social and political common ground with the insurgents. In response to the insurrection of the masses from below, two groups of leaders created their own organizations: the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the Temporary Committee of the State Duma [hereafter the Duma Committee]. The actions of the masses below triggered the actions of the leaders above, which turned the insurrection into a genuine revolution. In order for the revolution to be successful the leaders above had to fulfil a number of tasks. They had to provide some organizational coherence in the disorganized masses of insurgents and to steer them into revolutionary actions. They had to overcome the resistance of the police, capture strategic points and take over the

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government institutions. In addition, they had to prevent the counter-revolutionary forces sent from the front from reaching the capital, and force the tsar and the High Command to accept a revolutionary power. In fulfilling these tasks, socialist leaders and the Duma liberals acted mostly in cooperation. But the power they wielded was unequal. It was the Duma Committee that acted as a virtual revolutionary power in the capital during the crucial days from 27 February through 3 March, fulfilling these tasks listed above. The Petrograd Soviet played only a secondary role in these tasks. The strength of the Petrograd Soviet stemmed only from the overwhelming support that it received from the insurgent masses. The liberals, though acting as revolutionaries against the old regime, were unable to bridge the yawning gap that separated them from the insurgent masses, and their attempt to secure their unconditional support through the Petrograd Soviet’s endorsement failed. Dual power resulted from this process.

REVOLUTION FROM BELOW Workers’ strikes and demonstrations: Spontaneity and consciousness The workers’ strike movement that was triggered by the women textile workers’ demand for ‘bread’ on 23 February 1917 quickly widened, spreading from the Vyborg District to other parts of Petrograd on 24 February, and developed into a city-wide general strike on 25 February. A series of demonstrations were staged on the capital’s main thorough-fare Nevsky Prospect, with the slogans of not only ‘Bread’, but also ‘Down with the War’, and ‘Down with Autocracy’. On 25 February, Tsar Nicholas II ordered Lieutenant-General S. S. Khabalov, Commander of the Petrograd Military District, to quell the disturbances by the next day. The troops deployed at the strategic positions on Nevsky Prospect fired on the crowds on 26  February, but this shooting incidents set off a soldiers’ revolts on the early morning of 27 February, which quickly spread to other military units in the capital by afternoon.3 One of the issues that historians have debated is the question of spontaneity versus consciousness. Were the workers’ strike movement led by conscious activists who wanted the movement to develop into a revolution against the regime? Or were they leaderless movements spontaneously erupting from the nameless masses of the working class? The long-held Soviet orthodox view during the Soviet period that the Bolshevik party, guided by Lenin’s theory, played the leading role in the February Revolution has made the enquiry of these questions difficult. Since E.N. Burdzhalov challenged this dogmatic interpretation in 1956, it has been the consensus among serious historians both in the Soviet Union/Russia and outside that there was a loose coalition of left-wing revolutionary party activists – Bolsheviks, left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries, Mezhraiontsy (Interdistrictites) and Menshevik Internationalists.4 It is important also to emphasize the role of the moderate socialists under the influence of the Workers’ Group of the Central War Industries Committee in radicalization of the working class.5

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Another important aspect to which not many historians have paid sufficient attention was A. F. Kerensky’s role. It is known that during the February strikes, Kerensky was the main organizer who established a loose network of socialist organizations. Kerensky’s speeches in the Duma were incendiary, designed to achieve two goals: to encourage the workers to continue the strike movement against the government and to appeal to his liberal colleagues in the Duma to support the strike movement. He also utilized his Masonic ties to establish a network of political leaders connecting the socialists and the liberals. Even before the revolution began on 23 February, Kerensky was recognized by a wide segment of the workers as well as his Duma colleagues as the leader who could unite the workers with the liberals.6 If social historians who exerted important influence on this issue in the 1970s–80s, emphasizing the role of politically conscious activists in organizing the strikes and demonstrations, post-Soviet historians in Russian swing back the pendulum, emphasizing that spontaneous violence accompanied the strikes and demonstrations. Pillaging, looting, and stopping and vandalizing street cars were accompanied by the strikes and demonstrations. Boris Kolonitskii, for instance, considers them as anti-social criminal acts.7 After 27 February, soldiers’ insurrection, combined by the release of criminals from all the city’s prisons, incidence of violence suddenly skyrocketed. These actions might be better understood as the prelude to the breakdown of social order that proceeded with frightening speed after the February Revolution.8

Soldiers’ revolts: Actions and causes The shooting incidents on 26 February led to the abortive coup of the Pavlovskii regiment on the night of 26 February. Although this attempt was suppressed, the Volynskii regiment, led by Sergeant T. Kirpichnikov, revolted on the morning of 27 February. The revolt quickly spread to the nearby barracks of the Lithuanian Regiment, the Preobrazhenskii Regiment and the 6th Sapper Battalion. Insurgent soldiers moved to the Vyborg District, mingled with the workers who continued the strike and demonstration. One group attacked the Kresty Prison, and another group moved to the Moscow Regiment and the Bicycle Battalion north of the Vyborg District. Another group moved to the centre crossing the Liteinyi Bridge. It is difficult to say how many insurgents composed each group. It is known that a contingent of insurgent soldiers including Kirpichnikov were involved in the attack on the Moscow Regiment, but it appears that only a few soldiers joined the attack on the Kresty Prison. On the other side of the bridge, they raided the Main Artillery Administration, released prisoners from House of Preliminary Detention Prison, set fire on the Circuit Court, and moved towards the Tauride Palace, the seat of the Duma. By 3 pm, the Moscow Regiment capitulated to the rebels, but the resistance of the Bicycle Battalion continued.9 On the Petrograd Side, the soldiers of the Armoured Car Division joined the revolt, while the Grenadier Regiment maintained neutrality. On Vasilievskii Island, the Finland Regiment did not join the revolt until the next day. But in the southern part of the city, the Semenovskii Regiment and one group of soldiers of

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the Izmailovskii Regiment joined the revolt only in the evening. Not all the soldiers voluntarily deserted their barracks, but they were removed by force under attack from the insurgents, who did not hesitate to use machine guns and armoured cars. It is estimated that the participants in the soldiers’ insurrection rose from 10,200 in the morning to 25,700 in the afternoon, and to 66,700 by the evening on 27 February. It further grew on 28 February, in the morning to 72,700, by the afternoon to 112,000, and by the evening, 127,000. By the afternoon of 1 March, almost the entire garrison, 170,000 soldiers, joined the insurrection.10 On the evening of 27 February, the government had under its control seven companies of the guard regiments, one company of the rifle regiment, one company of the machine gun regiment, altogether 1,500 to 2,000 soldiers. Considering the disorganization and lack of discipline of the insurgent soldiers, the strength of loyal troops should not be underestimated. The quickness with which the revolts spread revealed partly the ineptitude of the security authorities.11 The soldiers’ revolt on 27 February was the decisive turning point of the February Revolution. The major actor in the insurrection shifted from the workers to the soldiers at that moment. Without the soldiers’ uprising, it was unlikely that the strike movement alone would have led to a crisis that threatened the existence of the regime. Why did the soldiers revolt? The immediate cause was the soldiers’ refusal to obey the order to fire upon the demonstrators whose demands they sympathized with. Two and half years of war changed not only the composition of the soldiers, but also their psychology. Rasputin’s scandals with the empress, and false rumours of treason at the imperial court and the government had instilled anti-government sentiments among the soldiers. Most important was their deep-seated resentment against the brutal and inhuman ways that military discipline was enforced by officers.12 As Colonel B.A. Engel’gardt, head of the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, observed, ‘Not united in discipline under commanding personnel, they were more reserves of flammable material than a prop of the regime.’13 The details of behaviours and actions of insurgent soldiers after they revolted and left the barracks are obscure. Did they maintain a degree of coherence as military units, or did they disintegrate and mingle with the workers? Did they coordinate actions with the workers or did they take independent actions? The initial contingent of the insurgent soldiers crossed the Liteinyi Bridge to join the workers in the Vyborg District, clearly to seek protection from the workers. Kirpichnikov noted, however, that only two hundred soldiers out of the many he had led to revolt reached the Vyborg District. Where did the rest go? We have no record indicating what happened with the rest of the soldiers. It is likely that they formed unorganized groups rather than individually disappeared in the sea of crowds. According to SR activist I. I. Mil’chik, ‘There was no excitement among the soldiers, they were frightened and depressed.’ According to a Bolshevik worker S. Skalov: ‘On the faces of the rebels, despair and fear of impending reprisals were visible … They powerlessly marked time. Their mood was extremely gloomy and depressing.’14 The most crucial moment for the soldiers’ revolt came around 2 pm on 27 February when two socialist deputies, Kerensky and M. I. Skobelev, opened the

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gate and invited a crowd of insurgents inside the Tauride Palace. At this moment, the insurgent soldiers roaming the streets found the destination and the authority that legitimized their actions against military discipline and the oath of allegiance.15 Around 2 pm the moderate socialists, who gathered in the Tauride Palace, appealed to the insurgents to elect their representatives to the initial meeting of the Petrograd Soviet. The soldiers were instructed to elect one representative from each company. Little is known about how and when the deputies were elected from the military units. Elections must have taken place in the Tauride Palace and in the barracks. It was not until the morning of 1 March that the soldiers’ deputies attended the Soviet plenary session. Historians identify the party affiliations of the speakers who spoke at the Soviet plenary sessions. But judging from their views expressed at the meeting, they were more united against the repressive military regimentation enforced by officers than sectarian differences over political issues. The debate at the Soviet session revealed that they were articulate in presenting their opinions, either having higher education or from working-class background. No one who spoke came from the peasants in the countryside.16 The Military Commission of the Duma Committee issued on 28 February, in Duma Chairman M. V. Rodzianko’s name, an order to the soldiers to return to the barracks and submit to discipline under the direction of officers.17 This elicited anger and fears among the insurgent soldiers. The discussion at this plenary session on 1 March revealed the sentiments and concerns of the insurgent soldiers. They took Rodzianko’s order to be the intention of the Duma Committee to make them return to the barracks, disarm them, and restore order and discipline under the supervision of the officers. They quickly resolved not to surrender weapons. The bulk of the discussions centred around the relationship between soldiers and officers. Past grievances poured out in the debate. They denounced the practice of officers treating soldiers as landlords treated serfs by addressing them in demeaning terms and using them for personal and household chores. They demanded that they be treated with human dignity. It should be noted that despite their anger they accepted the need for discipline and for the existence of officers, but they made it clear that the officers who did not support the revolution should be expelled. They had revolted in violation of the oath of allegiance, and they feared that they would be punished by the officers, when they returned to the barracks as Rodzianko’s order instructed them. Notably, only few expressed anti-war opinions. They assigned ten deputies to draft their demands in the form of a military order. This draft was presented to the Military Commission of the Duma Committee. Met with its rejection, they brought it to the Petrograd Soviet. The demand was issued as Order Number 1 by the Petrograd Soviet.18 Order Number 1 stipulated that the soldiers pledged their allegiance to the Petrograd Soviet, and support the Duma Committee only as long as its decisions were not contradictory to the policies of the Petrograd Soviet. This was a fatal blow to the legitimacy of the Provisional Government, which failed to gain the fullfledged support of the insurgent masses. The fragile foundation of the Provisional Government, characterized by ‘dual power’, originated from the soldiers’ demand.19 Furthermore, Order Number 1 encouraged the soldiers to establish soldiers’

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committees in each company, battalion and regiment. Soldiers’ committees and the committee members [komitetki] were to play a crucial role not only to military matters but also political issues in the subsequent development of the Russian Revolution.20

REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE The Petrograd Soviet and the Duma Committee The soldiers’ revolt jolted the Duma liberals to create the Duma Committee, which, from its inception, clearly sided with the insurgents against the government. As soon as the Duma deputies learned of the soldiers’ revolt on the morning of 27 February, they gathered in the Tauride Palace. Although they accepted the imperial decree of prorogation, they adopted the resolution that the deputies should not disperse, thus taking the first step to defy the decree of prorogation. At the unofficial meeting that began at 2 pm, the Duma deputies decided to create the Duma Committee, and finally at 11 pm Rodzianko, as the head of the Duma Committee, decided to take power.21 That the Duma would take the side of the insurgents against the government was clear from the moment that the Duma deputies learned of the soldiers’ revolt. Rodzianko rejected War Minister General M. A. Beliaev’s request to put down the revolt jointly with the government, and strictly forbade the palace guard to use weapons against the insurgents.22 Kerensky created his own headquarters to organize the military units, and began issuing orders to seize strategic positions inside and outside of the Tauride Palace, and to arrest tsarist ministers and officials. Kerensky’s headquarters evolved into the Military Commission created by the Duma Committee.23 Around 2 pm, moderate socialists, who gathered in the Tauride Palace, created a Temporary Committee for the Petrograd Soviet. Around 3 pm the temporary committee issued an appeal to the workers and the soldiers to elect their own deputies to form the Petrograd Soviet. The first session of the Petrograd Soviet began around 9 pm.24 Thus, by the end of February 27, two centres of power were created in the Tauride Palace, but in terms of power and influence, these two bodies were unequal. The Military Commission created by the Petrograd Soviet was taken over by the Duma Committee’s Military Commission, and it was the Duma Committee’s Military Commission that took a series of revolutionary actions, including capturing strategic positions such as railway stations, communication centre, the State Bank, and arresting tsarist ministers and officials.25 The food supply commission was first established by the Petrograd Soviet, but it soon merged with the Duma Committee’s Food Supply Commissions. The joint Food Supply Commission collaborated to feed the insurgents by creating food supply depots, but the central role for this task was performed by the Duma Committee, which provided the means of transporting food and the network of voluntary workers to

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serve at the food supply depots.26 Militia organizations were created to prevent the spread of crime and lawlessness, but with the exception of the workers’ quarters where the workers created the workers’ militia, the Duma Committee and the City Duma played a central role.27 It was also the Duma Committee that seized and controlled the government ministries by dispatching its commissars protected by armed detachments under its control.28 Especially important was the takeover of the Ministry of Transport, led by A. A.  Bublikov, a Progressive Party deputy of the Duma. It was Bublikov who announced in the name of Rodzianko to the entire nation that the Duma Committee had taken power. The Duma Committee’s takeover of the Ministry of Transport meant that the Duma Committee controlled the railway movement, including the imperial trains, a crucial factor that led to Nicholas’s abdication.29 Compared with the Duma Committee, the Petrograd Soviet possessed little power. Despite the radical socialists’ demand to create the Soviet as a revolutionary power,  the leaders who occupied the important positions in the Executive Committee – N. N. Sukhanov, N. D. Sokolov and Iu. M. Steklov – had no intention to take power; in fact, they feared that insurgent masses would push them to establish the Petrograd Soviet as a revolutionary power. It was not only because of their Marxist notion that the bourgeoisie should take power in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, but the lack of confidence in the success of the revolution and the fear of its suppression that they were anxious to see the liberal elite take power.30 Steklov’s speech at the First All-Russian Conference of the Soviets on 30 March vividly illustrates this point. To the question of why the Petrograd Soviet did not take power, Steklov answered: ‘The first reason is that … it was quite uncertain whether the revolution would triumph, not only in the form of revolutionary democracy but even in a moderate bourgeois form.’ He explained: ‘We thought that this weak group who surrounded the palace would be crushed. Every moment we expected that they would come and arrest us, if not shoot us.’31 This fear was the reason why the Executive Committee leaders took the initiative to negotiate with the Duma liberals for the conditions that the Petrograd Soviet would demand for their support of the Provisional Government. They were quite willing to give it a full-fledged support. Therefore, their demand was quite mild, totally acceptable to the Provisional Government. But the insurgent soldiers, who distrusted the Duma leaders, pledged their support to the Petrograd Soviet rather than the Provisional Government, derailing their intention. Under their pressure, the Petrograd Soviet leaders had to agree with only the conditional support of the Petrograd Soviet, while retaining the support of the insurgents for themselves. The liberals in the Duma Committee and the Provisional Government were painfully aware of the gulf that separated them from the insurgent masses, and found that the only way to secure their allegiance was through the Petrograd Soviet. But in the end, they failed to obtain the full allegiance of the insurgents for the Provisional Government. P. N. Miliukov’s statement on 2 March that the Provisional Government’s legitimacy resulted from the revolution was a hollow boast that did not meet the approval of the insurgent masses.32

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The Duma Committee, the counterrevolutionary expedition and the monarchy In order to accept the insurrection, the Duma Committee had to stop the counterrevolutionary expedition and to establish a revolutionary power acceptable to the Petrograd Soviet and the insurgents. When the soldiers’ revolt took place on 27 February, Tsar Nicholas II was in Mogilev, the site of the General Headquarters [Stavka], determined to suppress the revolution in the capital by dispatching the expeditionary forces from the front, commanded by General N. I. Ivanov. The High Command, led by the Chief of Staff, General M. V. Alekseev, supported this decision, believing that the revolution in the capital was led by radical socialists.33 In the beginning, Rodzianko as the chairman of the State Duma and as the chairman of the Duma Committee enjoyed unquestionable leadership among the Duma liberals. Initially Rodzianko’s proposed solution for the crisis was the formation of the ministry of confidence, a ministry headed by and composed of ministers who enjoyed the confidence of the country. This meant practically the formation of a government headed by and composed of the liberals. On 27 February, he attempted to use the influence of Grand Duke Mikhail, Nicholas’ brother, who was urged to persuade the tsar to form a ministry of confidence, and set up a military dictatorship in Petrograd. Nicholas categorically rejected this proposal.34 On 28 February, however, when the insurrection spread to the entire military garrison troops in Petrograd, Rodzianko modified his position, calling for the establishment of a responsible ministry, a ministry responsible to the legislative chambers. A ministry of confidence could be established within the existing institutional and legal structure, while a responsible ministry would require a substantial change in the Fundamental Laws, and transform the government structure into a genuine constitutional monarchy. Rodzianko endorsed the petition signed by the three senior grand dukes to persuade the tsar to issue a manifesto promising the establishment of a responsible ministry. This petition never reached the tsar, since he left Mogilev in the early morning of 28 February.35 Nicholas’ decision to leave Mogilev was one of his most consequential decisions. Movement on the railway was controlled by the Duma Committee, which manipulated the movement of the imperial trains, prevented them from proceeding to Tsarskoe Selo, and made them reroute to Pskov, the headquarters of the Northern Front, headed by General N. V. Ruzskii. Nicholas arrived in Pskov at 7.30 pm on 1 March, thus wasting two full days traveling in the railway in the countryside.36 General Ivanov’s expeditionary force left from Mogilev and reached Dno around 7 am on 1 March, but after Dno, his troops proceeded with excruciating speed, since the Duma Committee obstructed the movement of his forces. By the time Ivanov arrived at Tsarskoe Selo at 9 pm, he had received two telegrams, one from Alekseev and another from Nicholas, ordering him to halt his operation. Alekseev, in the telegram sent at 1.15 am on 1 March, stated that peace was restored in Petrograd and that the troops had joined the ‘Provisional Government’ under Rodzianko. Alekseev’s order virtually ended the possibility of a military intervention against the revolution in the capital.37

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The Stavka’s view on the political solution to the crisis had also changed with the new information supplied by Rodzianko. Late in afternoon on 1 March, Alekseev sent a telegram, No. 1847, to the tsar begging him to form a ministry of confidence.38 By the time Nicholas arrived at Pskov, however, Alekseev’s position had changed. Sometime around 7.30 pm, Alekseev advocated for the formation of a responsible ministry. The news of the spread of the revolution to Moscow, Kronstadt and the Baltic Fleet that Alekseev had received that afternoon influenced his change of policy, but this decision also corresponded to Rodzianko’s shifting position, mobilizing the three grand dukes to urge the emperor to issue an imperial manifesto granting a responsible ministry.39 By the time Nicholas arrived in Pskov, the political situation in the Duma Committee had drastically changed. Rodzianko’s prestige suffered due to Rodzianko’s order issued on 28 February that provoked anger among the insurgent soldiers. Those who advocated Nicholas’ abdication gained the majority in the Duma Committee and the liberal circles. During the negotiations with the Soviet Executive Committee representatives, Miliukov announced that the Duma Committee stood for the abdication of Nicholas II in favour of his son, Aleksei, under the regency of Grand Duke Mikhail. It was acceptable to the Petrograd Soviet leaders. After the negotiations were over, the Duma Committee decided to send two representatives A. I. Guchkov and V. V. Shul’gin, two monarchists, to Pskov to force this solution on the tsar.40 When Nicholas arrived in Pskov, Ruzskii and the High Command believed that the Duma Committee’s demand was to have Nicholas accept a responsible ministry. The difficult task to persuade Nicholas to accept this concession fell on the commander of the Northern Front. Initially, Ruzskii’s supplication fell on the deaf ears of the emperor. Nicholas was clinging to his mythical understanding of the Russian state as the autocracy headed by the Tsar whose responsibility was not to the nation, but to God.41 At about 11 pm, Alekseev’s Telegram No. 1865 arrived. Alekseev, together with the unanimous views of the front commanders, urged Nicholas to grant a responsible ministry. Under this pressure, Nicholas reluctantly accepted a responsible ministry. Simultaneously, the tsar agreed to halt Ivanov’s expedition, which was actually a post-facto approval of the decision already made by Alekseev.42 Then came a thunderbolt that jolted the High Command. Rodzianko called Ruzskii at 2.30 am on 2 March on the Hughes Apparatus, a coded telegraphic apparatus. Citing the mounting popular hatred against the dynasty, the Duma Chairman told the general that the formation of a responsible ministry would not be sufficient and that Nicholas’s abdication would be required.43 While the Ruzskii-Rodzianko conversation was still continuing, its contents had been relayed to Alekseev. The change of position from the formation of a responsible ministry to abdication of the emperor was a gigantic leap. All the military personnel, officers and soldiers alike had pledged an oath of allegiance to ‘Nicholas II and the Heir’ in the presence of God. One of the powerful reasons why the insurgent soldiers reacted so violently to Rodzianko’s Order was their fear of the reprisal for having broken the oath of allegiance. Now the generals at the highest commanding posts found themselves in a situation to violate their oath. Alekseev consulted N. A. Bazili, a legal expert

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attached to the Stavka, about legal issues that would arise with a possible abdication. The lawyer immediately presented to Alekseev his report, in which he stated that although the law did not envision abdication, it stipulated the order of succession to the throne, according to which the oldest son of the emperor should succeed him.44 Assured that nothing was illegal in abdication itself, at 10.15 am on 2 March, Alekseev sent Telegram No. 1872 to all the commanders in the front describing the gist of the Ruzskii-Rodzianko conversation. Alekseev proposed to accept Nicholas’ abdication to save the active army from disintegration, to continue the war, to save the independence of Russia and to save ‘the dynasty’. To save the dynasty was listed as the last objective; moreover, it was no longer to ‘save the tsar’, but ‘to save the dynasty’. All the commanders, including Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, former commander-in-chief and Nicholas’ cousin, supported Alekseev’s recommendation. With these collective telegrams, Alekseev sent Telegram No. 1878, recommending Nicholas’s abdication.45 Under the collective and unanimous pressure from the High Command, Nicholas accepted his abdication in favour of his son, Aleksei, under the regency of Grand Duke Mikhail in the early afternoon on 2 March. Immediately, Alekseev entrusted Bazili to write a draft manifesto of abdication. Bazili’s draft, approved by Alekseev, was sent to Pskov at about 7 pm for Nicholas’ signature, and the manifesto signed by Nicholas was given to Ruzskii.46 The Duma Committee’s delegates, Guchkov and Shul’gin, arrived at Pskov after 9 pm. Both expected a violent encounter with Nicholas and insurmountable difficulty in obtaining consent for his abdication. After learning that the Duma Committee’s delegates were to arrive in Pskov, Ruzskii withheld the emperor’s signed manifesto of abdication to Rodzianko. Then came another important twist in the drama of abdications. When the Duma delegates met the emperor, Nicholas changed his mind. He decided to abdicate not only for himself but also for his son, and offered the throne to Michael. This was a clear violation of the Succession Law, since the law stipulated that the throne should be passed to the heir, his eldest son. Nicholas had no right to abdicate for his son. Despite the Duma Committee’s mandate to seek Nicholas’ abdication in favour of his son under the regency of Mikhail, the two delegates accepted Nicholas’s double abdications.47 A number of counterfactual suppositions can be raised here. What if Ruzskii had transmitted Nicholas’ signed manifesto to Rodzianko, and Alekseev had sent the information to the commanders to disseminate among the officers and soldiers? Had this decision been made public, Nicholas would have had a hard time retreating from his earlier decision. The monarchical system would have been retained with the Provisional Government that would be responsible to the Duma but maintaining legitimacy granted from the abdicating tsar. What if the Duma delegates had rejected Nicholas’ amendment and insisted on the original formula? Would Nicholas have revoked his intention to abdicate, unless he could also abdicate for his son? Most likely he would have, since his desire to live with his son was his overriding concern. Had the throne gone to Aleksei, the boytsar would have had to live in Petrograd or Tsasrskoe Selo separate from his parents,

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under the supervision of Mikhail and his wife, Countess Brasova, whom the imperial couple loathed. At this crucial juncture, Nicholas’s primary concern was his family over the future of the state and even over the fate of the dynasty. Since he took it for granted that Mikhail would agree to accept the throne, the idea that his decision would spell the end of the dynasty and the monarchical system never crossed his mind. Similarly, the generals never thought that this decision would lead to the end of the monarchy, either. It is unlikely that the High Command would have exerted strong pressure on the emperor to rescind his decision of the double abdications. The Duma delegates did not reject the double abdications. They were in a hurry to secure Nicholas’s abdication. Their rejection would have resulted in protracted negotiations, the outcome of which would not be certain. So, they accepted the double abdications, citing their sympathy for Nicholas’s filial feelings. Whether it crossed their mind that their approval of the double abdications spelled the end of the monarchical system is difficult to know.

Grand Duke Mikhail’s refusal to take the throne Nicholas’ double abdications triggered a new political alignment among the members of the Duma Committee and the Provisional Government. This debate was closely connected with the question of how to obtain legitimacy for the Provisional government. Kerensky seized this moment to put an end to the monarchy by dissuading Mikhail from assuming the throne. Without the monarchy, his unique role as the bridge linking the liberals and the insurgent masses would be enhanced.48 Ironically, it was Miliukov, a staunch enemy of Nicholas, who considered it crucial to create the fiction that the Provisional Government should be anointed by the new tsar. He rejected the role of the Duma as a parent body of the Provisional Government. The new tsar should transfer ‘the plenitude of power’ previously held by the emperor. Once this transfer of power took place, the new tsar would recede into the background, and the Provisional Government would exercise dictatorial power. Unsure of the possibility that the Provisional Government could obtain the full-fledged allegiance of the insurgent masses, it was all the more important to ensure this legal fiction. For this it was essential for Mikhail to assume the throne.49 Kerensky acquired a powerful ally in Rodzianko. Although he suffered a setback of his prestige, Rodzianko still maintained enormous power as the Chairman of the Duma and the Duma Committee, continuing to discharge numerous administrative duties. He firmly believed that the State Duma should be the guarantor of the legitimacy of the Provisional Government, which should be the executive power, responsible to the State Duma that should function as the legislative power. Nicholas’ double abdications gave him the opportunity to enhance his prestige and the power of the Duma. If the monarchy was eliminated, the Provisional Government would have no foundation on which to base its legitimacy except on the Duma. Thus, this staunch monarchist made a volte-face, and supported Kerensky to put pressure on Mikhail to renounce the throne.50 Before the decisive meeting with the grand duke was held, Rodzianko then called Alekseev at 6.45 am on 3 March. The Duma chairman explained that Nicholas’

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rejection of the Duma Committee’s original formula made it inevitable that the future structure of the state would have to be determined by the Constituent Assembly. During the interim, the Duma Committee and the ‘council of ministers’ were to assume power. Rodzianko stated that no one would now accept Mikhail as the new emperor. Alekseev was shocked. Rodzianko was not only rejecting Nicholas’ double abdications, but suggesting the end of the monarchy. So shaken by this information, Alekseev dropped a hint of the military intervention against the revolution in Petrograd.51 Alarmed by Alekseev’s reaction, Rodzianko quickly called Ruzskii. The chairman of the Duma began with the request to withhold the manifesto of Nicholas’ double abdications on the pretext that another soldiers’ uprising had broken out, and the information of the preservation of the monarchy would pour oil on the fire and touch off merciless reprisals against officers.52 Belatedly realizing Rodzianko’s duplicity, Alekseev took immediate action. At 7 am on 3 March, he dispatched telegrams to the commanders-in-chief on all fronts, suggesting that military conference composed of all the commanders-in-chief should be held on March 8 or 9 to determine the High Command’s stand on the monarchy. But all the commanders, including Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, perhaps the most important member of the Romanov dynasty, opposed Alekseev’s recommendation for a military conference. The High Command had already ditched Nicholas II on 2 March, but on the following day it deserted the monarchy itself. By the time Alekseev received Nikolai Nikolaevich’s answer at 6.22 pm on 3 March, the monarchy had already been dead for more than several hours.53 Grand Duke Mikhail met the members of the Provisional Government and the Duma Committee at 9.15 am on 3 March. Despite Miliukov’s passionate plea to assume the throne, under the pressure of Kerensky and Rodzianko, Mikhail decided to decline the throne at 1 pm. At this moment the Romanov dynasty and Russia’s monarchical system ended.54

The Provisional Government and the question of legitimacy From 27 February to 3 March, the Duma Committee functioned as a quasirevolutionary power. But on 2 March, Miliukov and his supporters decided to establish a Provisional Government, separate from the Duma Committee. Mikhail’s refusal to assume the throne gave Rodzianko the chance to reclaim his power. While Miliukov was busy forming the Provisional Government, Rodzianko engaged in a rearguard campaign to elevate the Duma and the Duma Committee as a parent body for the Provisional Government.55 The Provisional Government, however, made no attempt to utilize the prestige of the Duma as a source of its legitimacy. On the contrary, it did everything to sever its ties with the Duma and the Duma Committee. On 3 March, after the meeting with the grand duke, the Provisional Government held its first meeting. Rodzianko and other members of the Duma Committee were not invited to attend. At this meeting the new Prime Minister G. E. L‘vov ‘raised the question about the need to determine precisely the scope of power possessed by the Provisional Government

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and the Fundamental Laws of the Russian State’. In this connection, the meeting discussed specifically the relationship between the Provisional Government and the Duma Committee. It concluded that the ‘entire plenitude of power that belonged to the monarch must be considered transferred, not to the State Duma, but to the Provisional Government’. Further, the Provisional Government resolved that it had the legislative power and that the Fundamental Laws should be considered invalid.56 This meant that the Provisional Government had inherited the absolute power enjoyed by the Tsar and established itself as a dictatorship without answering to the Duma or to any institutions. If the entire Fundamental Laws were declared invalid, then the Provisional Government would be the sole authority to enact and interpret the laws. In fact, it was tantamount to proclaiming itself as the state (gosudarstvo), not merely a government (pravitel’stvo) within the state. When it rejected the Duma as the source of its legitimacy, it had no choice but to claim that its legitimacy came from the revolution itself. Yet, the insurgent masses refused to pledge their fullfledged allegiance to the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government thus began its voyage on the stormy seas without any ballast of legitimacy.

Conclusion The revolution from below  – the insurgency by the workers and the soldiers  – provided the foundation colour on the canvass, but the final painting was drawn by the revolution above  – intricate negotiations between the Duma Committee and the High Command with regard to the monarchy, and power politics within the liberal circles in the Duma Committee. In the end the monarchical system was overthrown, and the Provisional Government, supported only conditionally by the Petrograd Soviet, was created. This outcome was by no means predetermined; it was a contingent process. Had different alternatives available to the Duma Committee leaders, the military leaders, and the Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail been taken, the outcome might have been different, and the future course of the Russian Revolution would have taken a different trajectory.

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CHAPTER THREE

Liberalism and the rule of law IAN D. THATCHER, UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER

Was there a viable alternative in 1917 of a liberal Russia based on the rule of law? There is a historical consensus of a resounding ‘No’. The Russian revolutionary movement broadly defined had for long fought for the replacement of autocracy with institutions and forms of governance that would have been recognized as central to the Western liberal experience  – chiefly an executive responsible to elected law-making parliaments, with an independent judiciary. In such a parliamentary law-governed state, Russians would be liberated from arbitrary autocratic rule, in which citizens lacked full and stable rights. In the context of Russia 1917, in which every issue was complicated a hundred-fold if not more by the war, however, historians argue that such a law-governed democracy had the odds stacked against it. This is because of several factors, some of which were the heritage of the autocratic past. The Tsarist system of government did not respect the rule of law and thereby did not propagate such respect in society. Property rights and contract law in market transactions, for example, were not universally valued. A vibrant civil society of independent pressure groups that understood the operation of democracy, its rules, and the fundamental importance of tolerance and compromise had not developed in Russia due to the various restrictions imposed upon society by Tsarism. There were thereby weak underpinnings for liberal democracy in Russia.1 To an unpromising autocratic bequest, the reality of the 1917 revolution (revolutions themselves being no respecters of law) in conditions of war and military rule (likely to promote violence rather than peaceful resolution of conflicts through compromise) has led historians to emphasize the barriers to the establishment of a law-governed state in Russia. Examples of problems and weaknesses abound: an executive (the Provisional Government) that lacked legitimacy and whose effective rule was either never established or dissipated well before the October Revolution; liberal political parties (chiefly the Kadets) that fell behind popular demands and failed to garner public backing for a liberal democracy; and a growing anarchy and disintegration as 1917 progressed in the

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economy, in society, in the military campaigns, and in the Empire that resulted in private and sectoral interests being prioritized above the general good. Indeed, what could one expect other than temporary anarchy and the suspension of a stable rule of law in conditions of imperial collapse? Viewed from above and from below, the liberal project was shot. For a central functioning government to be established, even the leading liberal and Kadet leader Professor Paul Miliukov concluded that a form of dictatorship was needed, with the choice in 1917 boiling down to ‘Kornilov or Lenin’?2 How the February Revolution played out in the specific circumstances of Russia in 1917 is central to any analysis of attempts to establish a rule of law and a lawgoverned state. In this, particular attention needs to be paid to the question of power. An accepted rule of law normally issues from a recognized single power, and applies to all members of society equally, including the state and its administration. Indeed, the pressing need of a single power occupied Miliukov, War Minister Alexander Guchkov, and many like-minded liberals in 1917. Their overriding priority was to maintain the integrity of the Russian state and the loyalty of its citizens to win the war. Hence, their constant insistence upon the need to overcome dual or multiple power. Yet, despite their understandable desires for a single power, the most persuasive model of power in 1917 stresses its voluntary nature.3 With the breakdown of autocratic governance, there emerged a multitude of potential sources of law in 1917, from governmental and non-governmental bodies and organizations. Any study of the rule of law in 1917 therefore must recognize that these were abnormal and unusual conditions for the issuing and functioning of law. With numerous resolutions and decrees being issued by various bodies claiming power and legitimacy, citizens and bodies on the ground had great leeway to choose to abide by whatever ‘law’ was to be in their perceived best interests. Moreover, with the court systems in disarray and no single recognized police force, disputes between conflicting resolutions and decrees could be resolved at the local level by who enjoyed the most power, or majority backing, or by violence.4 While the general context and indeed the outcome of October 1917 speak to the unlikelihood of a liberal Russia, this chapter will examine the various sources of law that were current. The multitude of laws and even war of laws did not mean that there was no respect for or understanding of the meaning of law. There was a rich contemporary literature in 1917, for example, that argued that the meaning of the February Revolution lay precisely in the establishment of an advanced law-governed democratic order, in which a previously ‘backward’ Russia would leap ahead of the more advanced liberal democracies.5 There were also competing interpretations about what institutions should be the origin of legitimate law in the Russian Revolution to replace the collapsed autocracy. This was perhaps a natural and unavoidable consequence of a revolution taking place across the world’s largest land-based empire with its numerous national groups. Any consideration of the rule of law must adopt an equally broad view to appreciate the extent and scope of democratization and the nature of a potential democratic alternative.

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PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT The Provisional Government’s right to be the single post-autocratic legitimate authority issued from several sources. First, when Grand Duke Michael declined the throne unless invited to do so by an elected Constituent Assembly, he requested that all citizens ‘pay allegiance to the Provisional Government … which is endowed with full power’.6 It was admitted even by the authors of the Grand Duke’s ‘request’ that he lacked legal power, so his declaration amounted to a ‘suspension of the law’.7 Second, when Miliukov announced the composition of the Provisional Government to a crowd and someone asked ‘Who elected you?’, the Russian liberal leader replied: ‘No-one elected us, for if we had waited for a national election, we would not have been able to seize power … The Russian revolution elected us’.8 A bald admission that the Provisional Government was claiming full power for itself by itself, although in the name of the ‘people’s will’. Third, the Provisional Government was appointed by an agreement reached between the Temporary Committee of the State Duma and the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and was thus embedded in what one scholar has termed a ‘3 March political system’.9 Finally, the fact of speedy recognition of the Provisional Government as Russia’s new ruling body by the leading foreign powers and military allies – Britain, France, America – meant that any attempt to establish a new Russian foreign or war policy had to be pursued through the Provisional Government.10 In an important sense, it was in international relations that the legal power of the Provisional Government was most secure and stable. In its first ‘Declaration’ the Provisional Government emphasized the ‘determination of the State Duma’ and the ‘unanimous revolutionary enthusiasm of the people’ as its origins. It saw itself as embodying the ‘will of the people’ and would rely on the ‘wholehearted support of all of the people’ for its legal authority. This marked a radical departure from the basis of the autocratic rule that issued ‘from God’ and was backed by a monopoly on coercive power. The Provisional Government claimed sovereignty resided in the people and its own rule would enact that popular sovereignty in a new legal order, prioritizing civil liberties and the democratization of the state (local and national government) on the four-tail suffrage.11 Moreover, in carrying out the people’s will, the Provisional Government would not rule by exercising a monopoly of force, for it believed that ‘the power of the state should be based not on violence and coercion, but on the consent of free citizens to submit to the power which they themselves created. It looks for support not from physical but from moral strength’.12 This was quite a statement in conditions of war and had radical implications for the legitimacy of a cabinet that would remain or fall according to the ‘people’s will’, in the absence of any recognized and regular way of recording the vox populi. The Provisional Government combined executive, legislative and juridical functions. It was in effect an ‘unelected dictatorship’ that nevertheless claimed legitimate rule by the people’s voluntary consent. It was provisional, meant as a temporary and necessary ‘dictatorship’ to hold Russia together and guarantee

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efficient rule and maintain the war effort until such time as nationwide elections to a Constituent Assembly that would be the founding body for the new constitutional law-governed Russia could be organized and held. That said, and despite standard historical criticisms that the Provisional Government procrastinated and prevaricated, it could not and did not put business to one side while the complicated business of arranging national elections was resolved. It fell to the Provisional Government to rearrange state law and administration to best meet current needs. If nothing else the Provisional Government was an extremely active law enacting cabinet.13 New laws were to be signed in accordance to their status in relation to existing Tsarist laws; that is, the prime minister could issue on his own authority laws which under the autocracy were decided by the ‘Supreme Power’ (ukases); individual ministers could on their own initiative issue enactments that were delegated to them under the Tsar; and all remaining legislative law had to be signed by all ministers (postanovleniia).14 In the state administration the Provisional Government retained some parts of the tsarist order, and reformed or swept away others. There were continuity and change. Respect was shown to liberatory moments in the Tsarist past, as in the formation on 25 March 1917 of a commission to restore the Judicial Charters of 1864.15 The Ruling Senate continued to receive and affirm the laws of the Provisional Government, but members deemed insufficiently loyal and educated were encouraged to retire and replaced with new senators.16 The ministries of state largely remained along with their civil servants. This noted, the ministries were altered and expanded in accordance with the frequent reformulations of the cabinet and the redrawing of responsibilities. There were thus new ministries of food, labour, welfare, and posts and telegraphs created around the formation of the first coalition cabinet of May 1917. Specialist councils were founded to aid the Provisional Government in its law-making functions. The first of these on 22 March 1917 was the Juridical Council to provide preliminary legal judgement on public law. In June 1917 to fulfil the coalition cabinet’s ambition of greater government control of the economy, an Economic Council and a Main Economic Committee were established. Important aspects of autocratic rule were swept away, most notably the almost immediate abolition of provincial governors on 4 March, after which Premier L’vov declared that the executive would ‘ ….not be making replacement appointments. Let the localities decide. Such questions should be decided not at the centre, but amongst the people’.17 The Provisional Government moved to decentralize power and decision-making away from the centre. From April 1917 onwards, over forty pieces of legislation on local administrative and government reform aimed at widening the competency and powers of local administration, applying the four-tail suffrage for the election of local government, increasing locally elected government in more regions, and in achieving a balance between local autonomy and central oversight.18 Key to the latter goal was the establishment of a hierarchy of Provisional Government commissars covering province, district, town that had responsibilities and powers to ensure that local authorities and citizens stayed within the law. In much government policy such as the grain monopoly and land reform the model of

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a central committee (Main Supply Committee, Main Land Committee) with local co-ordinating bodies (food committees, land committees) was followed. Moreover, these committees co-opted interest groups as the Provisional Government sought to build a more inclusive administration, one that worked in co-operation with rather than standing over society. In the absence of any parliamentary scrutiny the Provisional Government sought societal views, support and approval in invited representative events such as the Moscow State (12–15 August 1917) and Democratic conferences (14–20 September 1917). It also expanded the political system to found a Preparliament or Council of the Republic that sat from 7 to 24 October 1917. This was drawn from a range of political parties and social and economic interest groups that could suggest policy, debate the issues of the day and cross-examine ministers. The Preparliament housed a number of commissions, six in total, that worked on key policy areas including the economy and law and order. Often overlooked and dismissed as ineffective, the Preparliament has recently been described by one scholar as ‘one of the richest and most symbolic of the revolutionary institutions of 1917’.19 The Provisional Government may not have organized elections to a Constituent Assembly as quickly as some commentators would have liked, but there can be no doubting the commitment to hold a national ballot, and of the professionalism with which the preparatory Juridical Commission undertook its work. That the elections were held in November 1917, only ten months after the fall of the autocracy in a country the size of Russia and at war, is a remarkable and often overlooked achievement that promised the establishment of a law-governed Russian state. After all, turnout was high, with Russian women, for example, taking the polls in greater numbers than their American contemporaries.20 In only one case did a district electoral commission consider holding a re-election because of ‘irregularities’. Most electoral observers agreed that the elections were fair and proper.21 In upholding the rule of law the temporary Provisional Government was not planning to make its ‘dictatorship’ permanent. The Provisional Government’s reform of state administration has been viewed as crucial to the establishment of a liberal law-governed state. A notable reform was the introduction administrative courts to oversee the work of local officials. At last, the arbitrary practices of unaccountable tsarist administrators were to be held directly accountable to the law.22 The Provisional Government has also been praised for being ahead of its time in aspects of transitional justice. The establishment and conduct of two commissions of enquiry  – one into potential misdeeds of former Tsarist officials (the Muraviev Commission) and the other into Bolshevik conduct during the so-called ‘July Days’ (the Aleksandrov Commission)  – were in many regards models for a law-governed state. In both instances the rejection of any ex post facto application of laws worked in the interests of the defendants and hindered any potentially rapid and possibly politically advantageous prosecutions. This may have meant, in the view of a distinguished legal historian, that in the case of the Aleksandrov Commission the failure to bring charges against the Bolsheviks meant ‘the Provisional Government lost its last opportunity to mobilize the law in favour of

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the February Revolution’. At the same time this same legal historian acknowledges that in the instance of the Muraviev Commission: The investigation of Tsarist ministers was seen as a means not only to expose the crimes of the previous regime, but also to demonstrate to the Russian people that no one stood above the law. By the end of the 20th century, such proceedings would become commonplace after the collapse of authoritarian regimes (except, notably, in the Russian Federation). In 1917, however, the prosecution of government officials for violations of established law – as opposed to the retroactive application of new laws – was truly revolutionary and without precedent … in many ways the Muraviev Commission holds the distinction of being the 20th century’s first truth commission.23 In its legislation the Provisional Government did not leave the rule of law system to be determined by a future Constituent Assembly. The Provisional Government to a large extent established the legal framework under which Russia’s future government and society would function. A raft of laws that fulfilled the programme of the liberation movement for a liberal law-governed state that was developed, including in draft law form, from 1905 onwards. Consensus across political parties around civil rights ensured that legislation was swift and radical, having a broad impact in society. The cabinet, some of whom were well familiar with the administrative injustices of tsarism, was keen to repeal the most draconian aspects of the autocratic penal system. In short order the death penalty, deportation to Siberia, special civil courts, the Okhrana, and the use of irons and strait jackets and whipping in prisons were abolished. Important freedoms of association were enshrined in law, and legal protection given from administrative interference. Only courts of law could insist upon the closure of independent organizations for good legal reason such as breaches of the law. An amnesty was announced for all political prisoners and sentences reduced that were considered overly harsh. The abolition of restrictions based on religion and nationality guaranteed a host of important rights and freedoms, including to settlement, residence, and travel, to property, to employment, to admission to state service, to jury duty, to education, and to the use of languages other than Russian in private business. A regime of extensive rights was also granted to the army. The Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights (May 1917) embedded in law the legal right of commanding officers to command, but while off-duty soldiers were guaranteed civic rights and on-duty were no longer obliged to salute and punishments were curtailed. In the area of women’s rights, Russia jumped way ahead of its Western Allies as women were granted the suffrage on an equal basis to men in local and national elections in which women could also stand for election. Women’s rights were extended in other fields such as education where women teachers gained the same rights and privileges as male teachers. Coeducation was introduced into secondary schools. Women were also awarded equal rights of practice in state administration and in law and could serve as jurors.24 The list of liberation legislation was long and impressive, marking a radical rupture with the past. It was a legal revolution that overnight transformed Russian governance and society into a rights-based system of the rule of law. In one historian’s estimation

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in the Spring of 1917 the Provisional Government ‘realised the liberal conception of the relationship between the executive and an autonomous civil society … [its] legislative acts in this regard carried huge significance … 1917 was a year of free self-association. Societal organizations developed policy recommendations across broad aspects of government, thereby contributing to the development of a Russian democratic culture.’25 The Provisional Government’s legislative record on political and civil rights is however mixed. It has been argued that some of the ‘liberatory legislation’ undermined its capacity to guarantee the rule of law. The abolition of the Department of Police on 10 March, the refusal to rehire experienced ex-Tsarist police, and the release of over two-thirds of the Tsarist prison population (only a small percentage of which were former political prisoners), for example, produced an explosion of crime that proved destructive to a law-governed society.26 Furthermore, with the advent of political crises and increasing military pressures, including the collapse of the June offensive, the cabinet resolved the roll back some of the freedoms established in the immediate post-February period and shore up, on paper at least, the power of the state over society. On 12 July 1917, for example, the War Ministry and the Ministry of Internal Affairs received the right to close publications advocating refusal to carry out military obligations or fomenting civil war. Military censorship was extended on 14 July, and on 26 July punishments for breaking military censorship were introduced. On 12 July military-revolutionary courts were founded and capital punishment restored at the front for certain crimes. On 31 July capital punishment was reintroduced into the navy. At the end of July curbs were placed on the rights of association, with the War Ministry empowered to close all gatherings and meetings that could be considered a threat to the war effort or to state security. The cabinet was also rebuked for transgressing its own legal authority. This was so with paradoxically the longest lasting constitutional change introduced by the Provisional Government, the promulgation of the Russian Republic on 1 September 1917. The Senate refused to publish this law declaring it to be illegal. The Provisional Government could also not guarantee the rule of its own law within its own administrative structures. Ministers and ministries ruled by decree and circulars, of which there were many and some conflicting. In his memoirs the Socialist Revolutionary Minister of Agriculture, Viktor Chernov, for example, recounts how he tried to progress land reform by repealing the Stolypin legislation and stopping further land sales. Local land committees were instructed to begin drawing inventories of the land with an eye to future redistribution. Contrary orders were then issued by the Ministry of the Interior, worried that Chernov’s instructions could be read as encouragement for illegal land grabs from below, and from the Ministry of Justice, which was concerned about the legal status of private property.27 Perhaps the biggest threat to a well-ordered law-governed state however was in the frequent ‘rule of law’ grabs in the localities. These often conflicted with the spirit and the letter of central law and instructions, but there was little the Provisional Government could do to assert its authority. Examples abound in 1917 of local bodies and institutions taking decisions in their own perceived interests and vesting them with legal authority in their own name. The laws of the Provisional

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Government were noted more for their breach than in their observance. In the area of economic policy, for instance, the administration could not command citizen loyalty and subservience to the law. The government’s regulation of the food market to ensure supplies failed partly because its set price for grain lagged continuously behind black market prices, but crucially as people on the ground defied government instructions. Here the regime’s own provisions committees worked to defend local interests rather than meet the orders of higher ranked officials. If the local provisions committees issued orders the local citizens did not like, they were simply disobeyed or met with various forms of resistance. In surplus producing Kazan province, for example, there was strong, often violent, opposition to the grain monopoly to the extent that in certain districts as one local newspaper at the time noted ‘there was no grain monopoly’.28 Local peasants and local officials who supported them against their own government may well have had good cause and may have justified their actions with reference to broader ‘revolutionary justice’, but the transgression of the law and the Provisional Government’s inability to uphold the rule of law are evident. In the army officers and soldiers acted outside of the democratization reforms and contrary to current law. During the June Offensive, for example, soldiers’ committees decided not to follow officers’ orders, thereby undermining the army’s fighting potential. In response to soldier ill-discipline and the perceived break-up of the Russian army, some commanders, most notably General Kornilov, issued summary execution orders despite the current prohibition on the use of the death penalty in the army. In August 1917 Kornilov transgressed established lines of command by staging an attempted coup against the political leaders responsible for the rule of law.29 In September 1917 former Chief in Staff General Alekseev despaired at the absence of a stable rule of law in the army: ‘We need laws which will allow us to begin the rebirth and development of the army, but we don’t have those laws yet and the army’s illness continues to drag on without hope, threatening fatal and already irreversible consequences.’30 Certainly when the Provisional Government was itself overthrown, it had no reliable troops that would come to its rescue. On the contrary soldiers were widely perceived to be a leading cause in the breakdown in the rule of law as 1917 progressed. Across the Russian Empire commissars and other government officials reported out of control, often drunken, soldiers attacking people and their possessions which, in turn, encouraged other social groups to act outside of the law. An internal report from Nizhegorod province, for instance, noted that ‘all of the lawbreaking and anarchy was linked with the arrival of deserters, soldiers on leave, or delegates from regimental committees. Under the influence of the agitation of these delegates and soldiers, the local peasantry has strengthened in its conviction that all civil laws have lost their force and that all legality must now be regulated by peasant organizations.’31 On the eve of the October Revolution, the Nizhegorod provincial commissar, M.E. Sumgin, attempted to bring some order to illegal peasant seizures by issuing an instruction ‘transferring all land and woods to the keeping of the land committees to show the population the undoubted victories of the revolution’.32 It may have been a rational decision in the circumstances, but Sumgin was clearly breaking rather than upholding the current law of the regime that had appointed him.

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THE SOVIETS The concept of sovereignty residing in the people’s will was central to notions of a legitimate rule of law in the Russian Revolution. The Provisional Government claimed legitimacy for its rule of law in that it represented the will of the whole people. Soviets differed in that they were elected on a much narrower franchise and represented specific groups in society, chiefly soldiers, workers and peasants. They could be soviets of one interest group only or be formed in combinations. They were both national and local, with most historical attention focusing on the Petrograd Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies that provided a model of operation for local soviets. The Petrograd Soviet appeared so rapidly at the fall of the autocracy that its hastily formed and self-appointed Executive Committee was a power broker with the Duma’s Temporary Committee in agreeing the composition and priorities of the Provisional Government. Soviets sprang up at an impressive rate. In the larger towns, for example, there were 400 by May, 600 in August and 900 in October. In June the First national Congress of Soviets witnessed over 1,000 delegates from 400 soviets that claimed to represent 20 million workers and soldiers.33 By October it has been estimated that there were 1,429 soviets functioning in Russia.34 Soviet deputies were elected and recalled at the will of the electors on a constant basis. The soviets were undoubtedly ‘agents of democratisation’ in 1917. From a study of local soviets in Saratov, Krasnoyarsk, Tiflis and Kronstadt during 1917 Israel Getzler, for example, concluded that ‘it was the multiparty soviets that provided the forum for, and consolidated, that free and open debating society … it was the soviets that, by working overtime on the elective principle, turned Russia into a society of voters par excellence’.35 Crucially, the close link to the electorate gave the soviets a power and legitimacy in Russia, although they were not recognized internationally. In 1917 the Russian Marxist A.A. Bogdanov saw soviets as revolutionary institutions upholding revolutionary-legality that were not suited to replace state-legality.36 Such a distinction did not hold in 1917 as soviets complicated the picture of the functioning of law in the Russian revolution to the extent that they took on the state’s functions and issued their own instructions that carried legally binding obligations. In effect citizens had a choice whether to follow state or soviet law. The most famous and consequential soviet legal document of 1917 was ‘Order Number One’. Issued by the Petrograd Soviet on 1 March ‘for immediate and strict execution’, it was a radical restructuring of traditional military discipline and the functioning of the army. It was decided to issue the document under the format of an Order (Prikaz) precisely because it would then carry legal weight. It called for the election of committees by the ‘lower ranks’ that were henceforth to control armaments that ‘should not be turned over to officers, even at their demand’. The elected committees were also to oversee the operation of new rules of address between officers and soldiers, with the old imperial titles and rudeness of officers towards soldiers abolished. Only polite forms of address were to be permitted. Soldiers were granted full civic rights when off-duty, during which time they no longer had to salute officers or stand to attention.37 Order Number One politicized the army by calling upon all units to send their representatives to the Soviet and that

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in all political issues the soldiers were subordinate to the Soviet. Furthermore, the orders of the then Duma Committee’s and soon-to-be Provisional Government’s Military Commission should be obeyed only if they were not in conflict with the Soviet’s orders and resolutions. Although Order Number One was meant only for the Petrograd garrison, it was soon distributed across the Russian army with profound consequences. According to the future Red commander Mikhail BonchBruevich, for example, Order Number One ‘smashed at one blow the machinery with the aid of which we, generals and officers of the Army, had succeeded in maintaining subordination and imposing our will on millions of resentful armed men deeply disillusioned by the war’.38 It was precisely in giving legal foundation for the formation of elected lower committees with significant responsibilities that the significance of Order Number One lay. The powers of the local committees gave soldiers a genuine sense of their independence to control and change events. Small wonder that soldiers have been described as the ‘brokers of power’ in 1917.39 Despite the subsequent negotiations between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet to issue an Order Number Two to clarify that Order Number One was not intended for the whole army and that military command still lay with the officers, it was impossible to stem the tide of Order Number One’s impact. Indeed, in the political crises of the subsequent months the Petrograd Soviet revealed its willingness to issue operational orders above the Provisional Government’s chain of command. In the ‘April Crisis’ over foreign policy, for example, the Petrograd Soviet instructed soldiers not ‘to come out on the street armed, unless called out by the Executive Committee. Only the Executive Committee has the right to give you orders’. Orders had to be countersigned by one of seven Executive Committee members and a telephone number of the Petrograd Soviet was supplied for the confirmation of all orders.40 In the aftermath of the Kornilov Affair of August 1917, the Petrograd Soviet established its own armed force in the Military-Revolutionary Committees under whose name the overthrow of the Provisional Government was announced. Outside of military affairs, the Petrograd and other local soviets issued further orders and instructions that amounted to an alternative rule of law to that of the Provisional Government in numerous other areas. Committees covering a range of social and economic policy were formed within soviets. Their reports could then be published by the soviets as orders for general obeyance, whether on a national or local scale. There thereby developed a patchwork of laws across Russia, some of which applied only in particular localities. The soviet in the naval base of Kronstadt is an example of an extremely active and independent soviet that legislated across a range of local, national and international issues. As early as 7 March 1917 it introduced the eight-hour working day in the town’s factories and followed this with an increase in wage rates. It concerned itself with law and order, including prostitution and drunkenness, the transfer of land to labouring peasants, and with the separation of church and state. It resisted the War Minister’s attempts to regulate the conditions of the officers it had arrested. In resolutions of 13 and 16 May, it declared the authority of the Provisional Government’s commissar null and void, taking full executive powers upon itself and announcing that it would recognize

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only the Petrograd Soviet. Despite subsequent ‘compromise’ agreements with the Provisional Government, the Kronstadt soviet pursued policies independent of and contrary to the central cabinet’s rule of law, including rejecting the June Offensive.41 The resolutions of local soviets could even be used by parts of the Provisional Government’s own administrative structures to make laws that ran counter to or ahead of central statutes. In Kazan, for example, the provincial land committee supported a decree of 13 May 1917 issued by the local soviet of peasants’ deputies that transferred all land, including that privately held, to the local volost committees. This was in direct opposition to the decision of the Provisional Government that such a law could only be issued by the Constituent Assembly. Yet in Kazan the peasant soviet land law took priority and was used to conduct land seizures.42

NATIONS AND NATIONALITIES Roger Pethybridge made the very important observation that ‘Russia is the largest physical area in which political revolution has ever occurred. The English, American (confined to the eastern seaboard) and French revolutions were storms in a teacup in comparison. In 1917 over 170 million people and an area even vaster than the size of present-day Russia were involved.’43 This had enormous repercussions for the  establishment of a law-governed state as power decentralized and became a contested arena over which and whose law would predominate, the central Provisional Government in Petrograd or national parliaments? In the context of countries in the making – some of long historical progeniture and others making first claims to statehood – the Provisional Government in certain instances usurped powers that were supposed to be reserved for the forthcoming Constituent Assembly, while in other cases denied that it could make commitments on the legal ground that it was not empowered to do so as new constitutional arrangements were reserved matters for the Constituent Assembly. There was thereby an inconsistency of approach from the Provisional Government. In the example of Poland, a Provisional Government Proclamation of 16 March 1917 bound the Constituent Assembly to grant Poland full independence out of ‘all the lands in which the Polish people constitute the majority’. The Proclamation also prejudged the foreign and military policy of an independent Poland, foreseeing that ‘united with Russia by a free military alliance, the Polish state will become a firm bulwark of Slavdom against the pressure of the Central Powers’.44 In envisioning the exporting of the rule of law to Poland, the habits of Russian imperialism were still in evidence. Of course, because of the military occupation of Poland and the still uncertain outcome of the war, the Provisional Government’s Proclamation was decorative. Nevertheless, other nations and national groups could point to the granting of Polish independence ahead of the Constituent Assembly as providing a legal precedent for their own claims for independent statehood to be conceded. The Finnish move towards independence over the summer of 1917 involved conflicting interpretations of where sovereignty resided following the fall of the autocracy.45 The Provisional Government acted quickly to re-establish the constitution of the Grand Duchy of Finland, and to repeal the ‘Russification’

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policies from the 1890s onwards that the Finns had found so objectionable. The Manifesto of 8 March 1917 concluded that ‘Russia and Finland will henceforth be bound together by their respect for law’.46 Indeed, shortly afterwards the Provisional Government confirmed the transfer of further judicial and law enforcement functions to Finnish authorities. Politicians within Finland disagreed over whether to be satisfied with the granting of autonomy on internal affairs from the Provisional Government or should full independence be sought? In early July 1917 the Finnish Sejm passed a law claiming full legislative power and the right to designate the executive power in Finland. This claim was made on the grounds that with the cessation of the rights of the monarch, sovereignty fell to the Finnish people and to its parliament. The Sejm informed the Provisional Government of its so-called ‘power law’ along with a long note of explanation. This note pointed out that in the period from the fall of the autocracy, the supreme power had not been regulated by law, for the Sejm had not claimed in law the power to which it was entitled, and the Provisional Government had no legal rights to claim authority in Finland that belonged to the fallen Tsar. The note promised that Russians would be granted equal rights in Finnish law, both civil and commercial, and that restrictions on Jews would be lifted.47 In its Manifesto response of 18 July 1917, the Provisional Government disputed the Sejm’s understanding of the legal situation, for only the Provisional Government was the rightful inheritor of the autocracy’s supreme power, and these rights could only be surrendered to a Constituent Assembly. Here it is interesting to note that the Provisional Government made no mention of the Grand Duke Michael’s request that full power be transferred to the Provisional Government, but rather that such power had been vested in the Provisional Government by the ‘Russian people’. Furthermore, the Provisional Government argued that the Sejm’s power law was itself in violation of the Finnish constitution. These matters were not left to further legal arbitration in courts. The Provisional Government resolved to dissolve the current Sejm, call for fresh elections in October 1917, and for the new Sejm to meet in November 1917, by which time the Provisional Government expected the Constituent Assembly to be in session, for it promised the new Sejm a Russian Government bill for consideration of procedures for settling the internal affairs of Finland.48 Such a schema was made irrelevant by the October Revolution and the eventual declaration of full Finnish independence in early December 1917. Shortly after the formation of the Provisional Government a Central Rada was founded in Kiev. In the latter’s first communications with Petrograd, telegrams to Premier L’vov and Minister of Justice Kerensky of 6 March 1917, the Central Rada welcomed the new government, wished it success and looked forward to the satisfaction of the ‘just demands of the Ukrainian people’.49 At this stage, this was the slogan of ‘autonomy’, but without any definition. One month later, resolutions of a Ukrainian National Congress of 5–8 April 1917 offered more detail. The legal authority of an All-Russian Constituent Assembly to authorize Ukrainian autonomy was recognized, but it was also stated that in the meantime Ukrainians should organize in advance for this eventual autonomous status. The Central Rada, for example, should organize regional representative bodies. Further resolutions made

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clear that separate and individual Ukrainian institutions should defend Ukrainian interests in establishing the borders of a free and autonomous Ukraine. This would entail separate Ukrainian representation at any peace negotiations and especially over the formation of an independent Poland that had already been promised by the Provisional Government. There should be no encroachment by Poland on Ukrainian lands. The following warning was issued: ‘The Ukrainian people will not tolerate any attempts to seize the rights to the territory of the Ukraine covered with her sweat and blood.’50 In making claims for full sovereignty in foreign policy and state boundaries, the Ukrainian nationalists were quickly developing an implicit call for a Ukrainian rule of law that would take precedence over Russian law. This was not made explicit so early, and there were conflicting political viewpoints in Ukraine about how far national demands should be promoted against Russia.51 The subsequent months witnessed the expansion of Ukrainian demands across administrative, cultural, military and domestic policy. In response to growing Ukrainian nationalist pressure, both from the Rada and by Ukrainian military leaders, the Provisional Government in early June resolved to assert its legal authority. On 2 June 1917, Kerensky as Minister of War prohibited the gathering of a Ukrainian Military Congress. This was followed on the next day by an official communique that rejected a list of Central Rada demands. In this document, legal rights that could belong only to a nationally elected Constituent Assembly were denied to both the Central Rada and the Provisional Government. It was stated that the Rada had no right to claim it represented the ‘true will of all the Ukrainian people’ for it had not been elected by popular vote. Furthermore, Ukrainian requests for unique administrative arrangements lay wholly within the ‘jurisdiction’ of the Constituent Assembly and ahead of this the Provisional Government simply lacked legal authority to prejudge questions of borders and autonomy. The cabinet’s view of the legal position was confirmed two weeks later by the Juridical Council that also denied the right to a separate Ukrainian delegation at peace or border talks, for ‘participants in international conferences are states, and not peoples’.52 Of course, the Central Rada could retort that as the Provisional Government was not elected by the people, it itself had no right to claim sovereignty even on a temporary basis before the Constituent Assembly. The field would be left open for a war of the rule of legitimate law. This was the position taken almost immediately by the Second Ukrainian Military Congress of 5–10 June 1917 that met despite Kerensky’s ban. At a time when the Ukraine lacked a recognized national parliament, the Ukrainian military congress suggested that any self-directed action by Ukrainians themselves took on legal authority. It thereby branded Kerensky’s order ‘illegal’.53 In its First Universal of 10 June 1917, the Central Rada stated that by the will of the Ukrainian people it was ‘the guardian’ of their rights and freedoms. It also addressed the issue of an actual electoral mandate, stating that a future National Ukrainian Assembly (Sejm) elected on the four-tail suffrage would have the right to decide the legal order in Ukraine and which laws should be in operation, for ‘no one knows better than we what we need and which laws are best for us’.54 The Central Rada was thereby claiming an equivalent status to the Provisional Government as embodying

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a popular will but without an electoral mandate to manage affairs on a temporary basis until such time as a popularly elected national assembly could meet to make the laws of a new rule of law regime. Following negotiations in Kiev of late June 1917, in early July the Provisional Government resolved to backtrack on its previous insistence that there were good legal reasons why it could not grant certain Ukrainian demands. In administration it conceded the creation of a Ukrainian General Secretariat ‘in the capacity of a higher organ for the administration of regional affairs in the Ukraine’. The cabinet also invited the Central Rada to draft legislation for Ukrainian affairs that would be subject to ratification by an All-Russian Constituent Assembly. Finally, while denying the formation of separate Ukrainian units in the army as of right, discretion was given to the Minister of War to allow Ukrainians to gather in the same units and ‘special Ukrainian delegates may be commissioned to be attached to the War Cabinet, the General Staff, and the Supreme Commander’.55 The concessions to the Rada provoked a political crisis within the Provisional Government with the resignation of several Kadet ministers. Their reasons were all based on an interpretation of the so-called ‘Ukrainian agreement’ as illegal, breaking the rule of law in several ways: it prejudged rights that belonged only to the Constituent Assembly; it abolished the Provisional Government’s authority in Ukraine; it offered the Rada a ‘quasi-legal’ route to autonomy.56 The Central Rada responded positively, but several further declarations and draft proposals for the composition and competency of the Ukrainian General Secretariat witnessed strong disagreement between Petrograd and Kiev. In Russia the Senate refused to publish and authorize the Provisional Government’s Temporary Instructions to the General Secretariat of 4 August 1917 on the grounds that no law had established the General Secretariat or the Central Rada. The Central Rada rejected the Temporary Instructions for violating the Ukrainian agreement of early July, and for being ‘imbued with the imperialist tendencies of the Russian bourgeoisie toward the Ukraine’. By the end of September 1917, the General Secretariat reported to the Central Rada describing itself as the recognized higher authority in Ukraine in ‘intimate state-legal relations with the higher organs of authority of the all-Russian republic’. It made a series of recommendations, including Ukrainian delegations at any border negotiations and the convocation of a National Ukrainian Constituent Assembly for which the General Secretariat would issue a draft law. The Provisional Government called the General Secretariat to Petrograd but was itself overthrown before any meeting took place. Several rounds of negotiations between the Central Rada and the Provisional Government thereby failed to establish a shared understanding of agreements that were reached. At the centre of the disputes was the issue of the source of a legitimate rule of law. This was contested within the Provisional Government and within its own legal institutions, as well as between the Provisional Government and the Central Rada. The outcome and boundaries of the collapse of the Russian Empire would ultimately be resolved by military might, but in 1917 debates and declarations centred around the rule of law and which institutions represented sovereignty that was generally accepted to reside in the popular will.

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CONCLUSION The picture of the rule of law in the 1917 Russian Revolution is highly mixed. The Provisional Government undoubtedly oversaw a legal revolution that radically transformed the Russian state and its relationship with society. Rights for citizens and social organizations that received legal standing were enshrined in law. Society took advantage of these rights in a plethora of meetings, publications and the exponential growth of organizations. There may have been deficits in many areas of Russian life in 1917, but there was a surplus of freely spoken and printed words. Moreover, the Provisional Government, in many respects a regime of lawyers, ensured that it was itself accountable in law. There were flaws, contradictions and criticisms, but in the whirlwind of revolutionary, military, imperial, and social and economic crises the Provisional Government’s commitment to the rule of law was laudable. Indeed, in the short time of its existence, it remained committed to its stated aims of keeping Russia in the war and of preparing for democratic elections to local and national government. That this was achieved within ten months is remarkable. That the Provisional Government sought to include and confer with a broad range of social, ethnic, religious, political, economic and national interests reveals the extent of the revolution from an autocracy that all too often suspected independent citizen initiative to a regime that welcomed and encouraged civil society. While some early and subsequent historians present Russia and Russians of the time as lacking in understanding of the requirements of the rule of law,57 in exile Alexander Kerensky made the valid point that the system of the law-governed state began by the Provisional Government was not only viable, it was the only and better alternative to the Bolshevik Revolution.58 The reasons that the Provisional Government’s law-governed revolution did not take hold were largely due to the implosion of the empire and the rise of the popular revolution in the form of the soviets. In conditions of economic breakdown and military collapse, the Provisional Government could not guarantee the operation of its own laws. The rule of law was circumvented and ignored by sections of its own administration and challenged by new cites of authority in emerging national parliaments and organizations and local soviets. With executive power fracturing horizontally and vertically, the stage was set for citizens on the ground to obey what laws they saw as best serving their interests. Russian society of that time was extremely radical. Such radicalism had several sources, not least the impact of peasant moral economy that asserted that only those who worked the land should have rights of access to land and to the products of agricultural labour. This peasant moral economy was also felt in workers’ control demands in industry and in soldiers’ committees asserting control over officers in the armed forces. If the regime was not willing to legislate societal demands in law, citizens, as in the case of the soldiers who promoted Order Number One, took the initiative to draft and issue law in their own name. This was in contradiction to liberal conceptions of the rule of law in which only the state was the legitimate source of legislation and legality. Should the multiple-power and the multitude of laws from the various cites of authority damn the prospect of a law-governed Russia emerging from 1917? The

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fate of the Constituent Assembly is key to answering this question. The Bolsheviks could not prevent elections going ahead and the parliament met in early January 1918. This was the promise of the February Revolution realized – a democratically elected law-making parliament that would be accountable to the electorate via regular elections. Russians had shown themselves perfectly capable of organizing elections and making free political choices. The forced Bolshevik closure of the Constituent Assembly deprived Russians of the possibility of not only voting for a parliament and an executive, but crucially voting for a new parliament and fresh executive of any political colour. It is in this sense that, for many historians, the closure of the Constituent Assembly marks the end of the Russian Revolution.59 This noted, even post-1918 the cause of constitutionalism and even a law-governed state was not entirely lost. Bolshevism pronounced its own law and constitutions. These were taken seriously enough that citizens criticized the regime and tried to hold it to account for the divergence between constitutional promises and reality. This was true of the Soviet experiment from beginning to end. Khrushchev denounced Stalin for breaking Soviet law; dissidents criticized the post-Stalin regime for ignoring its own constitution and international human rights commitments. After an interval of seventy-four years, the constitutional voices of 1917 with their demands for a liberal state rooted in a rule of law returned, with an array of Western legal experts to help. In 2021, one can say that Russia has progressed down the path of liberalism and the rule of law but that there is still more to be done. The transition from autocracy to democracy in Russian conditions is undoubtedly complex, but one should recall that the process took several centuries in Western Europe and that a modern democracy such as Britain still has medieval features and definite democratic deficits. That the price of freedom and the rule of law is eternal vigilance is as true for many other countries as it is for Russia.

CHAPTER FOUR

Wartime logistics and the Provisional Government ANTHONY J. HEYWOOD, UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

For all the decades of reformist and revolutionary opposition, ultimately Russia’s wartime economic crisis brought down the Tsarist autocracy.1 The story is familiar. Severe economic difficulties helped to produce military and political crises by summer 1915. In the empire’s western borderlands, the war’s so-called Eastern Front was stabilized by the autumn, but in the rear the interrelated economic and political crises became ever more acute. Much of the problem, it seemed, was logistical: fuel, food and raw materials existed, but could not be transported to where they were needed. Indeed, the doyen of Soviet historians of Russia’s wartime economy, A.L. Sidorov, concluded that the inadequate and poorly managed railway system became the Achilles’ Heel of Tsarist capitalism.2 In February 1917 the shortages of increasingly expensive food and fuel in the capital, Petrograd, sparked demonstrations and strikes. When garrison troops1 mutinied rather than shoot demonstrators, riots turned to revolution.3 The men who constituted the resultant Provisional Government knew from their predecessor’s fate that they needed at least to alleviate the economic crisis. Again, the subsequent story is familiar. Popular enthusiasm for the revolution did not translate into a concerted national struggle for economic recovery. Production slumped, shortages worsened, prices rose and strikes proliferated. By the time when the Bolsheviks seized power in the autumn, the economy was in a far worse condition than in February.4 And at the epicentre of this collapse was a deepening transport crisis. So, what went wrong on the logistical front for Russia’s would-be saviours? This chapter explores how ministers understood the problem, how they addressed it, and why their efforts ultimately failed.5

THE WARTIME POLITICS OF LOGISTICS In theory the first Provisional Government was well equipped to tackle the economic crisis. The holders of the four key economic portfolios had considerable pertinent experience. The new Minister of Trade and Industry, A.I. Konovalov, was a textiles industrialist who had served as a deputy chair of the Central War

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Industries Committee from 1915 and as chair of the Moscow regional War Industries Committee. The Minister of Finances, M.I. Tereshchenko, was also a deputy chair of the Central War Industries Committee and additionally chaired the Kiev region’s War Industries Committee. A.I. Shingarev took charge of the Ministry of Agriculture thanks to his long service in the State Duma’s budget, agriculture and food committees, and his co-authorship of the agrarian programme of the centreleft Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. Finally, the new Minister of Ways of Communication, N.V. Nekrasov, had trained as a transport engineer, and was deputy chair of the State Duma throughout Tsarism’s last winter.6 As State Duma deputies and senior members of the Kadet Party, these men were all prominent long-time liberal opponents of the Tsarist autocracy who nonetheless supported the war effort. In summer 1914 their party presented itself as a patriotic loyal opposition, intent on criticizing government errors and inefficiencies constructively in the interests of victory. By spring 1915, however, the Kadets believed that the regime was badly mismanaging the war effort. Some Kadets like Konovalov and Tereshchenko therefore collaborated with other non-state actors in creating so-called war industries committees.7 But whereas this initiative was presented as helping the state, by August 1915 the Kadet Party among others was demanding a government of ‘popular confidence’. In truth, the Kadets wanted a constitutional monarchy  – a revolutionary demand. After the Tsar had dismissed this pressure, the Kadets became increasingly outspoken. By November 1916, when party leader P.N. Miliukov denounced the government in his notorious ‘stupidity or treason?’ speech to the Duma, their stance was effectively that victory in the war required a change of government.8 The intimate connection between this political context and the war economy is reflected in the Kadets’ perception of the logistical problems. Essentially, they believed that the transport system was ill prepared for the war’s demands and poorly exploited during the war. For them, Tsarism’s peacetime transport legacy was a badly managed and increasingly expensive service, with inadequate capacity due to years of underinvestment. For the war years the Kadet narrative again emphasized poor management  – from the Ministry of Ways of Communication (Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia  – MPS) and individual railway and shipping companies to junior officials such as station masters. For example, they believed that the MPS was neglecting waterways for relieving pressure on the railways, and that the wartime emergency investment was insufficient and too slow in yielding the essential returns. Not least, the Kadets regarded minister S.V. Rukhlov (to October 1915) and his successor A.F. Trepov (to December 1916) as political reactionaries. Better leadership, better management and more resources were essential for resolving the transport crisis.9 Historians, however, have yet to test this argument rigorously. A key reason is the high politics of blame. By 1916 the transport sector was being criticized openly by officials in the Ministry of War, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Agriculture and other major state and public institutions, none of whom wanted the blame for the war crisis.10 The MPS could rally only a few defenders.11 Importantly, for reasons of military secrecy it could not issue detailed explanations. Following

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the Tsarist regime’s demise, the critique was reiterated by Provisional Government officials, émigré writers, Bolshevik leaders and Soviet historians alike. For example, in emigration the former chair of the State Duma M. V. Rodzianko was strident in his memoirs. Within Soviet Russia the highly respected non-Bolshevik engineer V.I. Grinevetskii was likewise damning; his 1919 book about industrial strategy for revolutionary Russia was treated by Lenin and his colleagues as both vindication and guide.12 Since then, the few detailed historical treatments have never really acknowledged that so many of the transport industry’s critics had a vested interest in avoiding blame, seeking regime change or denigrating their predecessors.13 Because the contemporary critique still shapes our understanding of the wartime supply crisis, the assertion that the inadequate and decrepit transport system collapsed during the war remains a staple feature of essays about the February Revolution. Yet there are significant grounds for questioning it, as J.N. Westwood suspected back in 1990.14 In the next section, that suspicion is confirmed through a brief analysis of three major issues – pre-war investment, waterway freight traffic and railway freight traffic.

QUESTIONING THE CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM No transport system in any of the major belligerent countries was remotely ready for the actual shipment demands of 1914–18. Because military planners across Europe assumed that the next war would be short, their logistical investment priorities were concentrated on mobilization.15 But even if they had foreseen the actual chronic pressures of 1914–18, the cost of comprehensive preparations would have been prohibitive. This point applies even for Germany, reputedly well prepared. Famously fearful of a war on two fronts, the German High Command did anticipate the need to move their armies rapidly across their country. Fast east-west transit routes were a basic necessity for them. Yet in 1914 the capital Berlin remained a bottleneck for transit traffic: it still lacked an orbital railway for bypassing the city centre.16 Evaluated in this context, the traditional picture of Russian government parsimony and neglect concerning strategic railway investment is a caricature. Always difficult, the financial climate in late imperial Russia was especially tough after the expensive Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. The regime could not spend with abandon if it wished to rebuild and maintain domestic and foreign confidence in the state finances and economy. The Ministry of Finances certainly embraced this logic, and importantly the new State Duma also played a big role in restraining government expenditure. Not least, the Duma constantly pressured the government to reduce railway-related state debt and costs. For example, in spring 1914 its budget committee imposed a 50 per cent cut on an MPS plan for 16,700 new freight wagons for the state railways in order to save some 11 million roubles.17 From the perspective of the MPS, the creation of the State Duma made the process of getting investment approval slower and harder.18 It was thus inevitable in Russia as in the other major belligerent countries that the demand for transport in a long-term European war would greatly exceed the available capacity. Then the question would be how to deal with the shortfall. And in this light one can begin to see why wartime

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criticism from Duma deputies about locomotive and wagon shortages might strike senior MPS officials as political hypocrisy. The second example concerns the wartime usage of inland waterways.19 Water transport was potentially an important means for relieving pressure on the railways, but was not a simple option. It was best suited for bulk shipments of non-perishable cargos like fuel, ores and grain. But even with these goods, multiple variables had to be considered, each of which was problematic to a greater or lesser extent: the locations of the waterways; their suitability for navigation; the length of the socalled navigation season (determined mainly by winter ice); the availability of vessels, docks and labour; the consignment demand (type of freight, urgency, destination, etc.); and the relative costs of water and any alternatives. Unhelpfully, the waterways were often poorly located for the needs of shippers and/or recipients, and on most routes year-round freight flows could not be organized due to ice. Frequently, such constraints meant that a given consignment required at least one trans-shipment between rail and water. Yet these transfers were usually not mechanized, and hence were time-consuming, labour-intensive and required large amounts of warehousing or space for open storage. Because waterway tariffs could be cheaper than rail, shippers often chose them to move non-urgent freights. For instance, the Nobel Brothers oil company invested in not just rail tanker wagons, but also ships, barges and dock facilities to move their oil products from the Caucasus across the Caspian Sea and up the river Volga to such places as Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) and Saratov for onward transport by rail or water.20 In wartime Russia, however, with the much higher overall demand for capacity and greater urgency for delivery, the constraints made themselves felt more keenly. For instance, vessel and labour shortages were constant problems, and dock handling and storage facilities were often inadequate for the large previously unforeseen flows of goods. Navy requisitions of vessels discouraged shipping companies from trying to buy replacements. Accordingly, a rail-water transport solution for a given freight demand was not necessarily the best way to relieve pressure on the railways. How well the waterways were used during the war is an important question that still requires detailed research. For present purposes the pertinent point is that even if they did not exploit every opportunity, the Tsarist authorities did take this issue seriously. Vessel flotillas operated on each major water system, and traffic was planned in much the same way as for the railways. Thus, for instance, the river Northern Dvina and its canal connections to the Petrograd area were used from summer 1914 to relieve pressure on the Archangel-Vologda-Petrograd railway route, primarily by moving imported coal for the Baltic Fleet – 28 million puds in 1916. Problems included a shortage of suitable vessels, and insufficient warehousing at Kotlas for trans-shipments with the Kotlas-Viatka railway, which served as another means to bypass the Archangel-Vologda railway bottleneck.21 Further south, from spring 1915 Donbass coal was sent by rail to Sarepta near Tsaritsyn for delivery to Petrograd and the north-west via the Volga and Mariinskii canal system. This circuitous, slow route was also problematic in terms of vessel availability, but was crucial for easing the intense pressure on Moscow’s rail network: some 35 million

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puds of coal were shipped in 1916.22 Similarly, the Caspian Sea and river Volga were used for moving most of the oil products manufactured in the Caucasus.23 In the Far East the authorities became so desperate to clear imported goods from Vladivostok port that in early 1916 they began sending freights by rail and sea north to the Amur River for westward movement by barge to Sretensk, where they would be reloaded onto trains.24 The final example is railway freight operations. Recent research has challenged the established opinion that traffic was disorganized by winter 1915/16 and began to collapse during the following summer.25 Measured with a statistic known as pud-versts, the railways actually transported about 20 per cent more freight in the calendar year 1916 than in their record peacetime year (1913), having already exceeded their 1913 result by about 10 per cent in 1915.26 True, the monthly pudverst figures for the fourth quarter of 1916 have yet to be found in the archives, but since the monthly results up to 30 September 1916 exceeded those for 1915 by roughly 10 per cent, any slump relative to 1915 that may have occurred during the final quarter cannot have been large. It stands to reason that this record result could not have been achieved amid widespread disorganization. There was surely scope for better organization, but the real problem was that not even these record performances could cover the overall demand. The picture for January and February 1917 is less clear for want of network pudverst statistics, but certainly a catastrophic collapse did not occur. New disruptive variables were exceptionally bad weather from mid-January (until mid-March), poor quality locomotive fuel, and consequent locomotive failures, which in turn proved hard to resolve because of shortages of metals and skilled maintenance staff.27 The quantities of wagons loaded were well below the record amounts of January–February 1916 (Table 4.1), but these results must still be regarded as substantial given the atrocious circumstances and the record-breaking nature of the 1916 full-year performance. Furthermore, Petrograd and Moscow had enjoyed the top priority for civilian shipments of food and fuel throughout the war, and now

TABLE 4.1  Wagons loaded (excluding tankers) on Russia’s Railway Network, January–February 1916 and January–February 1917. 1916

1917

Wagons loaded

Wagons loaded

% of the 1916 level

January 1–14

504,725

471,907

93.5

January 15–31

533,356

431,605

80.9

February 1–14

510,611

397,842

77.9

February 15–28

464,819

412,255

88.7

Source: MPS Directorate of Railways Operations Department to Provisional Government, June 1917, calculated from attached charts 1 and 2 (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3677, ll. 35–36).

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their trains had the highest priority after military shipments. ‘First necessity’ goods did continue moving to the two capitals despite the new obstacles.28 In other words, the February Revolution erupted in a city that was better placed in terms of food and fuel deliveries than any other town or city in the empire bar perhaps Moscow. The above remarks do not mean that criticisms of the transport sector’s pre-war infrastructure and equipment legacy are unfounded, that managerial problems were marginal, or that the wartime transport difficulties were insignificant. The notion of a transport crisis during the winter of 1916/17 may indeed be correct; the difficulties with locomotive overhauls may well mark a decisive challenge, threatening decline and demanding attention after some thirty months of reduced maintenance. But the point here is that if the Provisional Government hoped to solve the sector’s difficulties, the ministers needed to understand clearly what that problem was. Yet the above examples reinforce Westwood’s doubts about their understanding of this industry as inadequate and badly managed, and as collapsing from summer 1916. And as the next section will show, there were also other problems that attracted less attention at the time but which with hindsight can be seen to have posed critical challenges.

RETHINKING THE LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE The initial logistical priority when the war broke out was to accommodate the military mobilization.29 The planning assumptions about commercial freight and passenger traffic were that services would be almost totally suspended for several weeks, and that demand and services would return gradually to more or less normal thereafter. In retrospect this thinking may seem naïve, but it was not unique to Russian planning. Britain’s railways, for example, took much the same approach, and for the British government ‘business as usual’ was a mantra until 1916.30 The key point for present purposes is that while Russia’s railways did cope successfully with the military’s mobilization demands, the suspension of most commercial freight services for some eight summer weeks badly disrupted the annual process of stockpiling food and fuel in urban areas for winter use. In fact, this problem points to a new explanation for the capital’s ‘first necessity’ shortages in February 1917. Severe disruption to the stockpiling process recurred in summer 1915, now owing to ramifications of the Great Retreat. Then it happened again in August–October 1916, probably mostly because of new traffic arising from Romania’s military collapse. Yet the tsarist regime failed to dampen demand for food and fuel by introducing systematic rationing. Petrograd’s fateful shortages, then, may well have been caused mainly by events and policies outside transport managers’ control.31 The major practical implication for the Provisional Government was that large reserves of food and fuel had to be stockpiled for Petrograd (and other urban areas) by October 1917 without fail. But that target required far higher delivery rates than had been recorded in the war thus far – a daunting challenge even in ideal circumstances, let alone amid revolutionary turmoil. These troubles, however, were almost unimaginable as the railways began restoring commercial traffic in the late summer and early autumn of 1914. Nonetheless,

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‘business as usual’ would never be the norm on Russia’s wartime transport system. Freight logistics were dominated by profound changes in demand and goods flows. Here, distinctions must be made between new demands and flows that stemmed directly and indirectly from the need to maintain the army in the field and the navy in steam; on-going demands and flows from the pre-war period; and pre-existing demands and flows that decreased dramatically or stopped. There were massive new long-term military demands, mostly in new directions, plus new demands for certain essential civilian flows. Primarily this meant westbound flows of arms, munitions, food, fuel and many other supplies to the empire’s western borderlands; a similar if much smaller southbound flow to the Caucasus Front; a southbound flow from Archangel of British coal for the Baltic Fleet and of other imported military supplies; westbound military and other imports from Vladivostok; and a northbound flow of Donbass coal to Petrograd and north-western provinces hitherto reliant on imports. Importantly, most pre-war demands persisted, and only a few shrank dramatically, notably export shipments of dairy products and grains. Overall, therefore, demand far exceeded the available capacity. Obviously, this unprecedented situation could not, and did not, continue for long without threatening dangerous consequences. Newspapers across the political spectrum began reporting about price inflation and shortages of food and fuel products in Petrograd during autumn 1914, and the word ‘crisis’ became well established in the press during spring 1915.32 The Tsarist authorities’ numerous and multi-faceted responses cannot be detailed and evaluated here, but two observations about wartime freight logistics are useful for elucidating the complex challenge that the Provisional Government would face. The first is that the Tsarist government made little attempt to dampen public and military expectations about access to transport capacity. There was no information campaign, and no rationing to curb civilian demand. The inter-ministry committees that planned the freight flows gave first priority to almost every military demand. There was scarcely any discussion of the relative importance of military and civilian consignments on congested routes.33 In 1915 the MPS did devise a procedure for defining the dispatch priority of each consignment presented for railway shipment.34 This measure all but closed the network to long-distance movements of low priority goods, yet this implication was never publicized. Hence, civilian shippers continued to expect access, and when they were refused, the consequences were frustration, recriminations and efforts to circumvent the restrictions, including corruption.35 As for alternative policies, at least three things could have been done differently for potentially significant improvements. One was to manage public expectations. The second was explicitly to ration transport capacity. The third was to create a mechanism fully independent of the Ministry of War for strategic evaluation of all demands for resources, including transport capacity, preventing the military demands from crippling the economy. But these options were not pursued. The second observation is the centrality of the Russo-Ottoman conflict.36 Typically viewed by the Russian army command as a ‘sideshow’, this war had profound logistical implications. It involved a tight enemy blockade of European Russia’s southern ports through the closure of the Turkish Straits, and a major Russian land

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and sea effort for supplying the Caucasus Front. The Ottoman blockade, coupled with the mining of the Danish Straits, meant that Russia had to rely on just Archangel and Vladivostok ports for its imports of military supplies, which were considerable.37 Both ports were distant from the empire’s battlefields, and their rail connections had not been designed for massive amounts of imports. Among the most important consequences was severe pressure on the two routes across the Urals between Siberia and European Russia. Their combined daily capacity in each direction was only 750 wagons – far less than the military demand, let alone any civilian needs – and this capacity could not be expanded quickly. This bottleneck was kept secret even from Allied governments. Thus, while critics of the MPS pointed to vast stores of food in Siberia, the reality was that those products could be moved into European Russia only at the expense of urgent military traffic. Similarly, as noted above, the military demand on the trunk railway through the Caucasus forced the authorities to send most of Russia’s oil products via the Caspian Sea and river Volga, even though this route was unusable during winter. In short, much of the strain on the transport system was a direct product of the Russo-Ottoman war. Like Germany, Russia was fighting a war on two separate fronts in conditions of near total enemy blockade. Acutely aware of these logistical connections, MPS officials kept a hopeful eye on the Allies’ ill-fated Gallipoli campaign.38 But whether the government and military leaders ever discussed these particular consequences, especially after the withdrawal from Gallipoli, is unknown. Nor is it known whether ministers Rukhlov and Trepov reported them formally to the Tsar, because most of their frequent wartime typed reports to the sovereign have not survived. Most likely, the ministers said nothing. They and senior MPS officials displayed a deferential attitude towards the state’s war policy and the transport needs of the armed forces as defined by the latter. On the rare occasions that they did raise broad questions, they backed down at the first hint of resistance. For instance, in January 1915 the Head of the MPS Directorate of Railways urged the army to reduce its demand for westbound shipments of Siberian oats temporarily by using oats stored in European Russia, but he was immediately rebuffed, and dropped the matter.39 Whatever was or was not said, the Ottoman war continued to dislocate the transport system into 1917. Accordingly, the February Revolution offered, at least in principle, an opportunity for fresh strategic thinking.

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT TAKES CHARGE The Turkish Straits did loom large in the Provisional Government’s short life, but not in any way helpful for improving the transport situation, for the idea of a separate peace with Constantinople conflicted with powerful political and alliance pressures. For centuries Russian nationalists had longed to control Constantinople and the Straits for reasons of Orthodox culture and security.40 In March 1917 Kadet leader Miliukov became the champion of this dream as the new Minister of Foreign Affairs. He argued against giving the British and French governments any excuse to break their 1915 consent for this Russian control in the event of Allied victory. But fundamental to the Franco-Russo-British alliance was an agreement never to negotiate a separate peace, and the Western Allies opposed an exclusive

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treaty with the Ottoman empire for fear of Russia quitting the struggle in Europe. Hence, despite the public clamour for peace, the Cabinet accepted that Russia had to continue fighting. Within just a few weeks that policy caused a public outcry, Miliukov’s downfall and a Cabinet reshuffle. Even so, the replacement Cabinet was also committed to the war.41 Ironically, therefore, the Russo-Ottoman conflict would continue until 1918 to cause precisely the devastating economic consequences that Russian control of the Straits was intended to prevent. Furthermore, the war’s continuation generated an unforeseen new danger for the railway system. In late March large mobs of army deserters began seizing control of trains. Locomotive crews were forced at gunpoint to take their train into a single-track section even if station personnel knew that, for instance, the track was occupied by an oncoming train, blocked by late snow or washed out by that spring’s extensive flooding. The rampaging soldiers simply ignored these dangers, and killed at least one station master. Efforts by the railway and military authorities to prevent these hijacks proved fruitless, and this anarchy continued to cause yet more delays to vital freight shipments.42 The army was in fact quick to bring the economy to the new government’s attention. On 9 March the acting Commander-in-Chief, General M.V. Alekseev, wrote to the head of the government, Prince G.E. L’vov, proposing an urgent conference at Stavka, the army’s headquarters at Mogilev. Alekseev wanted front army representatives to meet with ministers to discuss what the army needed, how far the country could meet those needs, and how to reduce the military’s requirements. L’vov designated 18 March as the day.43 However, the conference actually occurred on 30 March because the front staffs failed to supply the necessary information in time. This postponement became significant in the sense that the United States’ entry into the war on 24 March opened the possibility of a large American state loan for importing more war supplies, and in turn that opportunity influenced the discussion about transport. The attendance list augured well for achieving important decisions. Chaired by L’vov himself, the conference was attended by the ministers of war (A.I. Guchkov), agriculture (Shingarev) and foreign affairs (Miliukov), deputy ministers and senior officials from the MPS, Ministry of Trade and Industry and Ministry of Internal Affairs, a large delegation from the War Ministry, and a host of Stavka-based military and civilian officials. Representing ministers Konovalov and Nekrasov were their deputies P.A. Pal’chinskii and D.A. Ustrugov, respectively, and the deputy head of the MPS based at Stavka, General V.N. Kisliakov, also attended. A notable absentee was the Minister of Finances, Tereshchenko.44 Alekseev’s three questions  – especially the one about reducing the military’s requirements  – offered the government a chance to propose a new philosophy for managing the war effort that aligned military plans with economic capacity. But that opportunity was spurned. There was no fundamental reassessment of the military’s aims and requirements, nor were alliance commitments mentioned except in relation to Romania; the very full record shows that Foreign Minister Miliukov said almost nothing. Instead, the discussion was framed very narrowly, and L’vov acted merely as a conciliator, not as a leader with a vision of how to do things

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differently. No major decisions were taken. The outcome, in essence, was continuity with the old regime’s conception of how to run the war effort. Specifically, the reduction of the army’s requirements became the question of how much the front-zone ration commitment could be reduced. Haggling over relatively small numbers dominated the discussion. Summarized crudely, the army representatives sought a limited reduction consistent with the maximum amount of food that reportedly the railways could deliver, whereas Shingarev in particular – by far the most vocal civilian participant – probed and questioned their assumptions and data, seeking a larger reduction. The question of how the affected people  – potentially including the families of front-zone railway personnel  – would feed themselves was scarcely addressed. Eventually L’vov brought the debate to an inconclusive close by proposing that a decision be negotiated and finalized within two weeks. The second issue actually discussed was how to reduce the strain on the railways. Crucially, there was no broad debate about rationing access to transport and achieving a more balanced means of prioritizing military and civilian demands. Greater use of waterways, top priority for locomotive heavy overhauls and urgent efforts to expedite deliveries of new locomotives and rolling stock were the main measures considered. L’vov deduced, ominously, that there was no hope for any improvement in shipments during April–June. The discussion concluded with general agreement that ‘the question of getting rolling stock from America in Vladivostok was the most fundamental need in relation to the improvement of transport’. After that, Pal’chinskii delivered a report about metals and fuel, but there was little appetite for discussing it, whereupon L’vov closed the meeting. The conclusion about American rolling stock is remarkable and puzzling. This policy could be considered only because the United States had joined the war: a belligerent government could not borrow from a neutral government, Russia had thus been dependent on the British government for financing war-related overseas procurement since 1914, and in 1916 the latter had imposed a moratorium on new Russian contracts for American railway equipment. Furthermore, there was almost no practical chance of any deliveries from America in 1917, as recent experience showed. When in spring 1915 the Tsarist government had decided to order 400 locomotives in North America for urgent delivery, for a host of practical reasons these locomotives did not begin arriving at Vladivostok until late 1915, and then required reassembly at Harbin.45 Now at least five times that number was wanted – an unprecedented quantity in the global history of locomotive exports  – and Washington had yet to confirm a big loan. There was no reason to suppose that the delivery time could be substantially quicker even if, as the Russians hoped, the US government prioritized this support. Either the conference participants were deluding themselves about the procurement schedule, or they had abandoned hope for a fundamental improvement in transport during the remainder of 1917. The latter scenario was presumably their actual thinking, but it implied little if any opportunity for food and fuel stockpiling for the next winter. Were the new ministers perhaps distracted by the possibility of a big American loan? Or were they already resigned to mere damage limitation and a hungry, rebellious winter?

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The Provisional Government did at least act promptly on the core proposals from the transport discussion. In mid-April it passed a law compelling the maximum use of inland waterways during the 1917 navigation. Key clauses included a ban on using railway transport for any goods that could make the whole journey by water, and higher dispatch priority for goods forced to go by water.46 However, some of the resultant instructions to the heads of railway companies and the chairs of the regional freight traffic committees merely confirmed work that was already being done, such as routing imported coal via the Northern Dvina and Sukhona rivers to Vologda. Importantly, MPS officials cautioned that time was needed to agree contracts with shipping companies, prepare storage space and create teams of freight handlers (gruzchiki).47 In other words, the authorities were tackling obstacles that they had earlier treated as deterrents because of the considerable time and resources needed to resolve them. Crucially, the government seemed to ignore the intractable question of how to find enough workers amid a severe labour shortage. Consequently, with shipping already beginning to move, this law was unlikely to deliver a meaningful difference during the 1917 navigation season. As for railway investment, continuity was the reality for railway construction policy. During 1916 minister Trepov had initiated planning for a massive investment programme that looked ahead to post-war reconstruction.48 Shaped in part by consultation with public organizations like the war industries committees, it was finalized at over 37,000 km of new routes for implementation during 1917–22. In the difficult circumstances it was an extremely ambitious echo of Count Sergei Witte’s strategy in the 1890s to use railway building as a lever of industrialization and economic modernization. Given the public consultation and considerable effort expended, the Provisional Government was unlikely to adopt a radically different policy. It simply continued to fund existing projects, and explored options for new finance that included foreign investment.49 To procure transport equipment the government authorized enormous expenditure. Just two days after the Stavka conference, on 1 April, the Cabinet approved an MPS report about spending USD200 million on importing 2,000 locomotives and 40,000 freight wagons urgently from North America.50 These quantities of equipment and money dwarfed the combined total of the Tsarist government’s already substantial emergency overseas contracts of 1914–16 for railway equipment.51 Additionally, big contracts were awarded to domestic suppliers, and as with the railway-building plan, the new government’s decisions demonstrated an interest in post-war reconstruction. In particular, on 21 May the Cabinet authorized a five-year contract with the Kolomna machine-building company for delivery of 1,000 locomotives and 15,000 freight wagons during 1918–22. The same meeting also endorsed an even larger and longer deal with the Russian Company for Making Shells and Military Supplies, this time for 1,470 locomotives and 15,600 freight wagons by 1925.52 Long-term contracts of this ilk had been wanted by Russia’s transport engineering companies since at least 1913, and by early 1915 the industry viewed them as vital for resolving wartime cash-flow problems and resource shortages.53 The fact that the government brought a major armaments company into this arena in May 1917

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indicates a strategic intention to increase production capacity in an industry that had been operating at well below capacity during 1908–13. Given also that wartime losses of railway equipment to date had been quite modest, it seems reasonable to deduce that the government anticipated a long-term post-war process of equipment development and modernization to match the railwaybuilding programme.54 Yet none of these procurement decisions marked a revolutionary change in state policy. Back in spring 1916 the MPS had finalized a plan to import 1,300 locomotives, 34,915 wagons and over 126,000 tonnes of rail as well as other supplies from North America for nearly USD200 million. Unfortunately for the MPS, that plan depended on British funding, like so much of the Tsarist regime’s wartime overseas procurement, and it fell because London balked at providing so much money for non-military products.55 As for the domestic industry, the Tsarist authorities had conceded the principle of long-term contracts in March 1915, and by July 1916 the MPS had taken a firm decision to begin issuing long-term contracts to Russian factories to cover the needs of state-owned railways for the next five to six years.56 In reality, then, the Provisional Government was able to act so quickly because most of the preparatory work had already been done. Above all, however, these equipment contracts could not possibly solve Russia’s immediate logistical problems. As noted above, the American imports would not enter service in quantity before 1918. Similarly, the first deliveries on the domestic contracts were not due until 1918, and in any case the Russian factories still had to complete delayed locomotive and wagon orders from 1915 and 1916. In fact, Nekrasov and the Stavka conference really wanted the locomotive-builders to assist with heavy overhauls of existing locomotives. This tactic was sensible for expanding the operational stock, because locomotives fresh from heavy overhaul were the most likely to survive the next winter without breaking down. However, as the Bolsheviks would find when trying this same policy in 1920, the industry was resistant, preferring more lucrative contracts for military supplies and new engines.57 Accordingly, with shortages of labour, materials and spare parts continuing to hamper repair work, the proportion of ‘sick’ locomotives climbed from around 16.8 per cent in January 1917 to 22.9 per cent in late May.58 By November and December the reported figures would be 27.4 and 29.4 per cent, respectively.59

WORKERS, MANAGERS AND THE RAILWAY TRADE UNION Importantly, the US loan came with conditions. One was for the Russian government to facilitate a fact-finding tour by US railway engineers. The American side wanted to assess the situation for themselves. Naturally, MPS officials felt that their competence was being questioned, but they had to accede if they wanted the American equipment. The mission duly arrived at Vladivostok in late May, and its forthright chief, John F. Stevens, soon caught the local mood: ‘[The Russians] want us to put a big bag of money on their doorstep and then to run away.’ Instead, estimating that the railways were working at only about 60 per cent capacity, the

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visitors concluded that poor labour discipline and productivity were the main difficulties. Workers seemed discontented, idle, insubordinate, apathetic and indifferent. A further explanation was poor traffic management. The Americans believed, for instance, that managers were allowing coal traffic needlessly to congest the trans-Siberian route near Tomsk.60 Whether the Americans’ technical analyses were sufficiently sympathetic to the local equipment, conditions and culture can be disputed, but their comments about the workforce were hard to dispute, and their overall diagnosis could not surprise Nekrasov. Railway workers had achieved political notoriety when their October 1905 strike developed into the empire’s first general strike. In the aftermath, the Tsarist regime was determined to prevent any future disruption to transport services, for political and military as well as economic reasons. Its response relied heavily on repressive and coercive measures, including dismissal of some 60,000 staff during 1905–7 for revolutionary activity. It outlawed union membership and strikes, created special central and local security committees to enforce discipline, and passed legislation to subject employees to a form of semi-military discipline in wartime. Full militarization of the industry was considered, but ultimately not pursued.61 During the World War, the ministers tried to defuse worker discontent with modest efforts to improve the material situation of staff, especially lower paid personnel.62 As for railway management, Nekrasov among other Duma representatives had been complaining about it for years, as noted above. So, how did the Provisional Government try to deal with these issues? Unsurprisingly, appeals to transport workers to work normally were among Nekrasov’s first actions as minister.63 There had been similar appeals by previous ministers, and there would be more by Nekrasov and his three successors before the October Revolution. But generally the Provisional Government did steer a different course from its predecessor concerning labour policy. Some of the changes and proposed changes were not specific to the transport sector, such as the legalization of trade unions, the introduction of an eight-hour working day, the abolition of piece-work and improvements to the rights of women employed in the state sector. The material situation of railway personnel was investigated by a commission led by the veteran revolutionary socialist G.V. Plekhanov.64 A landmark change was the abolition on 7 March of political restrictions on hiring transport staff.65 However, the decisive labour development for the industry proved to be unionization. In particular, the large union that emerged on the railways had a powerful and ultimately notorious leadership called the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Railway Union (Vserossiiskii ispolnitel’nyi komitet zheleznodorozhnogo profsoiuza – Vikzhel).66 Disruptive for the economy as unionization proved to be, the government had little if any choice about allowing it for transport workers. Powerful pressures were the explosion of union-building in the society and the memory of 1905. But Nekrasov, on the left of his party, actually embraced it. On 27 May, following the union’s first conference, he issued MPS circular 6231 about the democratization of railway management.67 He began by observing that Tsarist management had been founded on administrative repressions, the oppression of the personality of

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railway personnel and the elimination of their initiative concerning their duties. This approach, he continued, was completely at odds with the principles of rights, justice and political freedom. Instead, the organisation of correct and safe railway traffic and the establishment of a strict culture (poriadok) of railway employment had to be based on the friendly cooperation of managers and workers, the full equality of rights of all people working on the railways, the conscientious attitude of staff to their job, and the firm internal discipline that knitted the railway army into a single powerful force. This discipline had to come not from fear of repression but ‘from an understanding that the proper operation of the railway network was exceptionally important for the people and the state’. That result could be achieved only if all personnel were united in a powerful single professional union. Nekrasov explained that such a union was now being created, its constituent congress would occur soon, and union committees already existed at railway and district levels. And so by agreement with the union’s executive committee Nekrasov now wanted to elaborate some interim basic principles for the joint work of railway management and railway union. The final version was to be based on the decisions of the union’s constituent congress. The remainder of the circular elaborated Nekrasov’s view of how the relationship would work. For instance, it allowed the union to monitor railway operating, and included information about staff secondments for union work, union access to the railway telegraph and free travel for union officials. Whether Nekrasov’s policy was naïve, idealistic or pragmatic can be debated. Indisputable is the fact that it failed spectacularly, and helps explain the pronounced decline in transport productivity and labour discipline over the next five months. Scarcely consulted beforehand, managers were appalled.68 For their part, union officials acted quickly to make their presence felt. For example, they intervened in hiring decisions and pressed for the dismissal of particular managers. Instead of friendly collaboration, the union-management relationship became tense and adversarial. At the same time severe tensions developed between Vikzhel and the union’s line committees, with the latter threatening strikes for improved pay and conditions, which the central committee could not deliver. These multiple tendencies became extreme by the autumn. There was a national railway strike in September, coinciding with the peak demand for harvest shipments. Then in October Vikzhel urged Prime Minister A.F. Kerensky to dismiss the minister himself.69 By that time the minister was A.V. Liverovskii, the fourth holder of the post since the February Revolution (Table 4.2). If better leadership had been a demand of opposition deputies in the State Duma, the Provisional Government cannot be said to have provided it, even though all four ministers were experienced transport engineers. Nekrasov held the job for the longest time, but that meant just four months. He became deputy prime minister during the July Days. G.V. Takhtamyshev was merely a caretaker figure whose own year reflected deepening chaos. Having worked abroad for many years, he had returned to Russia in spring 1917 and was appointed as an MPS Inspector from 8 May. Two weeks later he was promoted to Chief Inspector, then in mid-June he became a deputy minister; he returned to this

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TABLE 4.2  Ministers of Ways of Communication under the Provisional Government, 1917. From

To

Post

Politics

Education

Kadet

Engineer of ways of communication

Nekrasov, N.V.

2 March 4 July

Minister

Takhtamyshev, G.S.

11 July

24 July

Acting head

Iurenev, P.V.

24 July

31 Aug

Minister

Liverovskii, A.V.

25 Sept

25 Oct

Minister

Engineer of ways of communication Kadet

Engineer of ways of communication Engineer of ways of communication

Source: Zakrevskaia and Gol’ianov, Rukovoditeli vedomstva putei soobshcheniia, 41–44. Other sources list Nekrasov’s final day as 2 July. This source incorrectly gives Takhtamyshev’s final day as 24 August.

position after his fortnight at the helm. The next minister, P.P. Iurenev, was a longstanding Kadet who had worked with the Zemgor army supply organization from 1915. Unlike Nekrasov, he opposed Vikzhel’s interventionism and workers’ wage demands. However, his refusal to support Kerensky in the so-called Kornilov affair led to his departure. Liverovskii was an MPS insider, having headed the Directorate for Railway Construction since 1915. From March 1917 he combined the role of deputy minister with membership of the council of the engineers’ professional union. He did oppose Kornilov, but his brief ministerial career ended with his arrest during the night of 25/26 October 1917.70

ADMINISTRATIVE CULTURE AND STRUCTURES In this fluid context, the Provisional Government was unlikely to achieve much progress with improving transport administration and management. Criticism was an easy path for opposition politicians and foreign advisors, but for this wouldbe democratic government suddenly to transform a long-established management culture and bureaucracy was, realistically, impossible. The same aim would prove difficult even for the Bolsheviks despite their ruthless determination to retain power. Managers could be sacked – many transport officials were dismissed during spring 1917 and beyond – but their replacements had to come from the same professional milieu.71 This situation foreshadowed the Bolshevik government’s reliance on so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’ until a new generation of politically reliable ‘red specialists’ was ready to replace them.72 Unsurprisingly, then, neither the Provisional Government nor the MPS got far with reforming the culture of the transport bureaucracy. Early in his tenure Nekrasov initiated preparations for far-reaching decentralization of management.73

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His concept was to extend the power of the company managers over day-to-day decision-making and to refocus the Directorate of Railways on strategic issues. But with his departure in July the initiative appears to have been abandoned. Importantly, no major changes were made to the regime of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports that defined much of the routine administrative and managerial activity. The one noteworthy difference was that the MPS had to submit its funding requests to the Cabinet instead of the State Duma, and the Cabinet instead of the Tsar made the final decision. However, this was hardly a change of substance, nor was it specific to the transport sector. Ironically for a government rooted in the State Duma, the new mechanism was very similar to the old regime’s use of article 87 of the 1906 Fundamental Law, whereby ministries could ask the Council of Ministers and Tsar for funding approval without reference to the State Duma. This tactic had been used by the old regime for the majority of wartime funding decisions. Reform of administrative structures offered some scope for improving management, but this opportunity was largely ignored. The main changes implemented had the effect of weakening the state’s ability to control the workforce. The first  – the abolition of the railway gendarmerie  – was confirmed at only the third meeting of the Provisional Government ministers.74 An important coercive tool for the Tsarist regime, this special corps had no more chance of surviving in the revolutionary era than the hated Okhrana secret police. A related decision was the abolition of the central MPS security committee whose remit was to suppress transport strikes and disturbances; the subordinate committees on each railway were also abolished.75 Yet it might be argued that the gendarmes did not really disappear, in the sense that a railway guard force (strazha) was created in their place by June 1917.76 The parallel creation of a railway militia may also have reinforced feelings of déjà vu among railway personnel.77 Aside from the trade union, which was not a government creation, there were no novel changes to the operations-related structures. The MPS and its main directorates, most of the various central and regional traffic planning committees, and all the transport operating companies remained in situ. The prominent exception was the inter-ministry Administrative Committee for deciding freight shipment priorities: it was abolished in April 1917.78 But again, the idea was not new. A.N. Frolov, an engineer and member of the Special Shipments Conference, had proposed this measure in May 1916, and in January 1917 the Special Shipments Conference had instructed the Administrative Committee to consider his report.79 Importantly, as long as the government failed to improve the management of military demands for transport capacity, the risk of essential civilian needs being neglected would remain significant.

OUTCOMES: PERFORMANCE AND DEMAND Gaps in the wartime statistical record – increasingly a problem as railways struggled to submit their reports punctually  – were often not acknowledged when MPS officials compiled network-wide reports about operating performance before the February Revolution.80 Thereafter, the problem became worse, especially after about

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May 1917. But if one accepts the reported numbers for system-wide operations as indicative rather than absolute, they can still provide a general impression of freight transport during 1917. For example, if 8,000 million puds of goods were loaded in 1913, the figure for 1917 was much lower at 5,500 million puds.81 That dramatic decline, moreover, must be seen in the context of the work recorded for 1916, which was roughly 20 per cent above the 1913 level.82 The same basic picture is shown by more specific sources, such as the recorded arrivals of loaded freight wagons at Petrograd. If an average of 306 wagons of coal arrived at the capital each day in 1916, the comparable figure for 1 January–30 September 1917 was just 168 – about 55 per cent of the 1916 performance. The analogous figures for arrivals of food were 431 wagons per day for 1916 and just 309 per day for 1 January–30 September 1917 – roughly 72 per cent of the 1916 level.83 Army records for wagonload deliveries of food to the fighting fronts during November 1915–November 1917 provide a clear and relatively reliable perspective on railway activity. Table 4.3 shows the planned and actual monthly figures for overall deliveries, encompassing such goods as flour, meat, sugar, oats and cattle. Through to June 1916 deliveries remained close to plan, and even surpassed the target in May 1916. Thereafter a large shortfall against the target was recorded each month, although importantly, the deliveries actually completed during November 1916–March 1917 either matched or even exceeded the results during the same

TABLE 4.3  Food deliveries to army stores at the fighting fronts, November 1915–November 1917. 1915 plan 1915 actual 1916 plan 1916 actual 1917 plan 1917 actual January

51,243

56,688

93,992

63,283

February

58,987

55,567

88,256

49,211

March

72,385

71,316

93,961

71,630

April

83,790

78,747

90,930

38,844

May

94,116

94,475

80,476

66,404

June

87,960

83,599

67,080

60,269

July

93,837

80,909

69,316

39,002

August

97,837

64,652

69,316

32,027

September

80,970

56,480

59,490

40,398

October

84,041

62,711

59,923

43,495

57,990

34,425

November

57,075

33,445

81,810

57,434

December

51,243

42,284

99,417

62,726

Source: ‘Spravka o ezhemesiachnom pritoke na fronty intendantskikh gruzov’, [c. December 1917] (RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 357, ll. 54ob.–55).

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period a year earlier with the exception of February 1917. But from April 1917 onwards performance slumped far below the previous year’s results. One might question the realism of the plan targets from winter 1916/17, which ignored the natural pattern of summer peak and winter low, but these actual results confirm that the transport system’s performance was disintegrating throughout the spring, summer and autumn of 1917.84 Yet demand remained high. An attempt was made to dampen non-urgent civilian demand by emphasizing military shipments and centrally planned food and fuel shipments in a new July 1917 edition of the freight dispatch rules first introduced in July 1915.85 But once again this measure was not the strict rationing that the situation demanded. As Table 4.3 confirms, by this time the actual freight movements were well below the monthly target amounts for even the priority day-to-day military demands, let alone the requirements for immediate civilian use and winter stockpiling. Necessarily, the shortfalls between the cumulative actual deliveries of core commodities and the cumulative targets were increasing every month.

CONCLUSIONS There was no simple answer to Russia’s logistical problems in spring 1917. In the context of on-going global warfare, a substantial rapid improvement required an early peace treaty with the Ottoman empire and preferably also a marked reduction in army demand for long-distance shipments. However, with the Western Allies unwilling to countenance a separate peace with Constantinople, that scenario was never contemplated. Unwilling to sue for peace, the Provisional Government thus had to confront the same intractable challenge of waging a two-front war amid a dual enemy naval blockade that the Tsarist regime had faced. Whether or not the new ministers grasped the full complexity of this logistical conundrum, they did not, for all their earlier anger in opposition, offer any new strategy. The principal transport policies that they took from the Stavka conference of 30 March – maximizing the use of waterways, investment in new railways and capital equipment, and repair of existing locomotives  – had all been priorities of the old regime. To its credit, the Provisional Government did act quickly on these policies. But sorely needed initiatives to manage public expectations, ration transport capacity and balance military demands much more effectively with the core civilian needs did not follow. With L’vov himself acknowledging that no increase in the volume of freight shipments was likely before June, and the Stavka conference pinning its hopes on imported equipment that could not enter service before 1918, the revolutionary government appears actually to have settled in the spring for tinkering and damage limitation in order to keep freight moving during 1917. As of 30 March it was not unrealistic for the government to aim to maintain freight traffic at its current level for at least a few months. Railway officials seemed confident that they could sustain it, and the army representatives were adamant that only a modest reduction of their ration commitment was needed for the promised food deliveries to be sufficient. But this scenario meant that food and fuel deliveries

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to the urban areas would be insufficient for stockpiling for 1917/18 winter, and possibly even for some day-to-day basic needs: widespread food riots before the 1918 harvest were thus a real possibility. Also, it required the workforce to continue working more or less normally. Yet as the Stevens mission quickly discovered during May–June, that did not happen. Much of this problem was a function of the ongoing revolutionary turmoil, but the way that the railway trade union developed and operated made a significant contribution. Through a process that minister Nekrasov actively encouraged, Vikzhel became a hugely disruptive force. It spurred a big decline in labour productivity that made the spring volume of freight traffic impossible to sustain. Crucially, with the railway gendarme corps disbanded and its replacement inadequate, the Provisional Government lacked any coercive authority over the railway workforce to arrest that decline. From as early as June 1917 a hungry winter became ever more likely.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The October Revolution: Soviet power and socialist government SALLY A. BONIECE, FROSTBURG UNIVERSITY

Although the October Revolution resulted in a Soviet government ruled by the Bolshevik party, a one-party dictatorship was not the goal of the labouring classes who rallied to the slogan of ‘All power to the soviets!’ in 1917. Nor was it the goal of every left-wing socialist who advocated a revolutionary government based on the soviets, the elected councils of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies that originated in the revolution of 1905–7 and revived in the February Revolution of 1917. Instead, a faction in each of the three major socialist parties  – Bolshevik, Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR)  – aspired to create a government of all of the socialist parties represented in the soviets, from the Bolsheviks on the left of the socialist spectrum to the Popular Socialists on the right. First proposed by Iulii O. Martov of the Menshevik-Internationalists during the July uprising in Petrograd, an ‘all-socialist’ government by September had become the preferred political solution of the Left SRs and a group of prominent Bolsheviks led by Lev B. Kamenev as well. However, when the threat of a national railway strike forced the socialist parties into negotiations to form a multi-party coalition government immediately after the October Revolution, the enmity between extremist Bolsheviks such as Vladimir I. Lenin and the moderate Mensheviks and SRs overpowered the intercessory efforts of the pro-coalition socialists, leaving only the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs as mutually acceptable partners in soviet-based government.

ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS! Local soviets in revolutionary Russia, directly elected by military units and workers in the cities and by peasants in the villages, sent deputies to represent them at provincial, regional and national conferences and congresses of soviets. In the Russian capital, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies acted as a national soviet body until the First All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets convened in June 1917. The Central Executive Committee that was

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elected by the All-Russian Soviet Congress acted as a sitting national representative body for the workers and soldiers after the congress ended. Likewise, the First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies, which convened in May 1917, elected a national Peasant Executive Committee to meet in regular sessions. For the worker majority in Russia’s industrial regions and the peasant majority in Russia’s vast countryside, the soviets provided an experience of representative democracy, as the State Duma of the late tsarist era, a parliament based on indirect voting and a very restricted franchise, certainly had not. Yet from the February Revolution onward, the socialist parties were not in agreement on the purpose and function of the soviets, any more than they were in agreement on the paramount issues of forming a national government and participating in the Great War. Within both the SR and Menshevik parties, a moderate-minded leadership predominated that favoured continuing the war in defence of the revolution under a Provisional Government headed by liberal politicians from the State Duma, the most progressive representatives of the propertied classes, until a Constituent Assembly could be convoked to decide the question of a permanent government. To these moderate Mensheviks and SRs, who led not only their parties but also the soviets until the autumn of 1917, the soviets were coordinating bodies for worker, soldier and peasant activism rather than potential governing bodies. To the radical anti-war socialists, however  – the Bolsheviks, the Interdistrictites (Petrograd Interdistrict Committee of Social Democrats or Mezhraionka) and the Left SRs – the soviets were the foundation for government by the people.1 The left-wing internationalist socialists had evinced a reluctance to accept government by liberal Duma leaders since the revolution erupted in the last week of February. Indeed, the internationalist-led Petrograd SRs and the Interdistrictite SDs on 1 March jointly published a pamphlet urging worker and soldier representatives of the newly re-established Petrograd Soviet to ‘become the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the people’ – in other words, calling for a government based on the soviets.2 Though regularly outvoted in the Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee, the Bolsheviks, Interdistrictites and Left SRs continued to reject any association with ‘bourgeois’ government, their numbers strengthened by the return of like-minded comrades from prison, exile and emigration that spring. With Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd in early April, the Bolshevik press began to speak forcefully against the system of ‘dual power’ in which the liberal politicians of the Provisional Government prevailed over the moderate socialist leaders of the Petrograd Soviet. ‘In our country there should be only a single vlast’ (power)’, declared a Bolshevik editorial on 8 April, ‘and that vlast’ should be the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.’3 Lenin first used the slogan of ‘All power to the soviets!’ after he saw or read that it was displayed on a banner during street demonstrations against the aggressive war aims of the Provisional Government in late April. In early May, following the announcement that Menshevik and SR leaders had joined the Provisional Government as ministers in a new liberal-socialist coalition cabinet, the Bolshevik party published its first document to incorporate the slogan, a workers’ and soldiers’ guide for electing soviet deputies who would defend the goal of soviet power.4 ‘All power to the soviets!’ rang in the streets of the capital in early July, when up to

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sixty thousand armed workers, soldiers and sailors from Petrograd and the nearby naval base at Kronstadt demonstrated against the government’s recent launch of an offensive and the threat of a mass transfer of regiments to the warfront. To reinforce the revolutionary purpose of the protestors, the Bolsheviks produced a pamphlet that called for ‘a new power … the power of the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies’ and echoed the slogan of ‘All power to the soviets!’ A concurrent Left SR pamphlet similarly proclaimed the soviets to be ‘the sole legitimate organs of our revolutionary democracy’ and ended with ‘All power to the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies.’5

AN ‘ALL-SOCIALIST’ GOVERNMENT The crisis of the July uprising was compounded by the collapse of the first liberalsocialist coalition cabinet shortly beforehand over a series of policy disagreements, raising again the question of governance for revolutionary Russia. Whereas the crowds of demonstrators in the streets and their Bolshevik, Interdistrictite and Left SR champions demanded the transfer of power to the soviets, the moderate Menshevik and SR leaders of the two national Soviet Executive Committees insisted that the socialist parties must remain in political partnership with the liberal representatives of the propertied classes and not give in to ‘minority pressure’ from rioters in Petrograd. The Menshevik-Internationalist leader Iulii Martov, however, proposed an alternative form of power: neither coalition with the liberals, nor soviet rule, but an ‘all-democratic’ government led by the socialist parties and representing lower-middle-class citizens along with the labouring classes of workers and peasants. Martov’s resolution for a socialist-led democratic government, like the radical socialists’ resolution for soviet power, was voted down by the Menshevik and SR majorities of the Soviet Executive Committees in favour of renewing the liberal-socialist coalition, but the Menshevik-Internationalists began to promote the concept of a ‘homogeneous socialist government’ (odnorodnaia sotsialisticheskaia vlast’ or all-socialist government).6 In early August, the Left SRs called for ‘an all-socialist government based on the revolutionary laboring classes of the country … [and] responsible to the soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies and the democratized organs of local government’;7 the Bolshevik leader Kamenev made much the same proposal at the Democratic State Conference in September. The Menshevik-SR leadership of the Soviet Executive Committees organized the Democratic State Conference as a forum for a national discussion on governance, in the aftermath of General Lavr G. Kornilov’s abortive attempt, backed by liberal and conservative politicians and senior army officers, to supplant the Provisional Government of Prime Minister Aleksandr F. Kerensky with a military dictatorship at the end of August. Despite the complicity of the moderate socialist ministers in the government’s arrest and imprisonment of left-wing socialists after the July uprising, all of the socialist parties united against the imminent counter-revolutionary coup, mobilizing workers, soldiers and sailors through local and national soviets to stop the advance of Kornilov’s forces on Petrograd. The second liberal-socialist coalition cabinet having resigned to grant ‘extraordinary powers’ to Prime Minister Kerensky

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during the attempted coup, political leaders in Petrograd once more faced the challenge of forming a temporary government that would preside until the election of a Constituent Assembly in November. In mid-September, the Democratic State Conference, the venue for the moderate socialists’ third attempt to construct a viable coalition with the ‘democratic’ representatives of propertied society, brought the socialist parties and their worker, soldier and peasant constituents from the soviets together with delegates from commerce and industry, cooperatives, trade unions and local government organs across the country.8 Opposing the formation of yet another compact with the bourgeoisie, the radical socialists of three different parties  – Bolsheviks, Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs – argued at the Democratic Conference for the creation of an all-socialist government. Lev Kamenev expressed the view predominant in the Bolshevik Central Committee after the July uprising and Lenin’s flight from Petrograd to evade arrest. ‘The only possible course’, Kamenev stated, ‘is for state power to be transferred to the democracy – not to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, but to that democracy which is well enough represented here.’ Like Kamenev, Martov of the Menshevik-Internationalists recommended a socialist government inclusive of all the groups participating in the Democratic Conference. The Left SR Vladimir A. Karelin maintained that what Russia needed was not a third liberal-socialist coalition but ‘a coalition of revolutionary forces’, a democratic all-socialist government that would earn the people’s support because it defended their interests.9 By a narrow margin, the delegates rejected the left socialists’ proposal for an all-socialist coalition in favour of continuing the liberal-socialist coalition as proposed by the Mensheviks and SRs. However, the formation of a new cabinet was complicated by widespread suspicions that the liberal party prominent in every cabinet since the February Revolution, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), had sympathized with Kornilov, if not outright supported him. As a result, the effort of the Democratic Conference to pass a formal resolution on governance ended in deadlock, giving Prime Minister Kerensky and his inner circle of liberal advisers the upper hand in their negotiations with the moderate socialist leaders regarding the personnel and power of the new cabinet. While Kerensky agreed to convert the Democratic Conference into a sitting national body, the Provisional Council of the Republic or Preparliament, as the Mensheviks and SRs requested, he limited the purpose of the new council to consultative only, even though its membership was to be augmented by Kadets and other representatives of the wealthier classes.10 Failing to prevent a third liberal-socialist coalition, the left-wing socialists nonetheless made strategic use of the Democratic Conference to campaign for a Second All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets. The Menshevik and SR leaders of the Central Executive Committee were reluctant to convene a Second Soviet Congress, since it was likely to be a far more radical one that would obligate them to cede authority over the national system of soviets to the left-wing socialists. Throughout the week of the Democratic Conference, the front page of every issue of the Petrograd Left SR newspaper announced the Left SR platform, which began with ‘We demand the convocation of an All-Russian Soviet Congress of Workers’,

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Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’11 In the last days of the Democratic Conference, the Bolsheviks and Left SRs made a united appeal for a Second All-Russian Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets to be scheduled immediately; additional pressure from the soviet representatives attending the conference then compelled the Menshevik-SR leadership of the Central Executive Committee to set a convocation date of 20 October. All three groups of radical socialists – Bolsheviks, Left SRs and Menshevik-Internationalists – for the next several weeks promoted the concept of an all-socialist government that would be created by the upcoming Second Soviet Congress to rule the country until the Constituent Assembly determined the structure of a permanent government.12

THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY, THE PETROGRAD SOVIET AND THE MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE Meanwhile, the mounting insufficiency and insecurity of wages, food supply and land, exacerbated by German advances on the warfront and Kornilov’s attempted coup, further discredited the Provisional Government among the labouring classes and led to an upsurge of popular support for the left-wing socialists as summer turned to autumn. By mid-September, both the Left SRs and the Menshevik-Internationalists held majorities in the Petrograd city organizations of their parties, although the moderates remained in control of the SR and Menshevik Central Committees. Even more important, majorities in both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets in early September supported Bolshevik resolutions on forming a new government that represented ‘the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry’ over Menshevik-SR resolutions on forming a third liberal-socialist coalition. In the Petrograd Soviet, the defeat of the Menshevik-SR bloc led to the restructuring of the presidium, with leftwing socialists, primarily Bolsheviks, replacing the moderates. A recently released prisoner of the Provisional Government was elected chair of the Petrograd Soviet on 25 September: Lev D. Trotsky, one of the Interdistrictite group that had merged with the Bolshevik party after the July uprising.13 With Bolshevik dominance established in the soviets of Russia’s two largest cities, Lenin, still in hiding across the Russo-Finnish border, wrote to his comrades on the Bolshevik Central Committee in mid-September that the time had come for the party to organize an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. His fellow leaders, who were then arguing at the Democratic Conference for an all-socialist government with representation broadened beyond the soviets, chose neither to heed Lenin’s campaign by mail for an immediate insurrection, nor to alter the party’s public stance at the conference. On 7 October, however, the Bolshevik delegation staged a formal walkout at the opening session of the Preparliament, having decided that mobilizing popular support for the Second Soviet Congress took precedence over participating in a consultative assembly with bourgeois membership.  In an ‘emergency statement’ to the delegates, Trotsky announced the Bolshevik walkout on the grounds that both the Preparliament and the third coalition government, the products of ‘backstage deals’ made by the moderate socialist leaders with Kerensky and ‘open or masked Kornilovites’, were abetting the propertied classes in a deadly

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bourgeois conspiracy to crush the revolution and the labouring people of Russia: ‘The revolution and the people are in danger! … All power to the soviets!’14 As the Bolsheviks exited the Preparliament, wrote the Menshevik-Internationalist Nikolai N. Sukhanov, ‘The majority [of the delegates] gazed after them disdainfully, waving their hands  – good riddance! … But we [Menshevik-Internationalists], the closest neighbors of the Bolsheviks and their companions-in-arms, sat there utterly depressed by all that had happened.’ To Sukhanov, Martov and their fellow Menshevik-Internationalists, the Bolsheviks’ withdrawal from the Preparliament shattered the ‘democratic front’ of the socialists, at the very moment when all socialists should have united against the Kerensky regime as they had united against the Kornilov revolt. Certainly, the walkout and Trotsky’s justification for it engendered rumours, suspicions and discussions in the streets and corridors of Petrograd about Bolshevik plans to overthrow the Provisional Government.15 At the end of September, Lenin had returned covertly from Finland to the outskirts of Petrograd and intensified his pressure for revolutionary action. In party meetings, in letters to party comrades and in articles and pamphlets published by the party press, Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks launch an armed uprising in advance of the Second Soviet Congress scheduled to open on 20 October. As well as Bolshevik gains in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, Lenin based his case for an immediate insurrection on another recent development: the upsurge in the frequency and violence of peasant disturbances occurring across European Russia in September and October, a manifestation of the increasing land hunger and volatility of the class that constituted the bulk of Russia’s population and army. In an article of 29 September, Lenin wrote that should the Bolsheviks ‘wait’ for the Soviet Congress to convene, they would thereby ‘betray’ not only the revolution of Russian workers and peasants, but also the world revolution about to arise from the devastation of the war. Attending his first Central Committee meeting in several months on 10 October, Lenin further buttressed his argument for urgent action with his own suspicion – and rumours rife in Petrograd – that the Provisional Government planned to surrender the city to the advancing German forces, in Lenin’s interpretation ‘for the purpose of completely stifling the Russian revolution’.16 The only Central Committee members to voice open opposition to Lenin’s push for immediate action against the Provisional Government were Lev Kamenev and Grigorii E. Zinoviev, who remained committed to a peaceful transition to an all-socialist government created by the Second Soviet Congress; however, other leaders shared their doubts about a party-led seizure of power. Trotsky, the chair of the Petrograd Soviet, became the foremost proponent of a third Bolshevik alternative that developed in mid-October and amalgamated to some extent the opposing positions of Lenin and the Kamenev-Zinov’ev group. The third alternative was centred on a seizure of power through the soviets – specifically, by means of the new Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) organized in the Petrograd Soviet between 9 and 16 October. According to the third alternative, any action taken by the Petrograd Soviet against the government must be justifiable as vital to the defence of the soviets, and the overthrow of the Provisional Government must occur in conjunction with the Second Soviet Congress, the body that would legitimize the

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change in regime. While Lenin continued to push for a forceful offensive strategy, most of the Bolshevik leaders moved towards consensus on the third alternative.17 The MRC of the Petrograd Soviet, the key component of the emerging Bolshevik strategy for revolution, was set up in response to the Provisional Government’s orders for the transfer of a significant portion of the Petrograd garrison to the northern front of the war. Escalating the rumours of the city’s impending surrender, Prime Minister Kerensky decided to remove the more restive or ‘Bolshevized’ regiments from Petrograd and employ them to fortify the front against German forces, which by then had advanced to within 250 miles of the Russian capital. On 9 October, the Petrograd Soviet voted to create a committee that would plan the defence of Petrograd and coordinate the arming of the city’s workers; the structure of this new MRC was approved on 16 October and a leadership bureau of three Bolsheviks and two Left SRs chosen on 20 October. Furthermore, the Petrograd MRC in its formative stage was integrated into a network of local MRCs across the northern region, which the Bolshevik-dominated Northern Regional Congress of Soviets established in mid-October for a collaborative defence of Petrograd. Although the original purpose of the Petrograd MRC was to preserve the revolution, whether from internal attack by a ‘Kornilovite counter-revolution’ or from external attack by the German army, the Bolsheviks quickly recognized the committee’s potential as an instrument in the seizure of power for the soviets.18

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION On 18 October, two days before the Second Soviet Congress was scheduled to open, the Menshevik and SR leaders of the Central Executive Committee unwittingly made a pivotal decision that led to their own downfall. Having earlier questioned the necessity for a Soviet Congress that represented only the labouring classes when the forthcoming Constituent Assembly would represent all classes, the moderate socialists now decided to postpone the Soviet Congress until 25 October. They justified the five-day delay as allowing more time for the soviet deputies to travel to Petrograd, with the evident hope of maximizing the number of Menshevik and SR supporters at the congress. In actuality, the delay benefitted the Bolshevik party, since it provided Bolshevik leaders with another five strategically critical days in which to agitate and mobilize their revolutionary forces of workers’ militias and garrison regiments for action against the Provisional Government, either defensive or offensive as needed.19 With the Second Soviet Congress in abeyance until 25 October, the MRC took steps to position itself between the Petrograd military authorities and the Petrograd garrison. Petrograd Soviet and MRC leaders persuaded a conference of garrison representatives on 21 October to pledge their loyalty, first and foremost, not to the Provisional Government that was preparing to transfer their regiments to the warfront, but to the Petrograd Soviet and the MRC. In addition, the MRC began to replace the moderate socialist, pro-government commissars (political officers) stationed in garrison units and weapons depots with its own representatives. The Petrograd Soviet leaders sought to incite workers as well as soldiers to fight for soviet power, staging

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mass rallies in factories and assembly halls around the city on 22 October, which they had earlier appointed the Day of the Petrograd Soviet for fund-raising and propaganda purposes. At one of the rallies, the Menshevik-Internationalist Sukhanov wrote, a crowd of over 3,000 people exhibited ‘a mood bordering on ecstasy’ while voting to honour Soviet chair Trotsky’s plea that they support the Soviet ‘with all your strength and at any sacrifice’. The success of these agitational strategies among the factory and garrison populations encouraged the Petrograd Soviet leaders to challenge the Provisional Government openly on 23 October with the announcement that the MRC had dispatched new commissars to essential military units and defence points in the city, commissars authorized by the MRC to determine whether the soldiers obeyed or disobeyed any orders from the government.20 Before dawn on the next day, 24 October, the Provisional Government retaliated against the MRC by sending a detachment of officers-in-training to close down the printing press of the Bolshevik party, whose leaders Prime Minister Kerensky considered to be the sole instigators of all treasonous behaviour in the capital. A relatively minor attempt at political punishment, the raid on the Bolshevik press nonetheless reverberated among the Bolshevik and Left SR members of the Petrograd Soviet and the MRC as the opening salvo of counter-revolution. Trotsky and other on-duty Soviet and MRC leaders instantly telephoned their party comrades to gather at Soviet headquarters in the Smol’nyi Institute, Trotsky declaring, ‘Kerensky is on the offensive’. The closure of the press, coupled with alarming reports that Kerensky had ordered battalions from the suburbs to move into the city overnight, prompted the MRC to direct its forces to prepare for battle against the counter-revolutionary offensive.21 That same afternoon, Prime Minister Kerensky made a personal appearance in the Preparliament to solicit the assembly’s approval of a government crackdown on the Bolshevik party and the MRC, whose leaders he accused of ‘attempt[ing] to incite the rabble against the existing order’. Instead, by a slim majority, the Preparliament passed a resolution from Martov rebuking both the government for its plan to suppress revolutionary demonstrations and the Bolshevik party for its plan to overthrow the government. Martov’s resolution, which received the backing of all Menshevik and SR factions in the Preparliament, stated that the government must immediately introduce radical land reform at home and negotiate for peace abroad. In essence, therefore, moderate and left-wing socialists alike voted no confidence in the Kerensky regime on what was to be its final day in power.22 After the government’s pre-dawn raid on the Bolshevik press, all moves taken on 24 October by both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet could be construed as defensive, though the MRC recruited far more supporters to its cause and gained control of key bridges, the central telegraph office and a major railway station. In the very early hours of 25 October, however, the Petrograd Soviet and the MRC abandoned defensive action for offensive after Lenin himself arrived at the Smol’nyi Institute and exhorted his party colleagues to seize power before the Soviet Congress went into session that afternoon. The Bolshevik MRC leaders then launched a series of aggressive moves that over the next several hours expanded Soviet control throughout the capital, with MRC forces occupying other

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major railway terminals, the electric station and the main telephone station. Because the Left SRs withdrew from the MRC when the Bolsheviks shifted its orientation from defence to offense, the MRC’s offensive operations were party-directed rather than Soviet-directed; yet many Left SRs joined the workers, soldiers and sailors in Bolshevik-led actions to depose the government. At ten o’clock in the morning on 25 October, the day scheduled for the Second Soviet Congress to convene at the Smol’nyi Institute, Lenin issued a proclamation in the name of the MRC that the Provisional Government had fallen to Soviet power.23

THE SECOND ALL-RUSSIAN CONGRESS OF SOVIETS AND THE NEW SOVIET GOVERNMENT Lenin may have pushed so insistently for a Bolshevik-led insurrection to precede the opening of the Second Soviet Congress out of fear that without a Bolshevik seizure of power, the congress would vote to transfer power to an all-socialist coalition government, in which the moderate socialists might wield influence equal to, or perhaps greater than, that of the left socialists. Such a vote had in fact become a near certainty, for questionnaires completed by the 670 soviet deputies when they registered for the congress indicated that 505 of them favoured the transfer of ‘all power to the soviets’, meaning the establishment of a national government comprising all of the socialist parties represented at the Soviet Congress. Moreover, at the Menshevik and SR pre-congress party caucuses held at the Smol’nyi on 24–25 October, the moderate and left-wing socialists united on the question of future governance just as they had united against Kerensky’s cabinet in the 24 October session of the Preparliament. A majority of deputies at the Menshevik party caucus voted to establish a ‘homogenous [all-socialist] and democratic’ government at the Soviet Congress, while a majority of deputies at the SR party caucus voted to meet with the Menshevik-Internationalists to discuss proposing a formal resolution on a new government. In Lenin’s own party, Zinoviev and Kamenev were strong advocates of an all-socialist coalition who also spoke for other like-minded Bolsheviks.24 If popular expectations for a soviet-based, all-socialist government entailing a formal partnership between moderate and left-wing socialists seemed achievable on 24 October, the political atmosphere altered completely during the first session of the Second Soviet Congress, which opened late on the night of the 25th. Of the 670 deputies assembled, the Bolsheviks had the largest party delegation at 300; the SR delegation numbered 193, more than half of whom were Left SRs; the moderate Mensheviks numbered 68, the Menshevik-Internationalists 14 and the SD Internationalists 16. At first, Martov won the unanimous consent of the delegates for his proposal that the congress prioritize resolving the current crisis of power peacefully, ‘through the creation of a single, united democratic government’. However, spokespersons for the moderate Mensheviks and SRs subsequently excoriated the Bolshevik party for its ‘military conspiracy’ to appropriate the authority of the Soviet Congress and declared the intentions of their respective factions to exit the congress. Inviting all other groups who repudiated the Bolshevik takeover to join them, the moderate socialists walked out of the session.25

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In vain did Martov plead with the remaining left-wing groups – Bolsheviks, Left SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists and SD Internationalists – to initiate negotiations to form an ‘all-democratic government’ inclusive of all the socialist parties and factions. Trotsky refused vehemently to negotiate a coalition with the departed Mensheviks and SRs: What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious …. No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to [compromise] we say: you are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out; go where you ought to be: into the dustbin of history! ‘Then we’ll leave!’ Martov exclaimed, and he persuaded the MenshevikInternationalists to do so against the fervent arguments of his fellow leader Sukhanov. ‘By quitting the Congress’, Sukhanov wrote afterward in profound regret, ‘we gave the Bolsheviks with our own hands a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the revolution’.26 The tumultuous first session of the Second Soviet Congress ended early in the morning of 26 October, after the deputies endorsed a Bolshevik manifesto proclaiming the transfer of power; at the second session of the congress, which opened at nine in the evening of the 26th and continued until five the following morning, the deputies approved three Bolshevik proposals that addressed the manifesto’s promises for peace, land reform and Soviet government, respectively. The manifesto and corresponding three decrees were all authored by Lenin, who received a resounding ovation from the assembled deputies when he appeared in person at the second session to read his decrees on peace and land. Regarding the change of regime, Lenin’s manifesto declared that with support from the ‘overwhelming majority’ of the labouring classes, political authority in Russia was transferred from the Provisional Government to the Soviet Congress, which would act forthwith to end the war, redistribute all land to the peasants and ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Lenin’s Decree on Peace appealed to all peoples and governments currently at war to commence immediate negotiations for a just and democratic peace without annexations or indemnities. Lenin’s Decree on Land was derived from the SR land socialization program and incorporated excerpts from peasant petitions earlier published in the SR-edited newspaper of the All-Russian Peasant Congress; this decree abolished all land ownership without compensation and transferred all private and church lands to local land committees and peasant soviets until the Constituent Assembly could meet to resolve the land question.27 Kamenev was delegated to read Lenin’s third proposal on the composition of the new Soviet government, an issue that had occasioned talks between the Bolsheviks and Left SRs in the hours preceding the second session of the congress. The Bolsheviks, cognizant of the difficulties of securing national power when their party lacked support from Russia’s peasant majority, had approached the Left SRs about joining a left socialist coalition government, but the Left SRs declined in the belief that an all-socialist coalition might yet be formed. Therefore, Lenin’s

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proposed Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), the new ‘temporary’ executive organ that was to govern until the Constituent Assembly, consisted of Bolsheviks only, with Lenin as chair of Sovnarkom and Trotsky as Commissar of Foreign Affairs. To oversee Sovnarkom, the Soviet Congress formed a new Central Executive Committee of sixty-two Bolsheviks, twenty-nine Left SRs, six SD Internationalists and four left socialists from smaller parties; there was further agreement on augmenting the membership of the Central Executive Committee with representatives from the army, the peasantry and the moderate socialist factions that had walked out of the first session of the congress. The Soviet Congress officially confirmed both an all-Bolshevik Sovnarkom and a multiparty Central Executive Committee, although a visiting representative from the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers (Vikzhel) interrupted the proceedings with an announcement that challenged one-party rule and revitalized expectations for an all-socialist government.28

THE VIKZHEL NEGOTIATIONS Pressure for all-socialist negotiations from Vikzhel, a Moscow-based committee that was chaired and dominated by Left SRs, began when its representative read a telegram to the Second Soviet Congress denouncing the ‘seizure of power’ by a single party and demanding a ‘revolutionary socialist’ government accountable to ‘the entire revolutionary democracy’. To force the creation of such a government, Vikzhel threatened to take command of the railway network that transported troops, food and supplies across the country. Separate talks with the Bolsheviks and the moderate socialists then led to Vikzhel’s more specific appeal of 28 October for all of the socialist parties, from the Bolsheviks on the left to the Popular Socialists on the right, to enter negotiations immediately on forming a government. On 29 October, when an anti-Soviet insurrection instigated by the Mensheviks and SRs broke out in Petrograd, Vikzhel warned that if all-party talks did not start that day, a general railway strike would go into effect at midnight. The first round of formal negotiations among representatives of the socialist parties and groups took place that evening, with several additional rounds occurring over the next week.29 Since the Bolsheviks and the moderate socialists were engaged in armed contests for power in Petrograd, Moscow and other major cities throughout the negotiation process, the leaders of the railway workers’ union encountered continuous difficulties in attempting to broker an all-socialist agreement on shared governance. Initially, the moderate socialists proved more resistant to coming to terms, because of their confidence that Kerensky would make a triumphant return after fleeing Petrograd on 25 October to gather loyal troops from the northern front, and/or that a wave of resistance in the capital would eliminate Bolshevik rule. Within hours of exiting the Second Soviet Congress, the SR and Menshevik leaders had founded a rival organization, the Committee to Save the Homeland and the Revolution, which included members of the Preparliament and the Petrograd City Council and deemed itself the authentic governmental authority in Russia. In league with various liberals and monarchists, the Committee to Save the Homeland and the Revolution incited

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an anti-Bolshevik uprising of officers’ training corps in Petrograd that was to be coordinated with an external attack on the city by a force of Cossacks fighting for Kerensky; however, the unwillingness of other military units to participate caused both ventures to fail against the numerically superior forces of garrison soldiers and workers’ militias recruited by the MRC. Two military defeats between 29 and 31 October brought the Mensheviks and SRs to a somewhat more amenable position at the Vikzhel negotiations: at first dubious – and in the case of the SRs, hostile – about Bolshevik participation in a socialist coalition, they later consented to exclude only Lenin and Trotsky from the government.30 The Bolshevik representatives, on the other hand, were more open to concessions at the beginning of the negotiations. Confronting armed resistance in Moscow as well as internal and external threats to Petrograd in the final days of October, the Bolshevik party dared not antagonize the railway workers’ union by refusing to take part in the all-socialist talks. The Bolshevik delegation at the negotiations, moreover, was composed of Kamenev, Zinoviev and other proponents of socialist coalition who doubted that an all-Bolshevik government could retain power; in fact, the Bolshevik leaders opposed to an all-Bolshevik government included approximately half of the People’s Commissars that Lenin had appointed to Sovnarkom. Perhaps most important, the Bolshevik delegation met with no obstruction in the earlier stage of the talks from the Bolshevik foes of opposition, for Lenin and Trotsky were at that point too absorbed in the military defence and expansion of Soviet power to concern themselves with the Vikzhel negotiations.31 However, once Soviet forces prevailed in the battle for Moscow in early November, the Bolshevik stance at the Vikzhel negotiations shifted from conciliatory to obstructionist at Lenin’s behest. As of 31 October, with the steady encouragement and intercession of the Menshevik-Internationalists and the Left SRs, the socialist parties were on the verge of formalizing an agreement on an all-socialist government. A commission of the negotiators had selected a multiparty slate of ministers, all of whom would be accountable to the Provisional People’s Council, a new national assembly composed of representatives from the soviets, the Central Executive Committees of the First and Second Soviet Congresses, the Peasant Executive Committee, the Petrograd and Moscow City Councils and the major trade unions. Under Kamenev’s leadership, the Bolshevik representatives had even acquiesced to the exclusion of Lenin and Trotsky from ministerial posts. But on 1–2 November, Lenin and Trotsky, accusing the Bolshevik delegation of treason against Soviet power, strong-armed the party’s Central Committee into mandating a harder Bolshevik line at the next round of talks that put a halt to the Vikzhel negotiations.32 The supporters of an all-socialist coalition nonetheless continued to campaign for it and to oppose one-party rule in the days that followed. Reprimanded by Lenin for their readiness to compromise with the moderate socialists, five Bolsheviks, including Kamenev and Zinoviev, resigned from the party’s Central Committee on 4 November so that they could publicly express their views on forming a multiparty government. Furthermore, at a session of the Central Executive Committee that same day, the conciliatory group of Bolsheviks and the Left SRs contested a recent

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decree on the suppression of anti-Soviet newspapers, issued by Lenin as chair of Sovnarkom on 27 October without consulting the supposedly supervisory Central Executive Committee. Four Bolshevik Commissars, three of whom also quit the Bolshevik Central Committee over the Vikzhel negotiations, then resigned from Sovnarkom to protest the press decree; the Left SRs registered their own protest by withdrawing once more from the MRC, which they had rejoined to defend the October Revolution after the Second Soviet Congress. But although Lenin and Trotsky remained unwilling either to share executive power with the Mensheviks and SRs or to accept the oversight of the multiparty Central Executive Committee, the Left SRs’ determination to convoke a Second Congress of Peasants’ Soviets opened an alternative path to broadening the Soviet government.33

THE BOLSHEVIK-LEFT SR COALITION By convoking a Second Peasant Congress, the Left SRs intended not only to establish peasant support for the new Soviet regime and its Decree on Land, but also to incorporate peasant representation into the Central Executive Committee, the legislative assembly of the Soviet government, on the basis of parity with worker and soldier representation. Because the SR leadership had expelled the Left SRs from the party on 27 October for backing the Bolshevik-led revolution, the Left SRs needed the peasant vote to validate their breakaway group as the true adherents of the original SR program. However, the Left SRs also needed a mass base of their own to balance the worker base of the Bolsheviks. A plenary peasant congress being impossible to organize before the end of November, the Left SRs and their rival SR parent party agreed to convene a smaller preliminary conference of peasant deputies earlier in the month. Both the preliminary peasant conference of 10–25 November and the Second Peasant Congress of 26 November–10 December proved to be highly contentious, even raucous assemblies, each of which split into a Left SR body and an SR body; the division was roughly even at the plenary congress but favoured the Left SRs at the preliminary conference.34 During their battle to win the peasant vote for the Soviet government, the Left SRs moved decisively away from pursuing an all-socialist coalition and towards pursuing a left socialist coalition with the Bolsheviks. On the night of 14–15 November, Bolshevik and Left SR leaders drafted a proposal for restructuring the Central Executive Committee to include representatives from the Left SR body of the peasant conference, now reconstituted as an Extraordinary Peasant Congress. The two parties also began a discussion of the Left SRs’ entry into Sovnarkom, which the Left SRs made conditional on the achievement of peasant parity in the Central Executive Committee and on the certification of Sovnarkom’s accountability to the Central Executive Committee. At the Extraordinary Peasant Congress on the following day, the deputies accepted the joint proposal of the Bolsheviks and Left SRs to merge the newly elected Executive Committee of the Extraordinary Peasant Congress with the workers’ and soldiers’ Central Executive Committee on a basis of parity: in its final form, the united Central Executive Committee of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets would be composed of 108 representatives from the

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workers’ and soldiers’ Central Executive Committee, 108 representatives from the Peasant Executive Committee, 100 representatives from the army and navy, and 50 representatives from the trade unions. On the night of 17–18 November, the united Central Executive Committee approved Sovnarkom’s offer of the Commissariat of Agriculture to the Left SRs as well as a ‘Constitutional Directive’ confirming that Sovnarkom was ‘fully responsible’ to the Central Executive Committee.35 Bolshevik-Left SR negotiations on the disposition of additional government posts to the Left SRs continued for the next three weeks, at times strained almost to the breaking point by the Left SRs’ objections to a series of repressive Bolshevik actions against opposition groups associated with the Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, convinced of their moral obligation to carry out the promised land reform and to safeguard the revolution from Bolshevik excesses, the Left SRs formally agreed to enter Sovnarkom on 9 December. By January 1918, seven Left SRs were serving as People’s Commissars and four of the seven were directing People’s Commissariats, most notably Agriculture and Justice, while the Bolsheviks retained the more powerful Commissariats of Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs and Finance. With regard to their overall participation in the Soviet government, the Left SRs held about one fourth of the positions in Sovnarkom and one-third of the seats in the Central Executive Committee; they also worked in all of the Bolshevik-directed Commissariats and in other major Soviet institutions and agencies, including the new All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage (Cheka) that replaced the MRC in December.36 The lesser partners in the Bolshevik-Left SR coalition, the Left SRs in early 1918 supported the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and achieved the ratification of a land socialization law, before resigning from Sovnarkom in March over the Bolsheviks’ assent to harsh German peace terms.

CONCLUSION: SOVIET POWER AND SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT All of the major socialist parties – Menshevik, Bolshevik and SR – splintered on the issue of revolutionary governance during the course of 1917, and each of the parties contained a faction that advocated the creation of an all-socialist government with a basis in the soviets. The Menshevik-Internationalists and the Left SRs were leftwing minorities in parties with moderate majorities that dominated the soviets until the autumn of 1917, whereas the Bolsheviks favouring socialist coalition flourished during Lenin’s enforced absence from Petrograd in the summer and early autumn. To defend the gains of the February Revolution, the moderate Menshevik and SR leaders had allied with liberal politicians in the Provisional Government and rallied the soviets to support Russia’s continued role in the Great War. Under three shortlived liberal-socialist coalition cabinets between May and October 1917, however, internal instability increased in Russia, and German forces advanced on the warfront. The night of 24 October 1917, when all of the moderate and left-wing Menshevik and SR factions in the Preparliament united to vote no confidence in the Provisional

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Government, marked the point at which these groups cooperated most closely on forming an all-socialist coalition to rule revolutionary Russia. Later that night and into the next day, at meetings of their delegations for the Second Soviet Congress, moderate Mensheviks and SRs joined their parties’ left wings in voting to create an all-socialist government at the congress. However, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power through the MRC of the Petrograd Soviet on 24–25 October, a fait accompli by the time the Second Soviet Congress opened on the night of 25 October, divided the moderate and left-wing socialists once more. At the multiparty negotiations on constructing a socialist coalition demanded by Vikzhel after the October Revolution, the Menshevik-Internationalists, the Left SRs and a pro-coalition group of Bolsheviks worked intensively to formulate an agreement that would be acceptable to the more recalcitrant socialist factions. It was the moderate SRs and Mensheviks at one end of the socialist spectrum and the extremist Bolsheviks at the other, hostile opponents then engaged in an armed conflict over power, who impeded the formation of an all-socialist government. In assessing the Vikzhel negotiations, Western historians have paid tribute to the well-intentioned and unflagging efforts of the Left SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists and conciliatory Bolsheviks to bring about an all-party agreement while criticizing moderate socialists and Leninists alike.37 Although the Bolshevik and SR parties blamed each other for the failure of the Vikzhel negotiations, a historian of the SRs wrote, both parties were ‘equally insincere’ in sending representatives to the talks, for neither party, if prevailing in the ongoing armed conflict, would have agreed to compromise with the other.38 A historian of the Bolshevik party noted that the moderate socialists held ‘unrealistic positions’ at the Vikzhel talks, but he also pointed to Lenin’s and Trotsky’s ambition for the Bolshevik party to blaze a path towards world revolution, which precluded the Bolsheviks’ cooperation with the moderate socialists.39 For the politically conscious members of Russia’s labouring classes in 1917, ‘All power to the soviets’ did not mean one-party rule but rather a government of all the socialist parties represented in the soviets. The two concepts of soviet power and all-socialist government were similarly intertwined in the view of the Left SRs, the Menshevik-Internationalists and the pro-coalition group of Bolsheviks. Yet these concepts were unrelated in the view of the moderate Mensheviks and SRs, who preferred a government that did not include Bolsheviks and was not based on the soviets, and in the view of Lenin and Trotsky, who aimed to establish a soviet regime under Bolshevik control. In retrospect, therefore, the possibility that all of the socialist parties would form a government in 1917 was rather unlikely.

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CHAPTER SIX

The early Soviet government, 1917–23 LARA DOUDS, UNIVERSITY OF NORTHUMBRIA

The October Revolution delivered the birth of the world’s first workers’ and peasants’ socialist state, the Soviet Republic. In constructing their post-revolutionary government, Lenin and his fellow Soviet leaders were inspired by Marxist ideals of freeing the working masses from oppression and inequality. They aimed to introduce the ‘most democratic’ system in history. Instead, they ushered in an authoritarian Communist party-state dictatorship even more repressive than anything the tsars had managed to impose. The long shadow cast by the party-state monolith, which occupied the Soviet political landscape from the mid-1920s until Gorbachev’s attempt to disentangle it in the 1980s, obscured the fact that there was an initial delay in institutionalizing the party’s monopolistic, overbearing ‘leading and directing role’ by which its organs became the actual machinery of government. In the earliest years after the October Revolution government was conducted not through the party machinery, but through the Soviet state institutions, with the Council of People’s Commissars, or ‘Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov’ (abbreviated to Sovnarkom) at the apex. The earliest years of Lenin’s government were a period of improvisation and experimentation in the nature of power and legitimacy during which Soviet leaders believed that they were constructing a novel and superior democratic system, but were unsure of the organizational and structural forms that this new government should take. Soviet leaders had no concrete programme of what the post-revolutionary government of the transitional ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ should look like. Marx had taught them to scorn the ‘bourgeois parliamentary democracy’ of contemporary Western Europe, which amounted to nothing more than the oppressed majority being ‘allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!’.1 While the Bolsheviks rejected ‘bourgeois parliamentary democracy’ and its ‘con’ of separation of powers as part of the repression of the proletariat by the capitalist class, this did not mean that they immediately embraced repressive Communist party-state dictatorship.  An important element of ‘genuine’ Soviet democracy was economic equality, but in politics too institutional choices had to be made, at least until the state

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began to ‘wither away’ under the future communist society. Initially, government by Sovnarkom, combining supreme executive and legislative power, and responsible to the hierarchy of Soviets from the local level upwards, expressed at the centre in the Central Executive Committee, was the institutional form it took. Other institutional innovations intended to deliver ‘proletarian’ democracy included ‘collegiality’ within Soviet government and administrative institutions. The new state-builders rejected hierarchical control and the one-man management of the ‘hated ministers’ and favoured collective decision-making as a more ‘revolutionary’ form.2 The social origins of those working in government and bureaucracy were also important. Proletarian class and party background of staff were considered essential to the healthy functioning of Soviet democracy, although in practice suitable, able cadres were lacking to serve in the new government. It was impossible to find enough literate, capable workers, peasants and party members so Lenin’s government was forced to rely on the holdover white-collar staff and employ oversight instruments such as the Worker’s and Peasant’s Inspectorate, or ‘Rabkrin’, to surveil their activity instead.3 The ‘Receptions’ of major government departments were also viewed as a useful means of bridging the gap between state and society and making the Soviet government responsive to the masses. Within a couple of years, however, it became clear that these innovative measures had failed to deliver the desired results. Instead they impeded the effective functioning of government, with its pressing tasks of restoring economic stability to the country, and were side-lined. Instead of guaranteeing ‘proletarian democracy’ Rabkrin’s observation led to surveillance and policing from above, and the Receptions became a form of personalized, manual control. Collegiality in the commissariats led to inefficiency in the operation of the government machinery and a failure to develop powerful ministers to populate the central Soviet government institutions and cement them as a real locus of authority. Most crucially, from 1919 the expanding Communist Party machinery, in particular its apex, the Politburo, began to encroach on Sovnarkom’s authority in matters of government during the Civil War. This shift in executive power from state to party resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, ‘leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs’.4

HISTORIOGRAPHY The question of the rise of the monolithic Communist party-state dictatorship has been at the core of Soviet studies since its emergence as a discipline. The earliest literature which coalesced around Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s ‘totalitarian model’ asserted that the drive to dictatorship was in the Bolshevik DNA; a small, unrepresentative and embryonically totalitarian party imposed itself by force on the population in October 1917. From then on, Soviet politics were determined by the totalitarian dynamics of the Communist Party, with its dictatorial nature, ruthlessness, ideological orthodoxy, programmatic dogmatism, ultra-discipline and centralized bureaucratic organization.5 In the 1950s and ’60s, most Western scholarship presented the overbearing, institutionalized position of the Communist Party in the dictatorship under Stalin as the logical and inevitable development of

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the role Lenin sought for the party before the Revolution.6 Leonard Schapiro, for example, argued that Lenin developed a highly centralized, strictly disciplined party and immediately after the Revolution governed through its Central Committee.7 Even Soviet scholars who produced the first valuable works on the Soviet central state apparatus based on some archival access were restricted by official hagiography and were careful to avoid important but controversial issues such as the change in party-state relations in the early years of the Soviet regime. Iroshnikov studied not the operation of the new government, but instead the physical creation of the Sovnarkom and the People’s Commissariats in the first six months of Soviet power. Genkina analysed what Sovnarkom did, rather than how it did it, and her post-1921 chronology meant she too avoided addressing Sovnarkom’s change in status over its first five years.8 Thus, during the Cold War both defenders and detractors of the Soviet system were united in their desire to discern the existence of an all-powerful Communist Party which controlled and decided everything immediately after the October Revolution. Dazzled by the later supremacy of the Party machine and finding access to relevant archival material on government functioning difficult, Western scholars overlooked the Soviet state apparatus. As a result of this emphasis on the party’s activities, the role of soviet institutions in this early period was seriously underestimated. From the 1970s, various challenges to the totalitarian canon began to emerge which rejected the deterministic view of a dictatorial dogma shaping postrevolutionary politics and state building. Some scholars recognized an early democratic, idealistic impulse and asked how a revolution that promised the liberation of working people ended up generating an extremely violent and hypercentralized dictatorship. Early ‘revisionists’ like Robert Tucker and Stephen Cohen argued that Leninism and Stalinism were different political phenomena, and that the one did not lead inevitably to the other.9 In the 1980s a second wave of revisionists from among social historians variously attributed the origins of communist partystate dictatorship to Russian backwardness or the impact of the Civil War.10 Studies of 1917 challenged the notion of a coup d’etat, and identified elements of popular support.11 Alexander Rabinowitch discredited the notion of the Bolshevik Party as a hyper-centralized organizational weapon.12 Yet if the party was, as he argued, ‘open, relatively democratic and decentralized’, the question of how it grew so quickly into a highly authoritarian and bureaucratic organization which monopolized the functions of the Soviet government remained. His most recent book situated the emergence of a repressive, dictatorial one-party state among the various political, military and economic crises of the immediate post-revolutionary period, demonstrating how circumstances, such as the crisis in food supply, industrial collapse, violent opposition from various groups, mass unemployment and the dwindling of Bolshevik personnel shaped the agenda and decisions of the regime.13 Despite much fruitful revisionist scholarship, there has been little focus on the actual Soviet apparatus itself. The foremost Western scholar of the soviets, Oscar Anweiler, was pessimistic about their fate in the immediate post-revolutionary period, writing that ‘The Bolshevik October Revolution turned the Russian soviets from militant revolutionary organs into pillars of the new state power’ and that ‘this

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fusion of new soviet power and the Bolshevik insurrection proved disastrous for the soviets themselves; after this they were merely servants of the party and a cover-up for Bolshevik dictatorship’.14 Anweiler argued that ‘Lenin and Trotsky … laid the groundwork for their party dictatorship behind the façade of the soviets’.15 In contrast, T.H. Rigby was the only historian to seriously acknowledge the early vitality of the Soviet state apparatus in his classic work Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–1922. He challenged accepted wisdom by highlighting the neglected fact Soviet power did not at first mean government by the party, but by Sovnarkom.16 Rigby was the first Western scholar to discuss how this supreme central state apparatus operated and argued that in the early years after October it was state rather than party bodies which governed. Yet in his pioneering 1979 study Rigby acknowledged that ‘the evidence available does not allow us to chronicle the evolution of this dependence in detail’ and that while ‘the broad outlines are clear enough … precise information on agendas is lacking’. Only recently has attention turned to the now-accessible archival evidence, including agendas, minutes and departmental papers, to compare the functioning of Sovnarkom to the Party Central Committee and then to the Politburo. New research confirms that Sovnarkom was the principal body of the early Soviet government, until the supreme party organ, the Politburo, began to gradually usurp its authority during the Civil War. In the earliest years, the Party Central Committee, yet to be expanded into its PolitburoOrgburo form, played a minor role in ‘government’. By mid-1919, however, once the Civil War was well underway, Sovnarkom began to relinquish direction of some urgent affairs to the Politburo. It was not until mid-1921 that the Politburo, rather than surrender its jurisdictional gains after the Civil War, began to extend its reach to the full range of ordinary government business.17

CONSTRUCTING THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT The way in which events unfolded on the night of the October Revolution profoundly influenced the nature of the new government in ways that no one, including Lenin, could have foreseen. The Second All Russian Congress of Soviets opened on the night of 25 October 1917. The opening had been delayed by skirmishes in the city as the Bolsheviks were anxious to capture the Winter Palace and arrest the Provisional Government members before the assembly opened. By 10.30 pm the excited crowd of delegates could wait no longer, however, and the meeting began as the palace still under siege. The Bolsheviks were the largest party elected to the congress, gaining about 300 of the approximately 650 seats. To obtain a majority they needed the support of other advocates of Soviet power, especially the eighty-five Left SRs. The Left SR and Menshevik-Internationalists held the balance of power between the Bolsheviks and their moderate Menshevik and SR opponents. These numbers guaranteed that leadership under the new Soviet power would be from the radical left, and predominantly Bolshevik, but participants assumed that the congress would create a new government composed of a coalition of socialist leaders. Martov, speaking for the Menshevik Internationalists, proposed that negotiations begin immediately for a united, democratic government of all socialist parties.

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His proposal was endorsed by the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, and adopted overwhelmingly. Then a series a speakers from the Mensheviks, SRs and other parties rose to condemn the ‘conspiracy by the Bolshevik party’ which, they charged, pre-empted the work of the congress and ‘signals the beginning of civil war’. Calling on congress delegates to march to the Winter Palace to support the Provisional Government, most Mensheviks and SRs walked out. Martov, still searching for a compromise between socialist moderates and radicals, made an appeal to avoid civil war by forming a government ‘acceptable to the whole revolutionary democracy’, i.e. the moderate Mensheviks and SRs as well as the Bolsheviks and radical left, and he proposed that the congress suspend its work until this was achieved. The Congress of Soviets, however, was now in no mood for negotiations. The speeches and walkout of the moderate socialists left the Bolsheviks with an absolute majority and had also sharpened feelings among those remaining, undermining moderate Bolsheviks who were inclined towards conciliation. After passing a resolution declaring that the ‘withdrawal of Menshevik and SR delegates from the Congress is an impotent and criminal attempt to disrupt its work’, the congress continued its debates and resolutions through the night.18 Contrary to all expectations, events handed the Bolsheviks full control of the congress and an all-Bolshevik government was formed. Lenin became chairman of the newly created cabinet, the Sovnarkom. As well as Lenin as ‘Chairman’ it included twelve People’s Commissars and a committee of three responsible for military and naval affairs. The Bolsheviks were rather conservative in their division of portfolios and the new ‘People’s Commissariats’ largely replicated the jurisdictions of the existing ministries. In the following weeks, after some struggle against ‘sabotage’ by a minority of ministerial officials, a large part of the formerly tsarist administrative staff remained in their jobs and the departments were enjoined to continue with business as usual. The new government structure was finalized when the Congress of Soviets chose a new Central Executive Committee. The Bolsheviks initially took sixty-two seats, the Left SRs took twenty-nine and ten were divided between Menshevik Internationalists and other minor leftist groups. The socialist parties that had withdrawn were unrepresented. The separation of powers of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary systems was eschewed so that there was no formal attempt to firmly demarcate executive and legislative powers. The Congress of Soviets stated that the Central Executive Committee exercised full authority in its name between congresses, including general supervision and the right to replace members, but the exact relationship of the Central Executive Committee to Sovnarkom was vague. Sovnarkom was ‘entrusted with the general direction of the affairs’ of the state. It was empowered to ‘issue decrees, regulations and instructions, and undertake all measures necessary for the proper and prompt dispatch of state affairs’.19 All decrees having ‘general political significance’ were supposed to pass for confirmation to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets. The lack of precise demarcation of executive and legislative functions was also not an immediate priority because in the early months of Soviet power there was still the possibility that the entire constitutional basis of the state would have to be redefined by the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks held its elections in

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November 1918 and despite doing well in the cities, they lost overall, gaining only a quarter of the popular vote. Claiming that votes for their coalition partners, the Left SRs, were combined in the 40 per cent SR vote as their list had been compiled before the formal split of the parties, they forcibly closed down the Constituent Assembly on its opening day on 6 January 1918. It was then formally dissolved by the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets which confirmed Sovnarkom as the permanent government of the revolutionary state. Yet the Constituent Assembly’s dissolution did nothing to clarify the relations between Sovnarkom and the Central Executive Committee. It did not matter much in practical politics as Lenin and Sverdlov, chairman of the Central Executive Committee, had a close, amicable working relationship and passed important documents to each other for co-signature. The fact that Sverdlov simultaneously served as the Bolshevik Party Secretary was an additional lubricant to the engine of administration. Attention now turned to the drafting of the first Soviet Constitution, approved in July 1918, to formalize the regulations for the functioning of the Soviet government. The Constitution mandated a federal structure in which local soviets and regional, provincial, county (uezd) and district (volost) congresses of soviets were obliged to carry out all resolutions of corresponding higher organs of soviet power and otherwise settle questions of purely local significance. Supreme power formally rested with the supposedly bi-annually convened congress, and, when it was not in session, with its executive committee. One year after the October Revolution, 6,550 such soviet committees were counted: 6,111 at the volost level plus 286 uezd, 121 city, 30 provincial and 20 regional committees. Their number declined thereafter partly because of consolidation and partly because in areas near the front, revolutionary-military committees replaced them. In voting rights to the Soviet assemblies there was clear expression of the class discrimination element of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Delegates to the Congress were the elected representatives of city soviets (1 delegate per 25,000 voters) and the congresses of the provincial (oblast) and autonomous republic soviets (1 deputy for every 125,000 inhabitants). Thus, to underscore the privileged position of urban workers in the new political order, in elections to All-Russian Soviet Congresses, one urban voter was to be the equivalent of five rural inhabitants. Also, certain categories of people  – large property owners, clerics, White officers and many tsarist officials – were deprived of voting rights altogether. According to the Constitution, the Congress of Soviets was supposed to meet twice yearly, but the civil war disrupted things and it met only once a year in December 1919, 1920, 1921 and 1922, then not again until January 1924. As well as the promulgation of the first Soviet Constitution, July 1918 was also a significant moment as it saw, for all intents and purposes, the Soviet Republic become a one-party state following the final rupture of their coalition with the Left SRs. Although the turbulent post-Revolution weeks of negotiations for a broader coalition including moderate socialist parties ended in failure, the Left SRs did join the Bolsheviks in government. In its early months the Soviet republic was governed by Sovnarkom as a dual-party coalition composed of Bolsheviks and Left S.R.s, a phase often overlooked in studies of the Russian revolution.20

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Moderate socialists had rejected the class-based nature of the Congress of Soviets and argued that sovereignty could only come from a constituent assembly elected by all classes, but the Left S.R.s, like the Bolsheviks, accepted the sovereignty of the Congress of Soviets as the basis for a legitimate revolutionary government, although they would have preferred to include representatives of the bourgeoisie in order to prevent conflict. The main condition of Left S.R. entry into Soviet government was the principle of peasant parity in the Central Executive Committee. Instead of the Bolshevik ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, they advocated the ‘dictatorship of the democracy’, that is a class-based dictatorship but of the whole army of toilers – the peasantry alongside the urban workers. The Extraordinary Second Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies which convened on 11 November 1917 in Petrograd was the key moment which made coalition government possible. This national gathering had a solid Left SR majority, supported the land decree of the revolutionary government and agreed to a merger with the CEC of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. The terms of the merger were confirmed and 108 members of the existing workers’ Soviet CEC were joined by an equal number of representatives from the peasant congress, with 100 representatives of soldier and sailor committees and 50 trade union representatives to follow shortly. The new peasant members formally joined in a spirit of celebration on 15 November 1917. On 17 November 1917 the Left SR Andrei Kolegaev became Commissar of Agriculture in the new Soviet government. The Left S.R.s formally accepted Bolshevik terms for entry into Sovnarkom proportionate to their representation in the newly merged Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies and a few weeks later, on 9 December 1917, five more Left SRs entered Sovnarkom as People’s Commissars. Left SRs were also named to the collegia of all other people’s commissariats and central government institutions. The Left SRs, from January 1918, had 122 delegates in the CEC and their charismatic leader, Maria Spiridonova, headed its Peasant Department. Additionally, eight Left SRs were elected to the CEC’s presidium and Left SR Boris Malkin was appointed coeditor of the government newspaper Izvestiia.21 Sovnarkom met fifty-three times from December 1917 to March 1918 as a dualparty cabinet. On 13 December the Left SR Commissars attended their first coalition government meeting. The meeting ran productively, with the Left SRs considering and voting on topics as diverse as the allocation of funds to various commissariats, the law on unemployment insurance, appointments to central and local government, and the rate of pay for government employees. The Left SR members attended sittings, debated and voted on resolutions and helped to shape the cabinet’s agenda. Although the Left SRs were in the minority, they pursued formal and informal means of exercising some degree of moderating influence over government policy.22 For four months Sovnarkom operated as a dual-party coalition government of Bolsheviks and Left SRs, but the controversial issue of making peace with Germany caused a devastating fissure between the partners. After the final ratification of the treaty by the CEC, the Left SR People’s Commissars withdrew from Sovnarkom on 18 March, although they maintained limited co-operation with the Bolsheviks, retaining their positions on the commissariat collegia as well as their membership

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in the CEC and local soviets. Their resignation statement confirmed that when the Bolshevik Party returned to the revolutionary path from which it had strayed, the two parties would collaborate in government again. In July 1918 the Left SRs turned to terrorism with the assassination of the German Ambassador Count Mirbach, to try to end the hated peace, remove the main issue dividing the coalition, and reinvigorate their partnership.  This tactic backfired, the Bolsheviks perceiving it as a counterrevolutionary action, and it led to the final break in Bolshevik-Left SR relations and the removal of their representatives from all Soviet government institutions. While no explicit promulgation of a one-party state was made, arrests of leaders of parties hostile to socialism had been occurring in the early weeks after the October Revolution and from July 1918 on the organizations of Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and even the Left Socialist Revolutionaries managed only a stifled existence. All were persecuted more energetically after the end of the civil war. Yet, initially, the Bolsheviks assumed that their vanguard party would serve the revolutionary cause not through the conscious creation of a party-state, but by setting broad guidelines in policy and dispatching the party’s members to lead the Soviet government institutions. Thus, in its first year or two the work of Sovnarkom was conducted with Lenin as chairman and the representatives of the commissariats as members of this collegial organ of government, most of whom were members of their party’s central committee at this point. With rare exception Lenin chaired all sittings in its first three years. Lenin conducted his day-to-day work in his Chairman’s office on the premises of the Sovnarkom Administration Department. After the move to Moscow in March 1918, the Sovnarkom premises were located in the Kremlin, just a short walk down the corridor from Lenin’s living quarters. During its first three months of operation Sovnarkom had almost daily sittings but by the end of 1918 the sitting pattern had regularized at three days per week, on a Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Sovnarkom agenda were heavy. In the hectic weeks of late November 1917, for example, agenda averaged fourteen items, but gradually declined over the following months, reflecting the accumulated experience of handling business, as well as the increasingly formal regulations which Lenin introduced to streamline Sovnarkom’s work, including the establishment of the ‘Little’ [Malyi] Sovnarkom to deal with routine business.23 Comparison of the activity of Sovnarkom in its first few months, with that of the party Central Committee in the same period, clearly demonstrates that it was via the state organ that the new Soviet regime governed. It discussed and decided policy, drafting decrees on all important matters of government administration, the economy [industry, agriculture and trade], domestic questions of transport and infrastructure, the new social welfare system and the revolutionary legal system and radical civil laws on marriage and the family. The Sovnarkom also handled foreign affairs, considering questions of foreign trade, international relations and diplomacy. In its first year the Sovnarkom also dealt with military policy, including the logistics of building the Red Army.24 In 1919 the amount and types of business considered by the Sovnarkom were little changed from the pattern described above. Administering government institutions still occupied the majority of Sovnarkom’s attention. Issues of personnel and

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appointments to state posts were not yet the exclusive domain of the Party. Economic issues remained the second most common agenda items followed by domestic questions (ranging from the struggle with typhus, to social welfare projects, to library affairs). Foreign affairs were largely absent from the 1919 Sovnarkom agenda and the military questions were rarer, due partly to the creation of Sovnarkom’s sister organ, the Defense Council, later the Labor and Defense Council (Sovet Truda i Oborony or STO) at the end of 1918, but the newly created Politburo also took increasing charge of these matters after it began to operate in April 1919.25 The view that once in power the Bolsheviks governed immediately via the party Central Committee is difficult to sustain. The Central Committee did not sit often enough to be involved in day-to-day government affairs, and stuck to party organization and issues of ideological principle when in session. In the first six months of Soviet power it concentrated on organizing Bolshevik publications and the arranging of party conferences and congresses. Its limited forays into nonparty affairs, most tackled before Sovnarkom was properly up and running, were concerned with facing the urgent food supply problem and a few appointments of party members to government posts. The controversial peace issue, which pushed the party’s ideology to its limits, heavily dominated proceedings in the Central Committee in early 1918; its sittings of 21 January and 17, 18, 22, 23 and 24 February were wholly devoted to discussion of this topic.26 Similarly, over the following year the Central Committee met sporadically, three times a month in March, April and May 1918, then had a four-month break until its next sitting on 16 September 1918. The Central Committee then sat three times in October, twice in December, once in January 1919 and once in February 1919. The preparations for the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 brought a flurry of five sittings. These meetings had between five and ten attendees with a core membership of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, with Sverdlov chairing the sessions. Records were scribbled in abbreviated form into notebooks in a variety of handwriting. It was not until October 1918 that they acquired a stenographer and typed minutes and addendum in the formal style of the Sovnarkom records of the same period. The Central Committee agenda were still filled with party business: the nature of the work of the Central Committee, the calling of conferences, ‘general party policy’, party slogans, and issues of party discipline, party publications also frequently appear in the agenda, including the appointment of the editorial boards of Pravda and other party newspapers. On 3 May 1918 the Central Committee discussed the ‘strengthening of the party organization’ which was ‘struggling to fulfil its basic role’. The only ‘government’ business considered at Central Committee sittings in 1918 was the ‘allocation of forces’ to state posts, but still it dealt with only a fraction of the appointments of state officials which Sovnarkom largely managed in its first year and a half.27

CHANGING PARTY-STATE RELATIONS The earliest signs that the Civil War might have a negative effect on the functioning and status of the Sovnarkom emerged at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919. Delegates pointed out that since February 1919 the Civil War had taken several important party members away from their Sovnarkom duties.28 The collegial nature

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of the Sovnarkom and the Commissariats meant that deputies and members of the commissariat collegium could step in for them.29 This had detrimental consequences, argued the delegates, because by March 1919 Sovnarkom began to be filled by ‘departmental people’ who only ‘fight for the interests of their own department’ and ‘do not understand or are not interested in wider general policy’.30 In order for Sovnarkom to function effectively as a government cabinet, proposals were made that ‘a majority of members of the Central Committee must enter Sovnarkom’ in order to ensure its status.31 Congress resolutions reconfirmed that ‘The Party must implement its decisions through the Soviet bodies, within the framework of the Soviet constitution. The Party strives to direct the activities of the Soviets, not to replace them’.32 These proposals were not followed through after the Congress however. Instead, attention turned to ‘improving’ the central Party apparatus and its links with local cells, which had atrophied since the October Revolution. Measures were enacted which allowed the Party machine to gain the apparatus necessary for its ascent: an expanded secretariat, and the creation of the Politburo and Orgburo. In March 1919 a five-member Politburo was created as a permanent organ of the party to ‘take decisions on questions that cannot wait’. Its work would answer to the Central Committee within two weeks.33 On 25 March 1919 five Central Committee members were elected to the Politburo: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Nikolai Krestinskii and Lev Kamenev, as well as Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and Mikhail Kalinin as candidate members. The Politburo began to meet from mid-April 1919 and from the first months of its operation, this smaller, more dynamic body, unlike the Central Committee before it, met frequently and gradually widened its jurisdiction to encompass important areas of government business beyond appointments. The pattern of the sittings of the Politburo, compared to the Sovnarkom, shows the Politburo as a more flexible, responsive body, better able to adapt to urgent demands of civil war administration. By 1920, the steady, periodic pattern of meetings of the state bodies is marked, while the Politburo worked on a less regular basis. In its first three months, the Politburo met spasmodically between three and six times a month. Its average number of meetings per month increased over the course of the year, but due to demand rather than as an institutionalized pattern. Despite an attempt to regulate its sittings, by early 1921, the Politburo met even more frequently and had developed the practice of carrying out telephone surveys of its members to consider questions rapidly. This initially regular versus spasmodic pattern of sittings of state and party organs was partly due to the contrasting methods of preparation for the sittings.34 From Sovnarkom’s first months Lenin worked to bring about full and formal preparation of items submitted to the agenda well in advance of meetings, with an outline of the relevant facts and a draft decision. There were onerous bureaucratic practices of prior distribution of paperwork which required inter-departmental consultation before presenting items to the Sovnarkom’s Secretariat for acceptance on the agenda.35 The preparatory papers usually ran to around 50 pages, but sometimes to over 200, a time-consuming process to write or read before each sitting. Lenin himself acknowledged that this process had become a hindrance to the Sovnarkom’s work, complaining that ‘the most radical defect of Sovnarkom’

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was that ‘we are being sucked down by the rotten bureaucratic swamp into writing papers, jawing about decrees, drawing up decrees and in this sea of paper “live” work is drowned’.36 Thus, the Politburo had a more fluid style than the Sovnarkom: more flexible sittings when needed; telephone surveys to solve urgent questions instantly; fewer people attending and less strict internal-sitting practices, resulting in shorter but less restricted discussion and a less bureaucratic system of preparing paperwork for sittings. The more formal, bureaucratic culture which Lenin had instilled in the Sovnarkom apparatus, intended to allow fully informed and collegial decision-making, hindered it in conditions which demanded speed and flexibility. Politburo records for 1921 show more systematic interference in ‘government’ than in earlier years. From the first months of its operation in April 1919, the Politburo focused largely on military questions. As the Civil War wound down military considerations decreased accordingly while domestic affairs grew from a small proportion of Politburo business in 1919, rising dramatically by 1921 and even further in 1922. Government administration also gradually became part of the Politburo’s (and Orgburo’s) de facto jurisdiction, particularly appointments to government posts. Party business, including discussion of party congress and conferences, relations between central and local party organs, party publications, questions of admitting members and ‘cleansing’ of the party made up a steady proportion of agenda items until 1921, but largely disappeared from Politburo agenda as the new Orgburo and expanded Secretariat took over this work. The significant increase in the Politburo’s involvement in domestic affairs in 1921–2 included economic questions, such as consideration of the introduction of NEP, food supply issues and taxes. Other domestic issues handled by the Politburo for the first time in 1921–2 included schools, transport, religious issues, workers cooperatives and pay tariffs.37 Rather than stepping back from the governing role it had acquired during the Civil War to focus on ‘party’ affairs and broad policy making at a high level, instead the Politburo widened its jurisdiction to encompass areas of government that had previously been under Sovnarkom’s remit. By spring 1922 Lenin recognized that the Politburo had begun to encroach on the government business that was previously Sovnarkom’s jurisdiction. He condemned this development in his speech at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, lamenting ‘the relations between party and state are not what they ought to be. On this point we are quite unanimous.’ He added that it was extremely difficult to get out of this situation by formal means, for there is only one governing party in our country; and a member of our party cannot be prohibited from lodging complaints. That is why everything that comes up on the Sovnarkom is dragged before the Politburo. I, too, am greatly to blame for this, for to a large extent contact between the Sovnarkom and the Politburo was maintained through me. When I was obliged to retire from work it was found that the two wheels were not working in unison.38 Lenin’s solution was to recommend that ‘the Central Committee and Politburo should be relieved of minor matters, and more should be shifted to the responsible (state) officials. The People’s Commissars must be responsible for their work and

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should not bring these matters up first to the Sovnarkom and then to the Politburo.’ Nikolai Osinskii (Acting Commissar for Agriculture) agreed that the practice of referring ‘every trifle’ to the Politburo was a serious problem, but contested the assertion that it had only developed during Lenin’s illness; on the contrary, he claimed, this practice had long been endemic.39 Osinskii had a point. Lenin’s work as the Sovnarkom Chairman was disrupted from early 1921 onwards by his declining health. By spring 1921 Lenin’s headaches and insomnia were seriously debilitating and he saw fit to appoint a Sovnarkom Deputy Chairman, Aleksei Rykov, in May 1921. Lenin’s condition worsened and in December 1921 he was forced to leave his work in the Sovnarkom altogether. He had his first major stroke in March 1922, leaving him paralysed. Lenin returned to work in October 1922, but suffered another stroke in December and was unable to resume his Sovnarkom duties. In the meantime, he had appointed two further Soviet deputies, Alexander Tsiurupa and Lev Kamenev, to work alongside Rykov who was himself ailing. This diffusion of responsibility and authority was detrimental to Sovnarkom’s status, yet even before Lenin’s health declined, from early 1920, records reveal a growing trend of appealing Sovnarkom decisions to the Politburo for reconsideration. There were five direct appeals in 1920, rising to seventeen in 1921 and twenty-six in 1922.40 The appeals covered many areas of government decision-making. The first case of an explicit appeal against a Sovnarkom decision in the Politburo is from 23 January 1920. Alexander Tsiurupa, People’s Commissar for Food, sent a protest to the Politburo against the Sovnarkom decision of 3 January, which granted permission to Vesenkha organs to stockpile fodder.41 Even Osinskii, the most militant defender of the state’s autonomy, appealed a Sovnarkom decision to the Politburo in July 1922. As Deputy Commissar for Agriculture he was dissatisfied with the Sovnarkom decision of 18 July on sowing plots. He wrote a detailed letter to the Politburo the next day criticizing this decision and pointing out that it ‘liquidated the plan set out by Lenin and Tsiurupa’.42 In addition to decisions explicitly appealed to the Politburo, further overlap gradually crept in the agenda of the two bodies. Whether by direct appeal or by the commissariats bypassing the Sovnarkom and directing issues for solution to the Politburo in parallel, by 1921 a significant amount of government business was being transacted there. Why, then, were government matters now being appealed or directed to the supreme party organ? Contemporary observers pointed to the decrease in high-status party leaders and responsible officials participating in Sovnarkom sittings. This problem was first pointed out at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 and was raised again by Osinskii at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. He complained: The People’s Commissars do not attend Sovnarkom, but only their deputies … not the officially responsible people, deputies who are not obliged to look into general policies. So, what happens? The Politburo appears as the deciding level of authority … Such a situation is impossible: an institution composed of 16 people with little or no responsibility, just representing their departments, cannot write and decide laws! This has created an astounding flow of vermicelli, departmental decay and disintegration of the central organ of authority.

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Lenin’s Eleventh Party Congress speech also recognized that ‘we must raise the prestige of the Sovnarkom. The Commissars must mainly attend the meetings of the Sovnarkom.’43 Sovnarkom records confirm the claims of Lenin and Osinskii that the Civil War period saw a decrease in numbers of official commissars, who were high-status party members, participating in Sovnarkom sittings. From December 1917 to March 1918 Central Committee members from the Bolshevik and Left SR parties mainly populated the meetings. By spring 1920, only four Central Committee members were regularly involved in Sovnarkom sittings, and by April 1921, a year later, this figure had fallen to just three.44 Thus, a fundamental problem underlying the decline of the Sovnarkom as government cabinet is why high-status People’s Commissars stopped attending Sovnarkom sittings from 1919. Fighting the Civil War took some key party members away from the centre, but it is not the whole explanation, as other Commissars remained in Moscow yet still did not regularly attend Sovnarkom sittings. The system of collegiality, instilled in the soviet government institutions in the early months after the October Revolution as part of their effort to ‘democratize’ and ‘revolutionize’ the apparatus, militated against the development of the Sovnarkom as an effective cabinet made up of strong ‘ministers’. Commissars could send members of the commissariat collegia in their place and policy decisions within commissariats required consensual decision-making among collegia members.45 Collegiality certainly had the desired effect of preventing the rise of ‘dictatorial’ ministers, which the Bolsheviks had equated with the Tsarist regime, but in the long-term allowed the Sovnarkom to become a meeting place for what Osinskii later described as ‘department people’, not interested in wider policy issues beyond their own narrow interests. The context of devastating economic collapse and mounting military threat to the survival of Soviet power necessitated a more urgent, authoritative style of decisionmaking rather than the formalized, bureaucratic and collegial culture which Lenin had institutionalized in the state apparatus. The heavy requirements for lengthy inter-departmental consultation and voluminous reports prior to consideration by the Sovnarkom gave the more flexible Politburo, from March 1919, a head start in rapid and authoritative decision-making. Perhaps the Sovnarkom’s operational sluggishness could have been overcome if its members possessed a genuine sense of their mandate emanating from the soviets, not just the party. But the soviet apparatus nationwide was crippled during the Civil War. As the soviet assemblies atrophied in the struggle for survival, the central Soviet government apparatus, with Sovnarkom as its apex, was left increasingly detached from its foundation. Only a revival of the Soviet apparatus across the country and a reenergizing of the CEC and Congress of Soviets, which met infrequently in this period, could have restored some verve to their supreme organ. Otherwise the solution proposed on instructing the Politburo to reign itself was a superficial gesture which naively misunderstood Bolshevik ideology and practice as it crystallized in Civil War conditions and faintly perceived that the causes of the decline of Sovnarkom ran deeper than operational difficulties in central government. Dynamics at the local level, and relations between centre and locality were also key to explaining developments. Sovnarkom had inherited a highly dislocated state

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administrative apparatus. When power was seized in October, central ministries could not rely on their instructions being obeyed in the localities. The vertical line of command had virtually disappeared. Meanwhile there was also horizontal confusion. Various state bodies overlapped in jurisdiction and suffered from departmentalism. There was administrative disarray not only in the capital but in the provinces too. The Bolsheviks added to the disarray by creating ad hoc commissions to deal with particular emergencies so that the Soviet state was being governed by a mass of competing agencies whose officials had little more than a hastily scribbled mandate given to them in Petrograd. Even the party apparatus of 1917 was poorly equipped to deal with the crisis facing the Soviet government. Well into 1918 it continued to be characterized by fierce divisions and internal dissent, such as the major internal struggle over the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Orders from the centre continued to carry little weight and many Bolsheviks in the localities felt that a more clearly articulated state order was essential; they stood for centralist, authoritarian principles and called for organizational reform. The internal structure of the party underwent a rapid process of centralization from 1919 onwards. According to its statutes, the party was supposed to function on the basis of committees elected at conferences and congresses. Such committees were established at all levels, from the Central Committee elected by the All Russian Party Congress to republic and regional committees, provincial committees and so on down to the volost level. Relations within this hierarchy were supposed to be governed by the principle of ‘democratic centralism’ whereby authority flowed upward from the smallest cells to the Central Committee and discipline flowed in the opposite direction.46 Centralization occurred not only because the leadership was predisposed or found it expedient to pre-empt discussion, deliberation and elections at lower levels or because it lacked faith in the ability of rank-and-file members, most of whom had little formal education. The process of centralization was actually aided by local committees, many of which experienced an acute shortage of competent personnel and pleaded with higher bodies for information, cadres and guidance.47 On the one hand, confronted by civil war and economic catastrophe Lenin and his colleagues became impatient with internal party democracy. The party had to provide the command structure necessary to mobilize men, material and food from an economy and society in crisis. On the other hand, ordinary members themselves encouraged the closing of ranks; policy disputes were restrained and local cells urged firmer direction from the centre to maximize the use of limited personnel and resources. At the same time, the administrative burden placed on party members and high turnover in membership led to party cells meeting less and less often. Within each committee the authority of the secretary became increasingly pronounced, and it became common practice for key posts to be filled by appointment from above rather than election from below.48 All these measures could be and were justified by civil war conditions, which placed the party in ‘a position where the strictest centralism and severest discipline are an absolute necessity’.49 The degree of efficiency in the party imparted by centralization should not be overstated however. Much of the apparatus was ramshackle, but it was efficient enough to out-compete the Soviet apparatus by

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infiltrating and controlling it via party cells, or through parallel structures which performed more effectively. The final showdown between the ‘pro-state’ activists, and the Politburo majority, who jealously guarded their expanded jurisdiction, was at the 12th Party Congress, in April 1923. In mid-March 1923 Trotsky’s thesis ‘On Industry’ attracted criticism from Politburo members. One paragraph in particular, on ‘the question of the interrelationship between party and soviet organizations’ was strongly censured. Here Trotsky had argued for more full and systematic carrying out of the Resolution of the 11th Congress on the delineation of party and soviet work in the centre and in the localities.50 The Central Committee accepted Trotsky’s theses, but when it was brought for final confirmation before the Politburo, Kamenev and others proposed major corrections. Trotsky wrote to protest these ‘corrections’ to his theses: The question of the inter-relationship between party and soviet organizations is a fundamental question … the inter-relationship between party organizations and economic organs, especially in the centre, requires fundamental correction  … Should the Politburo lead the work of Sovnarkom? No. Should the Politburo lead the work of separate commissariats? No ….all this should remain wholly outside consideration and solution by the Politburo, and in a huge part, outside its jurisdiction.51 Like Lenin and Osinskii before him, Trotsky called for change in existing party-state relations. He proposed that the Politburo give up much of the day-to-day decisionmaking on state affairs it had taken over in the preceding two years. The Politburo must focus on ‘questions of intra-party life’ which it had side-lined and ‘must refuse to consider the innumerable departmental and inter-departmental conflicts and appeals presented to it by soviet organs’.52 Trotsky proposed to raise the question of the inter-relationship between party and soviets ‘in its full volume’ at the Congress. Unsurprisingly, the Politburo majority (Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev) were not receptive to Trotsky’s suggestions. On 22 March 1923 they composed a circular to Politburo and the Central Committee members condemning ‘Trotsky’s mistaken plan … on the central party institutions’ as ‘absolutely impermissable’ and certain to cause ‘crisis’. He was outvoted in the Politburo and Central Committee on 30 March.53 Simultaneously, Osinskii distributed a letter to delegates at the Twelfth Party Congress in response to censorship of his article on incorrect party-state relations.54 Here Osinskii argued: Comrade Lenin revealed the ‘open secret’: that the Politburo decides for us in the final instance concrete soviet affairs … Essentially, in the Soviet Republic there are two supreme government organs (keeping to one side the CEC Presidium). One of them is Sovnarkom. Members of the Central Committee do not sit here: from the staff of the government, not including the deputy chairmen, there are only two there from the Central Committee (really working). Here, even, rarely sit persons with full and formal responsibility for their departments. Instead the ‘technical deputies’ sit here, and if the People’s Commissars do sit, they are not

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those of the category of first-class political activists of the party … Sovnarkom does not govern, it only passes a continuous paper ribbon of decrees or estimates. All this, starting from the selection of staff of Sovnarkom and the ‘multi-headedness’ (mnogogolovosti) of the actual chairmanship … explains how the actual supreme government organ … appears as a Party organ, the Politburo … the Politburo naturally converts Sovnarkom into a technical apparatus, in order not to create dual power …. It is clear that the Politburo has little time remaining for ‘cleanly’ party questions or even for large-scale political questions.55 Osinskii highlighted that the Politburo’s dominance in the government system had emerged as a result of the Civil War: From where did such a position arise … It was created in the epoch of the civil war, when there was a necessity for quick and bold decisions. Then a sixteenheaded government could not exist. Full power direction by three to five people was necessary. The form for it was at hand. The Politburo, which could decide everything … Since this time the situation has changed, but all forms and habits remained. With each year the ‘emergency’ structure became all the more unsuitable for systematic, planned construction.56 Zinoviev, forced to address this issue, shut down the debate on reorganizing partystate relations. Now that the Civil War was over, he stated, it was inevitable that people would ‘propose to reconsider the coordination’ of party and state. He argued, however, that the strong support of workers, especially non-party workers, for ‘the dictatorship of the party’ meant that ‘it is not necessary to weaken things’.57 By Lenin’s death in January 1924 fusion of the ‘party-state’ apparatus in central government and across the localities was well underway. This ‘abnormal situation’, as Trotsky put it, was not the system of government intentionally established in the first year or two of Soviet power, but a by-product of the accumulation of ad hoc decisions made in emergency conditions combined with ambiguity over the precise role of the vanguard party. As the dust began to settle at the end of the Civil War and these developments became apparent, they sparked a debate among Soviet leaders about the appropriate ‘leading and guiding role’ of the Communist Party and its relationship to the Soviet apparatus of government. Yet, because of ideological constraints, practical demands and personal jealousies, it was much more difficult to untangle the bonds of party and state once fused.

PART TWO

Politicians and Parties

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Alexander Kerensky and the Kerenshchina BORIS KOLONITSKII, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY AT ST PETERSBURG, ST PETERSBURG INSTITUTE OF HISTORY, RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES.

The history of Russia’s 1917 revolution cannot be imagined without Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky (1881–1970). Before the monarchy was overthrown, he was a lawyer who defended revolutionaries in court, and a State Duma member representing radical opposition. An active participant in the revolution, Kerensky was made the Provisional Government’s Justice Minister, as well as deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. In May, he was appointed Minister for War and Navy, in July, chaired the Provisional Government, and in September he also became the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky’s government, and after a failed attempt to organize armed resistance to them, he went underground, and then left Russia in 1918. Kerensky himself wrote several books, and his autobiographies influenced historical writing.1 Kerensky’s political biography has already been studied by Vitalii Startsev, Genrikh Ioffe and Stanislav Tiutiukin among others.2 Richard Abraham authored the most detailed biographical study.3 Yet many aspects of Kerensky’s activities require further research. This paper will not be an attempt to create yet another biographical sketch. Instead, I would try to define some specific features of Russia’s Revolution and its political culture through the figure of Kerensky and of his supporters and opponents who created, used and destroyed the diverse images of this revolutionary minister.4

THE FIRST CITIZEN IN THE SPRING Kerensky’s influence can be explained by several factors. His actions during the February Revolution were of particular importance. Kerensky was the most visible politician who connected the increasingly oppositional State Duma and the semilegal and illegal socialist groups. In the days of the uprising, this position proved to be rather advantageous. Soon it was also institutionalized. On 27 February, Kerensky joined the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, and on the same day

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he also became the deputy chairman of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (later Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies). When the Provisional Government was formed on 2 March as a result of an agreement between Duma Committee and Petrograd Soviet leaders, liberal politicians thought it was necessary to get Kerensky enrolled. It was impossible to ignore the young politician, who became incredibly popular during the uprising due to his decisive actions. Though the socialists at the head of Petrograd Soviet’s Executive Committee expressed opposition to participation of its representatives in the Provisional Government, Kerensky, over their heads, addressed the plenary meeting of the Soviet, and the rank-and-file deputies enthusiastically approved his joining the cabinet.5 In the following months, Kerensky repeatedly used this method of putting pressure on revolutionary Russia’s political elites by direct appeal to the public opinion expertly using his enormous popularity to solve tactical issues. Kerensky’s political reputation was formed long before the revolution. His courtroom oratory was followed by Duma speeches which challenged tactful and constructive parliamentary debate. Kerensky provoked his opponents and did not shy away from scandals. In no time he became the State Duma’s best-known leftwing member.6 Historians cannot ignore Kerensky’s participation in a secret elite Masonic-type organization which united some radical and liberal public figures. Indeed, he played a major role in Russia’s ‘political Freemasonry’ but he had gained renown before this.7 Freemasonry’s role after the overthrow of the monarchy should not be overstated either. Fairly soon, ‘brothers’ found themselves in different, opposing political camps, but the experience of cooperation and personal trust should not be disregarded when we study the February Revolution, as it facilitated agreements beyond party barriers.8 Kerensky’s bold actions during the overthrow of the monarchy were also a source of his authority in the coming months. His calls to arrest Tsarist ministers created a reputation of a ‘mutineer’ in the eyes of the supporters of the ‘old regime’ but at the same time they made him a popular leader in the eyes of revolutionary masses. Later, Kerensky’s supporters described him as an experienced ‘freedom fighter’, from the ranks of eminent heroes, martyrs and leaders of Russia’s revolutionary movement. Kerensky himself sometimes referred to himself as ‘an old revolutionary’ in public. It was a crucially important resource for creating and strengthening political authority in those days because the cult of ‘freedom fighters’ was becoming a most significant element of new Russia’s political culture. Kerensky contributed to spreading this cult and, at the same time, he himself was becoming an object of veneration.9 Kerensky’s own party-political position was also of importance. During the 1905 revolution, he was linked to illegal organizations of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party but at the same time, he took an active part in forming various radical cross-party alliances. Kerensky entered the State Duma as a representative of the Trudovik (Labour) Group, a moderate neo-populist organization. He soon became the chief speaker of its parliamentary faction, and then its leader. At the same time, the politician continued to cooperate with illegal Socialist-Revolutionary groups and participated in forming various cross-party left-wing coalitions. Kerensky was simultaneously connected to the legal and official political life. He enjoyed

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parliamentary immunity as a State Duma member, but he actively tried to assist organizations of the revolutionary underground. Belonging to the worlds of both legal and illegal politics was not without danger yet it offered many opportunities, which manifested themselves during the February Revolution.10 Pre-revolutionary political experience was very important for revolutionary politics. Kerensky had developed skills in forming above-party and cross-party groups. The First World War complicated old political fault lines and Kerensky tried to unite both supporters and opponents of the war by proposing the shared task of overthrowing the monarchy, without waiting for the world conflict to end.11 This skill in organizing agreements and coalitions turned out to be in demand after February as well. The anti-monarchy revolution was successful because it managed to unite all kinds of opponents to the existing regime, including some monarchists. But serious contradictions made this coalition fragile. Issues of war, of power, agrarian and ethnic questions caused division. Only a frail coalition of the so-called ‘living forces of the country’ – a fragile agreement of moderate socialists and liberals – held the country away from a civil war. In the first Provisional Government, Justice Minister Kerensky, who declared his allegiance to the Socialist Revolutionary Party after the revolution, was the sole socialist representative. In May, a new coalition government was formed, with Kerensky, now Minister for War, joined by some other socialists. Other versions of the Provisional Government, which Kerensky headed from July, were also coalitions. In each case, Kerensky played a very important, often decisive role in forming and reforming a coalition of moderate socialists and liberals. Several circumstances facilitated his fulfilling the role of ‘conciliator’ and organizer of coalitions. Although the popular minister declared membership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, his relations with party leadership were complicated. Initially, the situation seemed mutually beneficial. Kerensky appeared to be a representative of Russia’s most popular political party, which convincingly won elections for democratic municipal administrations. At the same time, SocialistRevolutionaries often used the great authority of Kerensky, a popular figure, for their own purposes, especially during local electoral campaigns. At the same time, Kerensky could not be described as a disciplined party member. Soon some of his actions prompted protests from representatives of the left wing of the party. The Socialist Revolutionary Party was increasingly dividing, with the attitude to the war being the main fault line. With time, not just left-wing SRs but also centrists in the party had reasons to be displeased with Kerensky. It is not surprising that he did not collect enough votes at a party congress to be elected to the SR Central Committee, which provoked indignation on the party’s right wing. Kerensky became yet one more fault line within the party.12 In the end, this lack of his own reliable political organization became one of the reasons for Kerensky’s political defeat. He did not possess an apparatus or a reliable staff to project his authority. Yet in spring 1917, Kerensky’s ‘non-party’ and ‘aboveparty’ position had significant advantages. Much of the public was suspicious or even negative about the concept of ‘partisanship’. The ideal of all-national patriotic unity was popular in Russia. Additionally, the position of an ‘above-party’ politician, which Kerensky himself occasionally articulated in spite of his SR membership,

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was sometimes important for building inter-party coalitions. Public moods of that epoch were also of considerable significance. After February, exalted and euphoric moods were widespread. Overthrowing autocracy was perceived as a miracle, which was to lead not just to political and economic but also moral and even religious transformation. The people were expecting rebirth, even ‘resurrection’ of the country and Kerensky, an ‘enthusiast’ and a ‘romantic’ of the revolution, sincerely and ably expressed and crystallized the mass rapturous mood of the March days by his speeches and gestures. The perception of Kerensky’s speeches cannot be understood without considering these moods. Later, much was written about the ‘theatricality’ of those appearances and about the ‘histrionics’, which, supposedly, indicated the unnaturalness of Kerensky’s behaviour and even his ‘duplicity’. He was an actor constantly changing masks, hiding his true essence. But the first months of the revolution were the time of politization of theatre, the time of politization of leisure and simultaneously the time of extreme theatricalization of politics. In this atmosphere, Kerensky’s ‘theatrical’ style of oratory was very much in demand. He was a true ‘star’ of rally-concerts, a popular type of event at which speeches from popular politicians alternated with choral singing, musical performances and recitation of poetry. The image of an artist-politician found its expression in Kerensky.13 Kerensky and his supporters actively developed such representations to strengthen his authority. He was referred to as ‘the people’s minister’, ‘minister-democrat’ or ‘the first citizen’. He took to wearing semi-military clothes which looked like a repudiation of bourgeois style and foreshadowed images of Civil War leaders and of Soviet apparatchiks. Demonstrating his democratism, the popular minister constantly shook hands with a great number of his excited admirers, which impacted on his health. His right hand started aching, so first he wore a black sling, and then started putting his hand behind his field jacket’s lapel, which some contemporaries perceived as imitating Napoleon. Nevertheless, Kerensky continued to shake hands, but using his left hand.14

MINISTER OF THE OFFENSIVE As early as March and April 1917, Kerensky was sometimes referred to as the Leader, vozhd’.15 But after he was appointed the Minister of War in May 1917, the word Leader – ‘the Leader of the revolutionary army’ – started to be used to describe the politician much more frequently. One circumstance that contributed to this was that Kerensky now found himself in the very centre of sharp political conflicts. In March and April 1917, public criticism of Kerensky was extremely rare, even from radical socialists, including Bolsheviks. Lenin made acerbic criticism of Kerensky while in emigration but stopped public attacks after returning to Russia.16 This was primarily because there was a sort of consensus in the country regarding his actions as Minister of Justice. Many of his actions were greeted by nearly universal enthusiasm. People exultantly celebrated the amnesty, the abolition of the death penalty and the court reform. In July, the death penalty would be reinstated in the field army, and many Russian citizens would by then link the hike in crime rates to

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‘Kerensky’s’ amnesty, but in March and April no one dared to openly criticize these measures. His huge popularity meant that even some of the rank-and-file Bolshevik supporters had a liking for ‘the revolutionary minister’.17 When Kerensky was made Minister of War, he inevitably found himself at the very centre of sharp political conflict. The February Revolution had radically changed the system of power in the armed forces. The new army committees ran counter to the traditional understanding of discipline, and negatively impacted on the army’s fighting capacity. Kerensky, a socialist with an anti-militarist reputation, had never served in the army, and had previously shown no interest in military matters. He was appointed because of the colossal political authority that he commanded. It was thought that Kerensky’s reputation as a ‘freedom fighter’ and his authority as a ‘revolutionary minister’ would help him create new discipline in the armed forces and prepare the army for an offensive. After taking up the new post, Kerensky issued the so-called Declaration of the Rights of a Soldier in which he attempted to adjust the revolutionary reforms without revoking them, and to establish the principles for a new discipline based on the concept of a conscious ‘soldier-citizen’. At the same time, the new minister openly announced preparations for an offensive by Russia’s army. By these actions, Kerensky exposed himself to criticism, particularly from the Bolsheviks. They started a propaganda campaign centred on soldiers’ disaffection with strengthening discipline and, first and foremost, with preparations for the offensive.18 Liberal and conservative politicians were sceptical about Kerensky’s attempts to create a ‘new discipline’ but they did not deem it possible to openly express serious criticism of the Minister of War at the moment when he was preparing offensive operations. With the entire country split into supporters and opponents of the offensive, Kerensky was the touchstone. The Bolsheviks wrote about Kerensky’s ‘hard-labour orders’ and denounced ‘the declaration of soldiers’ rightlessness’; they criticized the ‘theatrical’ style of Kerensky’s speaking, and sniped at his ‘feminine’ manner. At the same time, they sometimes called him a candidate for the role of Russia’s Napoleon.19 Although supporters of the offensive were far from fully united, they all, with varying degrees of sincerity, thought it was necessary to glorify Kerensky and to defend him. Multifarious and multi-level conflicts around Kerensky created a tense atmosphere in which different actors, pursuing different objectives, were building a veritable cult of ‘the Leader of the revolutionary army’. On 18 June, the Russian Army went on the offensive, later known as the ‘Kerensky offensive’. Initially it was fairly successful but it ended in failure. Contemporaries, and historians after them, have argued about the causes of this failure. The ‘democratized’ army was hardly capable of solving the difficult tasks of an offensive operation which required quick and coordinated actions by millions of people. What is surprising is not that the Russian troops suffered defeat in the end but that the regiments which openly, thoroughly and ‘democratically’ discussed the question of the offensive launched any attacks at all. Kerensky himself played a huge role in this by making several propaganda tours of the front. However, all the War Minister’s oratorial efforts would have been fruitless had he not relied on a network of army committees in which moderate socialists enjoyed predominant influence.

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Ambitious junior officers and NCOs, those making a political career during the revolution, believed in Kerensky, believed in his concept of new discipline and believed in the success of the offensive. They imitated the style of the revolutionary minister’s speeches, and glorified him, thus strengthening their own authority, and by that strengthened the authority of ‘the Leader of the revolutionary army’.20 The news of the initial success, disseminated repeatedly by government and progovernment propaganda, prompted a large number of patriotic demonstrations in Russia’s cities. Kerensky was the main hero of these, his portraits turned into political symbols, and various political actors declared the Minister of War a unique Leader-saviour. Some of the rumours widely circulated in those days were further evidence of Kerensky’s outstanding popularity. Some claimed that he had led the revolutionary battalions in attack with a red flag in his hands. Others insisted that they saw Kerensky wounded in battle. There were even claims that he had been killed. Panicky rumours that the popular minister was shot dead by an enemy bullet put entire cities in a state of mayhem.21 Kerensky’s busts, pins and portraits were in demand, as were publications of his speeches.22 At the same time, the Bolsheviks created an ever-expanding ‘gallery’ of negative images of the Minister of War.23 Kerensky’s positive and negative images should not always be counterposed. His opponents frequently referred to him as a ‘Napoleon’ and accused him of ‘Bonapartist’ policies. But for those who dreamt of a victorious conclusion to the war and of halting the revolutionary process, the image of ‘a Russian Bonaparte’ was quite positive. Some praised Kerensky for attempting to establish the ‘strong power’, real or only imagined, while others condemned him – for the exact same reason.24 The Kerensky offensive ended in catastrophic failure. The counterattack by German and Austro-Hungarian troops was powerful and the Russian Army retreated to the border of the empire, abandoning to the enemy territories occupied during the 1916 offensive. The retreat was accompanied by desertion, riots and violence against the civilian population. It seemed that the defeat would strike a serious blow at Kerensky who personified this failed military operation. However, circumstances allowed him to turn this military defeat into his political victory. In early July 1917, Bolsheviks and their political allies challenged the power of the Provisional Government during the so-called July Days. With the government in crisis, radical socialists unsuccessfully tried to force the Soviet leaders, Mensheviks and SRs, to take power themselves, excluding ‘bourgeois’ political figures from the government. To put pressure on the moderate socialists, armed demonstrations were held, sometimes accompanied by fatal clashes. Some historians describe the crisis as an attempted armed coup prepared by the Bolsheviks, others question this claim. At any rate, even the Bolsheviks acknowledged that the country was on the verge of a civil war. In suppressing this rising, the position of the frontline army committees, and Kerensky’s own actions were of great importance. Field army regiments arrived in the capital to support the government and the Soviet.25 The Minister of War and his supporters presented Kerensky as the saviour of the country and the revolution. He declared that defeat at the front was the responsibility of the opponents of the offensive, primarily the Bolsheviks, who were accused of

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‘stabbing the Russian Army in the back’. A new coalition Provisional Government was formed with considerable difficulty. The Kadet Party and moderate socialists were unwilling to compromise, but Kerensky worked energetically and insistently to secure agreement, and, after threatening to resign, he became the head of the new coalition cabinet, retaining the War Ministry.26

KERENSKY’S COURT The July Days crisis led to radical change in the overall political situation. In Petrograd, the most radically minded regiments were disarmed and partly disbanded, and attempts were made to disarm the workers. Some Bolshevik leaders and activists were arrested, Lenin went into hiding. The government banned publication of Bolshevik newspapers, although some of them shortly resumed publication under different names. All of this led to decreasing influence of left-wing socialists in the soviets and committees, as well as a significant weakening of the power of soviets and committees. The period of ‘dual power’ was over. However, ‘single power’ had not yet arrived. Soviets and committees still wielded significant influence, which Menshevik and SR leaders sought to maintain, while the role of the General Headquarters, based in the city of Mogilev, became a new source of authority. In July, General Lavr Kornilov was made the Supreme Commanderin-Chief and under his pressure, the Provisional Government agreed to a partial reinstitution of the death penalty, at the front, in the area of operations of the field army. This was a difficult decision for Kerensky, for as Justice Minister he was praised by many as a statesman who abolished the death penalty ‘forever’. The Bolsheviks and other radical socialists had a new reason to criticize the head of the Provisional Government.27 Meanwhile, Kornilov demanded new tough measures from the Provisional Government, effectively as an ultimatum. First of all, he wished to restore traditional discipline in the armed forces, and in order to do that, he wished to introduce the death penalty in the rear too. He also wanted to significantly limit the powers of elective army committees and of government commissars. The Kornilovfriendly press spared no effort to propagate these measures. At the same time, for socialists, radicals and moderates alike, the general turned into a personification of the counter-revolutionary danger. They initiated a campaign to depose him as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Cossack and officer organizations, liberal and conservative groupings and publications started to demand that Kornilov’s position be sacrosanct and his programme implemented in full. A new political crisis seemed inevitable, with some people even speculating about a civil war.28 Kerensky, true to his tactics of maintaining political unity among ‘the living forces of the country’, tried to manoeuvre but his opportunities for manoeuvre were becoming more limited. It was impossible for him to dismiss Kornilov, but at the same time he could not go against moderate socialists who enjoyed massive public support. Socialist-Revolutionaries had won a number of major victories in the elections to municipal and local councils. Under these conditions, Kerensky used symbolic politics as one of the resources that remained at his disposal. The style

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of his political representation became more ‘majestic’. Although he continued to deploy revolutionary rhetoric and revolutionary symbols, traditional symbols of the state started to play a bigger part. His use of the train and the motor car that previously belonged to the overthrown Emperor served to underscore the high status of the revolutionary head of state. Even more important was his move to the Winter Palace. Some of its premises were occupied by Provisional Government offices, and some of the private quarters of the emperors became Kerensky’s residence. A red flag was raised above the Winter Palace when Kerensky was there: a revolutionary symbol was used in a ceremony that copied an imperial ritual.29 Some contemporaries disliked Kerensky’s new image, but other sections of public opinion perceived them as signs of establishing ‘firm government’. And it was precisely such a demonstration of firm government, in union with Kornilov, that some of his supporters now demanded from the revolutionary. Many continued to perceive Kerensky as the one and only, unique Leader-saviour. Characterizations of this kind were used in resolutions of the period that were addressed to him. What is remarkable, however, is that these Kerensky admirers continued to use rhetorical formulae that were developed earlier, during the June offensive. No new forms of glorification of the ‘revolutionary Leader’ appeared in this period. Occasionally, resolutions simultaneously praising ‘the two Leaders’  – Kornilov and Kerensky  – were passed at this time, but more frequently, their images were competing and mutually exclusive. The political campaign in support of the ‘irremoveability’ of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief led to the appearance of an alternative cult of the unique Leader-saviour. This process was accompanied by rumours to discredit Kerensky, to which his moving to the Winter Palace contributed significantly. Monarchists were indignant, democrats were offended, and many art and antique lovers had every reason to be worried about the fate of the numerous works of art kept at the Winter Palace. Kerensky was mockingly referred to as Alexander IV,30 and numerous rumours about Kerensky’s ‘court’ swirled around the capital, sleeping ‘in Tsar’s bed’, or even in the bed of the Empress. In the latter case, feminization of Kerensky was manifest. While in spring 1917 he embodied revolutionary energy and masculinity for many, in the second half of summer the ‘femininity’ of a ‘weak’ politician was discussed increasingly often. The theme of the politician’s ‘femininity’ had first appeared in the pages of some Bolshevik publications in May, but ill-wishers now referred to Kerensky as ‘Alexandra Fedorovna’, comparing him to the last Tsarina. Yet the image of a feminine and weak politician did not stem rumours of his amorous adventures. It was even claimed that he married one of the ex-Tsar’s daughters. Other women were also named as his ostensible lovers, most frequently the famous actress Elizaveta Thieme. In 1917 Kerensky indeed left his family. He lived in the Winter Palace with Elena Biriukova (née Baranovskaia), his wife’s first cousin.31 Rumours that the revolutionary minister was using drugs (some said morphine, others, cocaine) were first recorded in the early summer; later they became more frequent.32 Kerensky’s drop in popularity resulted from the crisis within the so-called coalition of the ‘country’s living forces’. The agreement between liberals and

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moderate socialists was becoming increasingly less stable. The country and even the Provisional Government itself were being split by the attitude to the programme proposed by General Kornilov. To overcome this social-political schism, Kerensky and his supporters initiated the State Conference in Moscow. Leading representatives of different social and political forces, with the exception of Bolsheviks, were invited. The conference was held in mid-August but it did not meet the organizers’ expectations. Not only did the conference fail to overcome the existing political crisis, it also became a vivid demonstration of the crisis itself, and an additional factor exacerbating it.33 The conference graphically demonstrated that sharp political schism. All observers noted bitter confrontation between its left-wing and right-wing parts. This conflict manifested itself particularly vividly during the speeches of General Kornilov and Don Cossack ataman (chieftain) General Aleksei Kaledin, who formulated the demands of the ‘Kornilov programme’ even more directly than the Supreme Commander-in-Chief himself. For moderate socialists, including even the ‘right’ wing of Mensheviks and SRs, who defended the idea of coalition with the ‘bourgeoisie’ particularly obstinately, Kornilov and Kaledin became the embodiment of counterrevolution. At the same time, for liberal and even more so for conservative politicians, for many entrepreneurs and officers, the Supreme Commander-inChief was increasingly being perceived as Russia’s sole Leader-saviour. A graphic demonstration of this was the grand welcome for Kornilov at the railway station and his triumphal rides through the old capital. It seemed to the general’s supporters that ‘all of Moscow’ enthusiastically greeted him, and he himself behaved as a leadersaviour. The Moscow State Conference also demonstrated the fall in the personal authority of Kerensky, who acted as its chairman, attempting to conciliate the feuding parties, and who delivered several important speeches himself. He still had many supporters and admirers, yet even they did not consider these speeches at the conference to be an oratorial success. Kerensky’s reputation as a ‘weak politician’, incapable of acting decisively, was only consolidated. Representatives of the antagonistic camps increasingly insisted that Kerensky take tough measures against their political opponents, but he avoided these suggestions, preferring to manoeuvre and to maintain the increasingly unstable coalition. This should not be explained by Kerensky’s personal indecision alone. There was a fairly clear political calculation in his actions. He realized that increasing confrontation could lead to a real danger of civil war. Additionally, the calls to make ‘a final choice’, which were presented to Kerensky from both left and right, were in essence calls for his political suicide. His political role was defined precisely by his ability to achieve political compromise. Support for one side or the other, moderate socialists or the ‘bourgeoisie’, would have led him to lose power.

THE KORNILOV AFFAIR Yet the situation was becoming increasingly tense. Contemporaries wrote about the real danger of ‘civil war’ both in newspapers and in private diaries. Particularly illustrative was the position of ‘right-wing’ socialists, on whose support General

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Kornilov’s political advisers counted for no good reason (e.g. they intended to include the famous Marxist Georgii Plekhanov and the prominent SR Andrei Argunov in their planned government). ‘Right-wing’ socialist newspapers openly wrote that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was provoking a civil war.34 Experiencing increasing pressure from all sides, Kerensky looked to conclude a secret agreement with Kornilov. Several elite cavalry divisions would be deployed in the vicinity of Petrograd and some measures earlier proposed by Kornilov would be implemented with their backing. However, this agreement was unstable and did not result from direct negotiations – Kerensky was in the capital, Kornilov at General Headquarters, in Mogilev, and it was impossible to discuss questions of this kind over the telegraph. In this situation, intermediaries were used and the Deputy War Minister, ex-terrorist and SR Party member Boris Savinkov played a special role. Other SR leaders were strongly suspicious of him at the time, and with good reason. Savinkov thought that his achievements in securing the agreement between Kornilov and Kerensky would help him strengthen his own political influence, with a sort of triumvirate emerging as a result. At the same time, Kerensky and Kornilov continued to treat one another with suspicion. Some of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief’s actions directly contradicted his agreements with Savinkov. For instance, contrary to the agreements reached, the Caucasian Native Cavalry Division was sent towards Petrograd, although using this ‘Savage Division’ to fulfil a delicate military-political task was hardly a sensible measure (and Kornilov’s opponents indeed later used antiCaucasus sentiments for political mobilization).35. Again, contrary to agreements with Savinkov, Kornilov appointed cavalryman General Alexander Krymov as the commander of troops sent towards the capital. The latter had a reputation of a tough and decisive military leader, not at all inclined towards political negotiations. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Kornilov himself was politically inexperienced, which was manifested in his selection of trusted political advisers. Even some of the general’s supporters thought that his choice of ‘experts’ was eccentric. In Kornilov’s milieu, Kerensky was discussed candidly and with scorn. It was supposed that his personal role in the new political situation would be exclusively representative, or, even worse, decorative. Kornilov and Kerensky’s secret ‘deal’ was also made more complicated by the fact that some ‘Kornilovites’ were conspiring against Kerensky. Some planned their own actions independently. For example, Petrograd-based officers later claimed that they were seriously preparing to storm the Winter Palace.36 We do not know precisely how far these preparations went, or whether they were sanctioned by Kornilov himself or by his inner circle, but the evidence appears to be quite plausible. At any rate, various contemporary rumours suggested such preparations, and under conditions of political crisis rumours sometimes make a major impact on decisions taken by key actors. Such rumours were passed on to Kerensky, who had sufficient grounds to suspect Kornilov of double-dealing. At the same time, Kornilov mistrusted Kerensky. Later, historians would pay much attention to Kornilov’s and Kerensky’s personal qualities that prevented them from reaching agreement, as well as to the cultural chasm that they represented.37 It also appears that they had different interpretations of their agreement. Kornilov was planning a military operation in which politicians

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would play an auxiliary role. Kerensky thought of adjusting the political situation with assistance from the military. Kornilov discerned no major difference between the Bolsheviks and leaders of soviets and committees, while Kerensky understood perfectly well that a brutal direct attack on these organizations would cause civil war. Kerensky’s suspicions about Kornilov intensified on 26 August, after he spoke to the former Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod Vladimir L’vov, who had just arrived from General Headquarters. Later some lawyers, and after them historians claimed that neither L’vov’s evidence nor the Hughes apparatus negotiations between Kerensky and Kornilov that followed provided legal grounds for the accusation of conspiracy against the general.38 Indeed, Kerensky did not know about all of Kornilov’s supporters’ actions, but historians cannot consider Kerensky’s misgivings as entirely baseless. On the same day, Kerensky sent a telegram to General Headquarters, dismissing Kornilov. The general refused to leave his post. In this, he was supported by those high-ranking officers at General Headquarters and by other senior military leaders, including front commanders. The divisions that had earlier been dispatched to Petrograd continued to move along the railways. The efforts of Savinkov and some other intermediaries who tried to somehow remedy the ‘misunderstanding’ by reconciling Kornilov and Kerensky did not succeed. Both sides had already ruled out the chance of an agreement, and the general stated his position so sharply that Savinkov accepted Kerensky’s proposal and started to organize the defence of the capital from the ‘Kornilovite’ troops, using for this the very army units that he had earlier intended to disarm in agreement with Kornilov. Kerensky, who was given extraordinary powers by the government, officially designated Kornilov’s actions as a ‘mutiny’ (miatezh). In his turn, Kornilov accused Kerensky of a ‘ruse’ (provokatsiia).39 The day of 28 August was the turning point in this information war, although many in Kerensky’s milieu deemed his position to be hopeless. Elite combat divisions of the Russian army continued to move towards Petrograd, with ill-disciplined and badly trained troops of the capital city’s garrison opposing them. But judgements of this sort betrayed an underestimation of political factors, primarily the mobilizational capabilities of soviets and committees. Kornilov was also losing in the propaganda war. His proclamations were so ineffectual that the general’s opponents reprinted them in their own publications. For example, his claim that the Provisional Government was acting under the influence of the Bolsheviks was impossible to believe, even by Kerensky’s opponents. Propaganda by agitators, sabotage by railway personnel, and mobilization by Kornilov’s opponents did their part. Echelons carrying the cavalry divisions halted, and the general was deprived of his only argument capable of putting pressure on the Provisional Government. He was forced to resign his post and was then arrested. The experience of the ‘Kornilov affair’ was very important for the progress of the revolution. Discipline in the armed forces deteriorated, for the suppression of the Kornilov rising was accompanied by arrests, beatings and sometimes even killings of officers. The influence of soviets and committees rose sharply again. The Bolshevik Party started to gather momentum. No less important were the culturalpolitical changes. For many contemporaries, those holding a variety of views, a civil war had already begun, as both newspapers and private diaries attest. While

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the general’s supporters said that they were fighting ‘Bolshevism’ (using this word also to describe moderate socialists), their opponents blamed the ‘Kornilovites’ and the ‘Kornilovshchina’ for the civil war that had started already. Representatives of the Kadet Party were included with the ‘Kornilovites’ (although some Kadets had been critical of the Kornilov rising), as sometimes were the entire ‘bourgeoisie’. A compromise with ‘Kornilovites’, responsible for the civil war, seemed politically and psychologically impossible for moderate socialists and their supporters.40 This seriously impeded Kerensky’s efforts as he tried once again to revive the coalition. In the end, he succeeded. A new Provisional Government was formed in midSeptember. But neither the Kadets, nor the Mensheviks, nor the SRs sent their most prominent leaders to the government. Support for the Kerensky Government by the main political parties was now in essence conditional. The ‘Kornilov affair’ also significantly influenced the perception of Kerensky. The conflict itself was personified. It was seen as a confrontation between Kornilov and Kerensky. Such a simplified opposition was used even in sessions of the Bolshevik Party leadership.  At the same time, they did not think it was possible to stop fighting against Kerensky. Some party activists thought that Kerensky was a more dangerous adversary than the undisguised enemy Kornilov. For example, just such an opinion was expressed during a meeting of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee by Mikhail Kalinin.41 Some resolutions passed by the moderate socialists expressed personal confidence in Kerensky, sometimes along with expression of support for the governing bodies of the soviets. Sometimes the ‘Kornilovites’ were counterposed to ‘Kerenskyites’ (kerentsy), but the latter word was seldom used.42 Despite the scornful attitude of many ‘Kornilovites’ towards Kerensky, he was not mentioned as the main enemy. The general’s supporters considered ‘Bolshevism’ to be their chief adversary. By contrast, the words ‘Kornilovites’ and ‘Kornilovshchina’ were used very frequently.43

FROM KORNILOVSHCHINA TO KERENSHCHINA Discussion about the ‘Kornilov affair’ continued to be hugely important even after the general was arrested. His supporters launched a press campaign and tried to defend him against charges of mutiny. To this end they reported various circumstances surrounding the general’s agreement with Kerensky, which undermined Kerensky’s authority. Bolshevik newspapers picked up these reports and launched a new attack on Kerensky. Nor was there any unity in the ranks of the moderate socialists. Some SRs demanded a full investigation into Kerensky’s involvement in the ‘Kornilov affair’, others thought such an investigation to be inappropriate, and still others continued to praise the head of the Provisional Government as a faultless leader.44 Attitudes towards Kerensky in connection with the ‘Kornilov affair’ contributed to deepening rifts among the ranks of moderate socialists. Meanwhile, supporters and defenders of the arrested general, expressing solidarity with him and his political course, pointedly started to use the words ‘Kornilovites’ and even ‘Kornilovshchina’ as a self-designation. Socialists started to talk about the possibility of ‘a new Kornilovshchina’. At which the Bolsheviks accused Kerensky himself of preparing the ‘new Kornilovshchina’. For instance, Lenin and his associates even referred

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to Kerensky as a Kornilovite who had a quarrel with Kornilov himself by sheer accident.45 The entire vocabulary of denunciation against Kornilov, ‘Kornilovites’ and ‘Kornilovshchina’, developed with the participation of Kerensky himself, could now be deployed against him by his opponents. In autumn 1917 a new word also appeared – ‘Kerenshchina’. Both left-wing and right-wing opponents actively started to use it. The would-be ‘Red’ and the wouldbe ‘White’ participants in the Civil War, supporters of Kornilov and supporters of the Bolsheviks alike, constructed their identities by counterposing themselves to Kerensky and the ‘Kerenshchina’. This word meant a ‘weak’, inefficient and irresponsible regime headed by politicians who substitute words for deeds. At the same time, confused, fruitless discussions at rallies and committee meetings could be referred to as ‘Kerenshchina’. And for Bolsheviks, ‘Kerenshchina’ also designated preparations for a ‘new Kornilovshchina’ camouflaged by democratic rhetoric.46 Rumours about Kerensky’s ‘court’, of his addiction to drugs and of his use of the palace furniture were spreading ever more widely. The feminization of his image received a new impulse. Whereas earlier these themes were aired primarily in correspondence and diaries, now they were increasingly making it to the press. Right-wing newspapers also started developing the version of Kerensky’s alleged Jewish origins which was recorded in diaries before that.47 Similar anti-Semitic talk among the Bolshevik rank and file was recorded by moderate socialists. This partial concurrence of far-left and far-right criticism of Kerensky was noticed by many contemporaries.48 Accusations of ‘treason’ and ‘betrayal’ were particularly important here. Bolshevik propaganda described Kerensky as a ‘traitor’ as early as May 1917 in connection to the attempts to strengthen discipline in the army and to prepare an offensive on the front. It was claimed that he had betrayed the interests of democracy by supporting the ‘bourgeoisie’.49 The Kornilov affair added new meaning to the treason charge against Kerensky. Some accused him of organizing a conspiracy against the revolution in cahoots with Kornilov, and others of betraying the general at the decisive moment. The theme of treason changed somewhat when German armed forces seized the islands of the Moon Sound archipelago and enabled the German Navy to enter the Gulf of Finland, putting Petrograd under threat. In these circumstances, the government contemplated evacuating state institutions to Moscow. Rumours started spreading that Kerensky was intentionally preparing to surrender the revolutionary capital to the enemy. Unguarded statements by some conservative politicians who said that the loss of Petrograd would contribute to stabilizing the situation inside the country made these rumours more believable. Rumours of Kerensky’s treason were spread by both right-wing and left-wing opponents. In right-wing and conservative circles, some spoke of the prime minister’s suspicious Jewish secretary, others of a ballerina of German origin who influenced him. It was even claimed that Kerensky spoke of his opposition to the Bolsheviks just for show whereas in fact he had already concluded a secret agreement with the Germans about a ceasefire. Rumours of this sort reached the British Foreign Office. It cannot be said that all of these rumours were believed in London (the ambassador in Petrograd decisively refuted them) but neither did British analysts reject them as utterly absurd.50 The left-wing version of Kerensky’s treason supposed a different set of enemies. Lenin claimed that the

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Provisional Government plan to surrender revolutionary Petrograd was dictated by international imperialism, as Britain and Germany prepared a separate peace.51 And it was not just the Bolsheviks who found it suspicious that the British Navy did not undertake active operations in the Baltic. The rumours of Kerensky’s treason were surprisingly similar to rumours of Nicholas II’s ‘betrayal’, which widely circulated on the eve of the February Revolution. Contemporaries sensed the connections between these conspiratorial schemes, which was also reflected in contemporary folklore. Ethnographers have recorded a chastushka (folk ditty) from that time: На столе стоит тарелка, А в тарелке – виноград. Николай продал Россию, А Керенский – Петроград.

There’s a plateful on the table, In the plate there are some grapes. Nicholas has sold all Russia, And Kerensky, Petrograd.52

As we can see, both left-wing and right-wing forces used negative images of Kerensky and the ‘Kerenshchina’ for their political mobilization. However, the circulation of such rumours was a manifestation of another important social process that influenced Kerensky’s authority. Spring 1917 was a time of revolutionary enthusiasm and universal interest in politics. People were ready to spend their time and money to buy newspapers and pamphlets, to visit rallies and concert-rallies, the great speaker Kerensky was uniquely matched for this time. But in the autumn, increasing numbers of people were disillusioned with politics. They had less and less faith in the promises of the authorities and were less and less interested in social problems. Disillusionment could also impact on yesterday’s idols. Some of Kerensky’s supporters abandoned him for his left-wing opponents, some moved to the right, but in the autumn many former admirers of the revolutionary minister ceased to be interested in the politics at all and retired into private life. Kerensky was becoming a symbol of their disillusionment with revolution and politics. This depoliticization also reflected a rejection of ‘Kerenshchina’. Bolshevik success is impossible to imagine without this mass political demobilization. By no means everyone supported overthrowing the Provisional Government but hardly anyone was prepared to defend it. Discrediting Kerensky played a significant part in Bolshevik propaganda. The class and political enemy was embodied and personified in him. Party supporters spread the most incredible rumours; for example, it was claimed that among Kerensky’s troops marching on Petrograd after the Bolsheviks took power there were monarchists and even Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich, the brother of the last Emperor.53 A principled opponent of the ‘old regime’, Kerensky was publicly accused of trying to restore monarchy. With the same ardour, some on the right thought that there was no critical difference between Lenin and Kerensky.54 Such claims were also heard immediately after the Bolsheviks came to power. Many admirers of General Kornilov thought that by overthrowing the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks were only clearing the way for a ‘normal’ military dictatorship; thus, they made no effort to organize resistance. For some opponents of the Bolsheviks, Kerensky was even worse than Lenin. People with a variety of views wanted to see

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the head of the Provisional Government deposed or even executed.55 An extreme example of such an attitude towards Kerensky was published in Petrograd’s Black Hundreds newspaper Groza. The paper saluted the Russian soldiers and workers who finally expelled the ‘yid’ and ‘traitor’ Kerensky from the Tsar’s chambers. It was also in this newspaper that the false report about Kerensky fleeing from the Winter Palace in women’s clothing was published.56 This legend lived on. The Whites also wrote about Kerensky as a cross-dresser, and the rumour of his Jewish origins was reproduced in various anti-Semitic writings.57

*** A study of the multifarious images of Kerensky clarifies some of the symbolic politics of 1917. In attitudes taken towards the revolutionary minister, several important features of political culture can be determined. The radical anti-monarchist revolution was carried out under democratic slogans. Yet the cult of the emperor was replaced by a cult of a unique Leader-saviour. Elements of revolutionary and socialist tradition were used to create this Leader cult and through it the cultural hegemony of the socialists in the development of the Russian Revolution.58 In the course of constructing the cult of the Leader of a revolutionary army, some forms of leader worship inherent in the Russian military tradition were also reproduced. Later this had significant influence on Soviet political culture. Of course, the cults of Lenin and Stalin and the cult of Kerensky cannot be equated, but some important forms and methods of glorifying the revolutionary Leader which developed in 1917, during the bitter struggle for power, were later utilized and disseminated by the Bolsheviks. Both in glorifying Kerensky and in repudiating him a traditional authoritarian political culture can be seen on which various ideologies could be superimposed – socialist, democratic, liberal. This was not a secret for contemporaries. For instance, the well-known Marxist Alexander Bogdanov wrote about this as early as May 1917.59 The different political parties were being built around authoritative political leaders, and the exit route from the various political crises was seen by contemporaries not in structural institutional reform but in promoting a Leader, in vesting him with new powers and in suppressing the Leader’s opponents. Such a peculiar authoritarian-patriarchal paternalist consciousness was also manifest when trust in a Leader was put to serious test and he lost his authority. A new Leaderrescuer was counterposed to the unworthy leader, and the former favoured one was subjected to progressive delegitimization. Thus some former Kerensky admirers started to see a unique Leader in General Kornilov. Authoritarian-patriarchal political culture was seen in the tactics of delegitimization too. The same method was used by mutually opposed political forces. Images of ‘feminine’, ‘weak-willed’, ‘hysterical’, ‘actorish’, ‘indecisive’ Kerensky had to underscore the ‘masculinity’, ‘strength’ and ‘will’ of ‘real’ leaders, White and Red, counterposed to him, adversaries united by their repudiation of the ‘Kerenshchina’.60 Preparing for civil war demanded different leader images, although in constructing them some of the same methods developed to glorify Kerensky were used.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Dreaming about Democratic Russia: Viktor Chernov in 1917 HANNU IMMONEN, RESEARCH FELLOW EMERITUS AT THE ACADEMY OF FINLAND

Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1873–1952) was the intellectual leader of the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (the SRs), the largest political party in 1917, and Minister of Agriculture in the Provisional Government. For Chernov, the outbreak of the February Revolution signified a chance to move forward to a socialist and democratic Russia. Accordingly, he was the main proponent of the rapid convocation of the Constituent Assembly believing that the assembly would be followed by a new socialist government based on the results of the election. This government would then have implemented long-held SR plans for land reform in a Socialist and Democratic Russia. Yet the plan ran into obstacles, the most basic of which was the ongoing war.

THE ISSUE OF WAR AND PEACE When the First World War broke out in August 1914, it posed a dilemma to Viktor Chernov. He believed that the war would end soon, and it would lead to the victory of one party over the other; moreover, he believed that the probability of the Allied victory over the Central Powers was more likely than other way round. Accordingly, his nightmare was that Imperial Russia, as one of the Allied countries, would emerge victorious from the war. To prevent this happening, Chernov argued from the beginning of the war that there was no point in stopping revolutionary work during the war; on contrary, it had to be strengthened because two previous wars, those against Turkey 1877–8, and especially Japan in 1905, had helped the revolutionary movement.1 Although the Socialist International had collapsed at the beginning of the War, Chernov in his articles and speeches stressed throughout the period of 1914–15, that it was imperative that socialist forces would be united in such a way that they could exert pressure when peace negotiations started. However, by the end of 1915,

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the situation had fundamentally changed. Now the war was continuing with no end in sight, and it was no longer possible to discuss it in terms of victory versus defeat. This made the demand for revolution even more paramount. At the same time, Chernov issued a call to the European socialists to act as a ‘third force’ between the warring parties trying to stop the war. Reviewing the situation after the Zimmerwald conference, Chernov noted that the ‘protracted war’ could lead into ‘reciprocal attrition’. It was now essential to use all kinds of revolutionary opportunities to paralyse the fratricidal war.2 When the February Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, it seemed to confirm Chernov’s prognosis: now the Russian people had themselves started the revolution without waiting for the end of the war. Accordingly, he now also believed that the Russian revolution would not remain an isolated incident during the war; rather, it would form the starting point for international revolutionary action. Russia was the ‘Revolutionary Knight’ which had set an example for revolutionary action that would exclude all imperialist war aims and by so doing overcome imperialism itself. However, before this happened, the new revolutionary Russia had to be defended. During the summer and early autumn of 1917, Chernov repeatedly raised in various forums the need to form a strong revolutionary army for the defence of the Russian Revolution. All that was left from his earlier peace policy was his conviction that the war should not be conducted until ‘complete victory’ but that it should be ended soon so that there would be no victors or vanquished, no annexations and no indemnities. The issue of war was discussed in the Third SR Party Congress which convened during a ten-day period (25 May 25–4 June 1917) in Moscow. By that time, the SRs had already started their impressive growth in terms of members and supporters which only continued after the Party Congress. In the summer of 1917, the SR organizations composed of about a million members.3 In Chernov’s view, the rapid growth of the party did not only make it stronger, but it had an adverse side as well. By the time of the Party Congress, it was already composed of three factions. According to Chernov, the largest of them was the centre representing two-thirds of all delegates. The left faction was represented by fifty to sixty delegates and the right wing ten to twelve supporters.4 During the Party Congress, a serious deterioration of relations between Chernov and the left and right wings took place. During the war years abroad, the members of the left-wing had been under the spell of Chernov’s revolutionary internationalism and pacifism. Now they were disappointed with him because when the resolution on war was discussed, he sided with the party centre against the left-wing. The resolution which was passed, proposed by the party centre, raised imperialist strivings as the main reason of the war; it advocated the re-establishment of the International; it stressed twice that peace should be concluded without ‘annexations and contributions’; it urged Russia to turn to its allies with the programme of peace; it demanded the liquidation of secret treaties; but it opposed separate peace; it stressed the need for a new revolutionary army; it emphasized the common front between the allies; and it stressed the need to create a fighting spirit in the army.5 Except for the reference to the common front between the allies, the resolution of the centre accurately expressed those ideas which Chernov had discussed after

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coming to Russia; at the same time, it markedly differed from those issues that he had advocated before coming to Russia. B.D. Kamkov, one of Chernov’s closest political associates before his arrival in Russia, commented on the situation thus: ‘When Chernov worked abroad and came forward as a revolutionary internationalist we were with him and if he continues to be such, we will help him but if he leaves that position, we will be against him’. (Kogda on rabotal za granitsei i vystupil kak revoiutsionnyi internationalist –my byli s nim. I poskol’ku on takim ostaetsia, my s nim, a poskol’ku on oteshel ot etogo – my protiv nego).6 The parting of ways between Chernov and the left-wing reached its climax in the summer. On 9 July, the Left SR paper Zemlia i volia published a declaration accompanied by a letter which was signed by B.D. Kamkov, A.L. Kolegaev and V.A. Algasov. In the letter they argued that the policy of the SR leaders ‘alienates the most conscious part of the labouring masses from the party’. At Chernov’s instigation, the SR Central Committee decided to expel the groups that had signed the declaration, ordered an investigation in the Zemlia i Volia paper and summoned the regional committee to change the conduct of the newspaper within a given time.7 While the Left SRs were emerging as a definite group, the right-wing SRs were also consolidating their activities. This group had been organized on the eve of the Third Party Congress and it had launched on 30 April the first issue of the daily Volia Naroda which appeared throughout the summer and autumn of 1917. The two major figures of the group were the veterans of the party Andrei Argunov and Ekaternia Breshko-Breshkovskaia who also financed at least partially the paper, but it also included Boris Savinkov and Chernov’s elder brother Vladimir M. Chernov. The collision between Chernov and the right-wing group happened at the Party Congress when Kerensky failed to get elected to the Central Committee of the party with 134 votes in his favour and 136 against. Kerensky’s friends accused Chernov of behindthe-scenes operations but the premises for this were false since the action against Kerensky came from the left wing of the party.8 Regardless of this, the election process to the Central Committee damaged the relations between Chernov and Kerensky.9 Finally, during the summer, the party centre also began to divide into two parts. At the end of the Third Party Congress, some members of the SR right-wing such as N.D. Avksentiev, V.V. Rudnev, I.I. Fondamainskii and M.V. Vishniak moved to the party centre. Yet they still felt solidarity with the right-wing. As a result, they formed non-Chernovian right-centre whereas Chernov with his supporters formed the left-centre. The right-wing and the right-centre favoured the Russian war effort continuing with the Allied countries until a victory had been achieved. Chernov wanted to put an end to the hostilities as soon as possible. The right-wing and the right-centre also wanted to postpone social reforms until the end of the war, whereas Chernov stressed that they had to be started right away.

CHERNOV AS MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE Chernov had returned to Russia on 8 April. At that time, the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet had already run into conflict over Russian war aims. The ensuing crisis – known as the April Crisis – led to the resignation of P.N. Miliukov,

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Minister of Foreign Affairs, on 2 May. Chernov had significantly contributed to Miliukov’s downfall by writing articles against his policies. When the negotiations for a new coalition government started, Chernov was offered a post in the new cabinet. He would have preferred the Soviet to the Provisional Government. Yet the formation of a large coalition or a united front, extending from liberals to socialists in their joint struggle against the autocracy had been one of the cardinal points of his political philosophy, developed as far back as the 1890s, and had been considered at the party’s Paris Conference in 1904. Accordingly, after his initial doubts had dissipated, Chernov supported the forming of a Coalition Government. Although the primary objective, the overthrow of the autocratic government, had already been achieved, the revolution in his view had touched the country only superficially; the remnants of the autocratic system were looming large in the countryside. Rather than antagonizing and confronting the old guard with an all-socialist government, the coalition could neutralize it.10 The Coalition Government was proclaimed on 5 May. The head of the First Provisional Government, Prince G.E. L’vov, remained Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior. He and the six other Kadet ministers formed the majority of the cabinet  – the six socialist ministers were A.F. Kerensky (War), V.M. Chernov (Agriculture) and P.N. Pereverzev (Justice), who were SRs; I.G. Tsereteli (Post and Telegraph) and. M.I. Skobelev (Labour) were Mensheviks; and A.V. Peshekhonov (Food) was Popular Socialist.11 On 21 April 1917 the First Provisional Government had issued a decree on the formation of land committees. The system consisted of the Main Land Committee in Petrograd and under it, local committees in the provincial and district (uezd) levels. The primary task of the committees was to prepare for a land reform as well as to devise interim solutions to urgent land problems pending convening of the Constituent Assembly.12 At the same time, a division of labour had been drawn between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Land Committees: the ministry had been put in charge of the maintenance of agricultural production while the Main Land Committee was expected to go on working on the land law proposal for the Constituent Assembly; the assembly in turn was expected to convene after the war. When Chernov took over the Ministry of Agriculture, he left aside these plans because he already had a land law proposal of his own; it was the land law proposal with 104 peasant signatories which the Socialist Revolutionaries a decade earlier, in 1907, had introduced to the Second Duma. This law proposal already included the basic points of the SR demand for the socialization of the land. Accordingly, it aimed at the abolition of all land ownership, it recognized the right to the use of the land as a subjective public right, and it ruled out any compensation for the landowners.13 During the summer of 1917, Chernov’s first point was that the  SR-dominated Ministry of Agriculture should rework the draft law of 1907, into the land law proposal for the Constituent Assembly. His second point was that even if the SRs were not to get a majority in the assembly, the party would in any case be the largest group. Under its leadership the peasant majority would then pass the SR land law as well as laws which would make Russia a democratic republic. Chernov’s third point was that after the assembly had convened, a new government would be formed

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according to the election results. It would then start to implement the laws which the assembly had passed. Finally, Chernov stressed the rapid convocation of the Constituent Assembly in late September or early October 1917.14 As a first measure, Chernov issued a law proposal to suspend all transactions of land starting retroactively from 1 March 1917. In Chernov’s scheme, the law proposal to suspend land transactions represented a ‘negative phase’ meaning the withdrawal of the land from commercial circulation. It would be followed by a ‘positive phase’ when the Constituent Assembly would have eliminated the concept of ‘land ownership’ altogether. However, the Kadets formed the majority of the government. When the law proposal was brought to the whole cabinet to discuss, it was suspended. It was only in July, when the Kadets had left the cabinet, that this law proposal was approved by the new cabinet. The suspension of this law proposal was only the beginning of Chernov’s problems with the Kadet ministers. At the beginning of June, Prince L’vov stressed that anarchy was spreading in the villages and attributed the reason for this to the exhortations made by the Ministry of Agriculture and ultimately Chernov himself. For Chernov, the reason was the inability of the Government to issue new laws, drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture to be applied in the countryside. These laws were delayed because once they had left the Ministry of Agriculture, they were sent for preliminary inspection in a series of interdepartmental conferences. During this procedure, the laws became stuck. This left the village without any laws on how to act in a new revolutionary situation. On 10 June, anarchists attacked the paper Russkaia volia and demonstrations followed. At that time, Chernov told to the SR Central Committee that the country did not have what he called a ‘competent, people’s government’. He felt that the government was to a certain degree ‘unauthorized’ (samochinnyi). At the same time, the Kadets were drawing up plans on how to get rid of Chernov.15

THE JULY CRISIS The Russian summer offensive had already started but the German and Austrian counterattack had not yet occurred when early in the morning on 2 July 1917, the Kadet ministers excluding Prince L’vov resigned from the government. On the same afternoon, representatives from the Petrograd garrison demanded that the Bolshevik Central Committee launch an uprising against the Provisional Government. After the demonstrations had started, the Petersburg Committee, followed belatedly by the Bolshevik Central Committee publicly endorsed the demonstrations. After the Kadets had resigned, Prince L’vov announced that he would also leave his post unless a new coalition could be organized based on a definite fight against anarchists and Bolsheviks. His conditions were not met and L’vov followed the suit of those colleagues who had resigned.16 On 8 July, Kerensky was appointed as new Prime Minister; he also preserved the post of the Minster of War. The liberal N.V. Nekrasov was named his deputy. Chernov and the other SR and Menshevik ministers preserved their seats. The empty ministerial seats left by the Kadets were filled by a new Radical

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Democratic Party which had been formed in March 1917. During the July Days, the party published a declaration in which it unlike the Kadets stressed the continuing significance of the coalition principle and cooperation with the Coalition Government.17 The new Cabinet issued a Government Declaration on 8 July in which it, following Chernov’s schedule, set definite dates for the election (17 September) and the convocation (30 September) of the Constituent Assembly, that is in two months’ time. The most controversial decision of the cabinet came on 12 July with the restoration of death penalty in front areas. Chernov had opposed the death penalty in any form but now he sided with the other ministers feeling that because of the critical military situation it was urgently needed.18 Speaking ten days later, on 23 July Chernov said that government had restored the death penalty, but it was an ‘exceptional surgical measure’ and he issued an appeal to support the programme of the Provisional Government.19 However, Kerensky had decided to bring the Kadets back into the cabinet. For the Kadets, one of their main conditions was the elimination of Chernov from the Cabinet. They felt that Chernov was deliberately trying to break down social order in the countryside, undermining the very principle of statehood (gosudarstvennost’) which the Kadets were trying to establish. Moreover, throughout his political career Chernov had been a convinced federalist, and in 1917 he saw the future Russia as a Federal Republic. However, although Chernov favoured making Russia a federal state, he did not want to encourage separation. He did share the SR view which supported independence for Poland, but the reason for this was self-evident: on 5 November 1916, the Central Powers had already proclaimed Polish independence. As far as other areas of Russia were concerned, such as the Ukraine and Finland, where nationalist feelings were running high, Chernov wanted the decision to be made by the Constituent Assembly. He thought that the striving towards separation might pass since it derived from the autocratic period when various nations had been forced to extinguish their own ‘national traits’ (samobyt’nost’).20 Yet this was not all the Kadets had against Chernov. During the July Days, Kerensky had ordered V.N. Pereverzev, Minister of Justice, to release the material in the ministry’s possession about Lenin’s connection with the Germans. Chernov had approved the publication. Indeed, already in April, he had accused Lenin of returning through Germany to Russia together with representatives of those parties whose countries were in the state of war with Russia. As soon became clear, Chernov had been throwing stones in a glass house. Soon after Chernov arrived in Russia, Boris Savinkov and his political associates had co-authored a letter to Delo naroda, the SR party paper, criticizing him above all for encouraging anti-patriotic sentiments. Since then, there had been reports that Chernov was a German agent. Moreover, during the July Days information was leaked to the patriotic daily Bez lishnykh slov (Without unnecessary words) claiming that Chernov had written articles (in fact only one article) for a magazine subsidized by the German Government for distribution among Russian prisoners-of-war. Thus, for the Kadets, Chernov was not only the ‘arsonist of the countryside’ but now also a German spy who was tearing Russia apart with his federal ideas.21

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As the campaign against Chernov mounted, he resigned on 20 July 1917; yet Chernov had support in the Petrograd Soviet, and he had a large popular following in the provinces; accordingly, Kerensky had to restore him as Minister of Agriculture, and the Kadets had to take it on the chin. Thus, the Second Coalition Government was finally formed on 24–25 July 1917.22 However, the Kadets had successfully demanded that the election of the Constituent Assembly should be postponed almost by eight weeks; accordingly, the new date for the election was 29 October and the new date for its opening was two weeks later, on 12 November 1917.23 This postponement had far reaching consequences. Had the Chernovian schedule been followed (elections and convocation in September), a new SR-dominated socialist government could have started its work before the start of October. This would effectively have hampered Bolshevik plans to seize power later in that month. But when the election was postponed to November, the political field was left open for anyone wanting to make a bid for power.

CHERNOV AFTER THE COALITION CABINET During the night of 26–27 August, the Kornilov episode put an end to the Second Coalition and to Chernov’s ministerial career as well. Chernov then planned to return to the Petrograd Soviet. In the spring, he had been elected to the Executive Committee of the Soviet and now he hoped to use this position more actively. However, a crisis was brewing in the Soviet. The crucial test vote on the procedures for the reorganization of the Presidium took place on 9 September, and the Bolshevik position received a narrow majority. When the results were announced, Chernov and his Menshevik and SR colleagues who had formed the old Presidium walked out, and on 25 September the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet was completely reorganized; Trotsky being elected as chair.24 In less than two weeks, Chernov had been thrown out from both the Government and the Soviet. After that, during the next days and weeks, he repeated in several places that coalition with the Kadets was not an option. This was also his point in the Democratic State Conference starting on 14 September. There Chernov demanded a concrete programme which would have been applied until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. Accordingly, Chernov felt that the main problem was not the coalition principle per se but a large coalition between liberals and socialists. In the autumn of 1917, Chernov thus favoured the formation of a more limited government that would have included moderate socialist parties and some representatives of the bourgeois parties and this he called a ‘real coalition’ or ‘democratic coalition’. What he was thinking of was the same kind of the government that had already existed in July 1917, when the Kadets were excluded from it. At the Democratic Conference the SRs were represented by their three factions (the right, the centre and the left) and the Central Committee had acknowledged the right for all three factions to appear and vote independently. At this time, the Left SR faction formed almost an independent party which stressed the need to establish an exclusively socialist authority (za sozdanie odnorodnoi vlasti) which would be responsible to the central organs of ‘revolutionary democracy’. When the Left SRs

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then pulled out of the Conference, it left the supporters of coalition in majority. On 25 September, Kerensky formed the so-called Third Coalition which consisted of socialists, non-party members and four Kadets.25

CHERNOV AFTER BOLSHEVIK SEIZURE OF POWER Chernov did not want to participate in the Second Congress of the Soviet scheduled to take place on 25 October 1917. In Chernov’s opinion, the SR party had turned to the right during the period from June to November. Although the Left SRs had only gotten one of their members onto the Central Committee and the actual right-wing did not have any formal member in it, the right-wing nevertheless predominated on the Central Committee through members who were sympathetic to it. Matters went so far that a series of Chernov’s warning articles were not published in the central organs of the party, even as opinion pieces. The Central Committee decided that the party was so accustomed to regard Chernov’s articles as its official position that their divergence from the decisions of the committee might cause general confusion. Chernov had already conducted discussions with some of his political associates and with the Petersburg party organization about forming a party organization of their own. Yet they decided to wait for the convocation of the Fourth Party Congress. In the middle of September, in the Seventh Petrograd SR Conference Chernov had said that the deepening of the revolution demanded intensification of revolutionary work in local areas; there was a lack of democratic forces and now he wanted to go there.26 On the evening of 22 October Chernov left Petrograd via Moscow for Minsk. A Congress of the Peasant Section of the Southern Front was holding its meeting there and Chernov had been invited because of the onslaught by the Bolsheviks and their allies. When the Bolshevik seizure of power took place in Petrograd on 25  October, Chernov was in Minsk, at the Headquarters of the Southern Front. There he put forward two resolutions, the first condemning the uprising in Petrograd and the other stressing the need to solve the agrarian question in the Constituent Assembly (the election being due in eighteen days, after a further postponement, that is on 12 November). He got overwhelming support; 257 votes were cast for the resolutions and only 23 opposed. Sixteen persons abstained. The congress ended on the same day and Chernov headed to Mogilev, the base of the Military headquarters and the main soldiers’ organizations.27 In the meantime, in Petrograd, the Left SR-dominated Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers (Vikhzel) had presented the Bolsheviks with an ultimatum to broaden the party composition of the government. The so-called Vikhzel negotiations started on 29 October. As a basis for these negotiations, the Vikhzel sponsored a formula for forming a coalition government of all socialist parties from the Bolsheviks to the People’s Socialists; the conciliatory Bolsheviks, led by L.B. Kamenev, favoured it. In the morning of 31 October, the Menshevik Central Committee joined these negotiations. Chernov’s name figured prominently in them. Already in August–September, when a list of names of possible ministers had circulated in the Soviet, Chernov had been named as Prime Minister.

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Now, as the list of the ministers was prepared, he was again planned as Prime Minister of the new government. However, Lenin strenuously opposed this plan and the talks collapsed.28 When the Vikhzel negotiations collapsed on 4 November, Chernov was in Mogilev. The General Army Committee which represented various soldier organizations had invited him there. The Army Committee envisaged an all-socialist ministry led by Chernov. From 4 to 11 November, negotiations about forming such a government (o sozdanii edinogo ‘obshchesotsialisticheskogo pravitel’stva’) took place in Mogilev. In addition to Chernov, the participants included General Alexander Verkhovskii, the Minister of War in the Third Coalition as well as the SRs Abram Gots and Nikolai Avksentiev, and the Menshevik Boris Bogdanov – active figures in the Preparliament. On 8 November, the General Army Committee issued an appeal in which it proposed to take the initiative in forming a new Government and nominating Chernov as its head. A crucial feature in these plans was the attempt to move the approaching Second All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets from Petrograd to Mogilev. Yet in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs furiously opposed the idea. Moreover, the events in Mogilev took an unexpected turn. The Mogilev soviet decided to arrest General Nikolai Dukhonin, the last Commanderin-Chief of the Imperial Russia Army, and Military Headquarter was occupied by revolutionary soldiers. This ended the attempt by Chernov and the General Army Committee to frustrate the Bolsheviks’ plans.29 Since the Congress of Peasant Soviets did not move to Mogilev, Chernov returned to Petrograd on 11 November. When he arrived, the Preliminary Congress of the Peasant Soviets was already in session. Before Chernov’s arrival, the old Executive Committee had suffered a defeat over the question of electing a presidium and, as a protest, it had left the Assembly hall. The remaining congress had then proclaimed itself an Extraordinary Peasants’ Congress and chose a Left SR presidium with Maria Spiridonova in the chair. On the following day, Chernov entered the Assembly hall being followed by all those who had left earlier. The Chernovian SRs then put a motion to elect him honorary chairperson. The Bolsheviks were categorically against. Taking their cue from the Bolsheviks, the Left SRs put forward a motion to deprive the members of the old Executive Committee of the right to vote. This vote carried by 155 to 137 with 5 abstentions. At that point, the members of the old Executive Committee and all those who supported it, left the Assembly Hall, and went to have a meeting of their own. The Extraordinary Congress ended in disarray.30 On 12–14 November, elections were held to the Constituent Assembly. The SRs received 370 seats, but this included the seats of the Ukrainian SRs (80) and the Left SRs (40).31 Although the Left SRs still were on the SR list, they now formed a party of their own and they had already concluded an agreement with the Bolsheviks. Accordingly, the proper number of the seats of the Russian SRs was 299, and that of the Bolsheviks 175; the combined number of the Bolshevik and the Left SR seats being 215. Two weeks later, on 26 November, the Second All-Russian Congress of the Peasant Soviets was opened in Petrograd. The first order of business was the election of temporary presidium and chairperson and the choice of a commission to check

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credentials. Maria Spiridonova was the candidate of the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs for the chair. Chernov was the candidate of the SRs. In the election Maria Spiridonova scored a victory with 269 votes against Chernov’s 230 votes (499 votes in all).32 The Congress was opened two days before the day, 28 November, originally scheduled to be the opening day of the Constituent Assembly. By that time, the general pattern of the electoral results was already well known. Under these circumstances, the Chernovian SRs decided to raise the issue of the Constituent Assembly as the main theme of the Congress. The Bolshevik and the Left SR majority, however, decided that this was the time to lay open the ‘mistakes’ of the old Executive Committee.33 On 1 December, the Chernovian SRs moved a resolution on the question of the Constituent Assembly. The result was Chernov’s victory with 305 votes, whereas the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs got 287 votes. This was a turning point in the congress. Until then, starting from the Second Congress of the Petrograd Soviet in October, through the Preliminary Congress of the Peasant Soviets, the Chernovian SRs had lost every vote that had been taken but now, in the wake of the victory in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the balance was shifting. Moreover, when the vote for the temporary chair had been taken on 26 November there had been 499 votes cast in all. Five days later, on 1 December the total number of votes had risen to 592. After the first vote, almost a hundred more delegates had taken part in the voting and they had turned the tables in favour of Chernov.34 The decisive vote was taken on 2 December. Before the vote, both Chernov and Lenin appeared in the Congress. According to Chernov, Lenin issued a strong plea by announcing that he was placing the fate of the Soviet of People’s Commissars in the hands of the Congress; if he were not supported, he would resign (esli emu ne budet vyrazheno doveriia, on uidet). Chernov then made a counter proposal for ‘delivering’ (vrucheniia) full power to the Constituent Assembly and to the government that it would ‘call into life’.35 Originally, three draft resolutions were put forward, from the Chernovian SRs, the Left SRs and the Bolsheviks respectively, but so as not to waste any votes, the Bolsheviks gave up their draft and then supported the Left SR draft resolution. The choice was then between the Chernovian and the Left SR draft resolutions. Since this was a vote of utmost importance, it was taken by name. The result was announced only during the night of 2 December; as it turned out, Chernov had won again: the SR draft had received 359 votes and the draft of the Left 321.36 The total number of votes that had been cast was thus 680 votes; accordingly, the new result was 88 votes more than the former total number of votes. This increase signified the fact that the additional delegates who now were involved in the voting included a slight pro Chernovian majority. For the Bolsheviks, the first point now was the attempt to control the damage that had already occurred. The Chernovian onslaught had taken place although the Bolsheviks with the assistance of the Left SRs controlled the Presidium and the commission to check credentials. The alarming prospect now suggested that should this trend continue, Chernov might turn the congress into a rally for the Constituent Assembly. Since the takeover of power in October had been made in the name of the Soviet Power, Lenin could not simply dissolve the Second All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, although it had withheld its confidence from his Government. The

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only way to get rid of the recalcitrant congress was to abort the proceedings inside. Accordingly, when Maria Spiridonova appeared next morning, on 3 December, she declared that this had not been a binding vote, but only the ‘ basis for one’. On 4 December, the Chernovian SRs demanded a vote be taken for the permanent presidium and announced that Chernov would be their choice for chair. The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs then gathered all delegates they could possibly find, not to vote for their own candidate, not even against Chernov but simply to abstain. Accordingly, the result was 332 in favour of Chernov but there were 362 abstaining (694 in all). This in effect aborted the meeting. The Chernovian SRs walked out, singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Retrospectively, Chernov argued that the Bolsheviks and Left SRs had filled the Congress of Peasant Soviets with delegates from front organizations, rear garrisons and the navy at the expense of genuine peasants.37 Yet the issue is more complicated. There were 489 peasant representatives officially registered chosen by rural soviets and 294 men in uniform which makes the total number of 789 representatives. However, the total number of delegates who took part in the voting was smaller than the total number of registered delegates. The final vote (694) included the highest number of voters but even it was below the total number of the officially registered delegates (789). There was a rising curve in number of voters, and it favoured Chernov almost to the end.

THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY The Fourth SR Party Congress was held concurrently with the Second Congress of the Peasant Soviets from 26 November to 5 December, in Petrograd. Retrospectively, Chernov described the Party Congress as his personal and political triumph: the new Central Committee had a pro-Chernov majority.38 However, some SR delegates elected to the Constituent Assembly who had already arrived in Petrograd had formed a Delegation. On 9 December, the Delegation elected a Bureau consisting of twenty-five members to act as its executive organ. Since most of the Delegation represented the right-wing of the party, Chernov had some difficulties in getting elected to the bureau; it happened only towards the end of December when more delegates arrived in Petrograd. According to Mark Vishniak, Chernov was the only leftist member in the Bureau. On the other hand, Kerensky and Avksentiev were hiding from the Bolsheviks and could not attend the Party Congress; therefore, the leading role belonged to V.V. Rudnev.39 It was only on 20 December when the Soviet of People’s Commissars decided that the date for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly would be 5 January.40 When the SR delegates arrived at noon on 5 January in the Tauride Palace, they found the palace surrounded by armed soldiers and the assembly hall empty. In the assembly hall the SR Delegation received information about clashes between supporters of the assembly and soldiers in which several demonstrators had been killed. By four o’clock the streets were under Bolshevik control and Lenin could order the proceedings to begin. The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs arrived in the assembly hall.

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The first item on the agenda was the election of the President. In the Congress of the Peasant Soviets Chernov had lost to Spiridonova but now he scored a victory by 244 votes for him and 151 against him.41 The total number of votes for and against Chernov was 395. Although approximately 700 delegates had been elected, the total number of delegates present could hardly have exceeded 400 delegates. Empty seats were filled with sailors and soldiers who threatened the delegates brandishing their arms. Chernov’s opening speech was followed by plenary discussion. After that, the SR delegation had planned to conduct a discussion about the war followed by the SR land law proposal and finally by the question of a new government for Russia. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, required that the ensuing discussion should be based on the Declaration of the Rights of Labouring and Exploited People which the Soviet of People’s Commissars had published on 3 January. The SR motion won with 236 votes for it and 146 against it. Following such a result, the Bolshevik and the Left SR leaderships requested an intermission so that they could discuss the new situation in their groups. Lenin took part in the meeting of the Bolshevik group and it decided that the group would not return to the assembly hall. Accordingly, when the intermission ended, the Left SRs returned but the Bolsheviks did not.42 Lenin then wrote his theses about the dissolution of the assembly.43 Once the plenary discussion of peace had been concluded, Chernov suggested that there should be a named vote so that the electors could know by name how the delegates had voted. Since this was a time-consuming method, he also suggested that the voting procedure should take place at the end of the meeting. Meanwhile, the delegates could now start the plenary discussion of the SR land law proposal. The Left SRs opposed this idea, but the SR majority overruled them and decided that both the votes on peace and land should be conducted according to name; moreover, the voting should take place only at the end of the meeting.44 Chernov’s move had put the Left SR leadership in a difficult position between the SRs and the Bolsheviks. The SR land law proposal with its promise to make the land ‘no-ones’ fulfilled the age-old desires of the peasants. Under these circumstances, it was difficult for the Left SR peasant delegates to leave the Assembly hall when they were ordered to do so. According to Chernov, they did leave only when one delegate from the group suddenly pulled out a revolver and threatened the group with it.45 Soon after the Left SR group had left the meeting, Commissar Pavel Dybenko gave an order to Anarchist Baltic sailor Anatolii Zhelezniakov, the head of the Tauride Palace guard detachment, to close the convocation of the assembly. Chernov had just started to read the first paragraph of the SR land law proposal according to which ‘the right of land ownership in the Russian Republic will be abolished now and forever’. At this point, Zhelezniakov touched the President by hand and told him: ‘I have been instructed to bring to your attention that all those present should leave the assembly hall because the guard is tired’. After Zhelezniakov had left the podium, the first one to speak was A.I. Strel’tsov, representative of the Ukrainian Left SRs. The Ukrainian SRs had their own Left group which shared the Great Russian Left SR views. However, unlike them,

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the Ukrainian Left SRs had not left the meeting and as their representative now explained they had even less intention of leaving it now.46 A quorum of four hundred deputies had been the precondition for the Soviet Government opening the Constituent Assembly.47 Accordingly, even after the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs had left, there were still slightly over two hundred deputies in the assembly hall consisting of the SRs and the Ukrainian SRs whether Left or not. Most of the deputies were still present, and during the forty minutes that the proceedings continued for, this majority then passed the first ten paragraphs of the SR land law. Had they been able to continue the meeting, they would undoubtedly have approved the land law proposal in its entire form. Now the remaining paragraphs were assigned to a special commission of the Constituent Assembly to be discussed there. Finally, on the authority of the Constituent Assembly, Russia was declared a republic.48 The entire SR land law proposal only emerged from the archive and was published after the dissolution of the USSR.49 Originally, the SR draft land law proposal had been conceived by SR agrarian specialists in the spring of 1907. Then the law proposal had been introduced with 104 peasant signatures to the Second State Duma. A decade later, in the summer of 1917, the law proposal had been reworked in the Ministry of Agriculture. The purpose had been to draw up rules for the application of the law so that it could be applied all over Russia without jeopardizing agricultural production. Finally, the SR land law proposal was more radical than the Decree on Land which Lenin issued on 26 October. The Decree on Land only ‘abolished the landownership of big landowners (Pomeshchi’cha sobstvennost na zemliu)’.50 In contrast to this, the SR land law proposal socialized ‘all land (vsiakaia zemlia)’. The convocation was closed by Chernov at 4.40 am. As he was leaving the building, he was approached by a man who identified himself as a Bolshevik and warned him not to use his car because there was already a crowd of soldiers waiting around it to kill him. Chernov took the other way round by foot. When, after a considerable time, he arrived at his home, rumours were already spreading that both Chernov and Tsereteli had been killed.51

CONCLUSION For Chernov, the February Revolution had signified a chance to move forward towards a democratic Russia. He had attempted to do this by successfully pressing for a rapid convocation of the Constituent Assembly. As he planned it, the assembly would have been followed by a government which would have been based on the election results. This assembly then would have passed the SR land law and formed a new socialist government leaving little room for Bolshevik activity later in the month. However, in the summer and autumn, the disintegration within the SR Party divided it into competing wings and eroded the power base that Chernov had enjoyed during the first months of the revolution. At a critical moment, the Kadets succeeded in postponing the elections of the Constituent Assembly by eight weeks. Finally, in

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less than three weeks before the first nationwide elections in Russian history were scheduled to be held, the Bolsheviks seized power. In the months following October, Chernov was still a credible democratic and socialist alternative to Lenin for the mass of peasant delegates who filled the Second Congress of Peasants Soviets and the Constituent Assembly. His name also appeared as Prime Minister in all those plans which were made in the post-October situation for a coalition cabinet. It was only by resorting to force that Lenin could suppress Chernov’s democratic alternative and establish dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia.

CHAPTER NINE

Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 BARBARA C. ALLEN, LA SALLE UNIVERSITY

Lenin and the Bolsheviks possessed a unity of purpose during 1917 that distinguished them from other socialist parties in Russia. While Russian Social Democratic Mensheviks believed autocratic Russia should follow a gradual, liberalizing economic and political path before it would be ready for socialist revolution, Bolsheviks sought an accelerated timeline and attracted a more radical corps of activists. Despite their differences, Russian socialists often cooperated in practice. During the First World War, however, an important rift developed between socialists who opposed the imperialist war – internationalists – and those who supported their country’s war effort because they feared the imperialism of the other side. Lenin went further by calling to turn the imperialist war into a social struggle against imperialist regimes. The issues of the war and the stance to take towards the caretaker government which replaced the tsarist regime would drive dynamics of fluctuation in party and factional alignments during the revolutionary year 1917 in Russia. Additionally, tactical disagreements ran through Lenin’s at times fraught relationship with more conciliatory comrades.1 Although much new information has been gleaned about the 1917 Revolution(s) from studying previously neglected social groups, the provinces and other topics outside of traditional political history in recent decades, historians agree that there have been no breakthroughs since classic studies were published in the 1960s–70s.2 On Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917, Alexander Rabinowitch’s books, Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks Come to Power, are still unsurpassed.3 Nevertheless, new findings and arguments about unity and difference among Bolsheviks in 1917, trade union organizing, women’s roles in the revolution and revolutionary violence enhance the classic narrative.

Research for this article was possible during the Covid-19 pandemic thanks to La Salle University interlibrary loan librarians Gerard Regan and Meghan Skiles and to my access to University of Illinois Urbana Champaign library databases during the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center Virtual Summer 2021 Research Lab.

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THE BOLSHEVIKS AND FEBRUARY The Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks both designated 27th February as the beginning of the February Revolution, because on that date both the Petrograd Soviet and a new temporary governing body were formed. Most historians agree, however, that the first day of the revolution was 23rd February  – International Women’s Day in Russia.4 Petrograd factory women and soldiers’ wives coalesced on that day to demonstrate against bakeries’ lack of bread due to a fuel shortage. By 1917, women were 43.2 per cent of Petrograd’s industrial workforce and 20 per cent of Petrograd’s metalworkers.5 Numerically they were a significant force, although many socialists regarded women as poor material for revolutionary agitation and organizing. The only Bolshevik who contributed original thought on ‘the woman question’ in socialist politics was Alexandra Kollontai.6 She became prominent in 1917 due to her oratorical excellence and unabashed radicalism. Like Lenin, she was still abroad during the February events but returned earlier than he because she was in Norway while he was in Switzerland. She delayed her return by a week to collect an important letter from Lenin to editors of Pravda. Neither she nor he had expected revolution in Russia to unfold so suddenly. Kollontai wrote an article on 1 March in which she assumed there would be a constitutional monarchy, but the very next day she was surprised to hear that the Tsar had abdicated.7 Lenin, likewise, had spoken in January 1917 on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the event which catalysed the 1905 Revolution in Russia, and gave every indication that he believed revolution in Russia was not nigh.8 Bolsheviks did not stand out during the February events, for internationalist socialists cooperated to organize meetings and demonstrations and distribute leaflets. A group of unaffiliated Social Democrats, the Interdistrictites or Mezhraionka, was the most visible issuer of agitational material in Petrograd.9 Mezhraionka, which was founded in 1913 to attempt to reverse the factional division between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, may have had somewhere between 150 and 500 members at the end of 1916 and several thousand by the time it merged with the Bolsheviks in July 1917.10 The Vyborg District Committee was the most active Bolshevik organization during the February days, with 500–600 militants placed ‘in strategically important factories’.11 These activists, alongside 1,000–1,200 other radical socialist organizers, worked on the streets and in factories to lead demonstrations and keep them disciplined, restrain Cossacks through persuasion, and target police for reprisals.12 The radical Vyborg district Bolsheviks clashed with the senior party Central Committee member in Petrograd, Alexander Shliapnikov, over whether to put armed worker units on the streets. Shliapnikov cautioned against provoking confrontations with soldiers; he argued that workers should instead persuade soldiers to join them. Indeed, violent episodes contributed to a sense of looming chaos before a new order emerged.13 After tsarist ministers resigned on 27 February, a liberal Provisional Government took their place. Simultaneously, socialists formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, led by an executive committee. Its moderate majority thought it premature for the soviet to seize all power from the Provisional

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Government. Given widespread hope for reform among Petrograd’s workers, moderate socialists did not want to agitate against or challenge the Provisional Government outright.14 While moderate Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries supported waging a defensive war and a gradual approach to constituting a permanent government, Bolsheviks (like other internationalist socialists) stood to their left but held varying opinions about key issues. In a series of four letters Lenin wrote in Switzerland in early March 1917, he called on Bolsheviks to oppose the Provisional Government and the war and to support soviet power. Most Bolsheviks in Russia opposed the war, but they disagreed about what rhetoric to use towards the Provisional Government. The Petersburg Committee aligned closely with the Petrograd Soviet, settling on not agitating against the Provisional Government unless it would take measures against the interests of the ‘democracy’ (those without significant property or wealth) or attempt to re-establish monarchy. The Russian Bureau of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee and the Vyborg District Committee aspired to soviet formation of a provisional revolutionary government, but they differed on a timeline. They envisioned for a provisional revolutionary government an agenda to end the war, establish a democratic republic, mandate an eight-hour workday, confiscate landowners’ estates, supply soldiers and workers with food, and convene a Constituent Assembly.15 The Vyborg Committee sought a provisional revolutionary government right away, whereas the Russian Bureau regarded it as ‘a task for the distant future’. Both bodies agreed that Bolsheviks should clearly oppose the Provisional Government.16 Bolshevik leaders returning from prison, exile or emigration in March brought new perspectives as they became better informed about opinions among workers, soldiers and grassroots Bolshevik activists within and outside of Petrograd. Lev Kamenev and Iosif Stalin, arriving in Petrograd from Siberia, reasserted their right to senior leadership roles they held before the war. Kamenev and Stalin took control of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper, and Kamenev overshadowed Shliapnikov as an orator.17 Historians have regarded Kamenev and Stalin as bringing a strong dose of moderation to Bolshevik stances towards the Provisional Government and as inclined to cooperate with moderate socialists, with Kamenev having advocated ‘conditional support of the Provisional Government’.18 Lars T. Lih argues that Kamenev and Stalin entered Petrograd knowing that Bolsheviks in other parts of Russia did not share its radicalism and that many workers and soldiers electing delegates to the Petrograd Soviet and district soviets did not yet support the Bolsheviks. Therefore, they chose to appear moderate while sharing the goals of those Bolsheviks who seemed more radical.19 Ronald G. Suny perceives a dynamic of ‘jockeying for positions of power’ in the disagreements among Bolsheviks in Petrograd.20 Suny differentiates Stalin from Kamenev, who he regards as having no significant backing among Bolsheviks. He interprets Stalin as having distrusted the Provisional Government as much as did members of the Russian Bureau, but as having differed from them in thinking that a Constituent Assembly was necessary to move the revolution forward. Suny characterizes Stalin’s position for much of 1917 as ‘centrist, pragmatic, and cautious’. Stalin, unlike Lenin when he was still abroad, thought it necessary to pressure the Provisional Government to negotiate to end the war.21

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According to the classic narrative, Lenin’s contributions to debate about Bolshevik positions towards the Provisional Government and the War were at odds with positions held by Kamenev, Stalin and the Petersburg Committee. This interpretation hinges partially on changes Pravda editors made to Lenin’s first ‘Letter from Afar’, which was published in Pravda in two instalments before he arrived in Petrograd. Lih has minimized these differences and accentuated the similarities among Bolshevik leaders’ positions. In an examination of Pravda editors’ redaction by 25 per cent of Lenin’s first published ‘Letter from Afar’, Lih argues that the edits did not censor Lenin’s positions but strengthened his argument by eliminating errors he made due to insufficient information. More importantly, they removed insults against moderate socialist leaders, whose support was needed to arrange Lenin’s return.22 Pravda editors may have softened Lenin’s criticism of Alexander Kerensky due to some rank-and-file Bolsheviks’ admiration for the latter and distrust of Lenin.23

ORGANIZING WOMEN Other differences arose among Bolshevik women in March 1917 and between women and men in the party. Before Kollontai returned to Petrograd, Vera Slutskaia, a woman Bolshevik activist, lobbied her fellow Petersburg Committee members to approve a group to carry out propaganda and organizing among women workers. The organization she planned was modelled on one in the German Social Democratic Party but modified to allay her comrades’ suspicions about ‘feminist separatism’. Although she won the Petersburg Committee’s endorsement, she faced obstacles from male Bolsheviks in the district-level organizations who saw her effort as undermining solidarity between men and women. She was unable to raise the ‘woman question’ at the party conference in April in Petrograd.24 Nevertheless, Bolsheviks made greater efforts than did other socialist parties to attract women to their ranks.25 Bolsheviks wished to ‘organize women workers first’ before other groups could, yet they still focused most of their efforts on male workers and soldiers.26 After having arrived in Petrograd and delivered Lenin’s letter (discussed above), Kollontai wrote for Pravda and was elected by soldiers to the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on March 27. Her visibility as a vocal defender of Lenin’s April Theses after his return to Russia brought misogynist attacks upon her in the liberal press and from fellow socialist politicians at meetings.27 Yet together with Slutskaia, Klavdiia Nikolaeva and other women, Kollontai pressed for specialized committees within the party hierarchy to organize women. She argued that if Bolsheviks did not pay special attention to women workers and soldiers’ wives, then bourgeois liberal feminists would win their support. Nevertheless, even some Bolshevik women like Nadezhda Krupskaia and Liudmila Stal’ doubted the need for women’s committees.28 Lenin was more receptive to Kollontai’s arguments than was Krupskaia.29 But all prominent Bolshevik women could agree upon rallying around the publication Rabotnitsa to write about issues that concerned women and to lobby women to join the Bolsheviks.30

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Rabotnitsa’s women journalists also trained agitators, met with women workers and did political work among women.31 Bolshevik outreach to women focused on the war, high food prices, and food and fuel shortages, while ignoring women’s concerns about ‘sexual harassment, job discrimination, overcrowded housing, and lack of child care’ that they wrote about in letters to socialist newspapers and journals.32 It is difficult to determine what impact Bolshevik outreach towards lower-class women had.33

THE APRIL THESES The party newspaper Pravda was a key forum for expressing Bolshevik leaders’ stances. After Kamenev and Stalin seized control of Pravda, Kamenev’s 15 March editorial created a stir among Bolsheviks by its words of support for the Provisional Government, which some took as endorsing continuation of the war. Several days later, the Petersburg Committee aligned with Kamenev’s position on ‘conditional support’ for the Provisional Government. Some Bolsheviks on the left felt that Kamenev and other moderate Bolsheviks were indifferent to rank-and-file Bolsheviks’ opinions.34 At a Bolshevik party conference in late March 1917, the Russian Bureau proposed that soviets should supervise the Provisional Government’s work but Stalin pragmatically took a wait-and-see position that would not ‘force events’.35 Accentuating unity among Bolsheviks, Lih points out that the 15 March editorial only voiced ‘support’ for the Provisional Government’s dismantling of monarchy but also expressed resolve to ‘criticize each failure of the Provisional Government’.36 In the editorial, he finds certainty of an eventual split between ‘democratic forces’ and the Provisional Government, for the latter would attempt to prevent power from passing into the hands of the proletariat and peasantry. Kamenev only wished to discourage actions to seize power prematurely.37 Across the empire the relationship between government and soviets sometimes differed from that in Petrograd. In some cities and provinces, governing bodies closely cooperated with soviets and even included delegates from soviets and trade unions. In other areas, ‘executive committees’ that appeared on an ‘ad hoc’ basis dominated elected bodies such as city dumas and soviets.38 News from the provinces about how Bolsheviks across the empire regarded the Provisional Government, the Soviet and the war played a crucial role in shaping Petrograd Bolshevik leaders’ rhetoric about timing.39 Both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks identified themselves as members of the ‘RSDRP’ in 1917.40 Many grassroots Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party organizations had not split along factional lines in 1917 and participated in congresses and conferences held by both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Some persisted in a unified state until well after the Bolsheviks had come to power in Petrograd.41 United SD party committees were widespread throughout the Russian empire until summer 1917, when ‘distinct Bolshevik committees became the norm’.42 Right after the February Revolution, there was widespread support among Bolsheviks for a united RSDRP that followed a revolutionary programme and tactics. About half or more of RSDRP committees in spring 1917 were ‘joint Bolshevik-Menshevik

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organizations’.43 Notable splits occurred in some cities in May after socialists joined the Provisional Government, but other organizations held together until the fall or even after the Bolsheviks took power in October.44 The Mezhraionka aspired to reunite Russian Social Democrats. In March 1917 the radical Bolshevik Party Central Committee Bureau favoured unity with Mezhraionka. The Petersburg Committee was open to unity with both Mezhraionka and Menshevik internationalists who opposed Russia’s participation in the war. Talks foundered over Menshevik and Bolshevik leaders’ insistence that unity occur exclusively around one or the other faction’s programme.45 Lev Trotsky joined Mezhraionka after he returned from emigration, but he did not lead it, for there seems not to have been a formal leadership structure. In Trotsky’s absence, Konstantin Iurenev was a more visible Mezhraionka spokesman.46 When Lenin arrived in Petrograd, some Bolsheviks, including Stalin, were in a meeting to discuss uniting the Social Democrats.47 Talks between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks seem to have alarmed Lenin and may have contributed to the tone he struck in April to distinguish Bolsheviks from moderate socialists. Lenin struck a more radical note than many Bolsheviks were prepared for in his April Theses. He urged social democrats, workers and soldiers not simply to oppose the war but to work to transform imperialist struggle into an international workers’ revolution. He also called for opposition to the Provisional Government, all power to the Soviets, and emphasized that there could be no compromise between moderate and radical Social Democrats. But he did not demand an immediate insurrection.48 According to Lih, Lenin’s Letters from Afar did not mark a notable break from pre1917 Bolshevism, but that marked turn did come in his April Theses. In April, Lenin called on Bolsheviks to formulate a new strategy based on the current reality.49 This had become necessary because older Bolshevik strategy was predicated upon a system in which Bolsheviks opposed liberals’ engagement with the tsarist regime. The fall of the monarchy had led to a profoundly new situation. Lih asserts that even before Lenin arrived, Bolsheviks including Kamenev and Stalin agreed that the Provisional Government was counter-revolutionary, that soviets should have all power, and that Bolsheviks should clearly distinguish themselves from moderate socialists.50 Lenin’s thoughts about the revolutionary situation in Russia began to shift in late March before he boarded the train to return to Russia. He began to write about moving towards socialism. Therefore, his April Theses which he announced upon arrival, called for a government by soviets, state economic regulation, and soviets of landless peasants (batraks) who would create model farms from confiscated land. According to Lih, this last proposal made the April Theses controversial among Bolsheviks.51 Lih argues that there were few substantive differences between Lenin and Kamenev in April 1917 and that ‘mutual misunderstandings’ exacerbated the acrimonious exchanges between them that month. In his interpretation, both Lenin and Kamenev and their supporters wanted to replace the Provisional Government, but they debated why it should be replaced and how this should happen.52 Focused on internal Bolshevik party politics, he leaves aside the question of a volatile situation on the ground.

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When Foreign Minister Pavel Miliukov sent a telegram on 20 April to Russia’s Allies, in which he assured them that the Provisional Government would not abandon the tsarist government’s treaties with them, many leftists were outraged by this apparent concession to imperialism. This may have played a pivotal role in changing attitudes towards Lenin’s proposals.53 After the Miliukov Note appeared, workers who before had not identified as Leninists started voicing support for him in demonstrations.54 Synthesizing Lih’s and Rabinowitch’s arguments, Eric Blanc writes, ‘April 1917 marked a moment of tactical evolution rather than strategic rupture for Bolshevism’. Both ‘Lenin’s impact’ and ‘the rapidly changing political context’ were factors of indeterminate degree in these developments. One cannot overlook the ‘massive outcry by workers in response to the revelation that the government planned to continue the war until victory’.55 Kolonitskii notes that attacks on Lenin ‘endangered the whole party’ and required Bolsheviks to close ranks around him in order not to weaken the party’s standing.56 There had been in early and mid-April ‘anti-Lenin sentiment’ among the ranks of Bolshevik party members, who shared the view of ‘Leninist’ as meaning ‘extreme, militant, mindless and anti-patriotic radicalism’.57 Yet liberal and conservative journalists made an error in attempting to undermine the soviets by trying to create a wedge between workers and soldiers. Instead, their propaganda against workers and soviets made Lenin’s accusations seem accurate and drew radicals closer to him and the Bolsheviks.58 It should also be noted that, at a theoretical level, there were criticisms of Lenin’s April Theses. Alexander Bogdanov, a major theoretical rival to Lenin, thought the April Theses created a sea change in the Bolshevik Party, but he doubted that soviets could be long-term governing bodies. Bogdanov supported a unified Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party as better for both workers and leaders, because he felt workers should ‘become Social Democrats before becoming members of a faction’. Bogdanov thought that party political culture would benefit from an environment in which ‘leaders would have to argue their case’ against others with equally substantive theoretical credentials.59 Bogdanov also disagreed with Lenin on the more fundamental question of economic readiness for socialist revolution. Lenin and other Bolsheviks were encouraged by the work of Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital (1910), to think optimistically that through controlling the banking system a revolutionary government could transform the economy. This inspired them to make haste to replace the Provisional Government. Bogdanov, however, was more sceptical about the power of finance capital, because he thought it lacked a centralized structure.60 At the All-Petrograd Conference of Bolsheviks, 14–22 April 1917, Lenin and Kamenev clashed over their positions towards the Provisional Government. They and Stalin went into a commission that produced ‘a resolution that basically reflected Lenin’s approach and passed overwhelmingly’.61 By the Seventh Conference of the Bolsheviks, 24–9 April, Lenin was saying that the only thing that separated him and Kamenev was that the latter wanted the Soviet to supervise the Provisional Government and Lenin disagreed. Stalin had come over to Lenin’s position.62

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At this conference Lenin achieved the support of a substantial majority of delegates for his positions on the Provisional Government and the war. But the congress sided more with Kamenev’s assessment of where Russia stood in the revolutionary process – that it was undergoing a bourgeois-liberal revolution rather than making a transition to socialist revolution.63 Close results in delegates’ voting for them to join the Central Committee further signified the essential unity between the two leaders. Lenin only had nine more votes than Kamenev.64 Moreover, during 1917 Lenin stepped back from some controversial points in his April Theses, such as batrak soviets and model collective farms. Lenin also toned down his rhetoric about ‘steps towards socialism’.65

WORK AMONG THE RANK AND FILE In early May, the Bolsheviks rallied around the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’.66 In that same month, Kollontai’s effective speeches to sailors of the Baltic Fleet and workers of Helsingfors (Helsinki) began to shift their support away from Kerensky and towards the Bolsheviks. At the same time, a new fleet commander favoured by officers was appointed contrary to sailors’ demands that they be able to elect the commander.67 Criticism of Kerensky mounted among Bolsheviks’ supporters and other radical leftists in May 1917 as he became more associated with the upcoming military offensive.68 The Bolshevik role in nonparty organizations drew new members to the party. Trade unions, worker militias and factory committees played important tactical roles in developing the Russian revolution. Although strike committees, factory committees and trade unions played a more influential role than political parties in leading and organizing workers, workers thus organized were attracted to the Bolsheviks’ programme and stated goals. This was mainly because of what was happening on the factory floor rather than because of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to communicate their message.69 Soviets and city governments created militias in usually ineffective attempts to keep order after tsarist police forces collapsed. Bolshevik Alexander Shliapnikov took up a charge from the Petrograd Soviet to oversee the arming and organization of a worker militia, beginning on 28 February.70 Yet his and other Bolsheviks’ intention to orient the militias in an activist political direction71 alarmed the moderates in the Petrograd Soviet, which by mid-March removed from Shliapnikov this responsibility. In the radical Vyborg District, the district soviet on April 29th announced creation of a nonpartisan worker guard with a mission that comprised both public order and revolutionary political goals. Red Guard units developed out of this process and became a centralized organization by August, superseding the worker militias.72 Moderate socialists and liberals worried that Red Guards would become Bolshevik shock troops yet Bolsheviks argued that worker militias and guards were necessary to keep order and to defend the revolution because soldiers would leave the city when the war ended.73 Red Guard units proved their worth in late August when they helped defeat General Lavr Kornilov’s attempt at counterrevolution.74

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A key Bolshevik demand in 1917 was workers’ control (supervision) of factories, but by what means? Moderate Mensheviks dominated the leadership of the trade union movement in 1917, while Bolsheviks had more influence over factory committees. But there was much cross-factional collaboration in these bodies. Moreover, ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ had different meanings in the issues that concerned these organizations. In some unions, the leadership was nearly split along factional lines. For example, four Bolsheviks, four Mensheviks and one unaffiliated socialist constituted the central committee of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union, which was elected in late June/early July 1917.75 Those unionists who wanted factory committees subordinated to unions included both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, while mainly Bolsheviks in the factory committee movement, with Lenin’s vocal support, sought the committees’ independence. The latter won a central leadership for a unified Petrograd factory committee movement at these bodies’ first conference, 30 May–5 June 1917.76 Only months after the Bolsheviks took power and wrested control of trade unions away from Mensheviks would factory committees be subjected to the unions’ leadership.77 Still, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks viewed trade unions’ role fundamentally differently. While many Mensheviks preferred for unions to avoid purely political positions that might undermine their ability to win concessions on economic issues, most Bolsheviks wanted unions to come out against the war and for international proletarian revolution, to reject collaboration with liberals and to call for all power to the soviets.78 Bolshevik women like Kollontai worked to get male-dominated unions to provide channels for organizing women.79 Opinions among historians differ as to how sincerely Lenin and other party leaders supported factory committees as a matter of principle, considering that they gave way on this after taking power. According to Nikolai Mikhailov, Bolshevik party leaders were ‘pure Westernizers’ who overlooked the ‘archaic, pre-industrial notions and the practices of a traditional society’ that ran through the workers’ efforts to organize and operate factory committees, because they wanted to use this campaign for their own political agenda.80

THE OFFENSIVE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Lack of raw materials led to work stoppages while workers’ wages were outpaced by inflation. Trade unions’ and factory committees’ efforts to organize workers to confront capital over the crisis in industry paralleled the political crisis in the country. Russia’s government and military leaders laid their remaining cards on the major offensive they had promised the Allies on the Eastern Front. They gambled that victory would restore the morale of Russia’s soldiers and give Russia a stronger hand in post-war peace negotiations. Protests in June 1917 expressed soldiers’ and workers’ worry about high casualties. Many increasingly believed that the government should deescalate its involvement in the war to deal with growing economic problems. These protests were capped by a demonstration involving almost 500,000 people in Petrograd on 18 June, when the offensive began.81

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Some Bolshevik supporters had been drifting towards the anarchists earlier in June, but the 18 June demonstration attested to the Bolsheviks’ continued popularity with their constituency.82 Undoubtedly, Bolshevik women orators and organizers played a crucial role in maintaining the party’s momentum at this time. For example, Kollontai inspired Finnish audiences in her June 1917 speeches about the Bolshevik position on national autonomy. She and other Bolshevik women participated in anti-war demonstrations and efforts to mobilize women to vote.83 In early July, Russia’s political crisis reached a critical conjuncture: the collapsing military offensive, decreasing food and fuel supplies, and liberal cabinet members’ resignation on 2 July over Ukraine’s autonomy. Bolsheviks dominated in the Petrograd Soviet’s workers’ section, which on 3 July resolved to support the AllRussian Soviet taking power.84 The July Days began on that day with an uprising among soldiers who feared transfer to the front where casualties were high. The Bolshevik Party Central Committee viewed an insurrection as premature, but activists in the Bolshevik Military Organization emboldened and aided the soldiers, as did anarchists and Left SRs. Soldiers’ demonstrations spread to workers who were already on strike. The moderate socialist-led Soviet called on demonstrators to disperse, but they ignored this instruction. Tens of thousands converged at the Tauride Palace where the Soviet met, remaining there into the morning of 4 July. By this point, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee expressed its solidarity with demonstrators, calling for all power to the soviets, but Soviet leaders remained firmly opposed to taking power. Lenin, who had been on holiday in Finland when the uprising began, returned to Petrograd late in the morning on the 4th. Addressing crowds, he called for a peaceful demonstration and assured them that Soviet power would prevail, essentially a wait-and-see approach that did not satisfy armed demonstrators. The Provisional Government quickly moved to neutralize the uprising’s coordinating centres. It issued effective propaganda against Bolsheviks, claiming Germany paid them to disrupt Russia’s war effort from behind the lines. Crowds began dissipating when they heard troops were on the way to Petrograd to suppress the uprising. Some demonstrators were shot. The government closed the Bolshevik party newspaper Pravda, put Bolshevik party headquarters under military occupation and arrested key party leaders. Because he went underground, Lenin was not arrested.85 Kollontai, who was in Sweden during the uprising, was arrested upon crossing the Finnish border, interrogated and imprisoned in Petrograd on charges of spying for Germany.86 For the remainder of the summer, the Provisional Government’s accusations against Bolsheviks turned the popular mood against them, though the charges were based on flimsy evidence. Intercepted telegrams mentioning sums of money and Bolshevik leaders’ names were about commercial transactions and unconnected political matters. Even the government’s own investigation failed to prove a link.87 Bolsheviks’ attitudes towards moderate socialists hardened. Because Soviet leaders had refused to take power and had acquiesced to the Provisional Government’s repression against them, the Bolsheviks stopped voicing the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ in mid-July.88 Stalin achieved greater prominence in the wake of the failed July Uprising. After his arrival in Petrograd, Stalin had worked where he was best suited – writing for

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the press and speaking in small meetings. During the July Days, he disregarded his personal safety to ‘mediate between the Soviet and the soldiers’. With other leading Bolsheviks in prison or in hiding, he became the ‘pivotal person’ in the party leadership and made keynote speeches to party assemblies, acquiring experience and visibility.89 He asserted at the Sixth Party Congress that the Bolsheviks would continue to represent workers and soldiers within the soviets.90 Despite being in jail, Trotsky, having only just joined the Bolshevik Party, garnered more votes than Stalin at the Sixth Party Congress to join the Party Central Committee.91 Moreover, Sixth Party Congress delegates gave the sixth highest number of votes to Kollontai, who entered the Central Committee as its first woman member, even while she was in prison. Her popularity ensued from her oratorical excellence; men who lost to her in debate covered for their weaknesses by making misogynist attacks on her.92 Despite Kollontai’s high profile, many working women who had joined the party in the spring and early summer left it in the wake of the July Uprising, because they were swayed by the Provisional Government’s propaganda.93 Notably, Mezhraionka merged with the Bolshevik Party at the Sixth Party Congress.94 This merger, long in the making, signified ‘a general recognition that the place to be a revolutionary was in joint action with the Bolsheviks’.95 Despite many top leaders’ absence, the Sixth Congress furthered party building by collecting information from delegates about membership numbers and resources.96

RECOVERY By early August, the Bolshevik party’s reputation was recovering. Bolsheviks pushed a successful resolution at a 7 August meeting of worker delegates to the Soviet ‘condemning the persecution of the radical left’.97 Yet, disagreements continued within the party. In early August, Kamenev favoured Bolshevik participation in the Stockholm Peace Conference while Lenin and Stalin opposed it.98 Likewise, Bolsheviks in unions had an inconsistent relationship with party leaders. Immediately after the July Uprising, trade unionist Bolsheviks had persuaded union and factory committee leaders to denounce the Provisional Government’s charges of treason against Bolshevik party leaders.99 The uprising’s failure derailed trade union negotiations with factory owners over wage rates, for owners took a more hardline position after the insurrection was crushed.100 Contrary to Bolshevik Party leaders, who feared it was too soon, the Metalworkers’ Union readied its members for a strike. The strike was averted by the intervention of the Minister of Labour who pressed owners to compromise in early August 1917, but labour-capital confrontation further radicalized trade union activists.101 Lenin did not number strikes among the means of revolution he found acceptable in 1917.102 The political fissure in Russia continued to deepen in August and September 1917. Counter-revolution appeared to loom, as the death penalty was restored in the army, liberals moved rightward, and Kerensky appeared to be preparing to impose martial law in Petrograd. Meanwhile, the general population had moved further to the left. The next conflagration, the Kornilov Affair of 27–31August, was a murky event during which the left rallied to prevent General Lavr Kornilov’s apparent attempt to

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seize power. Bolsheviks were released from jail to defend the soviets. Subsequently, their reputation was restored, and Kerensky was discredited.103 Signifying the turn, the Petrograd Soviet on 31 August passed ‘a Bolshevik resolution to create an all-socialist government that would exclude propertied elements’. This drew the support of many Mensheviks and SRs, but foundered in the executive committees of the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets.104 Despite soviet leaders’ moderation, new organizations offered opportunities to the Bolsheviks. For example, the Kronstadt Military-Technical Commission and Helsinki Revolutionary Committee had been organized to disrupt the Kornilov coup attempt. Kerensky wanted them to disband after the coup was derailed, but Bolsheviks gained more determination over these bodies’ decision-making and operations. By mid-September the Bolshevik Ivars Smilga became chair of the committee in Helsinki (renamed ‘executive’ rather than ‘revolutionary’).105 Jonathan Smele regards the failed Kornilov crackdown as the first episode in Russia’s civil war(s), for those who had backed Kornilov continued arming themselves in preparation for another assault on left-wing forces. In this context, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October can be seen as ‘a tactical maneuver in a civil war that was already underway’.106 While Bolshevik fortunes turned amid Petrograd’s tumult, Lenin was in hiding, where he completed his major work, State and Revolution (published in 1918). Having begun the manuscript in 1916, Lenin finished the first draft before the February Revolution.107 Scholars’ opinions vary about the extent to which it reflected Lenin’s developing views during 1917. According to Kevin B. Anderson, the book was far less a statement on the Russian Revolution than a critical engagement with German Social Democracy.108 Richard Stites characterized it as ‘almost devoid of utopian passion’.109 Lih notes that in this book, Lenin wrote about the soviets ‘as a higher type of democracy’.110 James Ryan has argued that passages in State and Revolution reflect Lenin’s uncertainty in 1917 about the role of violence in revolution. Although Lenin offered hope in this book that the revolution would not need to be bloody, he emphasized it must be carried out even if civil war resulted.111 Yet Eric Lohr and Joshua Sanborn say that Lenin used violent imagery in State and Revolution to urge the destruction of government bodies and ‘military structures’. They maintain ‘that October 1917 was not so much a coup to seize control of an operating state and army as a chaotic structural demobilization of state and army’.112 Because Lenin’s book was not published until well after the Bolsheviks came to power, it hardly influenced how other Bolsheviks thought about 1917 during the revolutionary year. Moreover, Eric Blanc has found that Lenin had a ‘relatively limited influence for most of 1917, especially outside of Petrograd’.113 Symbols and slogans may have been more important than texts during 1917. Although a range of political parties employed revolutionary symbols during 1917, moderate socialists’ use of revolutionary symbolism seemed increasingly at odds with their tactics, while Bolsheviks claimed sole ownership of revolutionary symbols.114 Bolsheviks’ success may be credited to their consistent message of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ through 1917, with momentary lapses. They resumed using the slogan in mid-September after having dropped it in mid-July.115

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Renewal of the slogan reflected increasing Bolshevik influence within soviets. Bolsheviks had already taken a majority in some soviets in early 1917, while in other places they did not win a majority until after the Bolsheviks came to power in October.116 The Petrograd Soviet fell under the control of a Bolshevik-Left SR majority on 25 September. Delegates elected Trotsky as chair and declared the Soviet’s lack of support for Kerensky’s government.117 Bolsheviks also won the support of soviets in Estonia, which were calling for all power to the soviets by 27 September.118

INSURRECTION Lenin and his radical supporters stepped up their rhetoric in late September and early October, urging armed insurrection to seize power, but more cautious Bolsheviks maintained that an all-socialist government formed from socialist parties represented in the Soviet should hold power. This disagreement harkens back to the differences between Lenin and Kamenev in early spring 1917 and shows that the Bolsheviks had not eliminated all the minor fissures in the party. Lenin’s persistence relied on his promise that a Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia would catalyse revolution across Europe, which was imminent and only awaiting a spark. A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee in late September discussed and rejected Lenin’s call for insurrection. Even some who were sympathetic to Lenin’s appeals believed that Russian industrial workers would not respond to a Bolshevik summons to rise. They doubted that Lenin understood how deeply Russian workers wanted a democratic revolutionary government responsible to the soviets, nor were they convinced that it was urgent to strike before the Congress of Soviets would meet in October. Lenin turned to the Petersburg Committee, of which he convinced a majority that the Central Committee had attempted to stifle his voice by censoring his articles in late September. Lenin and other radicals aroused indignation among their constituency by persuading them that the Provisional Government was on the verge of surrendering Petrograd to the Germans to suffocate the revolution. Such provocative charges brought more Bolsheviks to Lenin’s side, leaving only Kamenev and Zinoviev to remonstrate at a Central Committee meeting on 10 October and vote against Lenin’s proposal for an armed uprising (ten were in favour). No date for an uprising was set at the meeting, nonetheless.119 Lih argues that Zinoviev and Kamenev were just as concerned as Lenin about the prospect of counter-revolution in October 1917, but they worried that going on the offensive, as Lenin promoted, would result in another failure like in July.120 Lenin attempted to secretly enlist the support of Smilga and other Bolsheviks in Helsinki to bring troops from Finland to carry out a coup in Petrograd. Instead, Helsinki Bolsheviks arranged troops defensively in the Baltic region. Bolsheviks in Minsk offered to help, but Zinoviev and Kamenev argued that the Provisional Government’s defence of Petrograd was too strong to be overcome by troops from outside the city.121 Bolsheviks and their constituents felt an increasing sense of crisis. At a Moscow Metalworkers’ Union Conference in early October, delegates urgently called for

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power to pass to the soviets, for large industry and transport to be nationalized, and for workers to supervise production.122 Work stoppages surged during the week before the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met, including a major strike in Ivanovo that began on 21 October.123 Strikes were a potent revolutionary force and the most popular ‘form of participatory politics’ among Russia’s workers in 1917.124 The Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, held in Petrograd on 11–13 October, was a crucial stage of debate for the Bolsheviks’ desired insurrection. Trotsky convinced sailors of the Baltic Fleet that the Provisional Government planned to evacuate from Petrograd with the expectation that entering German troops would destroy the best forces of the revolution. Trotsky positioned the looming Bolshevik attack on the Provisional Government as a defence of Petrograd and the revolution.125 James D. White concludes that the Bolshevik seizure of power unfolded according to Trotsky’s outline rather than Lenin’s and would have been far bloodier if it had happened Lenin’s way.126 Government officials and moderate socialists grew sharply concerned about a Bolshevik coup and dictatorship. The press trumpeted warnings. Bolsheviks from a broad range of revolutionary organizations met on 16 October but could not achieve unanimity on whether, how and when to take power. Concerns included insufficient resources and doubt that workers would support a Bolshevik dictatorship. Only a slight majority, including Stalin, voted in support of ‘immediate insurrection’. That was enough, however, for Lenin and his fervent supporters to insist that they overthrow the government before the Second Congress of Soviets would begin on 25 October. The Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet was formed on 16–21 October and on the 21st–22nd it claimed authority over the Petrograd Military Garrison, a key turning point. Bolsheviks went to the streets to warn large crowds that the government would turn over the city to the Germans. The government summoned loyal troops to Petrograd. After Kerensky shut down the Bolsheviks’ printing presses on 24 October, Trotsky called the Military Revolutionary Committee to arms.127 The Military Revolutionary Committee and radical leftist military troops took control of Petrograd’s communications, transportation and other strategic points by the morning of 25 October. On the evening of that day, the Congress of Soviets convened. The Bolshevik delegation was the largest, but they could only command a majority through alliance with the Left SRs. Moderate Mensheviks and SRs who were outraged that the Bolsheviks had taken power without the Soviet’s approval walked out of the Congress. Bolshevik forces infiltrated the Winter Palace and arrested government ministers meeting there early on 26 October. Without moderates present, on 27 October the Congress of Soviets confirmed a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars. Zinoviev, Kamenev and other moderates worried that Bolsheviks could not keep their hold on power unless they participated in a socialist coalition government. Their resolution to create such a coalition won the support of the Soviet’s Central Executive Committee on 3 November, which infuriated Lenin and created a short-lived crisis when most moderate Bolsheviks resigned their government and party posts. Peace was restored when Left SRs

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joined the government later in November.128 Power had been taken. The story of its consolidation belongs to another chapter. Yet many issues had not been settled. To what extent did Bolsheviks encourage violence in 1917 to undermine the Provisional Government and advance their prospects? Alexander Bogdanov, who focused his efforts in 1917 on formulating ways to elevate proletarian culture, feared that Bolsheviks’ growing dependence on soldiers brought a harmful militarism into the party. Bogdanov worried about the Bolsheviks’ concept of action changing from a working-class concentration on ‘labour and skill’ to the soldier’s focus on ‘physical force’ and the ‘offensive’.129 Vladimir Buldakov attributes the Bolsheviks’ success in 1917 to the image they created that resounded with desire among masses of people for a primitive sense of community. Claiming their ideology influenced rioters, Buldakov ties the Bolsheviks to an increasing wave of uncontrolled violent acts in the summer of 1917. He asserts they exploited women’s summer food riots in Tver region, drunken riots and looting of wineries, and similar outbursts, to facilitate their rise to power.130 According to Roger D. Markwick, however, Bolsheviks in 1917 depended more on nonviolent agitation and organizing than on violence to achieve their goals.131 Party leaders offered nothing definite to Bolshevik trade unionists other than the general slogan of workers’ control.132 Kollontai and other Bolshevik women still faced scepticism about their efforts to bring women into the party. By fall 1917, they had won party secretary Iakov Sverdlov’s support for a conference of Petrograd factory women, yet some Bolshevik men called it ‘separatist’. Nevertheless, trade unions and women played crucial roles in the October Revolution. The Metalworkers’ Union gave the Petrograd Soviet 50,000 rubles from its funds, organized brigades, and collected weapons and barbed wire.133 In her 22 October speeches to factory workers, Kollontai rejoiced that the Bolsheviks would soon ‘seize power’.134 Among those who died in the first days in defence of the new government was Vera Slutskaia, who had striven so hard to make women full partners in the Bolsheviks’ revolution.135 Those who had reservations gave their support with the hope that their dreams would be realized under soviet power.

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CHAPTER TEN

Non-Bolshevik internationalists in war and revolution LUTZ HÄFNER, UNIVERSITY OF BIELEFELD

INTRODUCTION ‘Working men of the world, unite!’ This famous slogan of the Communist Manifesto had a programmatic character. It implied that socialism was crucially characterized by an internationalist outlook of the proletariat. Common class interests and international solidarity among workers meant to reject any nationalism as ‘bourgeois’ and therefore atavistic. However, the outbreak of the First World War quite clearly demonstrated the degree of self-delusion of the socialist parties belonging to the Second Socialist International. In the years prior to the war the practical policy of most Western socialist parties was based on the assumption that they had to integrate themselves into their national societies and the state organized around them. In other words, the ‘political religion’ of nationalism was more encompassing and flexible than socialism, while neither was, nor ever became attractive to a certain strata of society. And Russia was certainly no exception to this rule. After the outbreak of the war, bitter internal conflicts arose in every socialist party regarding the crucial question: ‘What is your take on war (and – of course – on revolution)’?1 The conflict let all socialist parties realign along a deep, unbridgeable fault line. The question of war and peace split the world’s socialist movement into two incompatible camps: on the one hand, the right-wing socialists opting for patriotic defence and concluding a so-called ‘fortress truce’ with their national governments. On the other hand, the left or internationalist wing which refused this course and wholeheartedly opposed the war considering it as ‘imperialist’. They, therefore, denied any common ground with their governments and ruling elites and finally – after they had overcome hesitations – were inclined to stop the war’s carnage through revolution. Thus, during the war internationalism had left the realm of theory and become one of the most relevant issues of everyday political debate.

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What the core of internationalism eventually constituted, was, however, highly controversial. First and foremost, internationalism meant to fight the imperialist war, to rule out any social chauvinist defencism and to reject a fortress truce. Also fundamental was the conviction that the socialist revolution had to be international, if not, finally, global. Unlike bourgeois cosmopolitism, internationalism essentially denied xenophobia including any feeling of national, ethnic or racial superiority.2 As a result of the February Revolution, new aspects developed which the internationalists had to deal with. The question whether ‘democratic’ revolutionary Russia and its political and social achievements had to be defended against the arch-reactionary Central Powers was put onto the political agenda. Among contemporary Russian socialists it was regarded as self-evident that the revolution must end the war. If not, the war would end the revolution.3 Moreover, all important issues of contemporary Russian revolutionary politics  – the agrarian question, the social question, the procurement crisis, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly – were related to the solution of the question of war and peace.4 Even the conciliatory Menshevik F. I. Dan conceded that the fate of the revolution was intimately linked to it.5 The war was the question of all questions.6 This article will provide a general overview of the five non-Bolshevik internationalist factions existing during war and revolution: two neo-populist groups and three with a purely Marxist background. To the former belonged the SR-Maximalists and the radical anti-war wing within the Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), the so-called Left SRs, which was the only party in Russia which could claim an increase in popularity and mass base between October 1917 and July 1918. Among the latter three only the Menshevik-Internationalists  – galvanizing around Iu. O. Martov  – were an integral part of the Russian SocialDemocratic Workers Party (RSDRP). Outside the party’s realm and even further to the left remained the Mezhraionka or Interdistrictites, which emerged in 1913 and merged into the Bolshevik party in August 1917.7 Further, this essay will consider the Social-Democrat Internationalists (S-DI). These five organizations joined forces in Petrograd during the February Revolution and were united by left bloc politics constituting an important political feature in 1917–18. However, more often than not they diverged because of tactical issues and socialist theory. Being anti-war did not necessarily coincide with a radical position in internal politics. An immediate socialist revolution or a government based on Soviet power, which became popular among SR-Maximalists and Left SRs in summer 1917, was acceptable neither to the S-DIs nor to the Menshevik-Internationalists. Therefore, I will first deal with their organization, membership and social composition, secondly with public relations, the Internationalists’ horizons of expectation and political target utopias, and thirdly with the concept of the enemy, the semantics of class war and of secular religion. The article is structured around the following guiding questions: Why did the five internationalist organizations not succeed in asserting their ideas against both the defencists and the Bolsheviks? An even more encompassing united front was set up in March of 1918, when with the exception of the majority of the Bolsheviks, all Russian political parties including the five internationalist organizations opposed the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Why

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did the internationalist factions that had so bitterly denounced the First World War oppose a peace treaty which would put an end to the shedding of toilers’ blood? Why did they become advocates of dragging on with the carnage? Whereas the activities of the Left SRs8 and Mensheviks-Internationalists9 have been relatively well researched in recent years, only scattered and comparatively little information is available on the SR-Maximalists,10 the Mezhraionka11 and the S-DIs.12

ORGANIZATION, MEMBERSHIP AND SOCIAL COMPOSITION The roots of the Mezhraiontsy reached back to the year 1913, when social democrats of various factions and convictions joined together in Petrograd. During the war, the Mezhraiontsy avowed themselves to internationalism, but at the same time criticized the party-splitting tendencies of the Bolsheviks.13 Although its membership was rather small – about 150 activists – the Mezhraionka played an important role in Petrograd during the February Revolution14 and enjoyed some popularity among workers and soldiers but attracted significantly less intelligenty in the capital.15 However, there are no data available either on the social structure or about organizations elsewhere, except for the city of Tula. According to information, Iurenev provided during the Sixth Bolshevik Party Congress in July 1917, the Mezhraionka had about 4,000 members including revolutionary luminaires like L. D. Trotsky, A. A. Ioffe, A. V. Lunacharskii, D. B. Riazanov and others, who helped to buttress the organization’s intellectual capacity.16 In Petrograd internationalist-minded social democrats galvanized around the Initiative Group, which was originally set up in early 1911 and took a radical internationalist stance against the war as early as August 1914. They rejected both Lenin’s defeatism and the patriotic concept of self-defence. They combined their efforts for peace at all costs with an international striving to topple the tsarist regime and free the Empire. However, they adamantly rejected any collaboration with the bourgeoise.17 Leading Menshevik-Internationalists such as Iu. O. Martov or P. B. Aksel’rod were in Switzerland during the war. Initially, the S-DIs centred on Maxim Gorky’s monthly journal Letopis’, established in Petrograd in December 1915. Among its editorial board were outstanding literary men such as B. V. Avilov, V. A. Bazarov and N. N. Sukhanov. In the second half of April 1917 Gorky’s daily newspaper Novaia zhizn’ became the new focal point of the S-DIs or – as they were also called – Novozhiznentsy. The Novozhiznentsy organized in mid-September an information bureau to establish contacts to local groups, which popped up in the wake of the failed unification congress of the RSDRP in a number of regions and cities, such as Vitebsk, Nizhnii Novgorod, Pskov and elsewhere.18 Despite their often excellent analysis of political and social current affairs, the S-DIs never succeeded in winning a broad mass base. According to a preliminary membership list they assumed they could count on about 38,300 followers in late August.19 However, many did not join their organization. When the S-DIs held their first party conference in October, they had 4,000 members, among them at least 250

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members in the Siberian city of Omsk.20 In January 1918, the founding congress of the RSDRP(i) took place, conceived of as an exclusively proletarian affair.21 The SR-Maximalists and Left SRs belonged to the socialist but non-Marxist, neopopulist camp. In contrast to all other internationalist groups the SR-Maximalists were critical of party structures. They called themselves a union of federally organized, autonomous local groups or factory cells.22 The SR-Maximalists revived immediately after the February Revolution. An initiative group popped up in Petrograd’s Vyborg district in March and established close connections with their comrades in the naval base of Kronstadt.23 Over the year, they could muster solid support in Shlissel’burg and along the Volga in the cities of Nizhnii Novgorod including Sormovo, Kazan’, Samara and Simbirsk.24 Moreover, they could claim a solid constituency among the factory workers of Urals heavy industry in places such as Izhevsk.25 Nevertheless, the Maximalists could not claim more than a few thousand followers in 1917. They lacked a centralizing institution, whereas the local organizations were hardly in touch with each other.26 According to a meticulously researched local study of SR-Maximalism in four factory-cities – Izhevsk, Votkinsk, Kambarka and Sarapul – in the Urals in 1917 the social structure of their members was almost entirely toiling: more than 85 per cent were either workers or toiling peasant-workers, an additional 13 per cent were day labourers.27 Why were the SR-Maximalists on a local level at least a political factor in 1917–18, although they had only very few and short-lived periodicals at their disposal and published hardly any brochures and pamphlets? The evidence suggests that being a SR-Maximalist was less an affair of theory but depended to a great extent on the human factor. In accordance with their syndicalist visions the Maximalists could exert influence in stable communities where they had able and trusted agitators who could rely on face-to-face contacts on a daily basis. Up to the October uprising, the Left SRs were not an independent organization, but the radical wing of the SR party – the most popular and largest party with about one million members in the summer of 1917 – divided among 436 organizations in sixty-two provinces.28 Strongholds of the Left SRs were the party organizations of Kronstadt, Khar’kov, Kazan’, Iaroslavl’, Petrograd and to a lesser extent Ufa and Pskov.29 It is impossible to give an exact number of Left SRs in 1917. Against the waxing socio-economic and political crisis in Russia in 1917 they became more influential.30 It is very likely that their share amounted to 40 per cent of all SRs in late summer of 1917. In absolute figures, however, the Left SR membership certainly did not reach a six-digit number.31 Based on statistical data of questionnaires from party and soviet congresses, the social composition of the Left SRs from late 1917 and early 1918 suggested that it could be called a ‘people’s party’ of the toiling masses.32 According to their integrative political and social conception, which fundamentally differed from the exclusive proletarian approach of the different branches of Russian social democracy, their organization consisted of almost equal shares of workers, peasants, the intelligentsia and to a lesser extent of soldiers and sailors.33 In most of the parties organized membership eroded in 1917–18.34 The Left SRs, however, were an exception to this

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rule.35 They increased their membership to at least 100,000 in July 1918.36 At the same time SR-Maximalists and Left SR announced their mutual intentions to merge their organizations.37

INTERNATIONALISTS’ HORIZONS OF EXPECTATION, POLITICAL TARGET UTOPIAS AND PUBLIC RELATIONS The Paris Commune was a key feature of Maximalist ideology. The SR-Maximalists regarded the Soviets as the creative incarnation of the new life and intended to establish a decentralized federation of local urban soviets and rural communes with a central soviet at the apex. They were advocates of a genuine soviet system as a volonté générale in which the formation of opinion was not pre-structured by parties. Their slogan was ‘All power to the soviets (and not to the parties)’.38 They strongly criticized the socialist parties for their ideological hair-splitting, which made them lose sight of the common goals.39 In order to overcome the differences between the socialist factions, the SR-Maximalists repeatedly called for the unity of all socialists.40 They favoured direct elections, permanent accountability and immediate recall of the deputies. The Maximalists wanted to turn social circumstances upside down and dreamed of a future in which the toiling people would be the masters.41 Regarding economic policy they campaigned for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production as the ‘root of all evil’, the socialization of all sources of exploitation such as natural resources, factories, land, railways, etc. and a general obligation to work.42 In order to give peasants an incentive to supply food, fixed prices should be introduced for industrial goods and commodities.43 The Left SRs ruled out any cooperation with the bourgeoisie at home or abroad, demanded an immediate armistice on all fronts, cordial international cooperation among all true socialist parties to intensify the war on war and against the ruling classes, assistance for the labouring masses through all means to organize them into political and professional unions in order to hand to them control over production and Russia’s economic life and finally a struggle against disorganization and anarchy.44 The Left SRs called for an active peace policy. Therefore, the Left SRs disapproved not only the SR party’s revolutionary defencism, its support for the Liberty loan and the participation in the coalition government but also its playing for time, i.e. the postponement of the agrarian reform until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.45 It was the war, above all, that made it unbearable for the internationalists to remain side by side with the defencists in the SR party. The SR-Internationalists in the Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk were the first to draw this conclusion and set up their own organization.46 The political and ideological grand design of the Left SRs was world revolutionary.47 They were convinced that the Russian Revolution was in a period of transition [perekhodnyi period] from capitalism to a socialist revolution and, ultimately, to socialism.48 This view, incidentally, was shared by the S-DIs.49 The Left

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SRs assumed that this phase would take a longer time, since the ‘parasitic elements’ of the old order had to be finally defeated. In this confrontation between capitalism and socialism, the support of the countries of the Orient and Asia should come to help the latter. Vladimir E. Trutovskii, the leading Left SR economic theorist, for example, turned against the mendacity of previous colonial policies: the ‘capitalists’ financed the social concessions to the workers of the Western industrialized countries at the expense of more intensive exploitation of the non-capitalist societies. He therefore appealed to the international solidarity of the working class and emphasized the potential of the Asian peasants as a revolutionary reserve army of unimagined proportions. The national liberation movements of India, China and the Ottoman Empire, which were engaged in anti-colonial struggle, represented an additional front for the imperialist states, which would bring the decision in favour of socialism on an international scale in the continuing struggle between capital and labour.50 The Left SRs criticized Marxism for not giving the ‘backward’ states of the Third World a perspective for its revolutionary development but instead exclusively focused on the developed capitalist states. On the contrary, the Left SRs wanted to use the agrarian revolutionary potential of the Third World to accelerate the overthrow of the bourgeois-capitalist social order in the Western Hemisphere.51 Once again, the Left SRs defended themselves against Marxist orthodoxy: there was not only one path to socialism that was binding for all: ‘We are not Marxists, therefore we cannot recognise one path in history. There are many paths that will lead us as quickly as possible to the goal, to socialism’.52 Trutovskii’s thoughts contained remarkable epistemological potential as he hinted at a possible rejection of a Eurocentric worldview. Basically, he anticipated the idea of relational or ‘multiple modernities’ as Sh. N. Eisenstadt aptly put it.53 Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs opted against any support for the ‘bourgeois’ Provisional Government. According to Martov, any participation of socialists in a joint cabinet was ‘impermissible’.54 Like the Left SRs, he was afraid that the socialists would be held responsible for all the Provisional Government’s mistakes.55 Such a coalition would be a compromise neither able to exit the war nor to stop Russia’s threatening political and economic collapse. The Left SRs were even more dismissive and radical. They were convinced that the Provisional Government would display ‘anti-narod (anti-popular) tendencies’. In marked difference from the Menshevik-Internationalists and the S-DIs, the leading Left SR Boris Kamkov added that only Soviet power could resolve the current problems of revolutionary Russia.56 In comparison to the Left SRs, who gained strength throughout 1917, the Menshevik-Internationalists faced many problems so that they could never muster as much influence as the radical populists. This situation can be explained by the fact that the pre-eminent figures among the Menshevik intelligentsia took up a defencist position during the war, and second that the leading spirit of the MenshevikInternationalists, Martov managed to return to Petrograd only on 9 May 1917  – more than a month later than Lenin, Chernov and other revolutionary luminaires. He could barely exert any sustainable influence on current political affairs and

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Menshevik ‘revolutionary defencists’ of the creed of Fedor Dan and Irakli Tsereteli filled the void and became the masses’ heroes. The Menshevik-Internationalists were in many ways prisoners of their Orthodox Marxist ideology.57 In Russia, they argued, capitalism had to develop its maturity and a bourgeois government must be at her helm, before a socialist revolution could take place.58 The socialist revolution could only be successful in Russia if it was international and included the economically more developed capitalist states of the West.59 For these reasons, they rejected as ‘utopian’ an acceleration of events in Russia, a socialist revolution and the establishment of a socialist social order, which the Bolsheviks campaigned for.60 The organizational merging of all revolutionary internationalist socialist factions under one roof could be seen as a central programmatic plank of the Mezhraiontsy and the Novozhiznentsy. Whereas the Mezhraiontsy had a new RSDRP in mind,61 Bazarov’s intention was even more encompassing.62 Similar thoughts of overcoming party strife and uniting for the common cause existed among SR-Maximalists.63 Bazarov eagerly called for a closure of ranks and the forming of a united front of revolutionary democracy.64 This was a first step in the direction of setting up a socialist coalition government comprising all socialist factions and parties, which Novozhiznentsy, Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs put on the agenda right after the October uprising.65 However, the similarities came to an end as soon as the soviets were identified as a base of an all-socialist government, a position the S-DIs and the Menshevik-Internationalists categorically rejected.66 Novozhiznentsy and Mensheviks-Internationalists alike regarded the soviets not as the equivalent of a government but as organs of class struggle.67 The S-DIs envisaged a single-chamber parliamentary republic with a high degree of local self-government based on the already existing bodies.68 As late as the second half of March 1918 the S-DIs demanded a cabinet, made up of representatives of all socialist parties, but accountable to the reconvened Constituent Assembly.69 They also called for the resurrection of the organs of local self-administration – the town dumas and the zemstva.70 It was the Left SR Trutovskii who touched upon a political taboo when he suggested a separate peace in early April 1917. This was a political provocation, as he suggested the hitherto unutterable idea of concluding a separate peace if the Western Entente powers did not join in Russia’s efforts for a general peace without annexations and indemnities.71 It made no difference to Russia whether the Western or Central powers won the war – both camps were imperialist. All internationalists were convinced that only a peace concluded by the working people of the belligerent states would lead to a democratic peace. In the case that a general peace could not be reached, the argument for a separate peace should be seen as an option – at least, to exert pressure on the Western Entente – but only as a second choice.72 The internationalists were convinced that the reputation of the Russian Revolution was its greatest asset at the same time. With every day that Russia remained at the side of the Western Entente states and could be accused of waging an imperialist war, the revolution lost its moral credit. Revolutionary Russia would have to put pressure on the Entente to publish the secret treaties and exclude annexations. If

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this did not succeed, Russia would have to leave the alliance, gain its freedom and be prepared to wage a separate war, but one that was not imperialist any longer. To stop the carnage the Menshevik-Internationalists called for an armistice on all fronts.73 The patriotic socialist defencists did not intend to waste a thought on either a separate war or a separate peace. They refused to review the convincing factual arguments of the internationalists, did not take into account the interests of the warweary toilers of Russia, insisted on loyalty to the alliance and gambled away not only the good name of the revolution but also its socialist future as they paved the road to victory for the radical slogans of the Bolsheviks.74 Propagandistic influence on the public of revolutionary Russia through a mass media campaign with an internationalist agenda might have prevented this fateful foreign policy of the liberal-labour coalition.75

Internationalist Newspapers in Russia 1917 Name

Place

Form and period of publication

Issues

Print run or subscribers

Mezhraiontsy Vpered. Organ Peterb. Pgrad. mezhduraionnogo komiteta

Twice weekly; 15 June to 15 September

9

20,000–40,000

S-D Internationalists Golos Sotsialdemokrata. Organ Tsentr. Biuro

Pgrad.

Irregular; 3 December to ?

Golos naroda. Organ Tul’skogo komiteta

Tula

Daily; 17 March until End of May, afterwards Menshevik

Golos proletariia

Odessa

Twice weekly up to No 71; 6 July to 30 September, afterwards Bolshevik

Minskaia iskra. Organ Minsk Minskoi org. RSDRP i fraktsii s.-d. int. 2-go frontogo s”ezda

Daily; 28 to 29 November 1917

2

Nabat. Organ s.-d. internats.

Bogodukhov Weekly; 30 October to ?

1 (?)

Novaia zhizn’

Pgrad.

Daily; 18 April 1917 to 16 July 1918

354

Pervoe maia. Maiskii vestnik s.-d. internatsionalistov

Saratov

1 May to ?

1 (?)

62,000–115,000

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Internationalist Newspapers in Russia 1917 Name

Place

Proletarii. Organ Omsk Omskogo ko-miteta s.d. internatsionalistov

Form and period of publication

Issues

Irregular; 3 December to 1918

Menshevik-Internationalists Iskra. Organ men’shevikovinternatsionalistov

Pgrad.

Weekly; 26 September to 26 November

12

Kronshtadtskaia iskra

Kronshtadt

Weekly; 22 July to 11 September

4

Letuchii listok men’shevikovinternatsionalistov

Pgrad.

Monthly; May to ?

2 (?)

Malen’kaia iskra. Izbiratel’nyi listok

Pgrad.

Daily; 10 to 12 November

Bor’ba. Organ Revel’skago Kom. part. levykh s.-r. (intern.)

Revel’

Thrice weekly; 1 December to 19 February 1918

Internatsionalist

Krasnoiarsk Irregular; 20 July to 8 September

Chernozem. Organ partii s.-r.

Penza

Daily; since the February Revolution until 22 July

Kurskaia zhizn’. Organ levykh s.-r. (internatsionalistov)

Kursk

Daily; 12 December to ?

3

Left SRs

Gel’singfors 22 June to 20 SotsialistRevoliutsioner. Organ October Gel’s. gr. levykh s.-r. int.

13 &14

7 156

77

SotsialistRevoliutsioner. Krest’ian. i rabochaia gazeta

Kazan’

Twice a week; 7 May to 14 September

34

SotsialistRevoliutsioner

Moscow.

Irregular; 10 to 21 November

2

Za zemliu i voliu. Krest’ianskaia gazeta

Kronshtadt

18 May to 6 June

16

Print run or subscribers

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Internationalist Newspapers in Russia 1917 Name

Place

Form and period of publication

Issues

Print run or subscribers

Za zemliu i voliu

Kazan’

Daily; 20 September 1917 to 1918

Zemlia i volia. Izd. Petrogr. Oblastnogo Komiteta

Pgrad.

Daily; 21 March to mid-July (afterwards SR)

+100 subscribers 38,000

Zemlia i volia. Organ Khar’-kovskogo k-ta Partii s.-e

Khar’kov

Daily; 12 March to 1918; Left SR since fall of 1917

+220 +21,000

Zemlia i volia. Organ oblastnogo komiteta

Odessa

Daily; 15 July to 19 November

Znamia truda. Izd. Petrogr. Komitetom partii s.-r.

Pgrad.

Daily; 23 August 1917 to 6 July 1918

Znamia truda. Organ Tomskoi organizatsii partii levykh s.-r.

Tomsk

?

107 107 50,000 &137

SR-Maximalists Znamia maksimalistov. Chita Organ Chitinskogo soiuza s.-r. maks.

1 June to ?

Maksimalist. Organ Soiuza s.-r.

Moscow

?

1

Trudovaia Respublika. Izd. Petr. i Kronshtadtskoi gr. s.-r. maks.

Pgrad.

Irregular, since No. 8 weekly; 25 June to 11 November

14

Weekly; 9 October to

3 (?)

Trudovaia Respublika Khar’kov Volia truda. Izd. Petrogradskoi i Shlissel’burgskoi Organizatsii

Pgrad.

Irregular; 1 September to 15 October

1 (?)

3

More than 4,280 periodicals with an average print run between 2.5 and 3.7 million issues were published in Russia in 1917. Of these periodicals 577 had a party affiliation.76 However, the share of newspapers with an internationalist conviction was rather paltry with only 5.3 per cent. The Mezhraionka published one, the Menshevik-Internationalists four, the S-DIs eight, the SR-Maximalists five and the Left SRs at least thirteen. The value of numbers alone, however, was even

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further reduced if one takes into consideration that many of these internationalist undertakings were rather short-lived. Only a few periodicals appeared for a time span of more than three months and could thus hardly attract a steady reading public. With a view to published periodicals the Left SRs were the most successful internationalist party. They could rely on papers both in the capital and in a number of major provincial cities. After the SR organization of Petrograd had been finally taken over in September 1917 the newspaper Znamia truda passed into Left SRs hands. However, the paper did not cover its costs in its first month of publication, although it had a solid circulation.77 In Kursk the Left SRs simply took over the former SR paper Kurskaia zhizn’ in mid-December, which had been published since the beginning of July. The zemstvo of Penza began legally to publish a daily in 1915. On 1 January 1917 the SR-Internationalist B. F. Malkin became editor. After the February Revolution he set an internationalist agenda and managed to convert Chernozem into the organ of the SR committee of the city of Penza. All internationalist groups had financial problems. The Menshevik-Internationalists lacked the money to set up a newspaper to articulate their convictions.78 True, the left Menshevik O. A. Ermanskii was among the four editors of the Menshevik central organ Rabochaia gazeta and could ensure that articles of an international vein were represented.79 However, this could not compensate for the lack of a MenshevikInternationalist paper. The Mezhraiontsy had to cut the run of their paper by half due to a lack of money.80 Even the Left SRs faced similar problems, although they were quite successful in publishing some periodicals for several months. Appeals for funds were regularly published with the result that donations trickled in.81 Unfortunately, in most cases we lack any information about the print run. We may assume that provincial papers rarely reached five-digit numbers as in the case of the SR and then Left SR organ of Khar’kov, an important industrial city in Eastern Ukraine. Since mid-December Zemlia i volia was even published in two editions – a morning edition with 15,000 up to 18,000 copies and an evening edition with about 6,000. About 1,270 copies were distributed among the volosti of Khar’kov province and could thus reach peasants directly in the backwaters of their native countryside.82 The case of Buguruslan, a district city of Samara province with about 15,000 inhabitants, would have been far more representative for the average provincial paper. The SR paper Golos truda was published twice a week with a print run of 2,000 issues in the summer of 1917.83 Despite this, the impact was more comprehensive because papers were available in libraries, reading rooms of factories or clubs, sometimes were even read aloud in the public – in other words copies were passed on. The evidence suggests that Novaia zhizn’ was not only a prestigious high-quality daily but also the daily most widely read in Russia.84 Although the Novozhiznentsy enjoyed a certain popularity and a widespread public impact due to their intellectual capacity, they could never transform their publicity into an impressive political influence in revolutionary Russia. Given the size of the country the outreach of internationalist propaganda was more or less narrowly restricted. According to B. Kolonitskii, the overall circulation of all SR printed matters published in 1917 amounted to 8.3 million copies.85 Taking this into consideration it is more than evident that internationalist propaganda hardly made up more than a tear in the ocean.

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CONCEPT OF THE ENEMY, THE SEMANTICS OF CLASS STRUGGLE AND OF SECULAR RELIGION Internationalism was an important element that could evoke strong sentiments and a deep feeling of fraternal proletarian solidarity on the one hand and hate against the class enemy on the other as the following example illustrates. Solidarity for Friedrich Adler and Karl Liebknecht was expressed at a mass meeting of the electrotechnical plant Dinamo in Petrograd in mid-May. Moreover, a resolution was adopted that branded the World War, caused by the ‘predatory aspirations of the bourgeoisie and its compliant lackeys’.86 Such salutary addresses which expressed not only close ties with the ‘Internationalist Brothers’ but also a sense of ‘belonging’ were not uncommon, as a meeting of the important Petrograd Rozhdestvenskii district of the internationalist SRs in mid-May 1917 showed.87 The language of class played an eminent role. The Novozhiznentsy called the Western Entente governments ‘international bandits’.88 Capitalists, ‘money bags’89, imperialists or ‘bellicose bourgeoisie’ were used more or less interchangeably to defame oppressors of the whole world. They represented the core of the internationalist enemy image.90 Among the ‘mortal enemies’ of all toilers and their rights was ‘vampire imperialism’, which sucked all the lifeblood out of the toiling people, and the ‘landlord spiders’ for the ‘toiling peasantry’.91 In the course of 1917 language became coarser, simplistic and renounced differentiation. The trope of the enemy, central as it was, became applicable to a great variety of individuals, societal groups, socialist parties and even former comrades: SR and SD defencists called their party’s internationalists ‘our Bolsheviks’.92 The Left SRs, however, amended the SR slogan ‘In struggle you will gain your right’ and ridiculed it with a view to the centre and the right wing of the party: ‘In your penchant for compromise with the bourgeoisie you will find your happiness’.93 After October, Left SRs labelled their former comrades as socialists who had already turned into half-Kadets.94 Gleb Avilov, for example, lashed out against the ‘petty bourgeois socialism’ of Petrograd defencist paper Den’.95 Moreover, the internationalists saw themselves as the revolutionary wing of socialism, while the defencists made up the ‘opportunistic’ reformist wing.96 The moderate socialists not only joined the Provisional Government but also cooperated with the Entente. Thus, they made ‘common cause’ with the class enemy at home and abroad and became enemies of the people and of the revolution.97 Three aspects of Left SR semantics stand out: the recourse to supernatural bloodsuckers – a popular motif of contemporary socialist language98 – secondly, a biologization, whereby the spider was a frequently used topos in socialist language.99 Against this background, it is hardly surprising that in the Left SR terminology addressed to the masses, employers and in general people who lived from the ‘exploitation of man’ were called ‘parasites’.100 The third striking feature was the use of Christian motifs and the memorable biblical language known to the mass of the population. The Left SRs spoke not of a triad of toiling people but of a trinity.101 The Left SRs’ vision of good and evil as well as their Manichean world view was deeply rooted in Jewish-Christian traditions. It is more than striking the degree to which

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the Left SRs made use of biblical language and metaphors.102 In accordance with their Manichaean world view, the Left SRs argued in a bipolar manner: us against them, comrades versus foes.103 Against this background, it is not surprising that the LSR called for a ‘holy uprising’ against the Central Powers in mid-February 1918.104 Left SR ideology amalgamated atheism and religion, showed thoughts of redemption and the goal of salvation. Like any philosophy of history that can be interpreted as a secularized salvation event, the neo-populist vision also had a religious component, embodied re-sacralizing tendencies despite its secular claim and emphasis on rationality and modernity. In this, the Left SRs referred to Chernov, who had described neo-populism as an ‘integral social religion’.105 This was based on a radical new beginning of human coexistence in the form of a socialist society to be established in this world, which was to be considered superior to all previous forms of human coexistence. The October uprising caused a partial realignment of enemy images as the Internationalists focussed more on the Bolsheviks, their ‘anarchist’ or ‘anarchosyndicalist’ aspects and the emerging dictatorship.106 The Menshevik-Internationalists, S-DIs and Left SRs condemned the October uprising. Martov for example held it in full contempt. The Bolsheviks had established a ‘regime of permanent anarchy’, ‘a dictatorship of a left party’ based on a handful of military units. Their ‘politics of terror, arbitrariness and suppression of civil liberties’ would unleash a civil war. The single option to overcome the political impasse of this ‘quasi-socialism’ was to convene the Constituent Assembly, to which all power should belong.107

CONCLUSION The five internationalist groups pursued different tactics in 1917: the Mezhraiontsy merged early on. They lost their independence, but a good part of their political leadership held high positions in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state. The S-DIs remained true to their convictions. They founded their own party only in January 1918, but it did not get beyond a shadow existence. A part made peace with the Bolsheviks during the Civil war. The Menshevik-Internationalists remained as a minority within the RSDRP. Their indecisiveness in breaking with the defencists forced the more radical Internationalists such as Iu. Larin as well as the S-DIs to leave.108 The restraint of not breaking with the party and its traditions indicated the enormous emotional bond so typical of members with decades-long service to a very dear institution, which meant to them more often than not than home or family. So, the Menshevik-Internationalists saw the party’s political disaster coming but could not change its course: loss of membership and heavy electoral defeats followed, with only a marginal representation in the Constituent Assembly. They stuck to the party for better or for worse. The Extraordinary Menshevik Party Congress in December 1917 elected a new central committee in which the Internationalists finally obtained an absolute majority for the first time – however, only until March 1918.109 Until October 1917 Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs were in a similar position. Unlike the Menshevik-Internationalists, however, Kamkov claimed, with the benefit of hindsight, that it had been a mistake not to

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have split from the SR party earlier in 1917.110 Nonetheless, compared with all other internalist organizations the Left SRs fared much better up to July 1918. Throughout 1917–18 there was little room for manoeuvre of internationalist thought and politics. Firstly, SR and SD-Internationalists lacked organizational autonomy; secondly, due to their small numbers and financial resources, they had only a handful of newspaper at their disposal to propagate their views. Thus, they lacked the political possibility to shape policy. Thirdly, there were considerable ideological differences between Marxist socialists and ‘petty-bourgeois’ neopopulists, which ultimately prevented an ‘internationalist united front’.111 Brest-Litovsk was an important political caesura. The internationalists remained true to their convictions concerning a democratic peace and the prospects for the international socialist movement and world revolution. Therefore, they categorically rejected the peace treaty, which was unacceptable for all Russian political parties including even the Left Communists, although they knew that the masses were war weary and longing for peace.112 The ratification led to a negative integration and a realignment within Russia’s socialist spectrum. It bridged to a certain extent the former watershed between defencists and internationalists.113 Many socialists hoped to end the civil war to join forces and to put up resistance against the Central Powers.114 In some respect Left bloc politics remained a rallying battle cry in 1917–18. After the Brest-Litovsk peace treaties, the possibilities for exerting internationalist influence dwindled further. Nominally, the World War was over on the Eastern Front, but military units of the Central Powers intervened in the now-independent Ukraine and also operated on Russian soil in mid-1918. The war changed its guise and raged on as a civil war. When the Bolsheviks, responding more and more to criticism with force of arms, further curtailed and ultimately abolished the freedom of the press in the course of 1918, they silenced the only weapon remaining to the internationalists, i.e. that of criticism. With the restriction of civil rights, the manipulation of the elections to the soviets115 and finally the ban on political parties, the Bolsheviks also gradually enforced their interpretive predominance and established their domination over the soviets.116 According to Sukhanov, the soviets were nothing more than a fig leaf for the rule of the Bolshevik Central Committee.117 Thus, the joint internationalist hope that ‘revolutionary democracy’ could play the role of a ‘third force’ (tret’ia sila) during the ‘continuum of crisis’ first plunged between the millstones of patriotic socialism and Bolshevik ultraradicalism and was finally crushed between the hammer and anvil of Whites and Reds during the Civil War.118

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The anarchists: ‘Manual workers of the revolution’ and the beginning of the Civil War DMITRII IVANOV, EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY AT ST PETERSBURG

Let’s sing a song to the thunder of blows, Explosions and bullets, blazes of fire, Under the black banner of gigantic struggle, To the sounds of tocsin, of the calling trumpet! Brothers, let’s destroy temples and idols, Break the shackles as you rip off the purple mantles; Enough of obedient and slave-like love – We will drown the people’s grief in blood!1 So said the Anarchist March, a song that Russian anarchists used as their anthem during the 1917 revolution and the Civil War. Many of the things mentioned therein – black banners, explosions, blood – formed the characteristically terrifying world of Russian anarchism. Visceral hatred of the counter-revolution, authority, capital often embodied by individual officers, politicians or burzhui (bourgeois) was a significant contribution of the Russian anarchists to the spiralling violence that started after the February Revolution and led to full-scale warfare. The scale of this contribution is, it seems, underappreciated. This paper will seek to explore the anarchist role in pushing 1917’s civil strife towards a warpath, and discuss their attitudes to violence more generally. It is made possible by emerging new studies of the anarchist movement which focus on such underexplored groups like the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups or the ‘undergound anarchists’. The best recent work providing an overview of the Russian anarchist movement, Dmitrii Rublev’s Russian Anarchism in the Twentieth Century, is a solid, chronologically organized synthesis of existing research in Russian, augmented with published and archival sources, of

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which the author has incomparable knowledge.2 I cannot hope to replicate his look at how Russia’s political life impacted on the anarchist movement and its ideology, and would instead attempt to focus on how the anarchist movement impacted on the ecosystem of the Russian Revolution. Most important here are not textual sources but rather actions and speeches. As literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum, the brother of anarcho-syndicalist leader Voline (Vsevolod Eikhenbaum), wrote: ‘It is scary when a person is screaming in a crowd, and is not audible – the crowd screams about its own things.’3 Russia’s anarchists not only screamed about their own concerns but they were also heard. Borrowing semiotics terminology, it can be said that violence was an element of revolutionary Russia’s sign system, part of its overall process of communication in which negotiations for power were carried out. The anarchist movement used it extensively, and it was an important trigger in the chain of events that set off the Civil War.

EARLY VIOLENT ENCOUNTERS Of the things the Anarchist March lovingly name-checked, blazes of fire were perhaps the first to come in the 1917 revolution. The Petrograd mansion of the Minister of the Court, Count Vladimir Frederiks, was reportedly the first private house that the revolutionary crowd stormed in February, robbed, smashed up and set on fire during the uprising, on the account of its location across the street from the Kexholm Regiment barracks, and its owner being a high-ranking courtier whose Swedish name sounded German. ‘The agitators, who by their type looked like Jews, included the actor Mamont Dal’skii, who was not squeamish about appropriating two gigantic stuffed Siberian bears and who was particularly enthusiastic about urging the crowd to rob and totally destroy everything that was in the house’, Frederiks’ son-in-law, palace commandant Vladimir Voeikov related.4 Dal’skii was not only one of Russia’s most famous thespians, but also one of the country’s most infamous anarchists.5 Before the revolution he expressed an interest in the theories of Proudhon and Bakunin, and, once it came about, he was instrumental in arranging some of the first meetings that the now-overground and legal anarchists held in Petrograd on 9 March. What was peculiar about the first session of the Petrograd Anarchist Club was its location  – at the offices of the 1914 Society, a chauvinist group that set opposition to Germanic influence as its primary task.6 When war broke out, Dal’skii penned and performed plays attacking Teutonic stupidity and brutality yet remained unflinchingly anti-monarchist. Like many others – including revolutionary veterans in the 1914 Society like German Lopatin – he joined the fray because the government did not prosecute the war efficiently enough.7 Anarchists were a part of Russian society at large, and many shared anti-German sentiments. Some intelligentsia notwithstanding, Petrograd anarchists drew most of their support from the city’s workers. During the February uprising, they helped organize strikes at the Rozenkrants Metal Works and the Okhtinskii Gunpowder Works, and their banners saying ‘Down with authority and capitalism!’ were carried at Putilovskii Factory demonstrations.8 Another major force that underpinned the anarchist movement in the first weeks and months after the revolution was newly

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released political prisoners. Although anarchists had a relatively small presence within the revolutionary subculture at large, they were vocal and influential in the political-prisoner population, as a militant minority with experience of armed struggle. In the Petrograd Province town of Shlissel’burg, it was workers from the massive Shlissel’burg Gunpowder Works who decided to halt work and to arrest the police when their comrades in the capital did the same. Their first major target was the Shlissel’burg Fortress, the infamous symbol of tsarist oppression. Ex-inmate, anarchist Iustin Zhuk set about organizing a fighting detachment (druzhina). In a speech, he declared: ‘I ask that those who tremble for their skin do not to sign up … Let’s not have any illusions: the bourgeoisie will not surrender its positions without a fight. We will have to shed a lot of blood before we secure political power.’9 During a rally, another anarchist ex-convict, Timofei Fomichev publicly ripped off the epaulets of the district police chief, Aleksandr Ivanenko, symbolically deposing the old regime. Zhuk and others led an operation to set the now-abandoned fortress buildings on fire at 1 am on 5 March.10 A burning prison was one of the symbols of the February Revolution, and Shlissel’burg was one of the leading contenders for the role of the Russian Bastille.11 These actions reflected not just the practical concern of preventing the use of the penal facilities in the future, but also the political culture of the Russian Revolution, of which anarchists were an integral, if somewhat unruly part. Even before all the suitable palaces and prisons were burned, anarchists started to organize their forces. One of their leaders, Iosif Bleikhman, joined the Petrograd and Kronstadt Soviets, and proved to be the anarchists’ star speaker. His populist, folksy, down-to-earth oratory was relentless in its visceral hatred of authority and militancy against the bourgeoisie. He spoke freely of what many other workingclass revolutionaries kept to themselves – that the Tsar’s ministers must be killed, that the officers imprisoned in Kronstadt should receive no mercy as they were faring no worse than revolutionaries like himself had faced in Tsarist prisons, that grassroots workers could easily sabotage any policies socialist leaders may have designed on their behalf.12 Initially, anarchist groups declared a truce with the new authorities as long as anti-monarchist policies were pursued. Petrograd anarchists’ Kommuna journal noted on 17 March that ‘we anarchists decided to go together with “democracy” towards this objective until our enemy is completely overpowered, until the external difficulties are overcome, i.e. the war continues, and temporarily refrain from any attempts to accomplish our final objective’.13 The Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups declared: ‘In the current political revolution, anarchist socialism sets as its task supporting the republican regime being established against any counter-revolutionary attempts. Not trusting the bourgeois Provisional Government, anarchist socialism, however, refrains from any actions against it as long is does not hinder conducting anarchist propaganda and organizing the revolutionary masses.’14 Irkutsk anarchists’ organizing meeting on 10 March approved ‘support for the provisional revolutionary government’.15 The anarchists followed the ‘in so far as’ line pursued by soviet organizations, if more grudgingly than the rest of ‘democracy’. Their small but tangible successes in forming groups and starting propaganda in the very first days of the revolution make historian Valerii

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Kriven’kii’s claim that ‘at least until April-May 1917 nothing was heard about [their] practical work in Moscow, Petrograd and other cities’ seem unjustified.16 One small problem with Kommuna was that its editor, Roman Bertgol’d, was a secret agent in the pay of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. The Provisional Government’s policy of publishing the names of provocateurs and informers wreaked havoc in all political groups, anarchists included. In April, Bertgol’d, who apparently had betrayed many of his comrades to the police before February, fled Petrograd, and was later captured in Rybinsk after a firefight.17 Another Okrana agent, Petrograd’s Vyborg neighbourhood soviet deputy Aleksandr Grekov, was killed in Moscow on April 20 by Petr Aleksandrov, sent by the Petrograd Organization of Anarchist-Communists. Revolutionary subculture treated those deemed traitors harshly, yet in the new political situation the Petrograd anarchists not only took responsibility for the killing, but also demanded the release of Aleksandrov whose action ‘was a result of our organizational instruction’.18 The revolution had brought a new understanding of justice. Anarchists happily took it into own hands because it not only allowed them to mete out retribution but also helped in their long-term objectives of state collapse.19 The likes of Grekov were not the only anarchists killed. On 4 May, anarchist Vasilii Lashkov attempted to save some burglars from being lynched by a Moscow crowd. He was dragged into a militia commissariat by the crowd where a student militiaman, Nakhum Monoszon, shot and fatally wounded him. Anarchists carried Lashkov’s coffin under a banner saying ‘The first victim of the new authorities’ in processions in Moscow and Petrograd.20 This act of police brutality increased anarchist hostility to the new regime. On 14 April, the Petrograd Anarchist Federation became one of the groups, alongside the Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists,21 provided with premises at the Durnovo mansion in the Vyborg Side neighbourhood. Armed anarchists also tried to take over the Duke of Leuchtenberg palace and the printshop of the conservative daily Russkaia Volia. The Provisional Government ordered them out of the Durnovo mansion in early June, but only attempted to enforce the order when, after the massive 18 June demonstration, the anarchists forced the Kresty prison administration to release Flavian Khaustov, a maximalist who edited the antiwar newspaper Okopnaia Pravda (Truth from the Trenches), and some others. In the ensuing operation one anarchist, former Shlissel’burg prisoner Shlioma Asnin was killed, and about sixty more were arrested.22 Some of those swept up went on to become major figures in the Russian anarchist movement. Vladimir Gordin, one of the most prolific anarchist writers during the revolution and later an efficient, if perhaps unwitting, tool of Cheka intrigues, declared a hunger strike to protest against imprisonment.23 Mariia Nikiforova, saved from being whipped by a Cossack by Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev who said that ‘it is prohibited to beat women’24, was one of the women political prisoners who had famously escaped from Moscow’s Novinskaia prison in 1909. Arriving in Russia after exile in France, she became a charismatic anarchist commander during the early, paramilitary stage of the Civil War in the south.25 And then there was Anatolii Zhelezniakov, a Kronstadt sailor who negotiated with the troops that surrounded the mansion and was later charged with tossing hand grenades at them. His charisma was acknowledged by his

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adversaries: Petrograd Counterintelligence Service head Boris Nikitin wrote that the speech of the ‘tall, imposing sailor’ was coherent and smooth, and described him as a ‘black-earth force’.26 Zhelezniakov led fellow conscripts in a rampage during a train journey to Petrograd in 1915, engaging in ‘political enlightenment’ which consisted of singing revolutionary songs, making noisy protests and breaking railway signalling at stations.27 His diaries reflect his hatred of authority: ‘The rulers of men, the great and the good, after reveling in power, entertain themselves with a new game – the world slaughter now in its third year. Laugh! But he who laughs best laughs last, and you laugh for the last time. The gnarled red hand of the revolution which strikes deathly terror into you is already stretched out’, he wrote on 6 September1916.28 Daring and eloquence made Zhelezniakov a popular leader of the Baltic Fleet anarchists. The Durnovo mansion operation was the first time that the new regime has used armed force against a revolutionary group represented in the Petrograd Soviet. It significantly aggravated the situation, leading to strikes and street protests, particularly in Vyborg Side. The anarchists’ role in setting off the series of protests and armed clashes known as the July Days is now well recognized.29 The anarchists’ tolerance of the Provisional Government was undermined not only by these violent encounters but also by its failure to end the war. Kommuna started to advocate fraternizing with the enemy, and its street vendors could face a real danger of being thrown into the river.30 In speeches made outside the Durnovo mansion, former Shlissel’burg inmate Pavel Kolobushkin exhorted listeners: ‘Comrades, unite, arm yourselves against the bourgeoisie; we don’t need a war in the front, we need one here, against the bourgeoisie.’31 The Petrograd anarchists’ anti-war activities were not limited to mere propaganda. They were also making concrete plans for an armed insurgency throughout June and early July, holding council with allies in reserve regiments and in the Bolshevik military organization, as well as establishing their own Military Revolutionary Council. As Russkaia Volia warned its readers: ‘Tattooed anarchists and parts of Vyborg Side Bolsheviks that joined them are actively preparing for civil butchery in the streets of Petrograd.’32 They even recruited a retired colonel, member of the Shlissel’burg Gunpowder Works’ executive committee Matvei Gavrilov, to help with preparations. The leading Menshevik Mikhail Liber described him as a ‘totally obscure leader of Durnovo mansion’s Bolsheviks and anarchists’.33 In the end, the July Days were an insurrection in the military sense only to a very limited extent, with political protests and spontaneous riot being more prominent. Some of the sentiment behind it was outrage at not being heard and despair over the ongoing war. The First Machine-Gun Regiment’s rebellious soldiers declared that they would have to protest carrying weapons after their calls for peace at the 18 June rally were ignored.34 During the July Days, anarchists with a black flag proclaiming ‘Long live anarchy’ and Kronstadt sailors briefly seized the Agriculture Minister Viktor Chernov. The sailors were angry at him because the Provisional Government was perceived as preventing Zhelezniakov being set free.35 Sailors repeatedly sent delegations to try to force Pereverzev to release their comrade.36 The anarchists then seized the offices and printshop of the conservative daily Novoe Vremia which was used as a military stronghold and a centre for producing anarchist propaganda.37

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Some civil strife was seen as a relatively small price to pay for stopping the war, and anarchists were among the more enthusiastic opponents of the Provisional Government which made no concessions on this crucial matter. These revolutionaries’ attitude to the war was quite dissimilar to that of Russia’s best-known-anarchist. As prominent anarchist-communist German Sandomirskii wrote: ‘for us anarchists, what could be more tragic than the heartrending discord prompted by the war which separated us from the most beloved of our teachers and leaders, P.A. Kropotkin’.38 Kropotkin was welcomed at the Finland Station on 30 May by massed soldiers, brass bands, banners and speeches from War Minister Aleksandr Kerensky, Kadet leader Pavel Miliukov and Labour Popular Socialist Party leader Nikolai Chaikovskii. The ritual was by then a tradition, experienced by both Lenin and Chernov in the past. Kropotkin was decidedly to the right of the revolutionary mainstream in Petrograd. His support for the war effort against German imperialism was well-known through his contributions to the Russian press. In 1917, Kropotkin’s new articles were published in the liberal daily Russkie Vedomosti rather than in any of the specifically anarchist newspapers. He explained why Germany was bound to lose and why the economic and social systems in France and England were superior. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the July Days, Kropotkin also swiped out at the Russian anarchists for ‘seizing palaces and villas for themselves’, and declared the necessity of ‘a bold fight against defeatism and Zimmerwaldism’, promoted by the German General Staff.39 His political contacts were mainly with liberal and moderate-socialist politicians.40 Kropotkin addressed the State Conference in Moscow in August 1917, to which he was personally invited by Kerensky (by then prime minister), one of whose sources of legitimacy were links to the heroic Russian populists of the past.41 Kropotkin’s daughter Aleksandra was also instrumental in establishing her father’s connections to pro-war actors like the Secret Intelligence Service agent William Somerset Maugham.42 Russia’s conservative and mass-market press lionized Kropotkin, who was presented as an example of a ‘good’ anarchist against a ‘bad’, pro-German anarchist Lenin. Kropotkin’s likeness graced the front page of Russkaia Volia merely days before anarchist-communists armed with machine guns and hand grenades seized its premises.43 Most Russian anarchists were reserved or hostile towards Kropotkin, described as one of the pro-war ‘gentlemen’ by Kommuna.44 A little later, Emma Goldman noted that by orchestrating the October coup, ‘the Marxian Social Democrats, Lenin and Trotsky, [were] adopting Anarchist revolutionary tactics, while the Anarchists Kropotkin, Tcherkessov (Cherkezov), Tchaikovsky (Chaikovskii) are denying these tactics and falling into Marxian reasoning’.45 Kropotkin was so closely associated with the war effort that he was asked to join the government. There are conflicting claims regarding Kropotkin’s co-option to the Provisional Government, which was not mentioned in the press of 1917 or any official communications. But there are several independent sources for the claim, which suggests that the story was one that Kropotkin liked to tell. Sandomirskii related that Kerensky was so desperate to save the war effort that he wanted Kropotkin for Prime Minister (but ‘[a]n anarchist proved to be stronger in Kropotkin than a defencist’). Historian Rublev, taking the account by Kropotkin’s niece Ekaterina Polovtsova

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rather uncritically, even suggested that since the proposal to form a cabinet was made just after the July Days, Kerensky wanted to avoid the danger posed by the anarchists by making one of them a Provisional Government figurehead. Nikolai Lebedev’s more vague statement that Kropotkin was asked ‘to take an active part in administering the country’ could mean anything, and Alexandra Kropotkina’s claim, made in an interview a half-century after the fact, seems frivolous. But Kropotkin’s diary for 20 July 1917 records that ‘A[leksandr] F[edorovich] K[erensky] visited’; adding ‘Ministry. Refusal’. At that time – not immediately after Kropotkin’s arrival as Lebedev claimed – Kerensky was looking for an Education Minister for his new cabinet (this is the position Aleksandra Kropotkina mentioned). Moscow University rector Aleksandr Manuilov resigned the post on 12 July, and Academy of Sciences member Sergei Ol’denburg was not appointed until 24 July. Sandomirskii’s claim that prime ministership was on offer is not plausible, as Kerensky was keen to keep the post for himself. Goldman claimed Kropotkin’s answer to be ‘I consider bootblacking a worthier and more useful occupation’, but he retained cordial relations with Kerensky, so such rudeness was unlikely. Kropotkin probably did have a chance to become the Provisional Government’s oldest and most anarchist member, but the matter did not go beyond one private conversation.46 That the matter was seriously discussed, however, shows the importance of revolutionary (not practical) experience as a factor for possessing authority in 1917 Russia. Kerensky did form a new government but it was dissolved on 27 August, during the attempted coup by General Lavr Kornilov. Anarchists were an enthusiastic part of the left-wing coalition that opposed the feared counter-revolutionary attempt, and their actions often aggravated the situation. Zhuk, accompanied by several hundred Shlissel’burg Gunpowder Works’ Red Guards, ferried a bargeful of explosives to Petrograd which was handed out to Vyborg Side workers. The factory’s Red Guard insignia bore the slogan ‘For Social Revolution’ and the date 28 August, highlighting the importance of anti-Kornilov struggle to their collective identity.47 In the Ekaterinslav province town of Huliaipole, a 29 August peasant rally was being addressed by Nikiforova, when its chair Nestor Makhno received the government telegram about the Kornilov coup. A member of the crowd shouted: ‘The blood of our brothers is being spilled there, and here counter-revolutionaries walk amongst us and laugh!’, and Nikiforova jumped off the platform to arrest the former district police superintendent, one Ivanov. He was saved from lynching by Makhno,48 but Nikiforova’s sudden turn from oratory to action shows how fine the line between rhetoric and violence could be. As tensions exacerbated, the distance between word and action grew shorter.

ESTABLISHING AND CONSOLIDATING SOVIET POWER Vocal opponents of the Provisional Government, anarchists were also enthusiastic participants in its overthrow. Zhelezniakov, sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour over the Durnovo mansion affair, escaped his Petrograd prison on 6 September 1917, finding refuge in the Baltic Fleet.49 He served as the secretary to

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the Second Baltic Fleet sailors’ congress in Helsingfors (Helsinki), and was elected one of the sailors’ deputies to the Second Congress of the Soviets.50 He participated in storming the Winter Palace.51 Anarchist Black Sea sailor Aleksei Mokrousov commanded the seizure of the Petrograd Telegraph Agency.52 Several anarchists were members of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, the October Revolution’s main staff.53 In early November 1917, Bolshevik sailor Nikolai Khovrin was appointed by the Military Revolutionary Committee to command an armoured train sent to assist the Soviet forces in Moscow. But anarchists were also strongly represented on the detachment’s staff  – Zhelezniakov was one of its members, and anarchist sailor Eizhen Berg served as the commandant.54 The earliest, smallscale phase of the Civil War was fought along railway lines, and sailors’ armoured trains were efficient at knocking the cadet and officer corps, Polish legionnaires or Don Cossacks from their positions, often due to the terror they inspired in their adversaries. ‘Our Kronstadters terrify [Cossack leader Aleksei] Kaledin. You probably were told what happened at Debal’tseve, where there were six of our men. Two of Kaledin’s echelons were shelling the station, and when they found a sailor’s cap ribbon, they were horrified that there are sailors there, and turned back’, anarcho-syndicalist leader Efim Iarchuk, who served as a commissar in one of the units, told the Kronstadt Soviet on 11 January 1918.55 A new detachment was formed in Moscow, commanded by Khovrin, with Zhelezniakov as his adjutant, and in November–December 1917 it fought against the opponents of the new regime in Belgorod, Kharkiv and Chuhuiv.56 After returning from the south, Khovrin and Zhelezniakov were ordered to form a new special sailors’ detachment ‘to guard and fight against the counterrevolution’ by the People’s Commissar for the Navy, Pavel Dybenko. It fell to Zhelezniakov, as the head of Tauride Palace guards, to implement Dybenko’s order and tell the Constituent Assembly speaker, Chernov, at 4.40 am on 6 January 1918: ‘I received an instruction to inform you that all those present must leave the assembly hall because the guards are tired.’ That made him a rare anarchist, one who successfully implemented his anti-parliamentarian views. The implied threat from the sailors and Red Guards that surrounded the building was one of the reasons why the Bolsheviks’ opponents offered no resistance.57 Reporting to the Third Congress of Soviets on behalf of Petrograd’s revolutionary detachments a few days later, Zhelezniakov assured the deputies that all the ‘manual workers of the revolution’ like himself have enough strength and rifles without rust to carry the revolution through to the end and achieve final victory over capital. The words ‘we are prepared to execute by firing squad not just individuals, but hundreds and thousands, and if a million would be required, a million it will be’ were not included in the official stenographic record but were reported in the papers.58 Writer Maxim Gorky noted that Zhelezniakov’s call to kill a million men for the well-being of the Russian people was ‘translating the fierce speeches of his leaders to the simple language of the man on the street’.59 This interpretation needs to be qualified, because anarchists like Zhelezniakov were their own leaders, had their own agency, and were capable of bloodshed even without prodding from their Bolshevik allies.

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As central Petrograd was convulsed by the political struggle around the Constituent Assembly, two of its deputies-elect, Kadets Andrei Shingarev and Fedor Kokoshkin, were taken to the Mariinskaia Hospital from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Their arrest on 28 November 1917 was followed by a decree drafted by Lenin that declared them ‘enemies of the people’. Early in the morning of 7 January, the guards who transported Shingarev and Kokoshkin returned with some sailors and murdered the Kadet politicians in their beds. The Council of People’s Commissars set up an investigative commission which identified one of the killers, former Parviainen factory worker, an Estonian named Oskar Kreis, as a member of Zhelezniakov’s anarchist sailor detachment. Attempts to have the murderers brought to justice failed as their ships’ crews refused to hand them over, and they fled abroad.60 In summer 1919, the Finnish authorities detained a suspicious Estonian sailor. He confessed to participation in the murder of Kokoshkin and Shingarev. According to him, sailor Iakov Matveev addressed the seamen at the Nikolaevskaia Military Academy building (where Zheleniakov’s detachment was based during the Constituent Assembly affair), declaring that an order was received to get rid of the ‘ministers’. Sailors drew lots to select those who would do the killing, and twelve of them, including two volunteers, marched a few blocks to the hospital.61 As historian Vadim Musaev concluded, Kokoshkin and Shingarev were likely targeted because it was easier to get to them than to other political prisoners. The killing was politically without much meaning, but it reflected the atmosphere of intolerance and hatred in the barracks.62 It was a major escalation, as killings of leading opposition politicians, extralegal or not, were not yet the done thing. The group of anarchist sailors led by Zhelezniakov and based at the Second Guards Naval Coastal Barracks in Petrograd was a source of tension in early 1918. They detained officers with the intention of shooting them without trial. ‘Why the hell do we need your protocol ? You’ll die like this, even without a protocol!’, they told their detainees, two of whom were driven to the outskirts of Petrograd and killed there. It took sustained personal intervention from Lenin and a full-fledged military operation to save at least one of the prisoners.63 Another anarchist sailor, Mokrousov, also expressed reservations about limiting violence in the interests of constructing socialism, telling Sevastopol’ Soviet on 12 November 1917: ‘A revolution is under way, and if we should kill under the red flag, then only the bourgeoisie. I propose to burn all flags, and the black banner of anarchism will rise from the ashes.’64 Massacres of burzhui and officers were sometimes carried out as organized acts of ‘black and red terror’ like the ‘St Bartholomew’s Day massacre’ in Simferopol’ by local anarchists and Sevastopol’ sailors on 24 February 1918.65 Much of the Russian public in 1917 was unable to distinguish between anarchists and Bolsheviks. Thus anarchist actions were perceived as resulting from Bolshevik policies. The Soviet Government’s often genuine inability to reign its allies in (Lenin’s secretary Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich described his visit to Zhelezniakov’s sailors as a thoroughly terrifying experience) was perceived as feigned. All of that increased the resolve of opponents of the new regime to oppose it. While the Bolsheviks’ lack of involvement in the attack on Shingarev and Kokoshkin, and their failure to bring their murderers to trial were plausible, the

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violent atmosphere in the city was something they cannot escape responsibility for. They weren’t alone in creating it. The anarchist daily Burevestnik initially condemned the murders, proclaiming on its front page: We anarchists have always protested against the death penalty … Thus we also protest against the murder of our enemies – Kadets Shingarev and Kokoshkin. Freedom doesn’t tolerate neither prisons nor executions … Freedom doesn’t tolerate executioners. However, the editorial collective then proceeded to expel Aleksandr Ge, its member responsible for expressing distaste at the political violence used against unarmed men in a hospital.66 But if some of the anarchists’ actions could be chalked up to excesses by the uncontrollables, at least some other actions were a direct part of political repressions on behalf of the new regime. In addition to anarchists like Zhelezniakov fulfilling orders from the Smolny (the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee), there were anarchists who joined the Cheka. Anarchist Fedor Drugov moved from the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee to the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission’s (Cheka’s) intelligence section and served there until April 1918. Secretary to the Moscow Black Guard staff Aleksandr Miotelko joined the Cheka anti-speculation section in Spring 1918.67 And Ge, who protested against political violence in January 1918, chaired the Kislovodsk Cheka in May.68 It can be said that Bolshevik power in its first few months depended to a certain extent on anarchists, who were involved in some of the most crucial military and security operations. One other victim of anarchist violence was Saratov tavern owner Mikhail Uvarov, killed on the night of 5 March 1918. A group of anarchists detailed to search the tavern and detain its owner decided that it was ‘dangerous and useless’ to keep a counter-revolutionary in prison. Uvarov had indeed been a former member of the far-right Union of Russian People (Black Hundreds) but the Saratov anarchists were enraged by a document he published on 28 February. The ‘libelous and pornographic’ paper, as the Saratov Anarchist Club described it, was the Decree on the Nationalisation of Women. A crowd reacting to the provocation smashed up the anarchist club in early March, and then, in a tit-for-tat move, anarchists came for Uvarov. That did not stop the circulation of the ‘decree’, which had a strong impact on perceptions of the revolutionary regime’s gender policies both inside and outside Russia.69 Some influence on Uvarov’s text may have come from the practices of Saratov anarchists, who did display an above-average interest in matters of family organization. In their response to a questionnaire, the Saratov Free Association of Anarchist Groups described its membership as ‘skilled workers, manual workers, soldiers, women married by lawful wedlock and by free love, hard-labour inmates, two amnestied, members of free professions, two students’. Members recognized ‘complete freedom of love’.70 Historical literature contains some discussion of women’s role in the anarchist movement. Many of these focus on Nikiforova, and

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her gender identity seems to be of great interest to researchers. Rublev and Leont’ev both dedicated several pages each to discussion of whether she was intersex and to the reasons why she sometimes wore men’s clothes. Rublev concluded that at any rate Nikiforova identified as a woman, and was married to a man, the anarchist Vitol’d Bzhostek.71 Some of Nikiforova’s controversial reputation is due to the challenge her very existence and role as a military leader posed to the gender order. Some other women who participated in anarchist detachments adhered to more traditional women’s role. Siberian anarchist-communist commander Nestor Kalandarishvili’s partner Khristina Mkervali helped organize nursing services for the fighters. Other women in Kalandarishvili’s detachment played an active combat role – one, Zinaida Sidorenko, rejected an offer of serving as a nurse and chose to be a fighter, following her husband into the taiga.72 Gender studies of the Russian anarchist movement are a promising field; research on masculinities or attitudes to sexuality is practically non-existent. Anarchists like Kalandarishvili were central to some of the local struggles as part of the ‘triumphal march of the Soviet power’. The small band of mostly Georgian militants he led was instrumental in the suppression of a cadet and officer corps uprising in Irkutsk. As Kalandarishvili later wrote in his 1921 autobiography, ‘a shot from an officer cadet on 8 December 1917, led me into the street with a rifle in hand, and after that I did not let that rifle out of my hands, protecting the interests of the proletariat, freedom, equality and brotherhood’.73 A Georgia-born revolutionary, he reportedly escaped from a death sentence and started a new life in Siberia, working as a photographer, actor and forger of counterfeit money. In February 1918, the Irkutsk Soviet authorized him to form the First Irkutsk Independent Cavalry Battalion of Anarchist-Communists. It included exiled Caucasus bandits, Hungarian prisoners of war, former Red Guards, a circus wrestler, gold-diggers and so on. Its black banner declared ‘Anarchy is the mother of order’. Kalandarishvili became one of the most important Red partisan leaders in Siberia.74 Revenge for fallen comrades was a powerful motivating factor in continuing the struggle. Speeches at funerals (and revolutionary funerals more generally) were an important instrument of political mobilization. During the funeral of Red Guards killed in Irkutsk in December 1917, ‘[t]housands of people who were present at the funeral, before the grave was covered, went down on their knees and made a solemn vow to avenge the White Guards for the death of their comrades, not to lay down their weapons until the Red banner of the Soviets was raised over all of Siberia and the Far East’.75 A black flag displayed at the funeral of the Cheremkhovo Red Guards read: ‘Eternal memory to the fallen freedom fighters. Your blood will be avenged.’76 Kalandarishvili, who had theatre experience, was apparently good at funereal oratory. In November 1918, he told a rally: ‘Let’s swear an oath by the memory of our fallen comrades-in-arms that we will avenge the enemy for their death and we will not rest as long as even one interventionist or White Guard remains alive in our land. Forward, comrades, to the total victory over the enemies of the working people.’77 New violence was necessary to give meaning to past sacrifices, thus martyrdom of comrades was a mobilizing force.

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‘Blood and joy’, a poem by Aleksandr Iaroslavskii, published by the Kalandarishvili detachment’s cultural and enlightenment section, encapsulates the uncompromising sentiments of anarchist participants in the Civil War: Thou, Rustic peasant man, Smelling of sweat! Thou, Driving nails into epaulets!78 Thou, Destroying the thrones! Waiting for the enemy at your machine gun! Thou, Turning the tender body of an elegant lady Into red meat! In a powerful outburst of a class rising up. Powerfully going Towards bloody victory! Thou, Gatherer of Universal energies! Thou, Ripping earrings out of ears! Painfully injured By the last arrows! Avenging by cudgel, knife and firing squads! Thou, Enraged soldier! – I tell Thee: Thou art holy!”79

BREAKING WITH THE BOLSHEVIKS Contemporary historiography of Russian anarchism, which has the benefit of hindsight and largely reflects the positions taken by emigres, considers the anarchists as irreconcilably hostile to the Bolsheviks throughout their reign and even before. There is some evidence to support such an interpretation, but much of it is retrospective. Soviet historiography’s view of relations between the two political groups changed over time. An extreme position was formulated in 1921 by Iakov Iakovlev, who stated that during the October Revolution the anarchists ‘did not advocate slogans and tasks distinct from us, Communists’; thus he started his history of the anarchist movement from the moment of the parting of the ways in spring 1918.80 His colleague Moisei Ravich-Cherkasskii argued that before October ‘[t]he tasks that the Bolsheviks set themselves did not cause a negative response amongst the anarchists’ before October.81 But as ideological blueprints were being enforced more stringently, Soviet researchers increasingly depicted anarchists as a perpetually

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hostile force. Makhmud Khudaikulov wrote that anarchists ‘objectively helped implement the aims of the bourgeoisie’.82 The split in the ‘left bloc’ of anarchists and Bolsheviks occurred not only as a result of the threat that the anarchists posed to public order, considerable though that was. In addition to lynchings like those carried out by the sailors, there were other troubling incidents, like a bomb that went off during an anarchist conference in Petrograd in January 1918, killing some of the participants.83 The main factor in opening a divide between anarchists and Bolsheviks was not this random violence but rather the challenge anarchists started to pose to the regime. This was directly connected to the World War. After experiencing humiliating powerlessness in the face of German army’s advance in February 1918 – the Soviet Government had initially declined to sign the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, but reconsidered its position when the German offensive resumed and appeared unstoppable – the Bolsheviks decided that they needed a standing army after all.84 The Red Guards and militia bands of their allies had to be reigned in, all the more so since by March, anarchists across Russia were forming their own armed detachments, the Black Guards, mostly with the intention of continuing the fight against Germany and its allies, and continuing that fight meant that the Bolsheviks would have pushed aside. According to the French military representative Jacques Sadoul, on 7 April 1918 Ge was openly discussing anarchist plans to use their armed forces to move against the Bolsheviks and to install a true communist republic. This, however, was just bragging, as the All-Russian Federation of Anarchist-Communists, formed by Ge and other members of the anarchist-communist faction in the AllRussian Central Executive Committee, were generals without an army. The Black Guards were controlled by a rival organization, the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, which had a relatively dense network of local cells, a daily newspaper, and a number of mansions at its disposal.85 In a few weeks’ time, Ge himself would join the Cheka. And yet, it was hard not to take seriously the All-Russian Federation claim to officially represent anarchists, as, by definition, all anarchists are self-declared. An anarchist attempt to reignite the war against Germany and its allies could endanger the Bolshevik and Left SR hold over the country. So a massive operation was carried out in Moscow to disarm the anarchists on the night of 11–12 April. Continuing the war against the occupiers was the most powerful justification anarchists had to recruit supporters and resources, and the war was probably the decisive factor in Bolshevik decision-making.86 Throughout April and May, the Bolsheviks disarmed anarchist and ‘anarchic’ (which were not necessarily the same thing) forces across Russia, as they geared up to prepare the Red Army as a proper fighting force. Sergo Ordzhonikidzhe presided over such an operation in Rostov, and Nikolai Podvoiskii in Kursk.87 Some of the most bitter fighting occurred in Samara under the command of another Bolshevik dignitary, Valerian Kuibyshev. The ‘anarcho-maximalist mutiny’ occurred against the background of the Bolsheviks’ refusal to surrender power to a provincial soviet executive committee in which Maximalists gained the majority in April.88 With the start of frontline warfare and the disarming of independent military detachments in April–May 1918, the anarchists lost their capacity to act independently. A rare contemporaneous account by a non-Bolshevik working-class revolutionary,

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Petrograd maximalist Ivan Firsenkov’s diary shows how grassroots non-Bolshevik activists committed to fight for the cause could become isolated and estranged from their organizations which could only intermittently provide propaganda materials to supporters. It was hard to get the intricacies of political struggle in the capital cities out to comrades on an armoured train, under conditions of wartime shortages and censorship,89 and the Communists’ infinitely better access to resources was one of the factors that gave them an edge over political rivals, who were persuaded that the only way to make an impact would be to join the Party. Writer Dmitrii Furmanov, who from February 1917 rapidly transitioned from SR to Maximalist to Anarchosyndicalist, in July 1918 joined the Communist Party, partly frustrated by failure to get political guidance, propagandists or printed materials from comrades in time and in sufficient quantity, but mainly to get things done.90 He famously went on to serve as the commissar of a Red Army division commanded by another ex-anarchist, Vasilii Chapaev, who joined Saratov anarchists while convalescing in a hospital there in spring 1917, though only for a few months. Historian Rublev warns against over-reliance on the retrospectively Bolshevised accounts of ‘people’s leaders’ like Chapaev who died in battle for Soviet power, and argued that the latter’s policies were close to anarchist-communist methods throughout 1918.91 It was increasingly hard for anarchist groups operating within Bolshevik-controlled territory to do what they wished. About a month before the Bolsheviks executed deposed emperor Nicholas II, Ekaterinburg anarchists reportedly tried to beat them to it. They moved a resolution at the local soviet ‘to have the former Tsar immediately killed’. When that failed, they and the local Left SRs allegedly started plotting to attack the house where the Romanovs were held and to kill them. But the plans were thwarted and anarchist militants were arrested on 13 June 1918, as the Bolsheviks still hoped to put the ex-autocrat on public trial.92 Killing ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ was something that the anarchists proposed back in March 1917, so they were pretty consistent in their hostility to the autocrat. The polarization in relations between Bolsheviks and anarchists was exacerbating. The trajectory followed by Kazimir Kovalevich encapsulates the life story of many such activists, thoroughly committed to continuing the revolutionary struggle. After the February Revolution, he promoted increased workers’ control over the Moscow railways from a moderate anarcho-syndicalist position in the trade union newspaper Volia i Dumy Zheleznodorozhnika. Kovalevich gradually moved the focus of his activities to the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, and was a major contributor to its newspaper Anarkhiia by the time Cheka shut it down in July 1918. By 1919, he was disillusioned with the opportunities offered by legal work, and helped form the All-Russian Insurgent Committee of Revolutionary Guerrillas. This organization of ‘underground anarchists’ conducted expropriations (some jointly with Maximalists), and on 25  September 1919, bombed the meeting of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party, killing twelve and injuring dozens more. Kovalevich, who edited both issues of the revived Anarkhiia, was killed after resisting arrest in October.93 Many anarchists fighting side by side with Bolsheviks in 1917 found themselves driven underground,

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as the political opportunities opened by the fall of Tsarism were imploding as the Communist regime established itself. Anarchists and related far-left movements (most prominently Maximalists) were not numerically the largest forces in the Russian Revolution but often punched above their weight, serving as catalyst and central element at important conjunctions. Their support was increased because the World War ‘exacerbated the deep polarization in society to a murderous extent’, as Steve Smith noted.94 Anti-militarist considerations soon started to dominate Russian anarchists’ actions, driving their radicalization. Many of them deemed confrontation with the ‘bourgeoisie’ the only way to stop the massacre and move the revolution forward. The Provisional Government first used armed force against a recognized revolutionary organization with seats on the Petrograd Soviet in June 1917, when the Durnovo mansion was raided. Likewise, the Bolshevik Government’s first moves against its Soviet allies were the spring 1918 confrontations with the anarchists and Maximalists. Anarchists were important in the mobilization for the ‘paramilitary’ stage of the civil war, before the Red Army was established, in outlying regions or at crisis moments. After that, the relations between the Communist-led government and the extreme left were often acrimonious. Terrorist methods, developed against Tsarism, were turned against not only White forces but also Communists. Massive insurgencies in Ukraine, Siberia or Kronstadt often used anarchist or maximalist rhetoric. Juri Lotman identified the process of actualization of text, wherein ‘the text which exists in the state of potentiality (the book on a shelf, the as yet unstaged play, and so on) acquires reality in the consciousness of the addresser’.95 Turning linguistic insights into a metaphor, it can be said that texts were often actualized into violence during the revolution. That process was especially short for some anarchists – like Nikiforova turning from oratory to policing action, like Kalandarishvili making graveside vows of revenge reality, like Zhelezniakov pledging to be ready to kill and acting like one of the ‘manual workers of the revolution’ himself. This was all part of the anarchist revolutionary script, which defined and limited political behaviour, although some political positions and political language were shared across the ‘left bloc’ allowing for alliances.96 Lotman identified Russian culture as a binary system, which meant, among other things, strong presence of ‘a desire for the complete apocalyptic destruction of the existing order’ in the moment of explosion, and maximalism that does not recognize the opposing side’s right to exist.97 These components found their fullest expression in the anarchist movement.

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PART THREE

Social Groups

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Working for a workers’ constitution NIKOLAI MIKHAILOV, RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, ST PETERSBURG

The overwhelming majority of objective researchers will not deny that Russian workers were the main driving force of the Russian Revolution. Even so there remain many questions which remain contentious to this day. In particular, how, in a peasant country where the proletariat made up only 15 per cent of the urban population and a proletariat was still in the process of formation with a cultural level leaving much to be desired, could the workers stand at the head of a revolutionary movement and, despite the entreaties of classical Marxism did not stop when in February Tsarism was overturned and the bourgeois-democratic revolution triumphed, but then went on in October to bring about the socialist seizure of power. Russia’s socialist project failed, and it was not Lenin’s prediction of socialist paradise which proved correct but that of Nikolai Berdiaev who thought that in 1917 Russia was not only not ready for a socialist revolution but not even a bourgeois one. ‘It is even possible that the bourgeois way of life in Russia will only appear after the communist revolution. The Russian people have never been bourgeois, never had bourgeois prejudices and never worshipped bourgeois virtues and norms.’1 In historical literature, devoted to the Russian worker, assessments are directly opposed. For some the Russian worker of the early twentieth century is conscious, cultivated, organized and revolutionary; for others backward, illiterate and uncivilized. Quite recently the well-known Russian historian, Boris Mironov decided to subscribe to the negative view. He posed the dilemma in title of his article, referring to the worker as ‘cannon fodder’ and not an active creator of the historic process: ‘By 1917, Russian workers had not formed a class and did not possess a proletarian socialist world view. They played a most active part in the revolutionary movement and the overthrow of the monarchy by reason of their sense of frustration, relative deprivation and unfavourable demographic structure, and because they fell for propaganda and manipulation. It was not because of their good revolutionary organisation or consciousness.’2 Mironov’s article was sharply criticized by the leading Western specialists in the history of the Russian revolution, William Rosenberg, Diane Koenker and Sarah Badcock.3

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WORKERS WERE VARIED: APPROACHING THE PROBLEM OF WORKING-CLASS FORMATION IN RUSSIA Russian workers really were very varied. They were the descendants of serfs forcibly attached to the factory and transformed into workmen. Having received their freedom in 1861, as a rule, former serfs stayed in their former place of work since accommodation, land and a supplementary economy were provided. They were part of the peasant estate, formed part of the peasant commune and benefitted from the rights of peasant self-government. Most lived in workers’ settlements, in their own homes and in the immediate vicinity of the enterprise. This solution to the problem of labour supply was characteristic of the majority of enterprises in the Urals and state military factories in European Russia. Close to Petersburg, such factories as the Sestroretsk Armaments Factory (Sestroretskii oruzheinyi zavod) and the Izhorskii plant in Kolpino fell into this category. By the beginning of the twentieth century many factory villages had been transformed into large settlements, as large as towns in terms of population, but nonetheless maintaining the status of rural settlements. Thus the population pulled in by the armaments factory in Izhevsk in the Urals had reached 150,000 by 1917, a large town with all the attributes of urban life, but administratively a rural settlement in Viatka province.4 In Russia the absence of a fully fledged labour market forced entrepreneurs to establish large-scale enterprises in places where it was easy to find a workforce. Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, largescale private enterprises grew up in the central industrial area and in the south of Russia and these laid the foundations for factory settlements many of which by 1917 had turned into large industrial centres, such as Ivanovo-Voznesensk, OrekhovoZuevo and Iuzovka (Donetsk). Some workers continued to live in their own homes in surrounding villages, but factory-owners also erected barracks for workers from more distant settlements; later on they began to offer loans so that workers could build their own houses close-by; other workers rented accommodation near the factories.5 In 1902 around 70 per cent of factory workers were employed in largescale enterprises (with 1,000 plus workers) which were situated outside the cities.6 The other large group of workers was concentrated in large cities like Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev. Thus on 1 January 1917, in Petrograd and its surroundings, there were 416,500 factory workers, and 70 per cent were employed in 83 enterprises with more than 1,000 workers.7 The workforce of these factories was built at first from former peasants who had come from provinces both near and far, but as their position in the town became more secure, so the number of hereditary workers increased. This process of adaptation to urban industrial life is well known thanks to workers’ memoirs.8 Unqualified workers often came only to earn money over the winter months, returning to their peasant work in the spring; but others got permanent work, went through apprenticeships and settled in town. The transitory workers were satisfied with factory barracks, or renting a corner of a room in an overcrowded flat paid for by the night: a qualified worker was able to rent a separate room and workers with a family often rented an entire flat. The key moment was when workers chose to bind their fate and the fate of their children to the town and

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factory. There were relatively few of this kind of worker at the end of the nineteenth century. According to the 1897 census, in the large cities it was workers who lived on their own who predominated: in Petersburg these made up 86.4 per cent of the total while in Moscow it was 93.1 per cent. In the provinces of central Russia the situation was better, as approximately half of workers lived with their families. In the Kingdom of Poland the number of lone workers was the smallest (25–30.2 per cent) while in Perm province in the Urals the figure was 32.9 per cent. It was normal for most workers to marry early, which conformed to the peasants’ model of marriage. It was only in the Baltic provinces and in Petersburg that it was typical to get married at a significantly higher age.9 Unfortunately, there exist no similar statistics for the two decades after the census. However, judging by indirect data the consolidation of a permanent workforce moved at a fast pace. On the eve of the First World War approximately half the workers in large-scale manufacturing industries had lost their link with the land, or had been born into worker families.10 According to data for 1918, around half the workers in Petrograd had worked in manufacturing industry for more than ten years, and in large- and medium-scale businesses they made up no less than 66 per cent.11 In the country as a whole number of workers living in barracks came down from 34 per cent at the turn of the century to 14 per cent in 1918.12 Data from a trade union survey of 1918 showed that in a whole series of provinces in central Russia about half of workers had their own homes. Moreover, about 10 per cent of workers in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Viatka and Penza provinces lived in homes adjacent to industrial plants and factories, while another 30 per cent of workers in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Tula and Voronezh provinces owned homes near-by.13 On the eve of 1917, Russian workers were a minority of the population. By the most optimistic estimates the number of people living as hired labourers in industry, including unskilled and seasonal workers, reached just over 18 million, which was slightly more than 10 per cent of the population; of them it is estimated that between 3 and 4 million were employed in large-scale industrial production. Because of the German occupation of western regions of the Empire during The First World War, there was an overall reduction in the number of workers, down to 15 million. However, those years also saw the number of workers in large-scale enterprises constantly growing and in 1916 saw a 13 per cent increase on the pre-war level. There was an especially large growth (+65 per cent) in the metalworking industry. Because of the mobilization of male workers, there was also an increase in the proportion of female labour (from 31.2 per cent to 40.1 per cent), as well as that of children and adolescents (from 11.1 per cent to 14.2 per cent).14 In 1897, the length of the working day was set at 11.5 hours. However, by the early twentieth century a nine-hour day was commonplace in the overwhelming majority of state-owned enterprises, while in many textiles factories a three-shift working pattern meant the eight-hour day was adopted. As the research of Iurii Kirianov and Boris Mironov has shown, pay rates grew slowly but steadily until the start of the First World War.15 And workers were far better off than peasants. At the end of the nineteenth century, a peasant family in European Russia would receive two times less for their arable produce than a worker could earn in a moderately sized industrial enterprise.16

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WORKER AND PEASANT Since the process of Russian working-class formation was far from complete on the eve of 1917, the question of workers’ peasant origins has been and continues to be hotly debated in academic literature. Under the influence of Marxism, for a long time the peasant influence on workers was considered to have been negative. The emergence of the working class was seen as one whereby workers overcame a peasant outlook, with its psychology of private ownership; at best honesty and hard work were acknowledged as positive peasant qualities.17 It was only in the 1990s that the notion that peasant origins might have had a positive impact on workers was heard. The traditional conception of the peasants condemned the ambition to accumulate and to make profit. Wealth was always seen as dishonest, as having criminal origins; and they recognized the right to land ownership only for those who worked it. In the peasant economy the coming together of the producer and the means of production happened in the most natural organic way: the peasant was at the same time a proprietor and a worker. Moreover, one working individual combined both command and executive roles, which in industrial society corresponded to opposing social forces. There was a strong levelling mood among the peasantry. The ideal was not the kulak, who made use of hired labour, but the middle peasant whose farm was kept going thanks to the efforts of a large peasant family.18 ‘The spirit of the peasant commune permeated the mentality of society as a whole. It was carried not only by the whole of peasant society but also by the working class of post 1905 Russia, which had just torn itself from the peasantry in the course of one or two generations.’19 The research of Jeffrey Brooks bears witness to how the lower classes of Russia adhered to traditional peasant values. ‘What clearly distinguished Russia was a strongly felt, clearly formulated, and widely-held antipathy to the functioning of the market economy.’20 All too familiar with the manufacturing world of the central industrial region was factory inspector S. Gvozdev, who was struck by the workers’ original views on the organization of factory life. Workers thought that the factory owner did not have the right to close his factory, that if he conducted business badly, his factory would be taken over by the state, that he was obliged to take into the workforce all the surrounding population. They also believed that if a capitalist amassed a lot of money the government would force him to build a factory. Other beliefs included was a factory owner was obliged to have barrack accommodation for workers, that the authorities could force a factory owner to pay higher wages, that the law of 2 June 1903 on compensation for victims of accidents obliged the owner to provide for workers in all cases of invalidity and illness. In short, on these matters workers were like real children, completely unconsciously believing in state socialism. Gvozdev stressed: ‘that this really is a result of their own thinking, and not as the result of having partaken of the fruits of any outside agitation, is clear because even earlier similar views were expressed by workers of the most conservative way of thinking.’21

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Of course, as to their political attitudes, the peasants who filled the factories and industrial enterprises displayed a belief in naïve monarchism, remained religious and had the most wrong-headed notions about political realities.22 From the 1870s, propaganda from the revolutionary intelligentsia familiarized workers in urban centres with socialist ideas. Workers’ groups of the 1880s and 1890s, followed by propaganda from the revolutionary parties (Social Democrats and SRs), influenced the ideological development of the Russian worker.23 Yet, those who participated directly in revolutionary propaganda among workers noted: ‘You could almost openly curse the factory administration, the police and priests, but the Tsar and God were not to be touched. “You can break the cups but don’t touch the samovar!” You could often hear shouts from old men when one of our politically conscious youngsters mocked the Tsar.’ That is how Semon Kanatchikov described the situation at the Moscow factory Gustav Liszt in the 1890s.24 The party intelligentsia was very irritated by the unwillingness of workers to follow the Marxist plan for revolutionary struggle  – first to overturn the autocracy, to achieve political freedoms and establish a democratic system, but thereafter to direct the spearhead of battle against the bourgeoisie. At the turn of the twentieth century, maximalist acts were not part of the agenda and were seen by the Social Demcrata as opportunism or economism. Yet at the same time, back in 1897, the maximalism of the Russian worker was clearly formulated in the newspaper Rabochaia mysl’ (Russian Thought): ‘the main fight of our lives is going on between capitalist and workers’.25 The battle with the government was unavoidable but secondary: ‘It [the government NM] is standing unashamedly on the side of capitalists and with the help of the police and troops, with arms in their hands, try once more to make workers bend under its unbearable strap.’26 The numerous incidents when armed force was used during protests by factory workers provoked strong doubts among workers about the justice of the existing political system. The mass shooting of workers in Petersburg on 9th January 1905, ‘Bloody Sunday’, inflicted a final, deadly blow to any monarchist illusions and opened the way to revolutionary political propaganda. ‘We will no longer have a Tsar’, workers said. ‘The Tsar has done a deal with the bosses and gone over to their side.’– this explanation of the bloody events in the capital, easily grasped by the ordinary worker, was given at a Urals factory by a ‘worker activist’ untouched by the influence of the intelligentsia.27 In February 1917 there were absolutely no supporters of the monarchy among the workers. The second and very important positive aspect to the peasant heritage was their experience of commune self-organization and its associated psychology of commune collectivism. The workers whose origins lay in the peasantry were very familiar with the way the commune functioned. Many workers in the old Urals factories, who had the status of peasants, took direct part in local peasant self-government, replicating practices of the commune at their factories. There were others who, finding themselves in a large urban centre and experiencing psychologically discomfort there, found a replacement for the commune’s sense of solidarity and mutual assistance in the factory collective. Even at the turn of the centuries, this transformation of the ideas and practices of the commune led to the formation of

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well-organized and cohesive industrial collectives which, during any spontaneous protest against the management, could be redirected into a well-organized channel.28 Those researchers into the workers’ movement who have focused on materials of a general nature have overlooked the most important processes which were under way in worker collectives on the eve of and during the 1905 Revolution. Yet, it was precisely at this time that changes of a fundamental nature were in train. Many memoirs bear witness to the replacement of patriarchal relationships with ones which were different. First, workers rid themselves of paternalist illusions about their bosses and started to oust management representatives from those legal organizations established by the owners, such as mutual-aid societies, lending and savings banks, and cooperatives, and to replace them with members elected by workers themselves.29 Second, in place of an informal leadership among workers determined by age and respect for elders, there emerged a young leadership who earned respect from their qualified status and level of culture, and was further strengthened by their readiness to ‘suffer on behalf of society’. This meant fighting for workers’ rights, organizing protests despite the risk of workers losing their jobs or being subjected to punitive measures by the authorities or owners. One such worker activist called the new leaders ‘the indefatigables.’ ‘For the most part they were good workers and people of enormous willpower. With foremen their behaviour was totally relaxed, as they tried to give the appearance of absolutely not needing them, work could be found anywhere at all. If a foreman gave himself airs and tried to show his power they simply thrashed him by waiting at the gates during lunchtime or in the evening and dealt with him there and then for all to see. They always stuck together. If someone decided to leave a factory, they would all leave together …. At times they would express their lack of respect, or more likely protest, not only to the foreman but even to the bosses themselves.’30 This shift towards informal leadership opened up possibilities for revolutionary propaganda. If in the past, a many revolutionaries noted in their memoirs, it had been necessary to hide, to put up posters at night or in the early morning before the shift arrived, by 1905 it became possible to deliver revolutionary addresses openly without fear of being given away to the bosses or the police. Activist-workers, whether party members or not, spoke to workers in the same language. They were more mobile than the vast majority of workers, moving from one factory to another, had contacts with people they knew in the other factories. Without them not a single protest within the city or region would have happened.31 It was precisely they who were in demand from workers during 1905 and its aftermath, when numerous elections took place: to the councils of elders and committees of deputies, to the Bloody Sunday Commission established by Senator N. V. Shidlovskii, to the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, to the Soviet of the Unemployed and for ‘electors’ to participate in the workers’ electoral college for the State Duma. In St Petersburg, the number of these workers’ leaders whom workers trusted to represent their interests in elected bodies could be counted in the thousands. Between 1905 and 1907 many of them were elected more than once. An analysis of these most sought after leaders showed that the overwhelming majority (over 80 per cent) were from 24 to 37 years old and either belonged to the Social Democrat Party (about 65 per cent), the SRs

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(17.5  per  cent) or were party sympathizers.32 In 1917, workers’ leaders stepped into the arena of revolutionary struggle in their tens and hundreds of thousands, representing workers’ interests in strike committees, factory committees, soviets, trade unions, cooperatives and other workers’ organizations. As in 1905 so in 1917, what led to the unprecedented explosion of workers’ organizing activity was the coming together in workers’ collective of, on the one hand, a heterogeneous mass with the commune traditions of self-organization, and, on the other hand, worker socialist leaders who could formulate demands in the workers’ language and thus gain their trust. We should not over-estimate the general level of education and level of culture among Russian workers. We can talk about elementary literacy – the ability to read and write, but among workers it was significantly higher than among peasants. According to the 1897 census literacy of workingmen (59.9 per cent was twice that of the male population of the country (29.3 per cent), while literacy rates among working women (34.9 per cent) was nearly three times that of the female population overall (13.1 per cent). This puts literacy among the working class as a whole at 48 per cent. The materials from the trades union census of 1918 showed a growth in literacy among workers to 64 per cent, to include men (79.2 per cent) and women (44.2 per cent). At 74 per cent the level of literacy in Petrograd workers significantly exceeded all-Russia indicators, indeed in several branches of the economy it approached 100 per cent.33 However, in every collective, even where the majority were poorly qualified workers, something especially prevalent among textile and chemical workers, there was always, an albeit small, but highly qualified group of workers tasked with the maintenance and repair of equipment, or servicing power stations and other pieces of complex equipment. It was they who in the days of revolutionary upheaval filled the ranks of the revolutionary parties and were in demand from the workers. They ensured there was a high level of organization even in those sectors where workers were not noted for their high level of culture. Uniting socialist ideas with the workers’ movement happened not just by drawing in individual workers but through the capture of whole workers’ collectives, who accepted these ideas not so much consciously but as a result of following leaders who had established their authority and enjoyed the trust of the mass of workers. By 1917, Russian workers had already possessed wide experience in organizing protest. Of course, the vast majority of their demands related to cutting the length of the working day, winning pay rises and improving working conditions. Among demands which were related to these economic ones, however, were those which concerned the organization of the labour process. From earliest times in the workers’ movement, there were demands for more courteous attitudes and less rudeness on the part of management representatives. The same could be observed at the high points in the workers’ movement, 1905, after the Lena Gold Fields massacre of 1912, in 1917 and into the early Soviet years.34 Moreover, workers did not only protest about the existence of rules which humiliated the human worth of the workforce, they could propose their own original model for organizing industrial production which at its heart drew on practices common within the peasant world with its

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denial of private property and experience of self-government and self-management, the traditional organization of production through the peasant family, the commune and the co-operative artel’.35 As early as 1905 the principles of a ‘workers’ constitution’ or ‘autonomy’ had been worked out and tested. At its heart lay five basic demands: 1) courteous treatment of workers and the removal of those in management known for their rudeness; 2) elections to workers’ representative bodies and their separation from the management; 3) the right of workers to be part of hiring or firing decisions; 4) the right to participate in drawing up the rules governing internal factory life; 5) the replacement of management control of mutual responsibilities with collective responsibility for maintaining discipline, observing rules and maintaining production. These demands did not have the immediate aim of improving the economic position of the worker, but they did show that neither the existing organizational structures of industrial production nor the position of the worker within it was acceptable.36 The special nature of these demands was immediately noted by the employers, who even in 1905 saw in them interference by workers in the management of companies. They strongly opposed any infringement by workers of the rights of owners. On 28 June 1912 the Petersburg Society of Factory-Owners adopted a special convention forbidding the approval of the demands at the heart of the ‘worker’s constitution’.37 In 1913 statistician with the Moscow Society of Factory-Owners singled out a special group of demands which touched on ‘the moral conditions of work’, while statisticians with the Council of the Congress of Trade and Industry added to workers’ political and economic demands those of a class nature  – ‘demands for the introduction of elders, for courteous treatment’, placing this type of demand in second place after political demands.38 During the 1905 Revolution, the efforts of workers to make progress with their demands for a ‘worker’s constitution’ were not supported by the leaders of leftwing parties, nor were they analysed by party theoreticians. For Marxists it was hard to imagine why workers took so strongly to heart productivity rates, and why they accepted responsibility for maintaining labour discipline, both of which, in their view, were in the interests of the owners and not the workers.39 In 1917 the demand for a ‘workers’ constitution’ resounded so powerfully that it was impossible to ignore.

THE 1917 REVOLUTION In recent years Russian historiography has tended to place the State Duma at the centre of the political history of February 1917 and to hand over the role of the driving force of the revolution to the massed soldiers rather than the workers.40 However, it is hardly possible to ignore the fact that the workers, who made up almost one fifth of the population of the capital, were not just the initiators but the most active and wellorganized participants in the revolution. Most research links the start of the February Revolution with the Putilov strike of 22 February 1917 and with the protests against food shortages by women-workers of Petrograd who had come out onto the streets during the celebration of International Women’s Day on 23 February (8 March in the Western calendar). The women’s demands supported the factory workers and by

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25 February the capital was paralysed by a general strike which on 27 February grew into an armed uprising with the slogan ‘Down with autocracy!’ The demonstration which had started spontaneously, catching even the parties of the left off-guard, quickly took on an organized character. Factory committees were elected at the big plants and it was their representatives who on 27–28 February formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, supplemented on 1 March by deputies from the garrison soldiers. On 2 March 1917 autocracy in Russia fell and a Provisional Government was formed by the Provisional Committee of the State Duma.41 It was thanks to the factory workers that anarchist sentiments did not prevail, industrial enterprises were not destroyed and in the course of one or two weeks after the revolution the economic life of this huge country was restored. Following Petrograd, soviets of workers’ deputies appeared in all large population centres in the country, defining the landscape of political life not only in the capital but in provincial Russia. In the euphoria of the March days of 1917, it was not only the Provisional Government and the SR-Menshevik leadership of the Petrograd Soviet which considered the revolution over, but in accordance with Marxist doctrine so too did the Bolsheviks. However, in the first days right after the overthrow of the monarchy the discontented voices of Petrograd workers began to be heard. They sharply criticized the decision of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies to resume work with no guaranteed eight-hour day, no pay rise and no workers’ self-management. On 5 and 7 March 1917 at sessions of the Soviet’s workers’ section they hotly defended their right to decisive changes in internal factory order and demanded the immediate introduction of a ‘workers’ constitution.’42 Over the next several days the members of the Executive Committee urged the workers to moderate their claims.43 In accounts of these sessions published in the newspaper Izvestiia Petrogradskogo Soveta the differences of opinion between the leadership of the Soviet and the workers were not mentioned.44 At first even the Bolsheviks did not take such demands seriously. At a meeting of the Petersburg Committee on 7 March attention was focused only on the demands for an eight-hour working day, and all that concerned the ‘Workers’ Constitution’ was, as in the past, simply noted in the column economic demands.45 Pressure from below, however, was so strong that for the organs of revolutionary authority there was no alternative but to accede, if only partially, to the claims of the workers. On 10 March 1917 the Soviet concluded an agreement with the Petrograd Society of Factory-Owners about the introduction of an eight-hour day and the organization of factory committees of workers. On 23 April the decree of the Provisional Government ‘On workers’ committees in industrial establishments’ legalized workers’ representation in state and private industry on an all-Russian scale.46

FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE SLOGAN ‘WORKERS’ CONTROL!’ The slogan of ‘workers’ control!’, which Lenin brought into 1917’s political lexicon, covered a multitude of creative acts by workers; because of its generality and the success of Bolshevik propaganda, it was accepted by workers and crowded

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out slogans such as ‘a workers’ constitution’ or ‘autonomy’. The slogan ‘workers’ control!’, as both Russian and foreign researchers attest, found its expression in the activity of factory committees. In the post-soviet period works have appeared which link the creativity of factory committees to the peasant commune and the artel’ tradition, and in so doing some authors assessed this ‘creativity of the masses’ as a manifestation of peasant rebelliousness and a parody of the commune order,47 others as lofty examples of workers’ democracy.48 Lenin formulated the idea of worker’s control in general terms at the end of March and in early April, as part of the process of the bourgeois-democratic revolution growing into a socialist revolution; at that time the factory committee movement was already established in a number of factories throughout the country. At first, setting out the slogans ‘all power to the soviets’ and ‘workers’ control of production’, Lenin had no concept of this control taking place at the level of the industrial enterprise. What he spoke of was a move towards control ‘over the social production and distribution of goods’ on the part of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, as organs of revolutionary power, that is a form of centralized, state control.49 Once he had returned to Petrograd, and quickly assessed how the continuance of ‘dual power’ complicated the political situation and prevented the early transfer of all power to the soviets, Lenin addressed the Bolshevik City Conference, 14–22 April 1917, about the idea of moving the revolution to the localities. On 14 April he noted: ‘we must be centralized, but there are moments when our tasks take us to the localities and we must allow the maximum local initiative’.50 At the Seventh (April) Conference, 24–29 April, he enumerated the measures needed ‘to move the revolution forward … in the localities’, while the notes for his thesis listed ‘power?, land?, factories?’, and above that ‘factories, control over them’.51 On 14 May Lenin wrote that the right of workers’ control should be implemented not only through the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies but also through ‘a soviet of workers in each factory’.52 On 19 May the Petersburg Committee, ‘in answer to approaches from party committees within factories’ recommended that ‘worker comrades should establish control councils (soviets) in factories from worker representatives.53 And finally, in his speech to the First Petrograd Conference of Factory Committees on 31 May, Lenin was already insisting that factory administrations should implement workers’ demands when he demanded ‘that administrations report on their actions to all the most authoritative workers’ organisations.’54 In this way the demand for ‘a workers’ constitution’ was transformed into Marxist language, yet the slogan ‘workers’ control!’ was seen by workers as a synonym for ‘a workers’ constitution’. The Bolsheviks used and encouraged the factory committee movement, granting ‘maximum initiative in the localities’, taking on merit the high degree of self-organization among workers, their potential for powerful protest and radicalism, behind which stood extreme-minded anti-bourgeois workers, ready to interfere with the organization of production and, objectively, to tear apart ‘bourgeois’ relationships and create conditions for mass political mobilization. After the July Crisis, when the Bolsheviks dropped the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ and adopted the course of armed uprising, Lenin insisted on the necessity of transferring the centre of gravity of party work to the factory committees. As

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the Bolshevik activist Sergo Ordzhonikidze recalled, Lenin stated that the factory committees would be transformed into organs of insurrection.55 The overall picture of the factory committee movement was very complex and contradictory. Driving out those members of the administration accused of behaving coarsely towards workers, and going on to establish factory committees, took place everywhere, not just in Petrograd but in the provinces. In some enterprises workers took control of hiring and firing; at others workers drew up their own rules and regulations and oversaw their observance. There were incidents when, without the agreement of the workers, owners could not move their finished product. Very often factory committees concerned themselves with the supply of fuel and raw materials, so as to ensure the uninterrupted operation of their factories. There were famous occasions when workers drew up plans for the modernization of production, and there were attempts to take under control the financial side of factory activity.56 Today the researcher is faced with such a variety of forms and powers exercised by factory committees that at times is seems impossible to determine general features. The picture becomes somewhat clearer if the concept of ‘a workers’ constitution’ is used as an analytical tool. Then it becomes clear that the variety of forms had its origins in the nature of the struggle between workers and employers or the administrators of state enterprises. Not always and not everywhere were workers able to win their full demands, from top to bottom. Factory owners fought against worker interference with particular ferocity, because they saw it as a challenge to their private property rights. Employers’ associations, like the Society of Factory and Mill Owners, agreed to cut short any attempt by workers to interfere with factory management or squeeze the rights of property owners. Quite often, especially in the provinces, they were successful. Owners blackmailed workers, openly threatening to close production or engaging in hidden sabotage. Thus, the Society of Factory and Mill Owners for Ivanovo-Voznesensk district made concessions on the eighthour day and an increase in wages, it accepted the existence of factory committees, but it determinedly resisted all moves to interfere in factory management. The factory committee of the Kuvaevskii Mill in Ivanovo-Voznesensk raised with the management the question of transferring to it the power to hire and fire; this happened on 2 June, 1 August and then on 10 August it asserted that if the right to hire and fire were not granted, ‘it would take that right through direct action’.57 At a factory committee conference in Tver, 12–14 October, it was noted that the factory committees at the Morozov factory and the electricity station had been unable to persuade the management to give them power over hiring and firing.58 It was above all in state enterprises at which there had been a tradition of worker representation that the norms of the ‘worker constitution’ were successfully introduced. Many of these went over to full worker self-management. According to the calculations of M. L. Itkin, such enterprises accounted for 4.3 per cent of the total, but in certain parts of the country accounted for considerably more. Thus in the Urals, 13.1 per cent of factories went over to workers’ self-management. Here, there is no doubt that the special situation for factory workers reflected rights gained through peasant self-management. A considerable number of enterprises, 42.3 per cent, accepted the basic demand of the ‘worker constitution’  – control over the

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internal workings and personnel.59 Most of all, factory committees grew up in those enterprises with the most qualified workers, among metal workers and printers. In a review for the Ministry of Trade and Industry on the situation in Petrograd’s enterprises, issued on 24 March, it was reported: ‘It has been observed that the influence of committees is greater, the more conscious the workers are: thus their influence is considerable in metalworking factories, but almost nil in those industrial operations where the majority of workers have a low cultural level.’60 The greatest successes were achieved in large enterprises. Among the smaller and middle-sized ones, the creation of factory committees only really got under way after October.61 In those areas where soviets took on leading the factory committee movement, workers’ organizations grew up not only at large but at smaller ones as well. In Saratov, where the local soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies had recognized the decision to establish factory committees at its first meeting in March, factory committees had been established everywhere, including small enterprises, within two months.62 In Petrograd, where the soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies had taken on the status of an all-Russian body, it distanced itself from the factory committees and frequently ignored their demands; in parallel to the soviet, district factory committees and trade factory committees were formed, until on 3 June a city-wide organization was established, the Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees. It was made up of thirteen district councils, uniting factory committees in 350 enterprises. By October, at least ninety-five unions of factory committees operated in various districts of the country, of which seventy-five were based on territory (district, region, province or city), nine were based on trade and eleven on production. In October, at the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees, held in Petrograd on 17–22 October, the All-Russian Central Council of Factory Committees was established as the movement’s leading centre.63 The names of these leadership bodies might differ – factory committee, council of elders, committee, soviet or commission of deputies  – as well as the methods of the formation, for the structure of factory workers’ organizations could differ from factory to factory, but everywhere the principle of election was observed, along with a clear hierarchy. The most important questions were decided at general meetings, while day-to-day matters were handled by the factory committee which, as a rule, chose from its membership a presidium or executive committee. Members of the factory committee then formed commissions to organize its work. Later, this spontaneously evolved organizational method was formulated in the ‘Draft Rules of Factory Committees, drawn up by the Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees’ and confirmed at the Second Conference of Factory Committees on 12 August.64 Since the factory committees often carried out representative functions at various meetings (according to trade or district), and then at city conferences of factory committees, the very name ‘factory committees’ became a synonym for city-wide organization. Within the enterprise, the factory committee was simply the leading body of the workers, implementing the will of the general meetings, which took place quite often. Thus, in the three and a half months between 14 March and 1 July, there were twenty-three general meetings at the Metal Working Factory

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(Metallicheskii zavod), and twenty-seven sessions of the council of elders.65 That means that general meetings were being held once or twice a week, and no serious issue in the life of the factory could be decided without the workers taking part. The factory committee at the New Admiralty works (Novoe Admiralteistvo), judging from the record-keeping of its protocols, met on average nine times a month, two to three times a week between the start of March and 25 October. The factory committee at the Galernyi Island (Galernyi ostrovok) works held on average twelve meetings a month, or three per week. The factory committee of the Okhtenskii Ammunition Shop (the former Kreiton factory, part of the Admiralty Factory) met fifteen times a month, three or four times a week. On top of this, there were at least eleven joint sessions of these three factory committees.66 Those researching the factory committee movement have noted that, at many enterprises, workers rejected the notion of full workers’ self-management. There were well-known incidents, like when in Petrograd, because the management of the Artillery Department had fled workers were forced to take over the administration of its enterprises, but returned them once a new management had been formed. However, such actions did not mean that these workers rejected the ‘workers’ constitution’. Thus workers at the Arsenal of Peter the Great factory rejected full workers’ self-management from the very start. Nevertheless, by May its factory committee had economic, technical and management sections; the latter was concerned with ‘the assessment, recruitment and dismissal of tradesmen and workers’.67 At the Cartridge Factory (Patronnyi zavod), when workers returned to work after the February events, they were forced to take over running the enterprise, but on 31 March returned the factory to a new management. Nevertheless, by April each workshop had a workers’ commission which oversaw internal discipline including the setting of wage rates.68 Whether or not the principles of workers’ self-management were deeply embedded in enterprises, workers everywhere showed a genuine interest in questions of production. Even where there was no mention of full self-management, factory committees established production and technical commissions and settled in to solving the problems faced by enterprises, such as the supply of raw materials. Similarly, where self-management was implemented, workers took to these matters with enthusiasm. At the Sestroretsk Arms Factory (Sestroretskii oruzheinyi zavod) the factory committee met every day, imitating the factory management, and considered any question concerning both the productive and socio-political life of the enterprise. There was a material difference in approach between the Provisional Government and the factory committee leaders when it came to the worker question. The government proposed the principle of mutual agreement between employers (management) and workers. Conflicts would be considered in conciliation chambers, where the two sides to the conflict could air their views through trade unions and employers’ organizations. The workers’ position on labour-management relations was simple: ‘all decisions of the factory committees are mandatory, for both workers and employees, just as they are for management and the factory administration, until they are revoked by the committee, a general meeting or the Central Council of Factory Committees.’69 This decision was contained in the ‘Draft Rules of Factory Committees’.

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Many researchers consider that worker interference in directing production in Petrograd did not in fact have negative consequences; the fall in the productivity of labour and the cut backs in production had other causes which did not depend on the action of workers.70 Nevertheless, it has to be recognized that workers organizing on the principles espoused in the ‘workers’ constitution’ had a contradictory impact. The isolated, autonomous existence of workers did not correspond well to the structure of the modern industrial enterprise with its complex division of labour. If the workers really could stand apart from the factory management, interacting with them as a united whole, then middle management inevitably became fully dependent on the workers, they should be managing. ‘In an individual factory, where a foreman, before fulfilling an instruction from the management, turned to the workers for guidance, is the management then not being confronted by hindrance from workers in the fulfilment of instructions?’71 Unlike in the peasant artel’, where production discipline was rigorously maintained, among workers the principle of collective responsibility and collective guarantees rather than management control was not so effective. Negative tendencies, linked to the breaking of rules concerning internal order, grew and factory committees were forced not only to return to the disciplinary measures against which they had once fought, but to introduce even firmer measures of punishment. Those unpopular measures, to which the factory committees were forced to resort, led to conflict between the working mass and the leaders, prompting the mechanism for deselecting representatives. On 20 June I. Davidov, the chairman of the factory committee at the Admiralty Shipbuilding Factory (Admiralteiskii sudostroitel’nyi zavod) on Galernyi island, announced his resignation ‘in view of an attack from the workers’.72 ‘Even elected worker representatives are suffering repression from the workers’, was a comment at a meeting of the Putilov Factory factory committee on 13 September.73 In August, the whole complement of the factory committee at the Arsenal of Peter the Great resigned, and all its members without exception refused to stand for re-election. ‘If at the general meeting they had not poured slops over the whole factory committee’, then we would not have resigned, one of its members explained.74 On 28 July, working women from the shell workshop of the Cartridge Factory (snariazhatel’naia masterskaia Patronnogo zavoda), called before the factory committee, refused to discuss the matter in hand, were aggressive and made threats to members of the factory committee: ‘we have already got the commission for internal order by the throat, and we’ll soon turn on you!’75

FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE TRADE UNIONS Unlike the factory committees, created by workers spontaneously in a compressed timescale, the rebirth of the trade unions, destroyed during the years of the First World War, demanded a much more complex and drawn-out process, which lasted for from a few weeks to a few months. Nevertheless, spring 1917 saw the large-scale construction of trade unions and by the time the Third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions began in Petrograd, on 21–18 June, there were not less than 967 trade unions, uniting 1.5 million members. Those trade union veterans, who had

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first headed the trade unions during the 1905 Revolution, played a large role in this rebirth. The leading role was played by the Central Bureau of Trade Unions, formed on 15 March. From the end of May it was led by D. B. Riazanov (then a non-faction Social Democrat, but in August 1917 joining the Bolsheviks). By June central bureaux existed in fifty-one towns, and by a decision of the Third All-Russian Conference, these were renamed trade union councils. The conference also established an All-Russian trade union centre, the provisional All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), composed of sixteen Bolsheviks, sixteen Mensheviks and three SRs. The leading posts were all taken by right-wingers: the president was the Menshevik, V. Grinevich, his deputies the Menshevik V. Chirkin and Riazanov, the secretary the Social Democrat Internationalist S. Lozovsky, and the treasurer, the Menshevik M. Kammermakher-Kefali.76 In spite of the fact that from the very start trade union activists called for the creation of production-based unions, the lack of experienced organizers meant that trade union construction during the first months was a haphazard affair. With rare exceptions, workers joined unions because of their trade and not according to the production principle. In this way, in any individual enterprise workers belonged not to one union, as supporters of production-based unions proposed, but to many unions, according to their individual trades. The result was a number of ‘dwarf unions’, uniting just a few workers in one factory and weakening labour representation. As in 1905, unions for servants, shopworkers and the handicraft trades were slow to form, and in the big enterprises, the trade unions did not have the authority and influence of the factory committees. In spite of the rapid growth of the Petrograd Metal Workers’ Union with 70,000 members at the end of April and 212,000 by October, the union did not have a firm rank-and-file base, and the best the trade union committees could do at factory level was to take second rank alongside the factory committees.77 The chaotic character of workers’ organizational creativity, seen in the spring and summer, created odd combinations at grass root level. At one of Petrograd’s largest enterprises, the Triangle (Treugol’nik) rubber goods factory, there existed at the same time a factory council of elders, shop committees, a soviet of workers’ deputies (giving representation to the City Soviet), a union of foremen and white-collar workers, a chemical workers’ union and party organizations of SR, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Such a situation gave birth to muddle, duplication and conflict. However, the factory committee could lord it over all other internal factory organizations, which could not really compete with it and therefore guaranteed worker unity on the most important questions of both internal factory and political life.78 Of the trade unions established at this time, that with the most influence was the Petrograd Printer’s Union, led by the Mensheviks, which even in 1905 had discovered an original form of organization, combining the principles of a west European trade union (individual membership, regular payment of dues) and the trade unity of the factory committees (collective representation in ruling bodies, special financial collections). Although the Menshevik leaders of the territorially based trade union councils and the individual union were categorically opposed to workers’ control in the localities, in reality in many factories where the Mensheviks

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predominated, the ‘workers’ constitution’ was as firmly rooted as in factories under Bolshevik control. Thus, in the first days after February, workers at the Petrograd State Publishing House got rid of the boss and the most unpleasant members of the leadership, and selected their own representatives to these positions, electing a council of elders, which operated according to ‘autonomous rules’; in August 1917 it was renamed the ‘autonomy commission’. ‘All decisions of the council of elders on small matters and all its resolutions on general questions, confirmed by a general meeting, are considered obligatory for all those working in the State Publishing House’, this was published on 1 May in the Herald of the Council of Elders of the State Publishing House, making absolutely clear that management was subject to the views of the workforce. A general meeting of workers in the State Publishing House passed a resolution obliging all workers to join the Print Workers’ Union, but it did so without consulting the union’s leadership, as happened on a number of other matters. Thus, without waiting for the conclusion of talks between the Print Workers’ Union leadership and the employers concerning a pay agreement, the council of elders enforced its own agreement three months ahead of the union, resulting in an illegal overpayment of 200,000 roubles.79 The trade unions and factory committees had very similar tasks. Both were concerned with increasing pay and improving conditions at work, establishing pay structures and concluding collective agreements, defending workers from dismissal and negotiating with management during industrial disputes. The trade union leaders, staring from the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, at the end of May and early June, tried at every workers’ congress or conference to campaign for the factory committees to be made subject to the trade unions, serving as their rankand-file organizations. But the leaders of the factory committees rejected this idea, up until January 1918. In the opinion of D. O. Churakov, the organizational rivalry between factory committees and the trade unions reflected ‘one of those moments in Russian history when traditionalism and westernising tendencies clashed’.80 As Anna Pankratova quite correctly observed back in the 1920s, the factory committees and the trade unions represented two completely separate forms of worker organization.81 The factory committees were much better suited to revolutionary times, and much more effective organizations than the trade unions. Their advantage came from their use of collective practices to which Russian workers were already well used, which involved workers taking part in managing production, going far beyond the bounds which trade union organizations found acceptable. These principled differences between factory committees and trade unions inevitably took on a political colouring. Encouraging workers in their struggle for a ‘workers’ constitution’, the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, SR Maximalists and Anarchists inevitably fostered the radicalization of the labour movement, and the extreme exacerbation of class contradictions. The right-wing socialists, the Mensheviks and SRs, leaders of the soviets and the trade unions, made despairing attempts not to allow worker interference in the management of enterprises, condemned the ‘dangerous partisanship’ of the factory committees, explained the maximalism of the workers by their cultural backwardness and categorically rejected workers’ control in the localities, insisting on the idea of centralized workers’ control, and, as the

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main method of defending the interests of workers against the employers suggested talks with equal representation on both sides, resolving disagreements in conciliation chambers; trade union-led strikes were permitted only as a last resort when all other methods of defending the workers had failed. ‘The struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the mass worker’s movement’, according to Pankratova, ‘thus took on not only the form of political struggle within the trade unions but also a struggle between the predominantly Menshevik trade unions and the predominantly Bolshevik factory committees.’82 The growth of this maximalist mood among the workers made possible not only the bolshevization of the soviets, but also the bolshevization of the leading trade union bodies. In autumn 1917 the Bolsheviks were able to strengthen considerably their positions in the majority of trade unions in industrial centres, particularly in Petrograd. In elections to the executive of the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions on 26 September its new composition was seventeen Bolsheviks and only six places for the Mensheviks. By that time Petrograd Bolsheviks had a majority on the ruling boards of the main branch trade unions, the metal workers and the textile workers. The Mensheviks retained a majority in the print workers and chemical workers, while the SRs had the transport workers, leather workers and builders. Menshevik representation in the factory committees, at any level, was minimal. The vast majority were controlled by the Bolsheviks, with broad representation also for the Left SRs, SR Maximalists and Anarchists.83 Mutual interactions between the trade unions and factory committees were sporadic in character; in July and early August the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions more than once discussed its relationship with the factory committees, but no meaningful results were achieved.84 Only the political crises in early July and the end of August, the July Days and the Kornilov Affair, pushed the leaderships of the trade unions and the factory committees to join forces. On 6–7 July and on 24, 26 and 29 August, the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions and the Central Council of Factory Committees held joint sessions, at which the current political situation was discussed and moves taken to coordinate the workers’ organizations of Petrograd in the struggle against counter-revolution.85

COUNTER-REVOLUTION, OCTOBER AND LIBERATED LABOUR After the July Days, the Provisional Government went on to the attack against those workers’ rights won in the first months of the revolution. The so-called ‘Skobelev orders’ of 23 and 28 August, introduced by the Menshevik Minister of Labour Matvei Skobelev, were aimed at the very basis of the ‘workers’ constitution’ and, coinciding with General Kornilov’s rebellion, were seen by workers as counter-revolutionary. In Petrograd the government were disarming the workers’ militia. The employers not only categorically refused the workers’ demand for salary protection against inflation, but even annulled earlier increases. They were not satisfied by blocking the broadening of workers’ rights as understood by the ‘workers’ constitution’ but insisted on restoring full management control over production. Thus, at the end of July, the board of the Bogoslovskii Mineral Division (Bogoslovskii gornyi okrug)

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made it a condition of continued employment that workers should not only refrain from any interference in managing its enterprises but also accept the loss of those rights achieved by force and even those concessions won ‘through conciliation’, i.e. entirely legally.86 Many employers were not satisfied with threats or hidden sabotage, but moved to close production completely. Throughout the country, between March and September, 799 enterprises were closed, at which 165,372 workers had been employed.87 The workers responded to the employers with strikes. On the eve of October, the most bitter clashes, characterized by extreme enmity and hostility, took place in the provinces. A leather workers’ strike took place from 16 August until 23 October, beginning in Moscow and then spreading nationwide. A general strike by railway workers began on the night of 24 September. There was a general strike of textile workers throughout the Central Industrial Region from 21 October until 17  November. In September–October workers took strike action in Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan’, Baku, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, Odessa, the Donbas, Kiev and many other towns. Those taking part reached numbers unheard of earlier in the year, more than one million workers in a month. Often workers took over the enterprises completely: they set up armed pickets, they took over the telephone system, and they protected the enterprise’s property, not allowing any goods or fuel to leave.88 The Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which went over to the Bolsheviks on 19 October, passed a resolution permitting the arrest, by workers, of any employers suspected of sabotage, and on 24 October declared it legal for factory committees to be involved in hiring and firing.89 In October 1917, the Bolsheviks came to power because their slogans – ‘Peace to the World!’, ‘Land to the Peasants!’ and ‘Factories to the Workers!’ - chimed with the longings of the broad popular masses, workers included. On 26 or 27 October, that is literally on the day after the proclamation of soviet power, at a meeting of the Central Council of Factory Committees in the presence of Lenin and Petrograd workers, the leaders of the factory committees proposed uniting the function of workers’ control with the function of regulating the economy by establishing a provisional All-Russian Council of the National Economy. On 29 October the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin’s new government, passed the decree on the eight-hour day, but postponed the question of workers’ control because of serious disagreements among those involved in the discussions.90 As Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife, recalled: ‘Some of the comrade spoke of the necessity for state control, which would replace spontaneous workers’ control, which meant factories and mines being seized here, there and everywhere. Others thought that control was not needed in every factory, but only the big metal-working plants, the railways and so on.’ In the end, Lenin’s view prevailed, which ‘proposed that this matter should not be squeezed, that workers’ initiative should not be put within limits. May be much will not turn out as it should, but it is only through struggle that workers will learn about real control.’91 Published on 14 November, the ‘Decree on Workers’ Control’, on the one hand envisaged a return to the idea of centralized workers’ control on an All-Russian scale, but on the other broadened workers’ control in the localities, extending it to all the

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enterprises in the land. The resolution put the activity of factory organizations led by factory committees on a legal basis and awarded them those rights which workers had strived for since March 1917. All the laws and government circulars limiting the activity of factory committees were repealed. Decisions taken by workers’ control bodies were declared obligatory for the owners of enterprises.92 The ‘Decree on Workers’ Control’, which also established an All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control, gave workers collective rights to dictate their conditions to owners and the management of state enterprises, and this undoubtedly continued the Bolshevik line of enflaming class antagonisms in the localities and opened the way for workers to seize private enterprises and their consequent and inevitable nationalization. Lenin presented a draft for the general nationalization of production to a meeting held in December 1917. Although even the Left Communists headed by Valerian (N.) Osinskii would not then support Lenin’s push for the headlong socialization of production, these proposals from the head of the Soviet Government were all implemented in the course of 1918.93 In State and Revolution, written in August– September 1917, Lenin noted that ‘accounting and control, that is mainly what is needed for the “smooth working”, for the proper functioning of the first phase of a communist society’. Furthermore, the accounting and control necessary for this, in Lenin’s view, ‘have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations – which any literate person can perform – of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic and issuing appropriate receipts’.94 Lenin’s thought about the simple management of industry, in a surprising way was shared by workers in their conviction that they were able independently to cope with the management of their factories. On 2 December the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) was established, and the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control was made part of it; in this way the idea of uniting workers’ control with the economic management of the country was put into life.95 In spite of protests from the Mensheviks and some Bolsheviks, the First Congress of Trade Unions, held in Petrograd on 7–14 January 1918, made the trade unions organs of economic management. This decision was taken out of necessity. Given the weakness of the new state administrative bodies, the Soviet Government was forced to use the existing structures of workers’ organizations and concede state authority to them.96 In March 1918 Lenin wrote: ‘the socialist organisation of production at the all-state level is this: workers’ organisations (trade unions and factory committees) manage, under the generally leadership of Soviet power, the only sovereign power.’97 The decision of the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions on merging the trade unions and the factory committees was supported by the Sixth Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees on 22–27 January 1918 and in the course of that year factory collectives headed by factory committees were transformed into the grassroots cells of the trade unions, organized along industrial lines.98 Taking control of workers’ collectives in every enterprise in the country, the trade unions greatly strengthened their influence. But along with rank-and-file organizations headed by the factory committees, they inherited a vast spectrum of problems, which workingclass creativity inevitably threw up. The Russian trade unions of that time had very

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little in common with the classic trade unions of the Western European type, by their very nature they remained factory committees in type. The change in name did not change the nature of workers’ collectives, or workers’ perceptions of the just organization of factory life. The sincere interest of workers in the management of enterprises and their willingness to take responsibility for production results gave birth to the hope that it would be possible to organize production on new, communist principles. However, the practice of workers’ selfmanagement during the first years of Soviet power bears witness to the utopian nature of these hopes. The tendency to equalize wages and the suspicion and mistrust shown towards ‘specialists’, who workers considered alien class elements, both impacted negatively on production. Mixing together in the workers’ collective the functions of distribution, implementation and control fostered a lack of responsibility, made worse by the system of collegial management. The inability of workers to maintain an acceptable level of labour discipline and labour productivity became the most serious problem when organizing production in the new conditions of ‘liberated labour’ and building the basis of a socialist economy.99 The vast majority of those who research labour history have not noticed, and still do not notice the contradictory nature of worker’s production democracy, which tried to combine workers’ known and archaic practices with organizing contemporary industrial production.100 The work of Diane Koenker on labour relations in the Soviet print industry is a rare exception. Although the author does not link the peculiarities of Soviet production democracy to the traditional understandings of workers, her observations speak for themselves. Koenker showed convincingly that the introduction of the Soviet system of labour relations was determined not simply by communist dictates ‘but within the limits of what I have labelled the communists’ participatory dictatorship, printers engaged actively in efforts to control their workplace and to elaborate their own vision of socialist culture’. The complex process of management at enterprise level deepened the contradictory consciousness of the workers themselves: ‘For the workers in the printing industry, socialism meant both a rational centralised economic authority and the recognition of their right to control their workplace, lives and work processes. These two goals may have been exclusive; certainly they were difficult to achieve together.’101 The above noted contradictions and the undoubtedly independent nature of working-class creativity throw doubt on the prevalent assertion that the Bolsheviks were all-powerful and played a defining role in the establishment and activity of working-class organizations. Workers and workers’ collectives without doubt acted as independent subjects in the revolutionary process, and the leaders of political parties both in 1917 and the early years of Soviet power had to engage with them. By freeing the workers’ hands in autumn 1917, the Bolsheviks achieved in a short time the fulfilment of their programmatic aims – the destruction of private ownership of the means of production and the nationalization of industry. Then, disappointed by the ability of workers, under a system of workers’ democracy, to increase productivity in the wake of the destruction left by the war, they resorted, as the country slipped into civil war, to the militarization of labour.

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By 1921 things had changed. The industrial workforce had fallen by 50 per cent.102 As the Bolsheviks strengthened the state and party apparatus, they gradually distanced workers and trade unions from any real participation in the running of factories. Instead, they introduced forms of industrial relations which permitted some imitation of participation, replacing any real influence of workers in management with forms which ritually allowed workers to preserve their sense of participation in matters of production. This challenge to the ‘workers’ constitution’ helps understand the motives of worker protests in the early Soviet period, which served as a breeding ground for numerous party discussions during the civil war and in the 1920s about the role of trades unions and workers’ democracy.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Peasants in the Russian Revolution: Adaption, anxiety, action PETER FRAUNHOLTZ, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

Russian peasants widely accepted the fall of the Tsar and the founding of the provisional government. Nicholas’ abdication and the collapse of the old regime created the potential for recasting Russia and brought the Russian peasantry into the multifaceted project of continuing the war effort while rebuilding political institutions and political authority across rural Russia. The power dynamic between state and peasants in 1917 was, to a significant extent, a continuation of the struggles between the two to define themselves and each other and of peasant’s rational effort to wield some degree of influence over their lives when the power of the state was overwhelming. While perceived by their late-tsarist era superiors as backwards and insular, in fact, peasants had gained considerable experience interacting with state institutions that had come to penetrate rural Russia over the previous decades. How they understood the possibilities of 1917 was significantly shaped by their experience of the Great War, of the thirty-plus years of state and elite efforts to make backward peasants modern, and of the enduring ramifications of the emancipation settlement of 1861. They had grown accustomed to, even skilled, at engaging with the agendas of their political superiors and social betters over the decades. Individually and collectively, peasants were prepared to articulate and defend their interests and proved ready to participate in the revolution on their own terms, in spite of the renewed state and elite efforts to mould peasants into ‘responsible citizens’. Peasants were rational actors capable of shaping their own lives rather than being mere products of their environment and those who would instruct them from above. Comprising roughly 80 per cent of the population of the Russian Empire, peasants played a significant and complex role in determining how the revolutionary dynamics of 1917 evolved. From the 1870s up through 1917, peasant villages became increasing fractious as they became integrated into the evolving Russian state and economy. Scholars have begun to challenge enduring notions such as ‘insular peasant culture’, ‘peasant backwardness’ and the First World War as a ‘watershed’

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moment for Russia’s peasants.1 Greater heed is paid to the challenges of penetrating the peasants’ world, given that so much of the source material created and used subsequently to understand peasant life was generated by socially and politically superior non-peasants.2 In recent years, scholars have shifted the focus away from the major cities and explored the ways local conditions shaped how the revolution played out in the provinces.3 In many important respects, peasants were driven by powerful decades-long swells of social, economic and political change that came to crest across 1917.4

CHANGING LANDSCAPE, PEASANT ADAPTION, CONTENTIOUS VILLAGE The rural landscape was significantly reshaped by the Emancipation settlement. The division of estate lands allows the gentry to keep the best land as its own private property, leaving the rest for the peasants’ communal property. Private and communal land was ‘highly intertwined’ to facilitate peasant renting of gentry land.5 From 1861 onward, peasants owed redemption payments for their land as well as other collective obligations. The peasant commune’s main contribution to peasant life involved risk sharing and resource allocation while administering collective obligation amidst demographic and economic change.6 Repartitioning was an important mechanism for matching resources and obligations in households whose composition and number of working-age adults changed over time.7 Pressure for repartitions stemmed from the growing number of younger military veterans without enough land to feed their families.8 Andrew Verner argues that the regime’s November 1905 Manifesto suspending redemption payments was interpreted by peasants as eliminating communal repartition since there would no longer be sufficient linkage between households’ landholdings and financial obligations.9 As Judith Pallot maintains, ‘these functions were lost on critics of the practice who, instead, concentrated in their analysis on demonstrating repartition’s harmful impact on peasant farming’.10 Nonetheless, many communes relied less on full partitions and increasingly more on partial repartitioning in the decades prior to 1914.11 The debate continues about the extent and nature of peasant impoverishment. Some scholars reject the notion that the growing frequency of sharecropping, land rental or hired labour were signs of backwardness, impoverishment or exploitation. These are seen instead as positive indicators of agricultural progress.12 Indeed, peasants who rented out land retained communal rights to it and bore the financial burden associated with the allotment.13 Yet across the Black Earth region, signs of land hunger and impoverishment emerged as rapid population growth left households with smaller allotments and greater reliance on costly rented land to achieve their subsistence.14 Yet from 1861 to 1914, Russian peasants adapted to rapidly changing conditions.15 Russia’s industrial modernization and expanding export agriculture created opportunities for peasant off-farm earnings. In the central region, peasants who worked in local textile mills were mainly young adults-males and females.16 The younger generation of working-age peasants now had multiple ways of contributing

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to the household’s net income. Southern Ukraine and Southeast Russia, with access to railroad and ports, became the main regions of commercial grain production reliant on migrant labor.17 In Kharkiv province, rural areas with smaller household landholdings tended to rely much more on off-farm earnings, as day-wage labourers on local estates or in rural industries or mining.18 The increasingly significant role of cash earnings in the peasant household budget was among the main indications of a broad transition for peasants from subsistence agriculture towards a market economy.19 The growing impact of such income earning on household budgets may well have reduced internal pressure for more frequent general repartitioning of communal land and obligations.20 Migration dynamics also produced or exacerbated existing divisions among the peasants. From the 1890s, peasant migration in search of factory work exposed more peasants to city life.21 Lutz Häfner refers to migrant workers as ‘transcultural individuals’, who ‘functioned as bridge builders and middlemen between rural and urban culture’.22 Otkhod also contributed to the longstanding distrust between absentee and resident villagers.23 In the case of longer duration male out-migration, women were left to manage the household and field work. In their husbands’ absence, women often played a more significant role in the village community.24 Despite taking on field work, according to Barbara Engel, women had more personal autonomy and a voice in the village assembly.25 Alternately, the wife of the younger seasonal labourer ‘was defenceless’ within the multigenerational household in his absences and subject to various kinds of abuse at the hands of her in-laws.26 One increasingly frequent result was razdel or the partitioning of the multi-generational household. The younger generation in the mutigenerational household, especially younger daughters-in-law, increasingly saw partitioning as a viable path towards greater control over their own lives.27 Indeed, off-farm earnings provided ‘a cushion of insurance against financial disaster’ for the young man considering splitting off from his parents’ household.28 Nonetheless, the economic viability of a household composed of just one working couple was a risky proposition. Robert Johnson found that multi-generational households were most often the most prosperous due to the labour of young married couples, whereas the poorest lacked daughters-in-law.29 Despite these risks, data from several provinces indicate a more than a three-decade long decline in average peasant household size.30 Peasant lives were also shaped by increasing state penetration into the countryside and elite modernization projects in the decades before 1917. Seeking to fortify state authority in rural Russia in the late 1880s, the Interior Ministry established the Land Captain, sub-district officials, out of concern that rural districts contained too many villages to be adequately administered.31 In the same reformist vein, the state afforded peasants an appeal process by which to contest volost court rulings, thus becoming ‘an important point of contact between villagers and the state’.32 Land disputes contributed to the increasing number of peasants seeking resolution from the volost’ courts.33 Based on evidence from the numerous appeals filed by peasants, Gareth Popkins concludes that ‘litigants’ behavior … frequently confounded the image of the ignorant, tradition bound peasant’.34 From 1908 to 1916 the Stolypin reforms aimed to pull individual peasants out of their traditional land use practices

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and erode the authority of the commune itself. Typically, a peasant’s arable land consisted of numerous strips, scattered across multiple fields of varying soil quality.35 During these years roughly 3 million households adapted to the reforms’ options for landholding – gaining title to their strips; being impacted by a commune’s group land settlement; using their land to form an enclosed farm.36 David Macey maintains that ‘peasants could simultaneously both retain a residual dream of a chernyi peredel or “black repartition” … and seek to become individual farmers and private property owners’.37 Yet, the options created by the reforms exacerbated pre-existing tensions within the village community. Migrant workers feared there would be no land fund left for their eventual return while resident villagers worried that if ‘absentees succeeded in receiving an allotment, they would only take out title and sell out’, thus diminishing the communal land pool.38 Following the lead of social anthropologist James Scott, Judith Pallot argues that Russian peasants worked from ‘behind a façade of compliance’ with the reform’s procedures, generally, rather than risk open confrontation. Indeed, strong communes were keen to exploit any advantage to maintain control over the land. Peasants opposing the reform developed ‘an acute understanding of its weak spots’, particularly the ‘numerous bureaucratic hurdles’ as well as points where official decrees were ‘silent on separators’ rights’.39 On numerous occasions peasants employed their own interpretation of official decrees, not least the April 1915 Decree suspending new land reorganization work.40 Overall, the greatest concentration of enclosed farms was in the provinces where communally held land was not the norm, whereas in regions where the repartitional commune was widespread, the proportion of enclosed farms was below average.41 The Stolypin reforms made greater inroads on the north-western, western, southern and southeastern peripheries where intensification and diversification of arable farming were already progressing.42

PEASANTS, WAR MOBILIZATION AND REVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS Peasants contributed significantly to Russia’s war effort through various forms of state mobilization. According to Aaron Retish, ‘this popular participation in the war created the language and context for mass political activism in the 1917 revolution, especially with its calls for popular participation in the rebirth of the Russian nation’.43 The Russian state’s mobilization of rural resources had a tremendous impact on the Russian village. The state’s agricultural specialists were drafted or redeployed when agricultural aid to peasants was suspended.44 Of course, the loss of male workers was profound. In Viatka province, over 40 per cent of peasant households lacked a male worker by 1917.45 In Kharkiv province, for every ten pre-First World War peasant households there were roughly fourteen working-age males; by 1917 there were only seven.46 The mobilization of male labour for the war ‘rapidly destabilized traditional generational and gender dynamics, already unsettled before the war by the outflow of young males and females for seasonal urban labor and the inflow of urban ideals and culture’.47

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Soldiers’ wives became a more visible group within the village and one that sparked a good deal of internal tension. Soldatki were often ‘suspected of being sexually loose and dangerous as all women were traditionally presumed to be without men to control them’.48 Yet, during the war they were driven to take ‘forceful actions in defense of their perceived interest’.49 Indeed, soldatki were ‘empowered by state recognition of their special status and rights, by their numbers, and by worsening material conditions that threatened the survival of their families and communities’.50 For poorer peasants, the loss of labour and draught power prevented them from farming their land, or deprived them of off-farm income.51 Despite the state’s efforts to remedy the challenges faced by soldiers’ families, peasants objected to communal aid and help with field work, arguing ‘that soldiers’ wives could just hire labourers, since they received generous support payments (the paika)’.52 A significant number of soldatki petitioned government officials demanding, among other things, that payments be increased to match rising prices.53 Indeed, during the war years, women inhabited a more visible position in rural affairs and in the village assembly.54 With their husbands away, soldatki experienced considerable anxiety regarding ongoing land reorganization work and did not hesitate to confront surveyors and other officials.55 When, by March 1916, soldiers grew anxious as a result of rumours that their households’ landholdings could be reduced, General A. N. Kuropatkin, commander of the northern front, protested to the Minister of Interior that ‘land settlement commissions, in their zeal, were undermining morale at the front’.56 During the war, shortages of and rising prices for basic consumer goods created a great deal of tension across rural Russia.57 Prices of agricultural products increased exponentially at the outset.58 However, shortages of primary goods by 1915 created the first of a recurring ‘scissors’ crisis, in which grain prices declined in relation to the escalating prices on manufactured goods, leaving peasants with little incentive to sell their grain.59 Corinne Gaudin notes that during 1915 police and governor mood reports frequently discussed the widespread rural concerns about inflation.60 During the spring of 1916, one police report claimed that the main cause of rioters ransacking of shops was ‘the artificial inflating of prices on goods’.61 In a broader sense, peasants were increasingly agitated by perceptions of unfairness in the distribution of the burdens of war.62 Some peasant families used the 1912 legal provision allowing the only son or sole able-bodied male worker of a household to be freed from conscription.63 Indeed, conscription did not impact households evenly. As Mark Baker argues, by 1917 in Kharkiv province 36.4 per cent of peasant households had no adult male workers. The remaining 63.6 per cent had roughly twelve working age males for every ten households. Peasant soldiers serving at the front became increasingly agitated by ‘the uneven and often corrupt methods of mobilization’.64 Soldiers’ families complained bitterly about villagers who appeared to be evading the draft: a young healthy man living at home, wrote one petitioner, ‘is offensive to us, because our brothers and sons are at war’.65 In the context of economic change and state modernization, peasants adapted to the new challenges and engaged with the state on multiple levels to defend their interest and preserve local control over scarce resources. Nonetheless, old divisions among villagers persisted and were in many cases exacerbated by rapid change and the uneven experience of wartime conditions.

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PEASANTS, PARTICIPATION AND POWER As the 1917 revolution commenced, political elites insisted the new rural order would be based on representative local government.66 Peasants understood the Provisional Government as embarking on a more effective approach to the war owing to the tsarist regime’s undermining of the war effort and its failed military campaign.67 Yet, as Corrine Gaudin suggests, ‘the broadly disseminated language of patriotism, sacrifice, and internal enemies colored peasants’ readings of developments within the village and … linked long-held disputes over village and communal issues like land, taxes, and welfare obligations to service and loyalty to the national cause’.68 The emerging political elite experienced liberation from tsarist rule in the context of their roles over the previous decade, and especially since the outbreak of war in 1914. According to Peter Holquist, specialists and public activists ‘sought to pursue their vision of a mobilized, participatory, and modernizing Russia’ to ‘implement measures that the autocracy had previously blocked, such as the grain monopoly’.69 The revolutionary elite’s vision depended upon creating citizens out of backward peasants, willing to accept the burdens of the ongoing war effort and play a constructive role in the new nation. Yet, according to Aaron Retish, the provisional government’s ‘rituals of peasant citizenship combined the myth of popular participation with strict regimentation’.70 The new regime appointed provincial and county commissars and sought to govern rural Russia through a hierarchy of executive committees, locally elected, down to the village level.71 As Michael Hickey argues, the dispersal of sovereign authority during 1917 among ‘the multiplicity of locations of power’ or mnogovlastie prevented the provisional government from establishing effective centralized power.72 Indeed, the notion of ‘Dual Power’, so prominent in the dynamics of the revolution in Petrograd, is not applicable to rural Russia in 1917. Peasant participation in the revolution was shaped, in part, by the language and decisions emerging from the new regime. The provincial government’s decision to abolish sosloviia was viewed by peasants as a ‘new emancipation’.73 In early 1917, citizenship combined elements of Russian nationalism and religious orthodoxy.74 Indeed, peasants participated in religious processions to ‘thank the Lord for their newly won freedoms, offering up prayers for the new government’.75 Mark Steinberg finds that ‘abstract ideas like “freedom” and “citizenship” pervaded the deluge of petitions and appeals from villages between February and October 1917’.76 Orlando Figes notes how the word ‘grazhdane spread throughout the countryside as a term of peasant self-identity’ and became ‘a badge of equality with the other classes of society, a society from which they had always been excluded’.77 As peasants emerged from subjects to citizens, Aaron Retish suggests that ‘terms like equality, citizenship, the nation, duty, sacrifice, and freedom were not new words-they blew across the countryside during the 1905 Revolution and many reappeared during the war-so they were familial with these abstract ideas’.78 Sarah Badcock argues that from spring 1917 on, ‘local direct democracy enabled local populations to wield massive influence over the shape of local administration’.79

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Prior to 1917, volost and village officials were ‘prosperous, middle-age, male peasants’.80 After the February Revolution, village patriarchs were pressured to open communal assemblies to the entire village, allowing a voice to younger men, returned soldiers, the rural ‘intelligentsia’ and (to a much lesser extent) women.81 Non-farming villagers, including craftsmen, priests and teachers were considered citizens, and contributing members of the community.82 Military experience and an acceleration of household partitioning resulted in younger male peasants playing a more significant role at the village assembly.83 Yet razdel, as Robert Johnson maintains, often left a young nuclear family economically vulnerable due to its limited labour capacity.84 According to Mark Steinberg, these young heads of households ‘were sure that if more communal land came into the hands of their commune, ruled by male heads of households, their economic condition would improve and they could better fulfill their roles as men’.85 Consequently, peasants forced separator households back into the commune. The southern part of the Black Earth region, with its strong communes and high concentration of separators, witnessed the most violent and successful attacks. In both Samara and Saratov provinces, the percentages of enclosed farms fell from just under 20 per cent to at or near zero per cent.86 Indeed, the authority of village communes and their assemblies increased as the tsarist state collapsed across the countryside.87 Various provincial and local bodies emerged after the February Revolution to facilitate and guide peasant participation as the new political order emerged. The most significant for peasants were the land and food-supply committees at the provincial, uezd and volost levels.88 The land committees’ main task had been to safeguard private land ownership until the Constituent Assembly could meet and resolve the land question. In fact, they were co-opted by the peasants and initiated various efforts to obtain more land for village communes.89 A variety of provincial bodies emerged across rural Russia. In Viatka, the Peasant Union became quite prominent at every level from April to June when it morphed into a Soviet of Peasant Deputies.90 In Kazan, the Soviet of Peasant Deputies played a major role in issuing decrees that supported the local taking of control of land.91 In Penza, Smolensk, Simbirsk and Samara provinces, provincial peasant congresses had a significant impact as these reflected and confirmed peasant demands regarding land.92 Given the institutional weakness of the Provisional Government and the intent to delay action on land reform, peasant congresses and Soviets of Peasant Deputies established their authority across rural Russia in the context of citizens’ participation and multiple practical resources problems.

REVOLUTION, WAR AND LAND The February Revolution of 1917 ushered in a complex period of liberation and political participation for Russian peasants in the midst of the collapse and rebuilding of the Russian state. Indeed, the moment appeared to arrive for fulfilling the long-standing peasant desire to claim ownership of and divide among themselves, the land they believed was rightfully theirs. With the establishment of universal conscription in the 1870s, peasants began to view their military service as bolstering

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their entitlement to land. After the Russo-Japanese War, young peasant soldiers, returning with hopes of starting families, pushed hard for a repartition of communal land.93 Andrew Verner argues that, despite evidence of village stratification, peasants opted to preserve ‘social cohesion and tranquillity’ by choosing to avoid the conflictridden repartitioning in favour uniting ‘in demanding additional land from private owners, the state or crown’.94 Not long after the outbreak of war in 1914, state officials considered and eventually issued decrees on confiscating land belonging to German inhabitants of Imperial Russia.95 Press accounts speculated about who might receive the confiscated land. Colleen Moore argues that peasants interpreted the proposals as the state’s giving them tacit permission to seize land from Russia’s wartime enemies in the name of the ‘peasant-soldier heroes’.96 Mobilization for the war had deprived many peasant men of their traditional patriarchal roles as heads of households and forced women to play that part.97 Mark Steinberg argues that ‘peasant men were often anxious about conditions that undermined their ability to be effective breadwinners and protectors of their wives and daughters, the justification for their position in the family hierarchy’.98 Soldiers’ sense of entitlement was transformed by the war and they expressed expectations of returning home to ‘seize the landlord’s land’.99 In the wake of the February 1917 Revolution, village power dynamics were challenged ‘by peasant-soldiers home on leave or who had taken advantage of the political and military disorder to desertand  … to not miss out on their part of the revolution on the land’.100 Indeed, as Steinberg suggests, ‘holding and working the land was the work of families, not individuals, and families were properly male-led hierarchies’.101

*** The peasant movement erupted with renewed fervour in the spring of 1917. According to S.A. Smith, the 1917 context differed in three ways from 1906: peasant expectations of the Provisional Government and land reform ran ahead of realities, the peasant movement coincided with an increasingly acute shortage of food, and the February Revolution greatly undermined the capacity of state authority to intervene in village life. Peasant recognition that the new government was not in a position to suppress agrarian insurgency, as it had done in 1906–7, proved critical.102 Central and provincial authorities in 1917 struggled to establish their authority on the major issues that concerned peasants most: land and food.103 John Channon and others argue that peasant action followed a traditional rural pattern ebbing and flowing in accordance with the seasonal agricultural cycle, starting with the spring sowing.104 Peasants in Black Earth provinces exhibited the strongest determination to gain access to more land. A recent statistical examination of the geographic variation in peasant unrest concluded that the key determinants were the presence of good quality soil and a history of serfdom in the area.105 From March through June, peasants attempted to increase their sown area by cultivating unused gentry land.106 Indeed, private and communal land was ‘highly intertwined’, in order to facilitate peasant renting of gentry land.107 As in 1905, peasants initially targeted intermingled privately owned lands often rented or sharecropped, by commune members.108

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Peasant delegates to the first Penza Provincial Peasant Congress (April 7–8) agreed that a Constituent Assembly should conclude a final resolution of the land question. Nevertheless, their concern about the spring sowing led to granting temporary use rights to peasants who typically worked the land. The congress resolved that volost committees take measures to ensure the sowing of all unused land, regardless of who owned it. These were to be temporary measures guided by instructions from the congress.109 Peasant congresses ‘organized their own teams of rural propagandists to acquaint the peasants with their resolutions’.110 At the village level, peasants ‘kept the question of unsown land at the forefront … to justify their claims against particular landlords’.111 The resolution of the First Smolensk Provincial Peasant Congress (28  April–1 May) on the land question ‘condemned “unplanned and arbitrary seizure” of land … in the interim, though local committees, and specifically local provisions committees (at volost, uezd, and provincial levels) should exercise ‘full authority (vlast’) to organize and supervise (kontrol’) local agricultural production and ensure the exploitation of all unused land’.112 Indeed, as Lars Lih argues, peasants placed greater stock in ‘maximum utilization of available resources’ than in private property rights given the imperative of ‘survival in a harsh environment’.113 After the spring sowing, provincial peasant assemblies focused on land for the sowing of winter rye. The Kazan Soviet of Peasant’s Deputies’ May 13 decree was used as a basis for land seizures across the province, as it ‘transferred all land, privately held and otherwise, into the hands of the local volost (land) committees prior to the decision on land by the Constituent Assembly’.114 In Penza, the second peasant congress (12–14 May) also sanctioned further peasant actions. Subsequently, the fallow estate fields were taken over by local committees and parcelled out among the peasants, many of whom previously possessed either very little, or no land of their own.115 It was a matter of state interest to ensure that no land be left unsown, as this threatened a reduction in grain supplies on which the war effort and urban populations depended.116 A Food Ministry decree of May 30 stipulated that land left uncultivated by its owner was to be taken over by the local committees for temporary peasant use for the duration of the war-induced food supply crisis.117 As Sarah Badcock finds, after the Kazan Soviet’s May decree, ‘reports from uezdy to the provincial land committee … [indicated] all privately owned land that could not be worked by the owners’ own labor had been redistributed by the land committees’.118

PEASANTS, LAND AND THE PROVISIONS CRISIS, JULY–OCTOBER The provisions crisis resulted from the collapse of the Tsarist supply system prior to 1917. Kimitaka Matsuzato argues that an interregional breakdown in the food supply chain occurred in late 1916, leaving many provincial officials in grainproducing areas, still liable to provision the front, to hoard supplies and officials in grain-consuming areas to overstate their needs. This and the intervention of desperate central officials produced chaotic bottlenecks, a widespread breakdown in confidence in the system, and, for peasants and local officials, a retreat into local selfprotection.119 Yet, the Provisional Government was determined to impose order and

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went to great lengths to instil in citizen-peasants a sense of discipline and duty to the nation.120 The February Revolution permitted the wartime specialists to implement measures that the autocracy had previously blocked, such as the grain monopoly.121 The new regime established provisions committees at the provincial, district and volost level to administer the state grain monopoly, particularly the registration of household grain stocks. The key determination was whether peasants (and volosts and provinces as well) possessed surplus grain in excess of established consumption norms (‘producers’) or had a grain deficit and were thus categorized as ‘consumers’. Under the state grain monopoly, completed registrations would facilitate grain redistribution from ‘producer’ localities and provinces to ‘consumer’ regions. Yet, popular hostility towards provisions committees, and the prospect of state control over peasants’ surplus grain, was commonplace in Volga provinces.122 Some scholars have concluded that peasants across the typically grain-rich Middle Volga region sought to retreat into their own autonomous world, free from the state and urban markets that had left them poorer and increasingly bereft of consumer goods.123 On the other hand, peasants in grain deficit areas could not survive in such isolation and sought out food where they could find it, including markets the Provisional Government struggled to control. For example, officials in Kazan were completely unable to stop the flow of ‘speculators and needy’ from coming by foot from Nizhegorod province to purchase grain at market prices.124 While the Provisional Government claimed ownership of all the nation’s grain, early on it avoided using force to compel peasants to hand over their grain surpluses.125 The regime’s efforts to appeal to peasant producers and satisfy the demands of consumers became more difficult when drought conditions across the Middle Volga region resulted in a grain harvest 55 per cent below than the 1909–13 average.126 In Penza province this left rye yields on less-fertile peasant lands 40 per cent lower than on estate lands.127 Both peasants and the regime grew extremely concerned about a prolonged provisions crisis stretching well into 1918. On July 18, central officials instructed local committees to assume responsibility for sowing any winter fields that landowners were unable or unwilling to cultivate themselves.128 Peasants in many cases found themselves with land but insufficient seeds for planting what would be the 1918 rye harvest. Given the low crop yields on communal land, peasants and local officials increasingly turned to the grain reserves of local estates.129 In a typical example, the Dolgorukov volost (Nizhnilomov district) provisions committee decided on July 9 to requisition higher-quality grain from the Golovkina-Saltykova estate for a fixed price (2.43 rubles per pud) in order to provide peasants with seeds for sowing communal and unsown estate land.130 Elsewhere, officials in Kazan’ tended to disregard private property rights in favour of the ‘controlled and practical use of local resources’, in managing local provisions crises.131

*** On July 5, central authorities released the official list of provinces impacted by a bad harvest, thus freeing those provinces completely from the requirement of exporting grain to the front.132 Central officials concluded that Russia’s overall

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harvest was average and that grain redistribution from surplus to consuming areas could prevent starvation.133 The Provisional Government’s redistribution effort relied on local committees to conduct an accurate grain registration, yet ‘data collection problems were central to the subsequent crisis in food collection’.134 While fledgling state institutions and an overtaxed railroad system significantly hampered the regime’s effort to enforce the grain monopoly, peasants took action to maintain control over local resources. From the peasant’s point of view, these were rational actions in the face of economic crisis.135 In many cases peasants sought to derail grain registration. In mid-August, when a provisions official in Bol’shoi Sunder village, Kozmodem’ianskii district refused to destroy registration records, a crowd dragged him from his office and beat him to death.136 Despite appeals to ‘altruism and revolutionary zeal’, the provisional governments struggled to persuade peasants to submit to the registration and turn over their surpluses to the state.137 Local responses to grain registration varied based on local conditions. Following the resolutions of the Third Penza Provincial Peasant Congress on 7–8 August, local officials began the grain registration process, ostensibly to locate surplus grain for redistribution to nearby areas of shortage.138 In a typical example, the Salov volost, (Penza district) provisions committee decided on August 13, just as grain registration was beginning across the province, to ban the shipment of grain out of the volost.139 Local officials, particularly in areas compromised by the drought, established grain embargos in order to accurately assess local needs first. Volost committees sought to keep control of surpluses until registration in every volost in the district was completed so that no volost had to give up a disproportionate share of their grain reserves. As with earlier efforts to mobilize rural resources, peasants were acutely sensitive to the fairness of the distribution of burdens. With complete local control over the registration process, local officials found ways to make it work to safeguard the community’s resources. Grain registration produced an unintended narrowing of the channels of grain supply, and prompted many rural district provisions officials to turn to estates for grain. Peasant resistance to the shipment of estate grain to district centres increasingly prompted authorities to mobilize armed force to regain control of estates. Provincial authorities resorted to soldiers with increasing frequency as the summer wore on, but were unable to establish their authority in peasant villages.140 A central order of August 20, 1917, called for local officials to use armed force and ‘wholesale requisitioning, starting with the large holders of grain and with villages closest to the railways’.141 Private estates became battle grounds between a failing regime and local peasants seeking to control their own fate amidst economic collapse. As in autumn 1916, the actions of desperate provisions officials exacerbated peasant anxiety about control over local resources.

*** By the late summer and into the fall of 1917, peasants, frustrated with the Provisional Government’s unwillingness to pass major land reform, and more assertive of their rights, took action ‘to right past wrongs and to take what peasants

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saw as justifiably and morally theirs’.142 Andrew Verner finds that during the 1905–6 Revolution village ‘unity exhibited toward the outside was not so much a reflection of internal cohesion as it was an effort to defuse internal tension’.143 This dynamic appears to have informed how the peasant commune was reshaped internally and faced the new government during 1917. The high rate of household partitioning in 1917 created a large number of young nuclear household with fewer working age adults and thus vulnerable economic prospects. While a decade earlier the growing availability of off-farm income might have provided some security, labour migration had significantly declined by 1917, increasing internal pressure for expanding and repartitioning communal land. Across the middle Volga and central Russian provinces, ‘the most intense peasant unrest was … located in the blacksoil zone’ … which ‘contained the largest number of gentry estates and the highest population pressure on the land.’144 Indeed, gentry and communal land was ‘highly intertwined.’145 Access to good-quality soil meant higher harvest yields even during dry years and thus a sense of food security when local resources were all that could be reasonably relied upon. The village assembly, pressured by the growing number of returning soldiers in late summer, took advantage of the weakened state authority in rural areas to take control of private lands.146 Peasants asserted their authority to land and resources through the summer and fall, with the number of reported peasant seizures of land and equipment growing in late fall.147 Once they took power in Petrograd in late October, the Bolsheviks quickly sanctioned the peasants’ control of the land.148 The Bolsheviks Decree on Land abolished private property and prohibited the renting and sale of land. Land was to be controlled by ‘the people’ and ‘passed to the tenure of those who worked it’.149 Distribution of land among the peasants was to be based on the number of workers or ‘eaters’ in each household.150 As Aaron Retish notes, the Decree on Land ‘fulfilled an important aspiration of peasants and something that many of them felt that the emancipation from serfdom denied them in 1861, legally sanctioning their control of the land’.151 The Bolsheviks strategically co-opted the land programme of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but Lenin acknowledged that ‘this is what the peasants carried out with their own hands’.152 Indeed, Bolshevik land policy may be seen as ‘reflecting popular preferences, yet the decree accelerated and gave greater definition to the agrarian revolution that was underway’.153

CONCLUSION Peter Holquist argues that as 1917 progressed the fate of the Provisional Government was sealed when the efforts of the technocratic elite to reconstruct, on a new basis, the political organization of society, ‘instead magnified preexisting social and political rifts’.154 Indeed, peasant communes were keen to re-establish some sense of social cohesion after decades of growing internal tensions exacerbated by wartime burdens and an acute sensitivity about their uneven distribution, both within the village and across Russia. Thus, the village assembly, strengthened and democratized by the February Revolution, often took the lead in organizing the assault on landed property.155 As Andrew Verner puts it, ‘the unity exhibited toward

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the outside was not so much a reflection of internal cohesion as it was an effort to defuse internal tension’.156 Indeed, multiple contingencies emerged prior to and during 1917 that helped drive peasants’ actions to address practical local resources issues. The traditional dream of land and freedom was operationalized by resources shortages, demands for rewards for service to the state, and the failed effort of the Provisional Government to establish a rural state presence to effectively project political authority on the major issues of concern to peasants. Across rural Russia, peasants demonstrated that they were quite capable of engaging with the fledgling state with ‘an acute understanding of its weak spots’.157 Central decrees could be silent on certain issues or appear at odds with other official mandates, giving peasants opportunities to pick and choose which official language, or interpretation of said language, best fit their interests. After October 1917, when the next stage of the revolution commenced, Russian peasants were prepared and determined to engage with the Bolsheviks and civil war burdens in a similar fashion.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Soldiers: The democratization and disintegration of the army KONSTANTIN A. TARASOV, HIGH SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, ST PETERSBURG, RESEARCH FELLOW OF THE ST PETERSBURG INSTITUTE OF HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

THE IMPACT OF THE WAR The First World War demanded from the Russian Empire a colossal degree of mobilization of human resources. By mid-June 1915 all reservists, who had completed military service shortly before the war, had been used up.  The large losses during the war had forced the military command to lower the draft age from twenty-one to eighteen years and to start a conscription of older generations, who had never expected to be called up.1 By the end of 1916, the Russia’s mobilization resources were almost exhausted. For the next year’s campaign, the military command could count on replenishing no more than 1.5 million people. Many of mobilized peasants were the main or even the only breadwinner for their families. Their conscription created a difficult situation in the village with a severe shortage of workers. By 1917, a total of 15–16 million men had been called to the colours. In spring 1917, there were about 7 million soldiers in the active army, and about 1.8 million in the infantry reserve regiments of internal districts.2 The total combat losses of the Russia’s active army (killed and died from wounds) were approximately 1,650,000.3 In addition, about 700–900 thousand men remained disabled, including the wounded and sick, who after recovery were recognized as unfit for military service.4 After being drafted, a recruit was sent to a reserve regiment, where he was trained. New barracks were not always satisfactory. Because of the planned offensive in spring 1917, the rear military units were overcrowded for there were simply not enough suitable premises. Space in the barracks was extremely cramped for the hundreds of people living there. Not surprisingly, this led to the spread of parasites (lice), as well as epidemiological diseases (typhoid).5

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Food difficulties also began during the war. In comparison with 1914, in 1916 the meat ration for soldiers decreased three times. Moreover, fish and ‘butchering waste’ were introduced, along with meat free days. Particular discontent among the soldiers was caused by the introduction of lentils into the ration at the end of 1916. For them, lentils were an unusual food, livestock feed, and they preferred to throw it out and remain half-starved.6 Solders’ letters were full of complaints about unmotivated penalties issued by officers, which were very often openly humiliating. From 1915, corporal punishment was returned to the Russian army. Typical punishments for minor infractions included a stay in the guardhouse, long hours of standing to attention with full pack and rifle (postanovka pod ruzhye) and ‘goosestep’ marching. Not to mention beating, verbal abuse and coarse language which were widespread in the army. Some soldiers considered it offensive addressing them as ‘you’ with the rude and familiar form of the pronoun ‘ty’ instead of formal and polite ‘vy’.7 Alan Wildman asserted that the real flaw in relations between soldiers and officers in the army was not physical abuse but the manifold outward signs of social distance imposed both by regulations and by society at large.8 The life of the lower ranks was strictly regulated. Among the prohibitions of the internal service charter, we can find a number of petty restrictions. Smoking on the street, visiting clubs, meetings and public lectures were prohibited. Soldiers were not allowed to go to public gardens and parks, buffets, restaurants and teahouses, since there they could buy alcohol. They could only use third-class carriages on the railways and were not officially allowed to ride inside trams, only to stand on the platforms. Military saluting, with its complex ritual, turned into a reason for reprimand even from those officers unknown to the soldier. A significant number of disciplinary actions were imposed for violation of these rules.9 In these circumstances, desertion and self- mutilation were common. According to the calculation of A.B. Astashov, in the whole country until March 1917, about 700–800 thousand deserters were detained at the front, beyond it and in places of their temporary or permanent residence. Counting those who were not detained, the number rose to 1–1.5 million.10 Fraternization at the front is recognized by many historians as an indicator of growing anti-war sentiment. The first cases of Christmas and New Year ceasefires were recorded in 1914 on the Northwestern and Southwestern fronts, involving about ten regiments of the Russian army. At Easter 1915, several dozen regiments participated in contacts with the enemy, which were very clearly cases of fraternization. From that time onwards, soldiers began systematically participating in meetings in ‘No man’s land’. Fraternization on the Eastern Front took on the character of a barter trade, exchange of news and goods. In 1916, the grocery character of fraternization acquired great importance. There was not enough food in the German trenches, and Russian soldiers were ready to exchange bread for the alcohol prohibited in the Russian army.11 Intense and unsuccessful battles in October 1916 led to unrest among soldiers and their refusal to go on the attack. Even later, in November–December, battalions and several regiments in different sectors of the front demanded rest, better food and ammunition. During the same period, there were extensive riots in the rear. The

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largest were the uprisings at the transit points in Gomel and Kremenchug (October 1916), where deserters and those serving disciplinary sentences gathered to take part. There were clashes with the police, attempts to seize weapons, and looting of government offices and stores.12 Even in Petrograd on 18 October, soldiers from the 181st infantry reserve regiment joined the workers’ protests and attacked a police detachment. Several dozen soldiers were arrested and brought to court-martial, and the regiment was taken out of Petrograd.13 A.B. Astashov, who analysed a large quantity of soldiers’ correspondence, concluded that there was growing discontent with everyone who, by hook or by crook, evaded service at the front: merchants, engineers, capitalists, refugees and deserters.14 He showed that autumn 1916 was a turning point in the soldiers’ mood. From that time peace for them was not only reconciliation with the enemy, but the opportunity to deal with internal enemies.15 An analysis of soldiers’ letters by O.S. Porshneva came to the same conclusions. By the end of 1916, there was a sharp increase in the number of letters indicating that the war was being waged in the interests of the bourgeoisie and officials who profit from the high prices.16

DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE RUSSIAN ARMY IN 1917 The upheaval in February 1917 began with workers’ strikes and demonstrations, which took place against the backdrop of a deteriorating food supply in the capital. Most of the Petrograd garrison during these days was confined to barracks. The most reliable units, training detachments of the reserve guard battalions, were supposed to help the police disperse demonstrators. On 26 February, soldiers were ordered to shoot on the crowds. From this moment began the transition of the Petrograd reserve regiments to the side of the revolution.17 Next day, in the early morning the training detachment, which had been directly involved in the shootings on Nevskii Prospekt on 26 February, refused to obey the order to take positions again. During the rebellion, led by non-commissioned officer T.I. Kirpichnikov, soldiers killed the company commander. They then scattered to other companies of the regiment urging them to join the revolt. Thus, in a short time thousands of soldiers ran into the streets to join the revolt.18 All day, on 27 February soldiers joined by workers engaged in revolutionary actions: opening arsenals, freeing political prisoners, fighting against police and pushing other regiments to join the revolution (often threatening to use force against them). The revolution was victorious almost without the participation of officers. However, on 1 March, by order of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, the military authorities began to return troops to their barracks and tried to reestablish order in the ranks. Outraged by the return of the ‘old regime’, the soldiers came to the Tauride Palace for a meeting of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. They demanded that the gains of the revolution be consolidated and a commission was drawn up from representatives of military units, who, on the same evening, drafted and sent to the press a document entitled ‘Order No. 1’.19 Order No. 1 reflected the demands of the soldiers. Weapons should be administered and monitored by

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elected committees. On duty, soldiers were ordered to observe strict discipline, but off duty they ‘cannot have fewer rights than those enjoyed by all citizens’. The obligatory saluting of officers and their forms of address were cancelled. Rough treatment of the rank and file was prohibited. Thus, the soldiers were worried about the humiliating attitude taken towards them. At the same time, Order No. 1 contained elements of the Soviet’s struggle for power over the Petrograd garrison. It was announced that ‘in all its political actions, the military unit is subordinate to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and its committees’. The orders of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma should be carried out, except in those cases where they contradicted the decisions of the Soviet. To a degree, the military command was able to restrain the explosion of revolutionary activity among front-line soldiers. Officers slowed down the spread of news from Petrograd. In some cases, soldiers learned about the revolution from the officers themselves. This helped to retain the authority of the military command for longer. In other cases, this strategy led to a tragedy. When soldiers became aware of the withholding of information, outbreaks of violence took place against those who, as they saw it, sympathized with the old regime.20 The killing and mass arrests of officers accompanied the revolution in the Baltic Fleet. About forty naval officers were lynched in Kronstadt. One of the first to be killed was the commander of the Kronstadt garrison, Admiral R.N. Viren, known for his petty insistence on observance of the service charter. In Helsingfors (Helsinki), about the same number of naval officers was killed, including the commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A.I.  Nepenin, who for a long time hid the details of events in Petrograd.21 By 5 March the greater part of the army had been officially informed about the Tsar’s abdication and the formation of the Provisional Government. Although Order No. 1 concerned only the Petrograd garrison, it was soon adopted at the front and in the rear garrisons. On 3–4 March, it was already actively spreading on the Northern front, the closest to Petrograd, while on 4–5 March, the Soviet order appeared in the provinces through the telegraph or delegates from Petrograd. However, the document barely applied to the Southwestern, Romanian and Caucasian fronts where innovations only took place by order of the military command.22 Soldiers’ aspirations reflected the extent to which the revolution was a demand to be recognized as human beings and treated with dignity.23 Thus, it is not surprising that this was recognized by the Minister of War A.I. Guchkov in his 5 March Order No. 114, which abolished regulations that limited the rights of soldiers and were humiliating in nature. Soldiers were no longer required to address their superiors with traditional terms of respect such as ‘Your Excellency’, and officers were forbidden to use coarse and derogatory language or the familiar form ‘ty’. Even the name ‘lower rank’ was cancelled. All military personnel began to be called ‘soldiers’. Standing to attention and saluting off duty were abolished. Thus soldiers gained full and equal citizenship. Under the influence of the Petrograd Soviet, the new Minister of War A.F. Kerensky, who replaced Guchkov in May, codified these rights in the so-called ‘Declaration of the Soldier’s Rights’. This document confirmed the abolition of

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various restrictions and duties (such as saluting) for soldiers off duty, as well as the creation of elected committees at all levels; soldiers officially received the right to participate in political life. However, the document also asserted the right of commanders in a combat situation to apply measures including armed force to ensure obedience. The unauthorized replacement of command personnel by subordinates was equally prohibited. Unlike Order No. 1, the Declaration did not establish the subordination of military units in political affairs to the Soviet, or recognize the control of soldiers’ committees over weapons. Without special orders being issued, the entire life of the army changed. ‘Citizens’ and ‘comrades’ entered the army as forms of address, military orchestras learned ‘La Marseillaise’, soldiers went to the front under red banners.24 In the first months of the revolution, the soldiers began a real struggle against officers’ shoulder flashes. These were often perceived as a hated symbol of social inequality. They were torn from the shoulders of unloved commanders, thus enacting a symbolic demotion.25 Although Order No. 1 did not imply the election of officers, on all fronts and rear garrisons the news of the revolution provoked a wave of spontaneous arrests, expulsions, and the monitoring and supervision of command staff. The main accusations were adherence to the ‘old regime’, abusive treatment of soldiers, severity of military service or sending units ‘to death’.26 In place of those expelled officers were chosen who enjoyed the confidence of the soldiers. It was extremely rare for non-commissioned officers to be chosen since soldiers didn’t want to change the whole military system but get rid of unloved commanders. Although the high military command demanded an end to the practice, it continued in the following months, acquiring a particular intensity during periods of political crises. The first organs of soldiers’ self-government, the committees, had appeared by the end of 28 February in a number of military units in Petrograd. They were created to replace the absent or expelled officers and to preserve order in the internal life of military units: to set up guards, give out rations and perform economic functions.27 Order No. 1 accelerated this process for the entire army. The military high command, fearing a loss of control over events, authorized the creation of committees during March–April. As early as 11 March, the new Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General M.V. Alekseev sent a telegram to the front commanders, in which he ordered the officers to join the committees ‘to take the course of events into their own hands, to lead them’.28 By his Order No. 51 of 30 March, a temporary provision on committees was introduced which established the obligation to set up committees, but strictly limited their activities to solving economic issues and educational activities. On 16 April 1917, the Minister of War A.I. Guchkov signed Order No. 213, which introduced company, regimental and army committees. Thus, the committees, originally a spontaneous phenomenon, were officially recognized as bodies of military self-government. Guchkov’s Order established a legal framework for them. They were to control supply, take legal steps against abuses of authority, resolve questions concerning the unit’s way of life, settle misunderstandings between soldiers and officers, assist in education and sports, and prepare for the elections to the Constituent Assembly. Intervention in military planning was prohibited, and committees were obliged to include representation

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from officers. At the same time, officers lost their ability to punish soldiers, since elected disciplinary courts were created. From this moment, the entire army was covered by a network of committees from company level to army level. Committees mainly dealt with economic issues (payment, food, uniforms and other property), determining leaves, maintaining discipline, normalizing relations with officers and educational work. However, they tended to overstep their defined functions and challenge the authority of commanders.29 In total, from 200 to 500 thousand people worked in elected organizations at the front.30 At the same time, the committees did not reflect the social structure of the army. They were dominated by ‘intellectuals in uniform’, the most educated soldiers, former students, clerks and specialists in the technical services, urban middle strata and literate, authoritative peasants, who were in the minority in the army. Their role in the political life of the army in 1917 was much greater than their representation in the army as a whole.31 To characterize them, Wildman used the term ‘committee class’.32 And this ‘committee class’ was more oriented towards the patriotism of the Petrograd authorities than to demands of their own constituents. Only grass-roots committees, at company and regiment level, involved themselves in the day-today concerns of ordinary soldiers.33 The consequence of this complexion of the ‘committee class’ was that in May and June it started to lose its prestige. Sometimes, in the eyes of soldiers’ committees, it became an adjunct to the authority of the government and the military command. First in rear garrisons, then at the front soldiers gathered in general meetings to re-elect those committees, which no longer met their aspirations. Such meetings in some cases became more powerful because their authority based on the direct participation of the majority of soldiers in the decision-making.34 This process of estrangement opened the road for the Bolshevization of the soldier masses.35 From the first days of the revolution, the Socialist Revolutionary party, which positioned itself as the voice of the peasants, enjoyed the greatest influence among the soldiers, especially in the ‘committee class’. This party, together with the Mensheviks, dominated in various soviets. From March to August 1917, more than 2,270,000 copies of these moderate socialists’ newspapers such as Izvestia, Delo Naroda, Rabochaia Gazeta and Golos soldata, plus 1,500,000 appeals and about 550,000 brochures were sent to the active army.36 In spring the Bolsheviks enjoyed much less support, although their army newspapers, Soldatskaia Pravda, Okopnaia Pravda, Pravda Grenadierskaia and Volna, began to seep to the front in May and June. The Bolsheviks were distinguished from other socialists by their position against the military establishment and against the resumption of active operations on the front. At first this was not very popular among soldiers.

PREPARATION FOR THE OFFENSIVE During the first months of the revolution, up until May, desertion rose sharply in the Russian Army, amounting to 86,000 cases. Most incidents, about 80 per cent, affected rear military units. In total, from 1 March to 1 August 1917, the number

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of deserters arrested was 170,000.37 The average incidence per month increased by 120 per cent, and according to N.N. Golovin, by November 1917, the number of open and ‘hidden’ deserters was estimated at more than 2 million.38 During Easter week, fraternization reached hitherto unseen proportions, involving hundreds of regiments.39 Officers tried to prevent this, using disciplined cavalry and artillery units. This was an alarming state of affairs for Kerensky when he became the new Minister of War in May. Although in spring 1917 socialists had advocated revolutionary defencism, his primary task was to rebuild the army’s fighting capacity and prepare Russia for the upcoming offensive requested by the Allies. In mid-May, with the approval of the new Supreme Commander-in-Chief, General A.A. Brusilov, two initiatives began to be implemented to improve the combat effectiveness of the army. First, ‘storm detachments’ (udarnyie chasti) of patriotic soldiers and officers, ready to die for the homeland, began to be formed at the front. Volunteers would have more privileges, better equipment and weapons, but discipline in such units would also be very tough. By the end of August 1917, there were 290 storm detachment units.40 Second, the idea of forming ‘death battalions’ from volunteers drawn from the rear was approved by military command. The idea was that they would be recruited mainly in military schools and among the sailors of the Black Sea, but also from all citizens of Russia not subject to conscription or subject to, but not yet drafted into the army (youth, students, intellectuals, workers). The movement became ever more widespread. Various ‘death battalions’ were made up from escaped prisoners of war, disabled veterans and holders of the St George’s Cross. In Petrograd, a battalion of volunteer workers from the Obukhovskii plant was organized.41 In total, thirty-three battalions and one division were formed from rear volunteers but only few went to the front before October 1917.42 The volunteer unit which gained the greatest renown was the 1st Women’s Death Battalion which consisted of approximately 300 women and was commanded by ensign M.A. Bochkareva. It was the only women’s unit which took part in combat.43 It prompted the formation of another fifteen women’s military units and more than 5,000 women volunteered between May and October 1917.44 As early as March–April 1917, the State Duma and the Petrograd Soviet had sent representatives to the front and throughout the country to explain political developments, and then to monitor events, consider complaints and eliminate friction within the army.45 In May 1917, under the new Minister of War, the dispatch of commissars became more systematic. Those working in armies and at the fronts were selected by agreement between the Ministry of War and the Soviet. The commissars, among whom were such well-known figures as B.V. Savinkov, V.B. Stankevich and V.S. Voitinsky, were not professional military men. They were former civilians, and mainly represented the moderate socialist parties. The task of the commissars was to promote the democratization of the army. They were supposed to act as intermediaries between the high command and the soldiers, direct the political life of the army, promote cultural development and also monitor the reliability of the generals. These commissars found themselves in a difficult situation. They were viewed with suspicion by the command, believing their presence weakened the power of the officers. Instead of consistent political work, commissars

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had to immediately resolve conflicts in the army and restore order, which did not bring them closer to ordinary soldiers.46 On 14 May Kerensky issued an order calling for discipline in the army and readiness for military action in the name of the revolution. The Minister of War followed this up with tours of the front where he spent three weeks speaking to the troops in great open-air rallies. For this he was ironically nicknamed the ‘persuader in chief’. Such a campaign was needed because soldiers were willing to ‘hold the line’ in accordance with a defencist stance but not to go further and launch an offensive.47 In May and June, the front was visited by dozens of delegations and groups. Special agitators, famous Soviet members, veterans of the revolutionary movement and socialist ministers from the Allies (Albert Thomas, Arthur Henderson and Emile Vandervelde) were sent around the country and among the troops to boost morale. To this must be added hundreds of thousands of copies of newspapers and proclamations projecting the slogan ‘offense is the best form of defense’. The June offensive would never have taken place if Kerensky had no support in the army, but as B.I. Kolonitskii has pointed out, ‘the persuader-in-chief had an entire corps of energetic persuaders of various ranks, on whom he relied’.48 Committee members and commissars actively campaigned among the soldiers at the front, calling for active operations. In the rear garrisons, they pressed the soldiers to resume the replenishment of units. In some cases, they accompanied soldiers to the front. Many of them went on the attack along with their units. Committees and commissars took over much of the responsibility for disciplinary action against those who refused to obey.49 On 18 June, the last offensive of the Russian Army began. The main blow was struck by troops on the Southwestern front. At first, operations in this direction were successful. This was largely due to the active participation of storm detachments. However, very soon, several battalions and then entire regiments began to refuse to move into position. General I.G. Erdeli, commander of the 11th Army, one the main attacking armies, reported: ‘It is my duty to convey that, despite the victory on 18 and 19 June, which should have strengthened the spirit of the units and the offensive impulse, this is not noticed in most regiments, and in some units there is a certain conviction that they have done their job and should not permanently continue the offensive.’50 The most efficient units suffered heavy losses, morale of others was lower. During the regrouping of troops, soldiers started rallies. Some regiments, and even divisions, decided to return to their initial position or even go to the rear. Offensive operations on the Northern and Western fronts were even less successful.51 On 6 July, German troops launched a counteroffensive, which turned into a disorderly retreat of the Russian Army accompanied by mass desertion, looting and pogroms. As B.I. Kolonitskii concluded, an offensive launched by a ‘democratic army’, debating battle orders in detail, was arguably doomed to failure.52 It is important to note the consequences of this failure. Trying to stop the retreating soldiers, General L.G. Kornilov, the commander of the Southwestern front, resorted to harsh measures on his own initiative. He banned rallies in the combat zone, ordered the use of machine guns and artillery against units leaving their positions, and promised to prosecute commanders for hesitation in the use of force.53 The death penalty at the front was officially reinstated on 12 July;

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military revolutionary courts (courts martial) were introduced. On all fronts, the disarmament and disbandment of military units, which were no longer obedient to the command, began. Punitive functions were performed by cavalry and Cossack units, as well as storm detachments. Arrests often took place with threats and the use of artillery fire. In some cases, it came down to open combat operations between troops. Almost 13,000 soldiers were arrested on the Northern front, fifty military units were repressed. On the Western front, seven regiments were disbanded, 2,000 soldiers were arrested. Entire divisions were disarmed on the Southwestern front.54

SOLDIERS’ ATTITUDE TO WAR The replacement of frontline units was carried out by the formation of reinforcement companies (marshevye roty) in the rear garrisons from recruits and convalescent soldiers. In April, under pressure from front delegations, military units in the rear garrisons began to send reinforcement companies. At first, the most disciplined soldiers and volunteers were enrolled in this way. However, the more these soldiers were sent to the front, the fewer remained in the rear, and the more difficult it became to form new reinforcement companies. The soldiers believed that it was fairer to send to the front those who had not yet served on the front, untrained recruits, or the permanent staff of reserve regiments. These protests were led by those who had served at the front, many of whom had already been wounded several times. They demanded that draft-dodgers of all sorts be sent: exempted groups (belobiletniki), simulators, deserters, idle staff officers in rear administrations, former police and gendarmes.55 In response, the Ministry of War decided to send to the front officers assigned to rear organizations, to reduce the size of zemstvo offices and to start medical re-examination for the belobiletniki.56 Even those reinforcement companies which were sent to the front were losing 20 to 50 per cent of their composition on the journey.57 Since the planned offensive needed new soldiers at the front, a more radical decision was made. On 5 June, the Ministry of War sent an order to replenish the army with whole reserve regiments, including all officers and committee members.58 This led to individual protests turning into mass uprisings throughout the country. In June–July, unrest took place in the garrisons of Astrakhan, Simbirsk, Samara, Syzran, Penza and Tsaritsyn. The soldiers perceived being sent to the front as a punishment and demanded that all shirkers be sent there first. They pointed to the need to preserve the revolutionary core of the army, demanded medical reexaminations for themselves and asked for leave before being sent to the front. Against this background, the spontaneous slogan ‘The bourgeois to the trenches’ was born. For soldiers, the ‘bourgeois’ were all who advocated ‘war to the bitter end’, ‘war to the death’ and who ‘fill their bellies while we die of hunger like dogs’.59 One of the largest soldier riots took place in Nizhnii Novgorod. The core of the rising was formed by the 62nd reserve regiment, which included a large number of convalescing soldiers. Many of these had been repeatedly wounded, and some were no longer able to carry out combat duty. Nevertheless, the military command demanded that this unit be sent to the front. After the decisive refusal of the soldiers

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to embark, they were declared deserters. On the night of 4–5 July, the soldiers arrested the government detachment sent to disarm the 62nd regiment. Armed clashes began in the city, and other regiments joined the rebels; power passed to a provisional executive committee. In the late evening of 6 July, troops led by the commander of the military district arrived and order was restored without resistance. By 11 July, most of the 62nd reserve regiment had been sent to the front.60 At the same time, the July Days took place in Petrograd when on 3 July protests occurred in the 1st machine-gun reserve regiment, where the Bolsheviks and anarchists had been actively campaigning. The protest was prompted by attempts to disband this military unit, or at least to disarm it. Large sections of other regiments of the Petrograd garrison joined the movement and for two days the city was in the hands of the insurgents, who demanded the removal of the ‘capitalist ministers’ and the transfer of all power to the soviets. Since the uprising took place under their slogans, the Bolsheviks tried to give it a lead, even though they considered it premature. It was put down after the government announced that it had evidence of the Bolsheviks’ connection with Germany, as well as after the arrival of government troops in the city. The July Days made it possible for the Provisional Government to blame the Bolsheviks for the failure of the offensive at the front, to begin the arrests of left-wing radical activists and to remove some reserve regiments from Petrograd.61 Despite all the unrest, 3,496 reinforcement companies and 32 reserve regiments were sent to the front between February and June with a total of 850,000 soldiers.62 From July to September, 119 reserve regiments (about 440,000 soldiers) and 14,742 marching companies with a total strength of 3,648,500 were also sent to the front.63 Yet unrest continued. It also affected the so-called over-forties (soldiers 40–43 years old), who numbered about 300,000 in the rear garrisons by summer 1917.64 The catastrophic situation in agriculture had forced Guchkov at the end of April to release the over-forties for fieldwork for four weeks and to discharge all those over forty-three.65 However, in early June, during preparation of the offensive, Kerensky demanded the return of all soldiers from leave by 15 June.66 In response, a wave of protests by older soldiers swept across the country. They believed that there were younger and healthier reserves who could serve at the front. In protest about 20,000 older soldiers arrived in Petrograd and built a camp near the Vitebsk railway station, organizing delegations to various authorities and demonstrations demanding an extension of leave until the end of sowing. They were expelled from the city only after the July Days and the problem was not resolved until the autumn.67 The overforties were officially allowed to return home in October. Very often the Bolshevik Party was accused of organizing such protests. However, the disorders occurring at the front and in the rear mostly were spontaneous reactions by soldiers to events rather than the work of Bolshevik agitators. The impression that party members were everywhere was created because the term ‘Bolshevik’ had been actively used in political language since April. In their reports, the military command called everyone who refused to obey orders ‘Bolsheviks’. And the soldiers who expressed their protest could also call themselves Bolsheviks, while

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having nothing in common with the party. Many of them considered themselves supporters of the party, because the Bolsheviks consistently opposed an offensive while the war continued in the interests of the ‘bourgeoisie’.68 Wildman concluded that such ‘vulgarized Bolshevism’ became the chief mobilizing force for the soldiers’ mounting hostility to the new offensive, ‘far outstripping the organized forces of the party and expressing itself in a new rash of major mutinies and disorders’.69 He suggested distinguishing between Bolshevism as subordination to party discipline and the more widely diffused ‘trench Bolshevism’.70 It cannot be said that the Bolsheviks had no influence on events. For instance, active anti-war agitation on the Southwestern front was led by ensign Nikolai Krylenko, who until the end of May was the chairman of the 11th Army committee. However, it is hard to find other similarly prominent examples, although in lower ranks there were some. The decisive role in the refusal of the 2nd Guard Division to participate in the offensive was played by shtabs-kapitan I.L. DzevaltovskyGintovt. Lieutenant F.P. Khaustov became famous on the whole Northern front for his agitation. Ensign A.Ia. Semashko was informal leader of 1st machinegun regiment, which provoked the July Days. The Bolsheviks began to enjoy popularity after mid-May when moderate socialists in the soldiers’ committees and soviets supported Kerensky and the resumption of active operations at the front. The Bolsheviks sought to lead the protest movement and give it a political character, to encourage to the idea that the issue of power was at the centre of events. Everyday problems, such as the lack of provisions and warm clothing or low family allowances, created a soil for Bolshevik agitation. The blunt words of General A.I. Denikin, commander of Western front, after the June defeat sum it up: ‘I have heard that Bolshevism ruined the army. I reject it. Bolshevism acts like maggots in the army’s septic wound.’71

CIVIL-MILITARY CONFLICT During the conference at military Headquarters where Denikin made this comment, major military commanders accused government officials of incompetent and ineffective interference in the affairs of the army. They considered the committees, commissars, political agitation by the parties of the left and the adoption of the Declaration of the Soldier’s Rights to be the most important factors in the demoralization of the army. The most moderate voices demanded at the very least strict regulation of the activities of self-government bodies. All agreed on passing a resolution demanding the return of disciplinary authority to officers, the removal of politics from the military, and a prohibition on meetings and membership of political organizations.72 The appointment of General L.G. Kornilov as the new Supreme Commander-in-Chief three days later reflected a change in the government’s position on restoring order in the army. Kornilov had a programme of measures which to his mind could save the country. He demanded extending the death penalty to the rear and to civilians, substantially limiting the power of commissars and prosecuting unruly committees. He also wanted the militarization

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of railways and key defence industries. Thus, all these measures were about the subordination of the entire country to the needs of the army. Kornilov’s programme received support from the patriotic organizations of officers, which had appeared in the first half of 1917. After the revolution began, officers endured constant attacks on their privilege, accusations of personal interest in continuing the war and soldiers’ suspicion caused by the fear of counter-revolution. This reflected a deeper social tension between the educated classes – noble and nonnoble – who made up most of the officer corps, and the peasants and urban lower classes who made up the common soldiers. The soldiers called the officers ‘bourgeois. As a result, some officers started to form organizations as a means of defending themselves and promoting their views. In several regions soviets of officers’ deputies were elected. The Military Union of Personal Example, the Military League, the Union of Military Duty and others appeared in April–June and set as their task not only uniting officers, but also defending a certain political program. They emphasized the need to defend the motherland, strong discipline, attention to duty and less interference in operational matters by soldiers’ committees.73 Kornilov relied in particular on the Union of Army and Navy Officers, created at Headquarters. After the June defeat at the front the Union demanded the withdrawal of the Declaration of the Soldier’s Duties and a law protecting the honour and dignity of officers. At the same time its activists started secret preparations to establish a military dictatorship in the country.74 During this period the committees found themselves in a difficult situation. The military command, especially at the front, increasingly ignored their existence. This was especially true of attempts to protect soldiers from repression. For instance, at the front, congresses of committees were prohibited. There was an active campaign in the press against the ‘committee class’. At the same time, their sponsorship of the offensive, participation in disciplinary actions and ignorance of soldiers’ aspirations led to a decline in the committees’ authority. Their political revival began only after the failure of negotiations between the military and civilian authorities, Kornilov and Kerensky respectively, on the introduction of ‘strong government’. Probably having received information about the conspiratorial plans of officers’ groups concerning a dictatorship, Kerensky announced on 27 August that Kornilov was a traitor and dismissed him from his position. Kornilov refused to resign and accused the government of opening up Russia to ‘counter-revolutionary enemies’. The ‘Kornilov revolt’ ended without a single shot largely thanks to the vigorous activity of the committees and soviets which blocked the movement of military units to Petrograd, arrested officers sympathetic to Kornilov and created sympathetic armed detachments. At the front and in the rear, the events of August initiated a new wave of indignation and hostility from the soldiers towards officers. In units with the most unfavourable conditions, it expressed itself in spontaneous arrests, violent actions and lynching.75 The main beneficiaries of these events were the Bolsheviks. After the July Days. Bolshevism at the front had been thoroughly suppressed in July and August, but under the threat of the revived ‘counter-revolution’ and disillusionment with the moderate socialist leadership it resuscitated.76

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SOVIET POWER AND ‘FINAL DEMOCRATIZATION’ After the short attempt to restore authority, discipline and order, in autumn soldiers’ unrest continued at the same level. As Wildman noticed, many incidents resembled those of the spring, but now took on a more purposeful, uncompromising aspect and covered a far wider imaginative range. The most frequent complaints concerned refusals to carry out work details and training exercises, or to replace other units on the line.77 In the rear, pogroms, requisitioning of goods, looting of liquor stores and warehouses were undertaken by soldiers, while the participation of military men in agrarian riots became more frequent. Very often the impetus for unrest was the lack of warm clothing or food.78 The report of the Political Directorate of the Ministry of War for 23–30 September said: In almost all armies, cases of the discussion of or non-execution of orders were noted. The attitude of soldiers towards officers has worsened … In rear districts, especially in Moscow, Kazan, Irkutsk, and particularly in the front-line districts – Dvinsk, Minsk, Kiev and Odessa – the mood is restless: training and work duties are being conducted poorly, soldiers of local garrisons are personally replacing commanders, or taking part in agrarian riots.79 The autumn also saw the political rebirth of committees and soviets. Many were reelected, giving more deputies from left radical parties – Bolsheviks, left-wing SRs, Menshevik-Internationalists, anarchists, etc. Those groups very often worked as a left bloc opposing moderate socialists and insisting on quicker action on social and economic reforms and the transfer of all power to soviets.80 The issue of the withdrawal of military units from the city was at the heart of the conflict which opened in October between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. The Petrograd Military District command ordered that several units be sent from the capital to trenchwork near the front. The soldiers reacted to this order with suspicion. On 16 October, the re-elected Petrograd Soviet created its Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), which included the parties of the left bloc: Bolsheviks, left-wing SRs and anarchists. The task of the new body was to monitor the orders of the military command in order to avoid a repeat of the Kornilov revolt. The MRC sent its commissars to all military units of the capital and these commissars made use of the prestige of the Soviet when, during 25–26 October, MRC troops occupied the city’s strategic points, arresting the Provisional Government and establishing Soviet power.81 The overthrow of the Provisional Government led to the acceleration of the transfer of power into the hands of the soviets throughout the country. In some places it happened quickly and completely bloodlessly. In other places, like in Moscow, Smolensk, Voronezh, Kazan, Saratov, Astrakhan, Omsk, Irkutsk, Tashkent and elsewhere, it was a result of fighting against military units loyal to the previous regime, such as officer-cadets, Cossacks, storm detachments or officer groups.82 Soviet power at the front was established with a help of corps, army and front MRCs. On the Northern front and in its rear, this process was relatively rapid. This speed ensured the victory of October in Petrograd. Local MRCs established

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control over communications, railways and troop movements throughout the district and this paralysed Kerensky’s attempt to bring troops from the front.83 Until mid-November, there was a struggle against those committees dominated by moderate socialists, but the Bolsheviks and their allies removed them from power by re-election, isolation or arrest. On the Western front, the MRCs took power in two armies as quickly as on the Northern front. Only in the 3rd Army was the elected MRC composed of approximately equal number of moderate socialists and Bolsheviks. In mid-November, the SRs and Mensheviks were ousted.84 On the Southwestern front, remote from large urban centres, the Bolsheviks and their allies did not have serious support. After a difficult struggle with their political opponents, they managed to establish formal control over the front only at the beginning of January 1918.85 On the Romanian and Caucasian fronts, the command was able to resist the Bolsheviks and maintain its positions until the army demobilized. In both cases, the Bolsheviks increased their influence but only as part of the left bloc. In general, the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly reflect the support for the Bolshevik Party among soldiers immediately after the seizure of power. In total, the Bolsheviks received almost as many votes in the army as the SRs – a little more than 40 per cent. For the party, this was a better result than in the country as a whole. On the Northern and Western fronts the majority of votes – more than 60 per cent each  – were for the Bolsheviks. On Romanian and Caucasian fronts, the lowest result – about 14 per cent. The ratio in the rear garrisons was even more indicative: here 57 per cent voted for the Bolsheviks, 22 per cent for the SRs. The number of votes for the party ranged from 82 per cent in the Iaroslavl garrison to 13 per cent in the Zhytomyr garrison.86 The new Soviet authorities immediately began reforms in the army, which they considered necessary. First of all, it was possible to get the support or at least the benevolent neutrality of the soldiers thanks to the Decree on Peace. Since the military command at Headquarters refused to declare an armistice, Lenin and the new Supreme Commander-in-Chief Krylenko sent a radio message directly to the soldiers with an appeal: ‘Let each regiment on the front lines immediately elect plenipotentiaries for the formal initiation of negotiations for an armistice with the adversary. The Soviet of People’s Commissars hereby gives you this authority.’87 Despite the opposition of the military command, representatives of the soldiers’ committees and the MRCs organized and quickly concluded local armistices with the enemy, within less than two weeks.88 In order to strengthen the policy of peace and spread revolutionary ideas, the new authorities initiated a campaign of organized fraternization. However, for the most part this retained the character of barter trade.89 The Decree on land was also received with great enthusiasm by the soldiers. In November–December, front soldiers took an active part in the agrarian movement in the rear areas closest to the front line, including participating in the sacking of wealthy households.90 In the first days after October, new commissars with emergency powers were sent to all military institutions, replacing the commissars of the Provisional Government. Despite the resistance of the military command or unre-elected committees, they had to carry out the decisions of the new authorities. In the following months,

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however, there was a growing tendency for commissars to be elected by the soldiers themselves.91 At the same time, the idea of elective command, which had been discussed since the February uprising, received its official legislative form. After October 1917, in a number of cases, the election of officers was introduced by the initiative of the soldiers. During November, the new military authorities drafted a new Declaration of the Soldiers’ Rights. It contained, besides the full election of the command staff, the expansion of the rights of the soldiers’ committees, the equalization of all servicemen’ rights and the destruction of all ranks and insignia, such as epaulettes and state orders (except for the St George crosses and medals), as well as the privileges associated with them. Finally, on 16 December the Council of People’s Commissars issued decrees on the equalization of all servicemen’s rights and on the elective principle in organizing power in the army.92 The last and the most difficult issue to be solved was the issue of war. The new government started peace negotiations. At the same time, the demobilization of the army began with the older soldiers (26–39 year olds) returning home by midFebruary 1918.93 These circumstances led to an uncontrolled increase in desertions. In November and the first half of December 1917, on the Northern and Western fronts alone, the number of soldiers remaining in the units decreased by more than 26 per cent, although a maximum of 11 per cent had been demobilized – the rest was a result of ‘self-demobilization’.94 Official and spontaneous demobilization was accompanied by attempts by soldiers to divide regimental property and money, and to take weapons with them. Committees, commissars and elected commanders seeking to hinder this process were subjected to re-election, insulted or beaten. The growing civil war and the loss of the army’s combat capability forced the new authorities to begin constructing a new voluntary army, according to a decree published on 15 January 1918. By spring 1918, some 70,000 volunteers had signed up.95 This was a negligible percentage of the old army, although former soldiers sometimes accounted for up to half of the new combatants.96 Under these conditions, no serious resistance could be offered when the German offensive resumed on 18 February. The conclusion of the new Soviet authorities was then unambiguous – to complete the demobilization of the old army and to begin the construction of a new army without an elected command and without committees.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The lower middle strata and revolution DANIEL ORLOVSKY, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY

We begin with a quotation (that I used when first examining this topic) from the Bolshevik, Vladimir Antonov at the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party in March 1919: Although the petty bourgeoisie is dispersed and at the present time does not have a specific political organization, it continues to exist as a defined social stratum and out of a desire to save itself is attracted to a well-known type of social mimicry. It began to adapt to the new conditions and to penetrate everywhere. After the October Revolution when the colossal advance began, the petty bourgeoisie strove to save itself and gradually began to penetrate the institutions created by the working class. In the end they filled our Soviet institutions and even supplanted a significant part of those functionaries who had earlier worked in those institutions- and as a well-defined stratum with a specific psychology infected our own workers (rabotniki) with that psychology.1 My idea here is to underscore that this phenomenon was already clear in 1917, as the triumph during revolution of the ‘hidden class’. This essay is in three parts. An overview of the problem is followed by discussion of the role of the lower middle strata in the borderlands, in this case Ukraine, and finally their political and symbolic participation in the endgame of the revolution in September and October 1917.

OVERVIEW OF THE PROBLEM Social and occupational movements and groups remain essential to the narratives of the Russian Revolution, whether considered from the perspective of the long crisis (1914–22) or the revolutionary year of 1917. The argument here is simple and straightforward, that there was a powerful and at times latent (and even hidden) social movement composed of occupational and social layers (strata) that created, populated and deployed to build an infrastructure that worked to sustain the Provisional Government and many more mixed and societal institutions and that was indispensable after October to the building of the Soviet state.2 This is

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not to discount the roles of blue-collar workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors or the many varieties of intelligentsia in the longer-term revolutionary process or especially in 1917. It only asks for a fresh look at these categories as well as the many layers of a new society coming into being during the early decades of the twentieth century in Russia. The lower middle strata as I see it comprise (are defined by) mainly occupations usually associated with the term white-collar workers or sluzhashchie in Russian. These include such occupations, as clerks, bookkeepers, shop and service personnel, cooperative workers, lower- and even middle-level enterprise or government officials. In my conception however, it also includes the lower and middle and in a few instances even upper ranges of what we may describe as the free professions. In Russia, these professions were stratified, so that for example, medical doctors stood at the top of a given professional hierarchy, but beneath them stood feldshers or paramedical personnel, having particular training, expertise, education, but having far less status, income security and aspiration for elevation into something resembling an as-yet non-existent middle class.3 For almost every profession these kinds of lower or shadow sub-professional groups could be found. This can be seen among technical personnel, pharmacists, orthodox church hierarchies and so on. Then there were entire professional groups that had lower than middle-class status, teachers for example, agronomists, statisticians, who were often on the front lines of policy making and political conflict in 1917. All of these groups became progressively involved in 1917 through many venues and many were radicalized, opting for either political neutrality or attachment to one of the deep party-led mass movements of the revolution. Who could deny the centrality of soviets, cooperatives, committees of public organizations, war industries committees, land and food supply committees, peasant union and trade unions in the revolution. And yet we have turned a blind eye to the social content of those key institutions, the lower-middle strata. Further, even the settled traditional social categories require review under this lens. The peasant category, for example, often included people self-designating as such, but who comprised the village intelligentsia of clerks, cooperative workers or employees of the various institutions now populating the volosts, the countryside or the small towns. Further, there was the question of birth, the social position of one’s parents, who in many cases were peasants. People often were either required to identify according to birth status rather than actual occupation or social position. And this has distorted our picture of social content in the revolution. Any look at the various census data (including agrarian and Bolshevik Party membership) hurriedly assembled in 1917–22 leaves little doubt about the inflated numbers for actual blue-collar workers and peasants and corresponding suppression of white-collar, sluzhashchie, intelligentsia participation.4 One of the most important contributions that remains to be made about the revolutionary era and process would be to construct an accurate occupational map of Russian society that took into account both layering between and even within ‘classes’ and ethnic identities in Russia and in the borderlands as well.5 Economists and specialists in provincial and municipal economic administration – economic departments of self-government and soviets and the war-time economic apparatus – would move directly into the post-October specialized branch economic

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committees (glavki), local economic councils (sovnarkhozy) as well as the burgeoning Bolshevik central economic apparatus (Vesenkha), for example. The Provisional Government had already created the antecedents of these kinds of centralized economic planning agencies with the Economic Council and Economic Committee. Many leaders from across the political spectrum recognized their central role: Chernov, Trotsky and Lenin did so, for example, even though they may have described this phenomenon using different language and categories determined by their own ideological preferences and requirements. So Lenin referred to them as the petty bourgeoisie.6 He saw this as a category that included the peasantry, much of the intelligentsia and most members of the Menshevik and SR parties not just a fantasy enemy of polemics and Marxist ideology, but a very real social political force. Categories could overlap and be incongruent. You could have the interstitial parties of the left, professionals and proto-professionals, white-collar workers, technical personnel, cooperative workers, shop and even domestic wage earners of many varieties. These groups constituted a vital social movement in 1917 (and beyond), one that embraced many professions and occupations and which requires us to rethink the revolution as led only by workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors or even nationalities. The national movements themselves within the Empire were led by lower middle strata professionals, sluzhashchie and students. In 1917, wherever there was a Public Organization, Committee or Soviet including those in the borderlands, they were peopled by the lower middle strata. The Provisional Government made a great commitment to the lower middle strata- in the plans for expanded self-government, in its creation of new lower-level mixed membership administrative units such as the land and food supply committees and in its wager on the cooperatives to take over various market and supply functions from the previously dominant commercial groups.7 One of the most important developments in the historiography of the Russian Revolution (and indeed in that of the entire Soviet project and experience including its demise in 1991) is the central role of nationalism, conflict in the borderlands and identity.8 Take Ukraine, for example, where, as in many regions of the Russian Empire, war and revolution provided both a vacuum and catalyst for the rapid growth of new identities and organizations dedicated to forms of autonomy, federalism and eventually independence. My point here is simply to illustrate that the lower-middle strata were on the front lines of this process; this ‘hidden class’ was active far beyond Russia and its own provinces. Here I borrow extensively from a remarkable source, the memoirs of the Ukrainian Social Democratic activist Pavlo Khrystiuk.9 He came from this social and occupational background and was a first-hand participant and witness to the successive stages of revolution in Ukraine. The lower-middle strata stand out in Khrystiuk’s description of the earliest or cultural phase of the Ukraine Revolution.

AN EXAMPLE FROM UKRAINE As was to be expected, the first to take the lead under the new conditions in Ukraine were the better-organized sections of Ukrainian society – the petty, democratically inclined bourgeoisie, the déclassé intelligentsia with its populist sympathies and,

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finally, the middle and wealthier peasants, who were also democratically inclined and organized in cooperative societies and unions. The unorganized Ukrainian workers and poorer peasants had first to examine the circumstances and organize themselves. Similarly, at the outset the Ukrainian socialist parties had to go through a brief period of organizational work before they could take the leadership of the workers and peasants into their hands. It is not surprising, therefore, that in this period of the revolution the petty-bourgeois and intelligentsia circles took the lead, and that the mass movement itself took on a national-cultural character with a faint colouring of political autonomy. Khrystiuk describes the creation of a Ukrainian national centre, the Ukrainian Central Rada. [See also the contribution to this volume by Nataliya Kibita]. The ‘all-Russian’ revolutionary civic organizations created in Ukraine in the first days of the revolution – the committees of united civic organizations and the councils of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies – immediately and clearly assumed an ‘all-Russian’, that is, Muscovite character and for that reason could not satisfy the revolutionary needs of Ukrainian society. For them, the cause of Ukraine’s rebirth was alien, uninteresting and secondary. Knowing all this, and knowing that the struggle for the national liberation of the Ukrainian people would fall exclusively on the shoulders of Ukrainian society, without help from anyone, the active forces of the Ukrainian liberation movement made the creation of a Ukrainian national-cultural and political centre the order of the day. Members of the Society of Ukrainian Progressives, led by the future Socialist Federalists, took the initiative of founding such a centre. Under their leadership, the Ukrainian Central Rada was created in Kyiv at the beginning of March. The Central Rada was modelled on the all-Russian ‘committees of united public organizations’, with the sole difference that the Rada was to be not a local or provincial but an all-Ukrainian centre. From the outset, therefore, the Rada included delegates of local Kyivan Ukrainian cultural, educational, civic and political institutions, as well as those of all-Ukrainian institutions that had their headquarters in Kyiv (representatives of political parties, cooperatives, the clergy, teachers, students and soldiers). At the beginning of its existence, the Central Rada had no definite, prearranged plan of action. Similarly, its composition was not settled. This later turned out to be for the good. The composition of the Rada, its tasks and methods of work evolved, with no great internal difficulties, together with the development of the Ukrainian Revolution. At first its work was limited to the sphere of tasks touched upon in the resolutions and proclamations of the Ukrainian progressives, but the sphere of its tasks grew ever wider, assuming more and more a national character. The Central Rada conducted its work under the leadership of Professor Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who, even before he returned to Kyiv from exile in March, had been elected its head in absentia. Initially, when the Rada was being formed and taking its first steps, Hrushevsky was assisted by Volodymyr Koval and Fedir Kryzhanivsky (representing the cooperatives), Dmytro Antonovych (Ukrainian Social Democrat) and representatives of Ukrainian student youth. In a comparatively short time, threads linked the Central Rada with the various Ukrainian cultural and educational, cooperative, civic, military, professional and political organizations that existed

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in Ukraine and beyond its borders, in the Caucasus, Siberia, Russia and even in America. The national committees, councils, Prosvita Ukrainian cultural societies and associations that appeared in various localities of Ukraine sent their delegates to the Central Rada either to take part in its work or for mutual information and support from the Rada’s directives, since they considered the Central Rada their administrative centre. The popularity of the Central Rada grew extremely rapidly, especially among the peasant and soldier masses. The popular masses huddled under its wing with extraordinary trust, considering the Rada their protector and leader. Before the revolution, cooperatives, primarily rural (credit, consumer and agricultural), were virtually the sole organized Ukrainian socio-economic force. The cooperative movement united mostly the well-to-do peasantry on an economic basis and carried on national and cultural work at the same time. In its continual struggle with the Russian cooperatives for the creation of separate financial and economic cooperative centre in Ukraine independent of Moscow, it propagated not only the national and cultural but also the economic separation of Ukraine from the Moscow centre. Because of the weakly developed political life in autocratic Russia, it was the more nationally and politically conscious forces of Ukrainian democracy that took up cooperative work in pre-revolutionary times (especially during times of reaction), forces that wanted to work on a community basis for the toiling masses of Ukraine. For the most part, these were activists with no clearly defined party ideology but with incontestable populist sympathies. These forces gave the Ukrainian cooperative movement ideological content and, thanks to this, made it a significant factor not only in the economic but also in the cultural and political life of Ukrainian society. It is not surprising, therefore, that the cooperative movement emerged earlier than other organized Ukrainian groups as an active factor in the first period of the revolution. At the beginning of March, the Central Ukrainian Cooperative Committee (the cultural, educational and organizational centre of the Ukrainian cooperative movement) was already operating in Kyiv. In the first days of its existence, in addition to questions of an organizational and cooperative nature, the committee placed on its agenda the question of aiding Ukrainian peasants and workers with political information and also took up the issue of ‘Ukrainizing’ local state and civic organs. The latter was carried out by the introduction of representatives of local cooperative associations into the newly created ‘councils of united civic organizations’ (urban and provincial), as well as into zemstvo meetings and civic supply committees. Members of cooperatives also participated very actively in general national organizations. Somewhat later, when the revolution in Ukraine assumed a clearly national character, many cooperative activists became involved either entirely or to a significant degree in political work. The cooperative movement carried on its revolutionary work through cooperative associations (making use of their well-trained and rather numerous teaching personnel), cooperative committees (organizations that were cultural, educational and organizational in nature) and congresses. The latter show best how closely the cooperative movement was linked to the Ukrainian revolutionary movement in its initial national-cultural period. Typical of the ‘cooperative’ mood

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of that time was the so-called First Free Cooperative Congress of Kyiv Province, which was held on 14 March in Kyiv. Although it was called a provincial congress, many cooperative activists from other provinces of Ukraine also took part in it. A great many people attended the congress, which turned into the first all-Ukrainian revolutionary holiday. Not only representatives of all Ukrainian (Kyivan) organizations but also representatives of the local authorities came to welcome the congress, which resolved ‘to support the new government with all its might, to call on all institutions to strengthen the new order’. Also, ‘recognizing the need for all authorities, from the highest to the lowest, to be elected by the people itself’, the congress expressed the conviction that ‘only a democratic federative republic in Russia, with national-territorial autonomy for Ukraine and the rights of national minorities safeguarded, would guarantee the rights of the (Ukrainian) people’. All other resolutions of the Cooperative Congress were also clearly national and political. These included a resolution on the speedy introduction of the Ukrainian language into the schools, courts, all civic and state institutions, and the church. The congress also appealed to the Provisional Government to free all Galician exiles and release them from other punishments. At the time, the delegates of this congress were the first and perhaps the best informants and agitators for the Ukrainian rebirth among the peasantry. Many such congresses were held at that time in Ukraine. Without exception they declared the necessity of creating a new life in Ukraine in Ukrainian national forms. They assigned first priority to the Ukrainization of schools, as well as state and local civic institutions. The tendency of all revolutionary cooperative work in Ukraine was set in broad outline by the First Cooperative Congress of Unions of Ukraine, which was held on 9–10 April in Kyiv and included representatives from as far afield as the Ukrainian community in the Kuban region. Besides strictly cooperative matters, this congress devoted much attention to the cultural and educational activity of the cooperatives, worked out a detailed plan for the organization of this activity, and declared the necessity of having classes on the cooperative movement in Ukrainian schools (with Ukrainian as the obligatory language of instruction). It is worth noting that the Ukrainian cooperatives did not wait for the government to implement these demands but undertook to found cooperative schools on their own initiative and at their own expense. One key resolution was to publish in Ukrainian, at the expense of the cooperatives and for peasants and workers, a non-party socialist newspaper, The People’s Will. This newspaper quickly won the sympathy of the Ukrainian peasantry and was the only large socialist peasant daily during the entire course of the revolution in Ukraine. Always broadly democratic, the cooperative movement declared itself as such early in the revolution, among other things by casting its votes in the election to the Constituent Assembly for the lists of Ukrainian socialist parties, the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. With the development of the political and social struggle in Ukraine, the cooperative movement slowly and quite naturally lost its significance as a revolutionary factor, confining itself more and more to strictly cooperative work. This does not, of course, diminish its revolutionary significance at the beginning of the revolution, especially as the early class-conscious organization

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of the Ukrainian peasantry into the so-called ‘Peasant Union’ was closely assisted in many localities of Ukraine by the cooperative movement. Close to the cooperative movement in the thrust of its work and participation in the Ukrainian national-cultural revolutionary movement was the revived selfgoverning zemstvo, or rural assembly. The first revived provincial and district zemstvo meetings (revived by introducing representatives of various community organizations, including cooperatives) were quite exceptional in their attitude to the Ukrainian rebirth. From the very beginning of the revolution, most towns in Ukraine took a position either hostile to or, at best, completely negative towards the Ukrainian rebirth, ignoring it. The zemstvos, on the other hand, even in their old propertied composition, were favourably disposed towards the national and cultural and even, within certain limits, the political rebirth of Ukraine and contributed greatly to the national enlightenment of the Ukrainian peasantry by means of zemstvo newspapers and journals published in Ukrainian. The pro-national mood that prevailed at the Kyiv district and provincial zemstvo meetings, held at the end of March, was typical of the zemstvos at that time. Not just leaders but other zemstvo members, representing the peasantry and the cooperatives, were even more favourably disposed towards the rebirth of Ukraine. There is proof of this in the extraordinary stipulation made by the district assembly regarding elections to the new government, namely that candidates be limited to those supporting autonomy for Ukraine and the restructuring of Russia on a federative basis. The Kyiv provincial zemstvo assembly had the same Ukrainian national character and sent a congratulatory telegram to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, calling him ‘a fighter for the freedom and prosperity of the Ukrainian people’. The composition of the provincial zemstvo administration was enlarged at this meeting with the addition of Ukrainian community activists from the lower middle strata. The first revolutionary zemstvo assemblies throughout Ukraine had more or less the same character. Even in the zemstvos with the most Russified populations as, for example, in the Kharkiv district zemstvo, the first meetings had a Ukrainian national character to one degree or another. Thus, at the beginning of April, a meeting of the revived Kharkiv county zemstvo unanimously recognized the necessity of introducing Ukrainian elementary schools into the district. Only technical questions of exactly when and how to begin Ukrainization were cause for disagreement. Nevertheless, a majority at the meeting came out in favour of immediate Ukrainization; the zemstvo allocated a certain sum of money for the purchase of textbooks for Ukrainian schools and for organizing summer courses for teachers. It was also decided to ask the Ministry of Education to help the zemstvo defray the cost of introducing Ukrainian as the language of instruction in the schools. The zemstvos, even their old landowner elements were directly connected with local life, with the peasantry, ‘Ukrainized’ them and convinced them of the need to recognize the existence of a living and vital Ukrainian people on the territory of Ukraine. Moreover, it convinced them of the need to rebuild national, cultural and political relations in Ukraine to conform to actual conditions. Even before the revolution, all the zemstvos in Ukraine had fallen under the influence of the Ukrainian peasantry, but the revolution forced into action even those elements

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whose sympathy for the Ukrainian project had been only potential. Economic interest too played a role in drawing people into the national movement. Besides cultural and educational work and national education of the Ukrainian peasantry, the zemstvos served the Ukrainian revolution at its inception with allocations of money to the Ukrainian Central Rada early in its existence, when the Rada was in great need of money. They also provided constant, clear and active support to the Central Rada during its struggle with the Provisional Government. Ukrainian school-age youth, which already had its organizations in secondary schools before the revolution, and the elementary teaching profession, which included many nationally conscious cultural workers, took up national, cultural and political work with great enthusiasm and energy during the revolution. The Supreme Ukrainian Student Council was already engaged in major agitational work at the beginning of March, and by the end of March the student journal Sterno [Rudder] was already being published. In individual towns in Ukraine (and outside Ukraine) where there were secondary schools, the Ukrainian student hromady (associations) organized lectures and Ukrainian-studies courses for students, workers and soldiers and also sent a great many activists to the villages. The all-Ukrainian student conferences, of which three were held in the first months of the revolution, gave general direction to student revolutionary work. Many students became cadres of the young Ukrainian socialist parties and through them influenced the development of the political struggle in Ukraine. Although the students began by defending the idea of national and territorial autonomy for Ukraine, as the national revolution developed they evolved to a position demanding Ukraine’s sovereign independence. Students were active in demanding the Ukrainization of education in Ukraine. The elementary teaching profession stood with the students and took up the cause of public education in Ukraine. The teachers founded the Society for the Propagation of Public Instruction in Ukraine with headquarters in Kyiv and, later, at the first All-Ukrainian Teachers’ Congress in April, the Supreme Ukrainian School Council. Ukrainian teachers carried on large-scale agitational and organizational work under the slogan, ‘Free Ukrainian schools in a free, autonomous Ukraine’. From time to time they convoked county and provincial teachers’ congresses and All-Ukrainian Teachers’ Congresses to elaborate a general plan of work for all Ukraine. The latter worked out detailed plans for Ukrainizing public education in Ukraine from the lowest to the highest schools. Teachers began implementing these plans immediately in the summer of 1917 with the establishment of many Ukrainian-studies courses to train teachers for the elementary schools. Before the post-October war between Ukraine and Soviet Russia, Ukrainian teachers managed to make a profound contribution to the national and cultural consciousness of the Ukrainian people. The contemporary Ukrainian and even the Russian press daily carried several reports of Prosvita societies being opened in the villages and Ukrainian schools, courses and lectures being organized throughout Ukraine. Ukrainian teachers waged a great struggle for native schools against representatives of the dominant Russian ‘democracy’. The latter gave a chilly reception to the Ukrainian school movement and even raised an alarm about what it imagined to be the ‘forcible Ukrainization of the non-Ukrainian population of Ukraine’. But Ukrainian teachers intended no ‘forcible

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Ukrainization’. The resolutions of the teachers’ congresses are the best evidence of this. It was simply a matter of establishing a number of Ukrainian elementary schools in the towns of Ukraine commensurate with the size of the Ukrainian population in them. The struggle for Ukrainian schools became particularly bitter in Kyiv, that former nest of the blackest reaction and the worst Ukrainophobia. From Kyiv, under the leadership of the Black Hundred newspaper Kievlianin [The Kyivan] and the Committee of the so-called ‘South Russians’ (an organization of Ukrainian Russophiles), came waves of militant Great Russian nationalism that engulfed all Ukraine. Telegrams were sent from Kyiv to the Minister of Education of the Russian Provisional Government demanding that it ‘save Russian children from forcible Ukrainization’. One might think that such a struggle would have no place in a ‘free’ and revolutionary Russia. However, this struggle for the right of the Ukrainian people to instruction in their native language was the first warning to Ukrainian democrats that they had overestimated the cosmopolitan character of Russian democracy and underestimated its great-power, centralist, and Russifying attitudes and tendencies. In Ukraine, the Lower middle strata would join with workers’ and military organizations that would emerge somewhat later in the revolutionary process.

THE CENTRE IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER Finally, to return to centre stage, questions of power and politics remained in terms of the Provisional Government and the endgame leading to the Bolshevik takeover in October. How can the story of the lower middle strata illuminate that outcome? Mainly this involved the movement for an alternative solution to the power question, creation of a democratic or all socialist government based on the lower middle strata infrastructure and democratic organizations and not the Soviets (though some viewed the Soviets themselves as necessary participants in an allsocialist government). As we have seen, there were large social and political forces and opportunities at work quite outside that class-based narrative and analysis projected by the Bolsheviks and their supporters. These were formulated by Menshevik leaders, by some SR’s including Viktor Chernov and even Bolsheviks in August and in the autumn of 1917 and they involved an emphasis on the democratic, non-class ascribed whitecollar and professional classes, a diminution of party as opposed to occupation and expertise, and a search for ‘responsible’ government, or a government responsible to these social and political forces (sometimes but not always termed ‘the democracy’. This would be a government that moved away from the ‘personal’ regime of Kerensky and the Directory and later coalition, a government that belied the idea of responsibility (otvetstvennost’) to a Republic that united in the words of one delegate of the nationalities to the Democratic Conference, Revolutionary Russian Statehood (stateness- gosudarstvennost’) to ‘the democracy’. The point is that for so many, socialism, never mind the hard-edged class driven Bolshevik version, was not desired as the outcome of the power crisis or of the Revolution itself. These people acted accordingly and with open eyes in the autumn of 1917, though their story has been largely denigrated.

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The political aspect of the power question considers the problem and opportunity of the so-called all socialist government promoted principally, but not exclusively, by Martov in September and October and the workings of the Council of the Republic, or Pre-Parliament (a term borrowed from the 1848 Revolutions in Europe). Here the vectors of politics, parties and institutions, governmental and public, intersect. Further, in all of the debates of the Democratic Conference, within the leading political parties leading to the Council of the Republic and within that body itself there is consistent linkage, unnoticed in much of the historiography, of the social dimensions of any potential socialist government with or without the Bolsheviks. Beginning as early as August and going right through the October Revolution, Martov advocated the culmination of the democratic revolution in the form of an all-socialist government. The key here is to understand that he meant by this not just a government by all parties of the left, or the parties representing primarily the ‘non- propertied’ elements of society. He very clearly stated that his idea of a successor government to the coalition cabinets of the Provisional Government and to the idea and reality of Dual Power (more accurately ‘many powers’ mnogovlastie as I and others have argued) was not and could never be a government of the soviets. These were class institutions meant to play a transitional role at best. Martov’s new government was to be one constructed out of all institutions, public and administrative/governmental and which themselves were based upon the major social force of the petty bourgeoisie and [author’s italics] workers. And he meant by petty bourgeoisie much more than just the peasantry or the urban under-class or the traditional meshchanstvo. For him the social base of the new revolution had to include the interstitial layers of trained, educated personnel that made the public and much of the new state administration, not to mention the soviets themselves operational.10 Martov argued that the soviets were not proper state-building material and that social structure determines the forms of state power. Lenin believed the opposite. He found that Martov had many supporters even among Bolsheviks, but in the end, Lenin prevailed in his party. The social and political dimensions of the power crisis leading up to 25 October were played out in the Council of the Republic. Basically, I propose to complicate a scenario or narrative that is dominated by the categories of class and party. In contrast to the dominant view of the crisis of power, a view that we know was promoted by the victorious Bolsheviks, other activists and historians all across the ideological spectrum, who were channelled by the categories of class and party often in the face of many kinds of evidence, we see other forces at work and other possible solutions to the power question. What was ‘the Democracy’, what was ‘odnorodnoe sotsialisticheskoe pravitel’svto’, what did coalition really mean in September and October and to whom? How did support for these goals play out among party leaders and factions, social and occupational groups and their organizations, and Kerensky and the Provisional Government? From beginning to end, that is from early August and even back into July 1917 to October 25, the oppositions, the alternatives were caste in terms of a ‘democratic’ option and a class option in regard to solving the crisis of power.

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In this discourse, Martov, for example, did not equate democracy with socialism, and the ‘propertied’ or tsensovoe were never in binary opposition to socialism. An all-socialist government or broad solution to the power question meant something far different than a coalition of the socialist parties or non-Bolshevik left wing parties. It was neither a party nor a socialist solution. It was a dynamic and deep grouping of occupations, social groups, public institutions, professions, self-government bodies, unions and associations and all manner of professional groups set against a hard line, class centred, exclusionary social imaginary that barely included even the peasantry and its own parties and soviet. It was a vision clearly stated by Martov and others (including Chernov and more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists and other interstitial left-wing groups) in August that forcefully and consistently played down party at every opportunity, as the history of both the Democratic Conference and the Council of the Republic will attest. It was a vision proposing a broad front to counter ‘anarchy’, ‘counter revolution’, the German threat and, just as important, to build in the terms of the Menshevik Fedor Dan a new kind of government and state, or power (vlast’) that was not the bureaucratic and personal power of the Old Regime or the current Provisional Government, but a new ‘democratic’ vlast’ emerging from the broad democratic social and institutional milieu described above. For Martov and Dan, the political was the social, but not the strict proletarian class version of the Bolsheviks. The ‘coalition’ issue was not about parties alone and it is only by restricting our view to the question of whether or not any new Provisional Government cabinet in August or September ought to include members of tsensovoe obshchestvo, defined as members of the Kadet Party, that we miss the actual dynamic of the power issue as it relates to coalition. It helps us to understand better the nature of the voting at the Democratic Conference. These votes have been routinely mocked in the historiography, another legacy of the Leninist triumph and mythological turn, as illogical and inconsequential, a feature of the deep confusion and weakness of the non-class oriented democratic representatives. A close reading shows however, something very different, that there was among many representatives a rather clear idea of excluding only those directly implicated in the Kornilov affair, leaving as possible coalition partners a broad swathe of propertied society including even members of the Kadet Party. In other words, a vote for coalition without the Kadets made perfect sense. It was a vote to make a political statement, but not to foreclose the possibilities of finding common ground between ‘the democracy’ and sympathetic and talented groups within society who believed in the saving the state and building the new Republic. Representatives at the Democratic Conference debated whether party or occupational/corporate group should be the basis for representation and voting in the proposed Democratic Council (eventually the Council of the Republic). A galaxy of representatives of self-government bodies, cooperatives, trade and professional unions, women’s groups, students and the nationalities, for example preferred to steer representation and voting in the new body along corporate rather than party lines. And yet our vision of the power crisis and political debate in those crucial months remains dominated by party narratives (as is the publication of

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documents). There was serious discussion also about responsible government and who best spoke for the ‘people’ or ‘the democracy’. Was it the class-based soviets, whose representatives complained of under representation and within whose camp there were serious divisions still as between workers’ and soldiers’ soviets on the one hand and peasant soviets on the other, or the democratic institutions of selfgovernment (zemstvos and towns), professional organizations and trade unions and the vast cooperative network that also claimed precedence as the foundation of popular sovereignty? At Menshevik meetings on the eve of the opening of the Council of the Republic, Martov’s rival and sometimes opponent, Dan criticized what he saw as growing bureaucratization in the Provisional Government and especially the behaviour of fellow Menshevik Aleksei Nikitin, who as Minister of Internal Affairs had adopted the patterns of the hated bureaucracy, especially in ordering postal and telegraph employees to cut off communication to and from railway workers and employees. He complained that too much contact with the corridors of power had turned Nikitin into a ‘Bureaucratic Pasha’. For Dan, the Council of the Republic must transcend the ministerial form of behaviour. Martov himself advocated Menshevik activism in the Council of Republic. For him, ‘the democracy’ had to push its legislative agenda and not wait for the Provisional Government ministers. In an early October editorial, Martov argued that the Russian Revolution was a democratic revolution and not a soviet revolution and not even a socialist revolution. For him the idea of power to the soviets was a deep misconception. Power was a broader and deeper concept that involved many social and occupational groups as well as state and public administrative institutions. The result, he hoped would be a new kind of non-bureaucratic state unlike that of the Old Regime or even the present Provisional Government.11 As the Council met, these views and the prevailing Menshevik belief in the inadequacy of the soviets as a basis for a new revolutionary and permanent state were stated in the Soviet daily Izvestiia forcefully and clearly on 12 October, in an article titled The Crisis of Soviet Organization. According to the authors, the soviets were in crisis. There were now over 800 local soviets, but many of these had stopped functioning or existed only on paper. Networks were broken, weakened or simply destroyed. Those coming from the provinces, especially from further away, report that local soviets had less authority than they had had earlier and this also meant a diminution of power. Even when they met regularly and displayed some degree of organization, they have lost their capacity as revolutionary power (vlast’). It would be wrong, it was suggested, to blame this on deficiencies of particular soviets or their activities. There were general causes which had to be illuminated to fix the problem. And the most important of these was that the soviets have ceased to be general democratic organizations. Nowhere did they unite the entire ‘democracy’, and rarely even represented a democratic majority. For example, the peasantry remained entirely outside the soviets. The promised coordination between the workers’ and peasants’ soviets (usually less developed institutions than their urban counterparts) had failed, especially in the localities. As a result, the workers soviets had no influence on the peasantry, and even worse lacked any peasant

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organizations. Even in the largest cities, Petrograd and Moscow where the soviets were most developed, they hardly represented ‘the democracy’. The large class of intelligentsia, for example, were not represented, nor even all the workers as some were not conscious enough to participate and others preferred trade unions or other organizations – and such organizations sometimes were better able to serve the daily needs of their constituents. Then there was the issue of the emergence of the new democratic and functional institutions of self-government. Municipal dumas, elected on universal suffrage, had much more authority than the soviets. No one could disagree that the municipal dumas were elected on a more democratic franchise than the soviets, thus as the dumas developed so the soviets would diminish. The fact was that the soviets were excellent in the fight against the Old Regime but inadequate for building the future. They lacked specialists, expertise and organization, not to mention the habits and wisdom to manage affairs. Soviets by definition could not be food supply organs, police, public health, or judicial organizations. Specialized administrative organs were needed, and as this state work rose, the Soviets should decline. Professional interests had to be the concern of the soviets, and if not even the workers and soldiers would turn away from the soviets. To the extent that a new state structure was being built, the soviets would fall away. Thus, the article concluded: we are the grave diggers of the soviets to the extent that we are building a new democratic free Russia. The temporary soviets must be replaced by new permanent state structures and the Council of the Republic was a step in this direction.12 Further evidence of the seriousness of the democratic challenge to the soviets is found in the understudied protocols of the Petrograd Soviet itself. There in the unexpurgated words of Bolshevik leaders themselves is full recognition of the social and political challenge as they admitted at the time. In September and October, the power question was visible in the operations of the Petrograd Soviet. The Soviet was one of the original formulators and partners in the ‘Dual Power’ model that emerged in February. The Soviet developed its administrative activities in March and April in tandem with the Provisional Government.13 After the Kornilov Affair, elections to the Soviet produced a Bolshevik majority followed by a Bolshevik takeover of the Executive Committee.14 Soviet meetings were less frequent during the September interregnum due to the preoccupation of leaders and representatives in party work and the activities of the Democratic Conference. The workers’ and soldiers’ sections and the general meetings as well as executive committee and party fraction meetings paralleled those of the Democratic Conference.15 The ongoing debates over the power question reveal through the speeches of Bukharin, Trotsky, Kamenev, for example, a very determined, hard-line class based approach that already in September made the case not just for rejection of any form of ‘collaboration’ (soglashatel’stvo) with either the propertied elements or the Kadets, but also clear statements of the view that only a Congress of Soviets could legitimately resolve the power crisis and that morally, if not yet factually, power belonged to the soviets.16 Trotsky’s speeches were the most pointed and imaginative in making these points. He frequently used colourful historical analogies to unmask the weaknesses of his opponents, those primarily SR and Menshevik leaders, who tried to penetrate with facts or

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alternative takes on Marxist ideology, the hard defensive ideological outer crust of the Bolshevik world. On 21 September, he compared his opponents’ unwillingness to imagine the idea of all power to the soviets to the hostility of Tsarist officials and members of Old Regime Society not to mention Duma politicians and the idea of ‘four tail suffrage’ in the discourse of political reform. He and the other Bolsheviks constantly pointed out that the soviets were drastically under-represented at the Democratic Conference. The numbers never equated to their ‘real’ weight in regard to the question of power. Throughout Petrograd Soviet debates, speakers argued that a projected AllRussian Congress of Soviets was the only legitimate source of popular sovereignty and determinant of the form of power and thus the legitimate sovereign body instead of the Democratic Conference, and later, the Council of the Republic. According to Kamenev for example, the Provisional Government was a bourgeois dictatorship, and the Democratic Conference Soviet delegates, small in number as they were, had pursued the loathsome policy of collaboration (soglashatel’stvo).17 The Menshevik Boris Bogdanov argued that the Petrograd Soviet needed to unite with the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (i.e. to say Martov’s democracy, the lower middle strata) or face their gravitation to the bourgeoisie. The Petrograd Soviet heaped scorn on the reports of the Democratic Conference appointing a small group to negotiate with Kerensky on the formation of a new cabinet and rejected out of hand the resulting bourgeoisindustrialist-commercial cabinet. It also again proclaimed the inadequacy of the platform agreed on 14 August at the time of the State Conference. And Trotsky again charged the Provisional Government with avoiding the issue of responsibility (otvetsvennost’) a key component of the power crisis.18 Here Trotsky observed that the state principle (gosudarstvennost’) as deployed by the Provisional Government and other political figures across the spectrum was simply a mask for bourgeois hegemony. For him, the working class, soldiers and peasants had their own gosudarstvennost’, a concept that always had class content. The Mensheviks had wanted to turn the Petrograd Soviet into a state organ, but we claimed it as a revolutionary organ. They wished to use the cooperatives as their social support (and by implication the rest of ‘democracy’), but we said, who has ever heard of ‘cooperative democracy’? ‘What is this new class?’, he asked. For Trotsky, the idea that known expert individuals might serve the peasantry as officials (chinovniki) did not mean that they expressed the revolutionary and political will of the peasantry. This was the same as considering doctors who treated workers as expressing their political will. The cooperative people should and could be good workers, organizers, traders, bookkeepers, but not defenders of class rights. For this they depended on their soviets. And yet now they called on the cooperatives to create a revolutionary power (vlast’). Trotsky thought enough of the cooperative/ democratic threat to call out one of its leaders Sergei Prokopovich for his resistance to Bolshevik demands to give land immediately to the Land Committees and soldiers. His ideal power would be class-driven and in describing it he promised everything to the class constituencies. Matvei Skobelev, answering for the Mensheviks and for all of the non-Bolshevik left, agreed with Trotsky’s evocation of ‘cooperative democracy’, but claimed this was indeed popular and the voice of the people

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and far preferable to politics resolved by the bayonets of the Petrograd garrison. A Menshevik resolution to this point was rejected. In the Provisional Government’s view, the Council of the Republic was meant to link the Provisional Government to ‘organized social forces’.19 All layers (sloi) of the population were to be represented there led by the delegates elected at the Democratic Conference and indeed the roll-call was a veritable Noah’s Ark of occupations and interest groups. The government would lean on the trust of that Council (doverie). This government which by oath upheld the inviolable unity of that state power received from and constructed by the revolution, recognized its duty to take into account in all its actions the great social and public significance of the Council until the Constituent Assembly gave full and final representation to all layers of the population. The statement establishing the Council closed with an appeal to all classes to help the government build a strong authority capable of business-like work to solve the nation’s pressing problems. To this end, the government supported the need for a general peace, necessary to unleash Russia’s creative capacities, but one which guaranteed the integrity of Russia’s borders. This meant that the military would require loyal technical experts and commanders willing to work with the new Republican order and its democratic committee structure. One can see here how the Council of the Republic at least attempted to make real the idea of responsibility and actualize the September Provisional Government Program although filtered through its party and occupational/social lenses. In party terms, for the Mensheviks it was clear that the Internationalists were now in all but name a second party. Dan’s memoir of the final days in the Council of the Republic is instructive in this regard.20 It sheds light on both the Menshevik split and the relationship of parties and government to power as expressed in the Council of the Republic. According to Dan, leading socialists in September focused on the Democratic Conference and the idea of an All-Socialist Government. They were making lists of potential cabinet ministers in an exercise that suggests historical parallels and symmetry with the 1906 and 1915–16 discussions of possible governments of public confidence. He claims that this initiative involved soviet, democratic and public organizations, the cooperatives, zemstvos and town dumas, including people organically tied to the peasantry and ‘democratic meshchanstvo’ above all, who have the necessary economic and practical public sector skills and experience to govern the country. The Mensheviks, he wrote, had already moved closer to this group at the Moscow State Conference where the 14 August programme of ‘the democracy’ was hammered out with their support. According to Dan, a democratic government would have had a hard road and would have needed these people. Here Dan blamed the Soviet Central Executive Committee for not pushing less for a government embodying these forces than for the August program alone. But he also criticized the white-collar workers and technical employees and intelligentsia for not elevating the August programme into state policy but supporting it only as a vague statement of future principle. They had overplayed their tie to the people and portrayed themselves as purer than the urban party types and thus had not pressed for an immediate break with propertied society and the idea of coalition. For Dan,

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they hindered the process of building an all-socialist government, ironically since they were necessary to such a project and yet rendered it hopeless Dan felt that the so-called petty bourgeoisie would not allow the Bolsheviks to participate in a new government and yet claimed by virtue of deep experience with the people that the people would not support a government without the Bolsheviks, and that if one came about it would lead to civil war. He reported how he attended a meeting at Skobelev’s office with leaders of the lower middle strata intelligentsia, white-collar workers and cooperative officials where they said they would absolutely not serve in a cabinet with the people on his list. The only choice by that logic was government with the Bolsheviks but without non-soviet democracy and even against them, and this too would lead to Civil War. This was uncomfortably close to the Bolsheviks’ own position and was unacceptable to us, Dan lamented. We could not pursue responsibly this kind of narrowly based power. So it turns out that the lower middle strata, the white-collar workers and similar groups were more decisive than is usually recognized in the politics of coalition or all socialist government as a solution to the power question. But they were unwilling to surrender their favourable position among the peasants or to assume power alone.21 The new coalition government contained no major socialist party [author’s italics] leaders and same might be said about the ministers drawn from financial and industrial circles. Party domination of politics in the Provisional Government cabinet had ended. Kerensky meanwhile rejected the idea of a government tied to the people, ignored the 14 August programme and tried to promote Provisional Government power by military force. For Dan, as October approached, this was a confrontational strategy reminiscent of the politics in the First and Second Dumas of the Old Regime. That the Council of the Republic was only a consultative organ was largely due to the opposition of the Provisional Government itself, despite the earlier wishes of the Soviet Central Executive Committee. Dan’s position was that the factual relationship of forces would trump formal structure and allow the left to use the Council to create a broadly based democratic government that would move quickly to implement the 14 August programme. The hope was that the non-Soviet democratic left (the lower middle strata) would be nurtured by the confrontational parliamentary experience to lose their conservatism. But time was at a premium, the politics of the moment rapidly changing. To stave off the Bolshevik planned action the Council needed to get the government to immediately move for peace and socialization of the land. Dan and the Council jousted with Kerensky about peace resolutions and Kerensky’s failed search for a motion of unconditional support from the Council, which in turn wanted to take a specific three-part proposal directly to the workers and soldiers. Kerensky to the end seemed blithely unaware of actual social and political forces and certainly of the weakness of potential military support. Dan criticized the AllRussian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (VTsIK) for not attempting to construct a government based upon the entire ‘democracy’, by which he clearly meant the lower middle strata in partnership with broader social elements.

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To build a revolutionary state, both the Provisional and Soviet Governments had to continue engaging with the ongoing population of the already growing economic and administrative infrastructure, professional and social organizations, self-government, land committees and soviets. Revolutionary states demanded knowledge, expertise and administrative experience or potential. The lower middle strata were central and indispensable to these projects. The subsequent history of the Civil War and transition to the New Economic Policy in 1921 found the lower middle strata to be ubiquitous, well-deployed, if ‘hidden’, and absolutely capable of exerting its influence and imparting its values to the rapidly growing Soviet/ Bolshevik state.22

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The ‘revolution from above’: Tsarist elites and the revolutionary process MATTHEW RENDLE, UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

On 12 March 1917, the socialist newspaper Nashe slovo published an article on the nobility’s reaction to the February Revolution. Responding to a declaration by the national organization, the United Nobility, in support of the new Provisional Government, the article expressed surprise: who would have thought the day would come, it proclaimed, when the ‘reactive’ nobility could write such a declaration. Naturally, the author cautioned, one should be suspicious as reactive ‘nests’ remained alongside political and class divisions. Nonetheless, the implication was that the nobility was accepting the revolution, perhaps even welcoming it since the declaration referred to February as ‘great days’. The nobility might be a minority within society and, the author believed, would always be a conservative force but, as this article recognized, this move helped to stabilize the political situation, removing the threat of counter-revolution and civil war in the short term at least.1 In many ways, this article provided a more perceptive analysis of the importance of the nobility – and, by implication, other tsarist elites – in the February Revolution than most historians have done subsequently. Usually February is seen as a popular revolution that swept away the powerless elites of the old regime. Yet the role of elites in all revolutionary processes has long been recognized by theorists of revolution. Few revolutions succeed, they argue, without ‘fractured’ or ‘alienated’ elites, even if most are inspired by popular protests. Few revolutions, too, mark a complete break with the past, politically or socially. Few revolutions, finally, avoid some form of counter-revolution, which is highly likely to involve elites.2 Tsarist elites, therefore, mattered: their alienation aided the quick and comprehensive success of the revolution in February; they formed a vocal minority through 1917 with their arguments and actions influencing the popular mood; some participated in the main counter-revolutionary threat that emerged in 1917 – the Kornilov Revolt – and far more formed the backbone of the counter-revolutionary challenge to the October Revolution during the civil war; and yet, despite this, even the Bolsheviks could

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not dispense entirely with their expertise, using elites as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘military specialists’ as they constructed a new state. The multiple publications that have accompanied the centenary of the revolution have reaffirmed the paradox that, on the one hand, specialist studies have provided more evidence to support the role of elites but, on the other, broad surveys rarely recognize this role beyond the odd mention or where it fits neatly into established narratives.3 Much of this problem is based, with justification, on the minority status of elites, the battle for space in such surveys and the understandable desire to stress the popular forces driving the revolution.4 Russian-language surveys do devote more attention to elites, at least up to the February Revolution, where ‘conservatives’ are included politically if not socially. Yet conservatives (or the ‘right’) usually turn out to mean the reactionary ‘far right’, whereas many elites felt greater affinity to moderate conservative or liberal parties who played important roles through 1917.5 This focus on elites politically meshes with how the revolution is now remembered in official discourse in Russia, with some officials and church figures using the ‘lessons of history’ to condemn revolution as something alien imposed by educated elites on Russia in 1917 at huge cost and thus to be avoided in the present day.6 Similarly, a more positive official stance on Tsarism has fuelled interest in hearing the voices of the far right on the eve of 1917, and their fears and ambitions, alongside the voices of more populous groups in society.7 This chapter, therefore, has two aims. First, it examines the activities of the tsarist elite – nobles, officers, landowners, industrialists, property owners and the Orthodox clergy were groups that overlapped, but together formed about 2.5 per cent of the population before 1917. This was not a united elite, however; as well as conflict between groups, each had members spread across the political spectrum as well as divisions based on wealth, occupation, lifestyle and culture.8 Second, the chapter integrates these activities into the revolutionary narrative. In doing so, it seeks to emphasize the importance of looking at the revolution from ‘above’ as well as the more common emphasis on the revolution from ‘below’. A growing desire for some form of political change alienated elites from Tsarism and their voices in 1917, while not inherently counter-revolutionary, fuelled growing popular fears of counter-revolution. Yet the diversity of elites explains why counter-revolution remained weak as most continued to engage with the revolution through 1917 in some way. The fracturing of elites continued after the October Revolution. Some formed the White armies, but struggled to forge a coherent vision for Russia’s future; others fled Russia or kept a low profile. Others, though, served the Bolshevik state in various ways for different reasons. Throughout, therefore, elites helped shape the revolutionary process and this legacy persisted into the 1920s and beyond.

THE ALIENATION OF ELITES AND THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION If few revolutions succeed without ‘fractured’ or ‘alienated’ elites, then recent research has only reinforced that the tsarist elite was fractured and alienated prior to 1917: fractured within as their fears and ambitions increasingly differed, and steadily

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alienated from a seemingly ineffective tsarist regime. Landowners, for instance, feared that a modernizing, industrial Russia was undermining and marginalizing their traditional landed wealth and influence. Industrialists, conversely, felt landed elites still enjoyed disproportionate political influence and were preventing faster economic development. The nobility, whose members fell into both groups, sometimes with individuals straddling both camps, became splintered. Even the Orthodox Church, distinct from these groups, faced the challenges posed by an increasingly urban and secular society, and was dissatisfied with the state’s response. These trends were exacerbated by the revolutionary unrest of 1905–7. The unrest hardly bred confidence in the Tsar, while growing politicization consolidated ideological divides as elites became active across the political spectrum from extreme monarchism to liberalism, if only rarely socialism. Even those on the far right who derided the new representative assembly (Duma) and political system still formed their own parties and organizations, launched newspapers and sought wider support.9 Indeed, the unrest prompted a level of organization across elite groups previously unseen, with new (if often initially short-lived) unions of industrialists, landowners, nobles, officers and clergy formed.10 The First World War temporarily brought state, elites and society together, united in mutual patriotism. Associations of local nobles provided finances and organized medical aid and other assistance, as did the church. Industrialists formed war industry committees in May 1915 to mobilize regional concerns, a union of landowners was formed in 1916 to aid food supply, and all were involved in uniting the efforts of local government into a joint committee (Zemgor) in July 1915. Yet these efforts appeared to be in vain. Military defeats followed in quick succession, supply and infrastructure problems seemed endemic, and the state not only ineffective, but even obstructive. Discontent coalesced politically around the formation of the Progressive Bloc in summer 1915, a loose coalition supported by two-thirds of the Duma (including liberals, conservatives and some further to the right) and around 46 per cent of the more conservative State Council.11 Some ministers were sympathetic and far more bureaucrats, many of whom worked alongside Duma members in wartime committees.12 The Bloc, then, represented a range of groups and an unprecedented level of political collaboration. It argued that the government could only win the war by incorporating a greater official role for society’s representatives in government, demanding a ‘ministry of confidence’ (cabinet) approved by the Duma, a legal and enlightened approach to government, and some social reforms.13 The Bloc did not demand an elected cabinet or a reduction of the Tsar’s powers, but support for both was present. These demands, though, fell on deaf ears: sympathetic ministers were removed from power and, rather than devolving power, Nicholas II reasserted and extended his authority by appointing himself as Commander-in-Chief. Recent research has revealed the extent to which all this impacted on elites politically, even among monarchists where the war hastened the disintegration of the far right as a united force. Members disagreed on whether the surge of patriotism offered an opportunity to destroy representative institutions, particularly the Duma, or justified conciliation in the name of victory. Increasing dissatisfaction with the monarch only sharpened this polarization as Nicholas was seen as either too weak

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in defending autocratic interests or too inflexible in seeking reform. Those believing the former discussed ideas for restructuring the monarchy; those thinking the latter moved ever closer to the demands of the Bloc. Indeed, the only thing uniting monarchists by 1917 was that all were talking about some form of political reform.14 This discussion was only greater among other groups. Similar divides can be seen across elite groups, from nobles and the church to officers and bureaucrats, and even within the Tsar’s own family.15 Take the United Nobility. When its president responded publicly to the Bloc’s programme by stating that only the ‘unshakeable foundations of the existing order’ and a firm and united government would protect Russia from internal strife, it caused turmoil in the organization. Four local associations left, over a dozen condemned his words and some were deeply split. At the organization’s congress in November 1916, the majority favoured a ministry of confidence and condemned the ‘dark forces’ surrounding the Tsar.16 A new leader was elected, A. D. Samarin, who had earlier been dismissed as a minister in part for his willingness to listen to the Bloc’s demands.17 None of this means to imply that elites were an active revolutionary force. Some were sufficiently desperate by 1916–17 to start plotting a palace coup, but arguments that these plots fed into an organized elite revolution in February are unconvincing.18 Nonetheless, talking cemented dissatisfaction across groups and shaped how these groups reacted to the revolution when it emerged, especially the usually apolitical military.19 The officer corps had changed during the war, becoming larger and more socially diverse as well as increasingly politicized as they sought reasons for, and solutions to, Russia’s faltering military campaign.20 All of this meant that while few elites were prepared to force revolution, continuing to fear its potential disruptive force, few were also prepared to defend the regime against revolution. As noted in October 1916 by the monarchist, I. I. Vostorgov, revolution seemed ready to erupt at any moment, but where was the counter-revolution?21 Against this backdrop, the eruption of popular unrest broke the deadlock paralysing elites.22 During the tense February days, when war and social order were key concerns, it seemed better to accept revolution, and try to restrict its impact and guide its direction, rather than risk further conflict by opposing it. These reactions have been reinforced by recent research on the February Revolution stressing the role of the Duma. Far from ‘reluctant revolutionaries’, key politicians from the Kadets, Octobrists and other conservative parties acted to lead the unrest sparked by workers and soldiers. The Duma held meetings, co-operated with the new Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and increasingly took a governing role, establishing new commissions and sending its commissars to state organs. One historian now talks of a ‘Duma Revolution’; another of ‘triple power’ to reflect the Duma’s ongoing importance alongside the Soviet and the Provisional Government.23 These arguments may give the Duma too much agency, but it did become a focal point for elites. Encouraged by the links made during the war, elites hoped the Duma could restore order and keep the revolution focused on political over social change. Officers were a key group here, of course, and a recent publication of documents to and from the High Command in February reinforces how far leading officers were aware of the unrest, not just from the Duma but also from seemingly

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neutral sources like the capital’s telegraph agency.24 They may have been reacting to events not driving them, but their actions were no less significant for that, and their decision to side with the Duma and the new Provisional Government facilitated the rapid collapse of the Tsarist regime.

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT Elites accepted the February Revolution in the hope that it was a political revolution and all elites came out in various ways immediately afterwards to express their support for the new government as the ‘legal authority’, and urge the country to unify and restore order.25 Lower social groups, however, saw February as a social revolution, and pressed for changes to economic and social structures that would inevitably challenge elites. Almost instantly, elites faced challenges in their daily lives, whether it was coming to terms with the new language and symbols of the revolution, facing growing insolence and threats from lower social groups, coping with frequent house searches and growing crime rates, or simply struggling to manage businesses and estates as usual.26 Within days and weeks, officers were removed, elected and subordinated to new soldiers’ committees; landowners were forced to renegotiate agreements with peasants and some had their land seized; factory owners faced paying higher wages and reducing working hours; and the church was challenged by laity demanding greater input into religious affairs. Elites were not counter-revolutionary in that they opposed the revolution immediately, but they had different visions for the revolution and this quickly became tantamount to counter-revolution amid the fevered politics of 1917. The rest of the year saw growing conflict and distance between the two visions as lower social groups pushed for material gains and elites were forced into ever more vocal protests, demanding strong government and law and order to defend their interests. Although the subsequent defeat of elites seems inevitable in hindsight, elites did not feel at the time that their position was hopeless despite their minority status and the scale of the challenge. The Provisional Government was committed to civil liberties and the rule of law, and decisions on major political, economic and social questions were postponed to the forthcoming Constituent Assembly.27 The government was also determined to place state interests above those of party or class, and it sought to ensure that all groups, including elites, had a voice where possible in order to be ‘democratic’ in the absence of elections; as one historian noted, this meant it was actually more ‘corporate’ than ‘democratic’.28 The key for elites, therefore, was to make their voices heard. On the one hand, they managed to maintain influence in central and local government as few revolutions completely sweep away the governing structures of the previous regime. Ministers were removed (and often arrested), but over 46 per cent of deputy ministers, directors of departments and other senior officials remained until October 1917, most of whom were elites, while at least 52 per cent of those who became ministers in 1917 were nobles and more were industrialists and other elites. Similarly, the Holy Synod was reformed, but only 22 per cent of bishops were removed.29 Locally, the corporate mentality led to the participation of elites in new local

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committees, especially property owners, industrialists and clergy. The government’s local representatives  – provincial and district commissars  – were initially often liberal nobles who had served in local government before 1917, although many were later replaced by socialists from diverse backgrounds.30 On the other hand, elite groups – as with other groups – formed unions to articulate their views and support their interests. Some emerged within days of the revolution, especially among more politicized elements of the elites; officers in Petrograd with socialist sympathies formed the Union of Republican Officers to promote the Petrograd Soviet and liberal counterparts created the Soviet of Officers’ Deputies to support the government, while the Union of Progressive Petrograd Clergy and the Union of Democratic Orthodox Clergy and Laity also emerged quickly, espousing liberal and socialist ideals respectively. Growing rural unrest had sparked landowners into action by April and national unions of property owners had emerged by the summer, although local groups had appeared much earlier. The emergence of unions represented the most visible sign of elites across 1917. They held local and national congresses to demonstrate support and formulate demands that were widely reported in the press. The major unions published newspapers to promote their views and all spread their views through pamphlets, flyers and public lectures. They also provided practical aid, helping members with disputes, circulating new laws or even supplying free legal aid. No membership records were taken and the vast majority of elites were clearly not actively involved, possibly fearful of repercussions during a revolution. Unions also had a vested interest in exaggerating their size as it provided substance to their claims for influence. The Union of Officers, for instance, claimed to have support from 100,000 officers (c.40–50 per cent of all officers) by counting active members as ‘representatives’ of all officers from particular armies or garrisons. In reality, many officers were too busy or afraid to participate, others were opposed, and some may have been pressurized into joining in fear of being blacklisted, and some branches allegedly counted retired or inactive officers. Nonetheless, reports of meetings suggest some unions could attract hundreds and even thousands, and national unions united numerous local groups – over five hundred for the Union of Trade and Industry.31 Indeed, it is worth stressing how many local unions appear to have existed, often representing similar groups, such as the four unions of clergy and believers in Saratov during 1917.32 Some also succeeded in reaching out to non-elites to broaden their social base; the majority of local members of the Union of Landowners, for example, were smaller peasant owners. The unions wielded varying levels of influence. The Union of Landowners obtained representation on the Main Land Committee, the organ in charge of land reform, and helped persuade the government to use troops to quell agrarian unrest later in the year. The Union of Officers wielded influence in the High Command (Stavka), receiving access to its printing facilities and support for some of its policies, especially its attacks on ‘Bolshevik’ officers. The Union’s consistent pressure to reintroduce the death penalty, stamp down on socialist agitation and reinforce officers’ authority gained traction after the failed June Offensive. The Military League, All-Russian Military Union and the Union of George Cavaliers

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organized volunteer battalions, while the latter two and the Union of Officers were invited to Stavka in early August to discuss military reforms.33 Electorally, various local ‘parties’ of property owners averaged 4.5 per cent of the vote in municipal elections in mid-1917, including over 20 per cent in eighteen smaller towns and over 50 per cent in two.34 These elections, though, were for organs rapidly losing authority to the soviets. More broadly, any survey of the records of national and local government organs will reveal that elite views and complaints were taken seriously, even if there was often little that could be done. Similarly, a survey of any newspaper does not take long to find these groups mentioned, whether a report on a congress, a note on their demands or even an advert for potential members. No group talked publically of counter-revolution, and even privately most wanted to engage with the revolution initially, but for socialists expecting counter-revolution and Russians warned of its danger, these activities suggested a real threat to the revolution and contributed to the radicalization of the popular mood. As one historian noted, their political experience, wealth and education, along with the pervasive fear of counterrevolution, ensured their influence far exceeded any electoral base.35 Despite this, these groups did not form a united elite movement for much of 1917 as, in the first instance, unions promoted the interests of particular elite groups and often the interests of specific sections within these groups. There were points of unity, of course, not least defending the position and role of elites, but there were political and policy divisions. All groups had unions that represented conservative and reformist (and sometimes even socialist) elements within their ranks, which led to differences on how far particular unions were prepared to move towards meeting popular demands for social reform. These divisions could run deep: how far to defend private landownership, for instance, or incorporate soldiers’ committees into the military hierarchy. Elsewhere, unions reflected geographical (national versus provincial, front versus rear) or hierarchical (senior versus junior officers, church leaders versus parish clergy) divisions. And, ultimately, some groups just prioritized different issues, with industrialists, property owners and landowners more interested in private property than, say, officers or many parish clergy.36 It was not until summer 1917 that concerns over the failed June Offensive, growing social unrest and the increasing weaknesses of the Provisional Government brought elites together, as on the eve of 1917, in a shared desire to restore order and stability, and for some degree of political change even if, as before, they disagreed on the best option. Industrialists had reached out to liberals, urban property owners and officers from the start, usually providing financial aid for their activities. But by July, landowners were forging links with industrialists, homeowners and liberals; liberals and the clergy were growing closer; and officers’ groups were holding joint meetings. Some bodies, such as the Republican Centre, were specifically created to bring civilian and military groups together in pursuit of strong government, law and order, military victory and an end to radical socialism.37 By late summer, it was possible to talk of an elite ‘movement’ and this was evident to contemporaries after several conferences in Moscow in the first half of August. The first was the Congress of Public Figures on 8–10 August, which consisted of almost 400 representatives from non-socialist groups, including conservative and liberal politicians, officers,

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landowners, industrialists and clergy. The second was the government-organized State Conference on 12–15 August, involving 2,400–2,600 individuals with elites in a vocal minority. Finally, on 15 August, the All-Russian Sobor of the Orthodox Church opened with 564 delegates (of which 299 were laity, including nobles, landowners, industrialists, officers and politicians).38 All three were characterized by what one historian has termed a sense of ‘deep crisis’ as elites criticized the direction of the revolution, demanding a strong government to combat political instability and social unrest.39 It remained unclear what constituted such a government. Some officers desired a military dictatorship, but most civilians were unconvinced. Others wanted the government to simply be more forceful in enacting existing policies and quashing unrest, despite its obvious growing powerlessness. Meanwhile, press coverage of these conferences must have fuelled popular fears with the socialist press exaggerating the more authoritarian views, thereby exacerbating fears of counterrevolution. These fears seemed to be justified in late August with the ‘revolt’ of the Commander-in-Chief, General L. G. Kornilov. The advance of troops towards Petrograd and his refusal to leave his post when dismissed seemed an obvious instance of counter-revolution. Yet this event, alongside the conferences, reaffirmed the fractured position of elites even though they agreed Russia was in a deep crisis. Some generals supported Kornilov vocally and the leaders of some unions were involved (Union of Officers and Union of George Cavaliers), and most officers supported Kornilov’s demands for greater order and discipline, but the majority felt the revolt would never succeed. A few industrialists allegedly offered funds, and some liberal and conservative politicians proffered support, but other elites were deeply divided over the desirability of Kornilov’s aims as well as their chances of success. Many desired an effective democratic government, as promised after February, rather than a military dictatorship that might marginalize civilians and be ineffective amid the revolutionary turmoil. Participants in the Sobor, for instance, recalled heated debates over whether to support Kornilov before his failure became clear. Even then, it has been argued, most aimed to avoid the dangers of the current divisions and a possible civil war rather than advocating counter-revolution.40 What is clear is that revolt was hugely damaging for elites, particularly officers, leading to arrests and investigations. More significantly, the revolt radicalized the popular mood. Suspicion of elites turned into open hostility, calls for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ gathered momentum, and there were increasing instances of land and property seizures. Elites were excluded for the first time from a national assembly, the Democratic Conference, on 14–19 September 1917 and poorly represented thereafter. The Congress of Public Figures reconvened, but lacked its previous influence. Ironically, this marginalization of elites came at the same time as the government tried to act more strongly to quell social unrest, as elite unions had demanded for months, but it now lacked any authority to succeed. Elites could do nothing more than protest futilely at the increasing attacks on them and, with their ‘movement’ shattered, await the further political change that now seemed inevitable.

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THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION, CIVIL WAR AND BEYOND If elites played a role in February hoping for a political revolution, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in October marked the victory of the social revolution that they had always feared. In theory and rhetoric, there was no place for the ‘bourgeoisie’ in a ‘proletarian’ revolution. Furthermore, the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the bourgeoisie were not a potential threat but a reality to be fought against wherever found. Revolution was conceptualized as class war and social origins were fundamental: membership of an elite group determined an individual’s political and material position regardless of their actual views and lifestyle. There had been elements of this class warfare in popular discourse before October, of course, but it now became a state-sponsored element of the revolutionary process. There was very little elites could do in response. Immediately after the Bolsheviks had taken power, the Decree on Land sanctioned the seizure of privately owned land. A fortnight later, all social classes and ranks were abolished, along with their privileges and institutions, while all military ranks were abolished in December. Other decrees established workers’ control over factories, state control over banks and separated the Church from the state, ending its privileges, as well as creating the means to target counter-revolution (and elites) – censorship, secret police (Cheka) and revolutionary tribunals. Unions protested fruitlessly and urged members to record their losses in the hope something would change, but most were increasingly targeted by the state and the Cheka, and ceased functioning in early 1918. Before this, some had campaigned in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, but parties sympathetic to elites obtained no more than 6.3 per cent of the vote.41 In any case, the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Assembly after a day indicated the futility of the ballot box. The obvious next steps seemed to be either fleeing or fighting, and these constitute the traditional picture of elites after October; they formed a sizeable portion of the 500,000 to 3,000,000 people who emigrated during the civil war,42 while they were also the basis of the ‘White’ armies, particularly officers, and were involved in resistance behind the frontlines.43 Yet recent research, building on earlier scattered work, has revealed a more complex picture here too, and the fracturing of elites remained decisive. Not only did the continuing diversity of their political views prevent the Whites from forming a coherent vision for Russia’s future, but many elites actually neither fled nor fought the Bolsheviks. Instead, many tried to survive within Bolshevik-held territories. Some of this was a case of simply trying to keep undetected and continue lives as best possible, something that was increasingly difficult but not impossible. Elites may have been disenfranchised in the new constitution in July 1918, losing the rights of other citizens and becoming ‘former people’, making it more difficult to access housing, rations and jobs, but recent research has demonstrated that many succeeded, often using familial and other networks to help them survive. Taking on new roles demonstrated they could transform into productive members of society and become ‘soviet’.44 These roles often involved serving the new regime in some form. While

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there was no place theoretically for elites in the new society, in practice – as with all revolutions – the Bolsheviks could not build a new state from scratch and needed the military, bureaucratic and economic expertise of elites. Many simply carried on in existing roles. So just as there was continuity in state officials across the February Revolution so too was there across October. This declined over time, but a report in 1920 suggested that 20 per cent of bureaucrats and technical personnel remained extsarist officials, landowners, priests and other old regime remnants, while 35 per cent of the senior officials in the Commissariat of Agriculture in 1924 were nobles and more were in lower level posts.45 These individuals rarely had a significant influence on policy, but such ‘bourgeois specialists’ played an important role in enabling the fledgling state to function. Equally, some industrialists helped the state run their factories and some landowners survived on their estates. More strikingly, perhaps only 40 per cent of the 250,000 officers on the eve of October fought in the White armies in 1918–20, with 30 per cent serving as ‘military specialists’ in the Red Army, including senior generals (the rest emigrated or returned to civilian life). These officers expressed a range of feelings, from personal ambition for promotion, to an acceptance of the popular appeal of Bolshevism, to a belief that the Bolsheviks represented the best opportunity to re-establish order and a strong Russian state.46 Indeed, it was notable how those who served on opposing sides in the civil war both justified their actions in their search for ‘strong’ government to restore law and order to Russia. While elites had never been a united force, as noted, the revolution had created new divisions; as it became clear that the Provisional Government’s vision of democracy was not working, elites proved unable to agree on an alternative. Disunity and the lack of a clear programme were fatal for the antiBolshevik opposition as the Whites were unable to say with clarity what a future Russia would be like, making it easy for the Bolsheviks to portray them as reactive and regressive. Equally, the presence of elites on both sides during the civil war emphasized that this was a war fought within social groups as well as between them, helping to explain its intensity and ferocity. Nevertheless, social background always mattered and this meant that the position of elites was precarious, whether being more susceptible than other groups to confiscations of property, fines, arrests and punishment. Local authorities, including the Cheka, kept an eye on former people in their localities and tsarist elites were the predominant focus of revolutionary tribunals in the first year of their existence.47 One example of the precarious nature of elites was A. A. Eiler. He was a noted agronomist, ran a model estate and was popular with the local peasants. Despite serving the Provisional Government, he remained as manager of his estate and advised the Commissariat of Agriculture. But the local Cheka arrested him, apparently solely because he had been a large landowner, and resisted the appeals of prominent individuals and demands from the Commissariats of Justice and Internal Affairs to release him.48 For many Bolsheviks, especially in the Cheka, it was inconceivable that such class enemies could remain, irrespective of their practical value to the state. Another obvious example was the fate of the church. Numerous instances of the murder and arrest of local priests, alongside attacks on churches, monasteries and printing presses, were followed by a more systematic campaign

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to nationalize church valuables from late August 1918. Even though persecution fluctuated across the civil war, religion was clearly incompatible with the Bolsheviks’ vision for Russia’s future. Even those priests who helped implement state policies as ‘religious specialists’ in the hope of facilitating church reform, including former leaders of the Union of Democratic Orthodox Clergy and Laity, were left under no illusions with the advent of an atheist newspaper and organization, the League of the Militant Godless, in the 1920s.49 The state remained paranoid about the persistent presence of class enemies throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and targeted them through trials and purges as well as other means, such as internal passports in 1932. Yet, ironically, constant persecution only served to alienate many elites, particularly younger generations, who only wanted to live quietly after the revolution and civil war, and had no intention of actively opposing the state.

CONCLUSION Viewing the revolution ‘from above’, from the perspective of elites, allows a better understanding of the revolution in two ways. On one level, elites played an important role in many of the key developments that marked the evolution of the revolutionary process: appreciating how even the tsar’s natural supporters were discontented emphasizes the scale of society’s alienation from the regime before the revolution; examining their role in February demonstrates how the revolution from ‘below’ interacted with that ‘from above’ to enable the sudden and comprehensive collapse of Tsarism; exploring elite activities during 1917 not only complicates our understanding of the revolutionary democracy that permitted them a voice beyond that justified by their size and support, but also reveals how their demands helped fuel the radicalization of the popular mood, laying the foundations for October; the ongoing fractures among elites, which culminated in their conflicting responses to the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, even to the extent of fighting each other on the battlefields of the civil war, help explain both the failure of the Whites and the success of the Bolsheviks in their struggle to rebuild an effective state structure; and the ongoing struggle of the Bolsheviks to eliminate the role of ‘specialists’, many of whom were former elites, alongside enduring suspicions of class enemies fuelled by ideology and the formative experiences of the civil war, continued to shape key developments through the 1920s and 1930s. On another level, appreciating the revolution ‘from above’ and integrating elites into the revolutionary process align the study of the Russian Revolution with comparative and theoretical studies of revolution. In searching for common attributes across revolutions, the role of elites is clearer in these studies: the fracturing and alienation that weaken regimes sufficiently so popular protests can have a significant impact; the dynamic between evolving and inseparable conceptions of revolution and counter-revolution that drive revolutions; or the interplay between change and continuity as existing structures remain surprisingly resilient in the face of revolutionary change. Integrating elites into the Russian Revolution, then, is not about trying to claim that they are the most influential group in 1917 (despite their minority status), or that they were active revolutionaries (despite usually reacting to

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events), or that their activities were not doomed to failure (given the differing goals of the vast majority of the population). Rather it is about recognizing that elites were rarely uncompromising defenders of the old regime (as often presumed) and instead often promoted ideals like Western-style democracy, the rights of individuals, the right to own property and the rule of law that were central topics of debate in 1917. Promoting these ideals placed elites alongside the middle classes and others, whether lower-level officials or peasant landowners. As such, their voices fed into the discourse that drove the revolutionary process along with those of other social groups, even if ultimately, categorized as they were as counter-revolutionaries, these voices only convinced the majority of people to seek more radical outcomes from the revolution. As for accusations that elites were motivated primarily by selfinterest, they were surely hardly alone in this; all groups sought to use the revolution to further their own ambitions. It was the interaction of these ambitions and the relative weight of the groups behind them that shaped the final outcomes of the Russian Revolution.

PART FOUR

Identities

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Russia’s revolutions in 1917: What’s gender got to do with it? ROCHELLE GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

‘Even the ladies of the “constitutional democracy” in Petrograd proved more courageous against us.’ – Lenin to Clara Zetkin, 19201 The year 1917 is the most researched year in twentieth-century Russian history. Yet, with a few exceptions, accounts of the revolutionary year remain baritone and bass. The centennial of the Russian Revolutions sparked a boomlet in books and articles on the events of the year, and more scholars devoted attention to issues of women and gender. At the same time much mainstream scholarship on 1917 continued to heavily privilege the male perspective. The question of the role of women and gender in the key Russian historic events of 1917 still too often accords with traditional and/or Soviet stereotypes. The story of gender assumptions and women as political actors in 1917 remains largely invisible in the major histories of the period. This phenomenon persists despite a growing body of scholarship on women and gender that dates back at least to the 1970s.2 No account of 1917 can be complete without an examination of women’s participation in major events of that critical year. The late tsarist era represents a massive political awakening for women as well as men. Opposition struggles in Russia had been notable for the ways in which people of both sexes worked together in reformist as well as revolutionary groups. Under pressure during the 1905 Revolution, in his October Manifesto Tsar Nicholas II finally made the major concession of establishing a parliament. But women were barred from participating directly in voting or holding office. The question of women voting split the liberal opposition. Some, like Kadet leader Paul Miliukov, opposed women’s suffrage. Socialists, who in their platforms supported women’s rights, often gave lip service but little else to the

The author acknowledges the Tina Turner 1983 song ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’

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issue. The sense of betrayal by their erstwhile male comrades motivated progressive women, mostly from the intelligentsia, to form feminist groups and organizations to fight for their rights. These organizations affiliated with international women’s rights organizations, but as with other opposition groups, their possibilities for public action became more constrained as the government backlash grew. In general, cultural norms and the autocracy’s laws limited women’s range of public possibilities. Despite growing numbers of women flocking to factory work, the dominant ideology claimed that women’s place was in the home. As tsarist Minister of Justice Ivan Shcheglovitov stated in 1913: ‘One of the chief tasks of the twentieth century … consists of keeping women in the sphere most suited to them – the family and the home.’3 Some groups of women workers had occupied public political space before 1917, as strikers in factories employing a predominantly female work force, such as textiles and tobacco. Still, this was unusual, and women entering into public space, especially unaccompanied, risked labelling as ‘loose’. The feminist Maria Pokrovskaia in her publication Zhenskii vestnik (Women’s Herald) recounted her experience of being mistaken for a prostitute when walking alone on a St Petersburg street.4 Developments in 1917 changed these spatial and political constraints. After the February Revolution, democracy (demokratiia) was a key theme throughout the rest of the year. The intersectional appeal of extending rights to women became evident from the beginning. Groups of women occupied public space as conscious actors demanding equal rights several times in ways that directly affected the course of events. The first turning point came on February 23 when International Women’s Day demonstrations served as the first spark for the revolution that toppled the Tsar. Several weeks later, on March 19, in a massive demonstration for their own rights, women of all the urban classes flocked to the streets. At the end of that single day, they had won a commitment to women’s suffrage jointly from leaders of both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet.5 The third appearance of women as political actors came when they exercised their newly won citizenship rights, and voted in the Constituent Assembly elections in November 1917. Of the approximately 40 million voters in the Constituent Assembly elections, at least half were women. This represented the most significant expansion of democratic participation in the world at that time.6 Longstanding debates about spontaneity and consciousness in the events leading to the toppling of the Tsar largely focus on men. In February, when women intrude, they are still too often portrayed as a mass faceless group spontaneously erupting before ceding the really important events to male actors who possess revolutionary consciousness. Consciousness about women and gender is not a matter of political correctness. It is a matter of accuracy. A full picture of 1917 must include the roles played by members of the majority of Russia’s population in critical events of the year. Much progress has been made in researching and writing about women and gender in the late tsarist era, in 1917 and in the early Soviet period. But integrating this scholarship into the dominant narratives and classroom teaching is still problematic. While much about 1917 would benefit from a more thorough gender analysis, the outbreak of the February Revolution, the 19 March suffrage demonstration,

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the creation of the Women’s Battalion and the Constituent Assembly elections are especially significant occasions where women’s and gender issues illuminate the 1917 narrative.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY International Women’s Day demonstrations in Petrograd in 1917 sparked the February Revolution which led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. The first and only socialist women’s holiday was still new; it had been proclaimed on 26 August 1910. Searching for ways to attract more women to the cause of socialism worldwide, leading German socialist women’s activist Clara Zetkin called for the establishment of ‘a special Women’s Day’, whose primary purpose would be ‘to promote Women Suffrage propaganda’, at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, held in Copenhagen. Zetkin advocated suffrage as a democratic reform advantageous to the proletariat. In naming the holiday, Zetkin used the word ‘women’, and not ‘women workers’, acknowledging that women were a separate organizing category.7 Many socialist women leaders evolved on suffrage. Initially they were hostile, considering voting rights a ‘bourgeois’ demand. Or as Alexandra Kollontai wrote in 1908: ‘The woman question – say the feminists – is a question of rights and justice. The woman question – answer the women workers – is a question of a crust of bread.’8 In time, noting the appeal of the suffrage movement to women workers, activists reconsidered and reframed the issue of suffrage. The proclamation of International Women’s Day, the first and only socialist women’s holiday, demonstrates this change, as suffrage was recast as a key goal for the female proletariat. Russian celebrations of International Women’s Day started in 1913. From the beginning, the commemoration of International Women’s Day in Russia sparked conflict as activists across the feminist-socialist spectrum claimed the holiday. Feminists emphasized the cross-class organizing of women, while socialists viewed the day as a way to mobilize working-class women to join with their brothers in the revolutionary struggle. Thus, in 1917 International Women’s Day already had resonance among disparate sectors of Petrograd’s female population. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the largely male Petrograd socialist leaders expected the celebration of International Women’s Day to be the catalyst for revolution. The theme of the uncontrollable female can be found in several male socialists’ memoirs about the outbreak of the revolution. Angry about the women who went out on the streets on 23 February, Trotsky later complained: ‘Despite all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike.’ The Bolshevik Vasilii Kaiurov claimed that the night before, he had urged the women workers to show ‘restraint and discipline, yet suddenly here was a strike’.9 Only one socialist leaflet was distributed for International Women’s Day. The leaflet, the work of the Petersburg Interdistrict Committee (Mezhraionka), has been the subject of much scholarly debate. That debate has largely centred around its initial slogans: ‘Down with the Autocracy! Long live the international solidarity of the proletariat! Long live the united Russian Social Democratic Labor Party!’ But

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further down, the leaflet defines the pecking order of the proletariat: Women had ‘only recently became part of the family of workers’ and ‘often still are afraid, and don’t know what and how to make demands’. Owners exploit the ‘darkness and timidity’ of women workers, who should join in the struggles already initiated by male workers. Underscoring concerns about the revolutionary aptitude of the female proletariat and the feminist threat to class unity, the Interdistrict Committee leaflet departed sharply from the original intent of the socialist women’s holiday, focusing on class, and omitting any mention of suffrage. The holiday’s name, International Women’s Day, morphed into ‘Woman Workers’ Day (Zhenskii rabochii den’)’ or the ‘Woman’s May Day (Zhenskoe 1-go maia)’.10 Women workers were still suspect, as ‘backward’ elements of the proletariat susceptible to feminist siren songs of sex solidarity. The trope of the undisciplined, disobedient women existed side by side with the image of the backward female worker, who needed guidance from her more enlightened male comrades. As Elizabeth Wood has argued, assumptions about women as backward, impulsive and untrustworthy were very much part of the debates about women’s roles once the Bolsheviks took power. But in the early stages of the February Revolution, as Choi Chatterjee and Irina Iukina have shown, women’s actions belied the stereotypes. Often the women were bold and the men hesitant; they urged their proletarian brothers to lay down their tools and join them. Women put their revolutionary lessons into practice more thoroughly than did their male comrades.11

THE INVISIBLE MARCH After the February Revolution, as Boris Kolonitskii has noted, use of the term democracy was ‘a must for all political forces’.12 Women were among the most active and visible of those political forces. As McDermid and Hillyar demonstrate, women ‘did not simply instigate the revolution but contributed significantly to maintaining its momentum’.13 Women’s suffrage is an important and understudied theme informing women’s activism in the revolutionary year. Women’s critical agency in attaining their suffrage, in extending democracy, is one of the most immediate consequences of the February Revolution. In the aftermath of the toppling of the tsarist government, as part of the widespread post-revolutionary fervour for implementing democratic reforms, the cause of suffrage resonated across class and gender barriers. Suffrage was an issue of interest not only to the educated women of the intelligentsia, but also to the female workers and peasants. Arguments for extending suffrage emphasized working women’s prominent role in revolutionary events in the capital became an important argument in the arsenal of women’s rights supporters on the left. Prompt action on women’s rights was not decried as a frivolous demand of ‘privileged women’ but as a natural consequence of women’s courageous actions in sparking the initial demonstrations and then moving revolutionary events forward. Support for suffrage in that time proved unifying, one to be championed by defenders of the proletariat. Alexandra Kollontai added her voice to those arguing that granting women equal rights would complete the revolution, repeating this

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theme in her first article in Pravda after her return from her more than eight-year exile on 18 March. Wrote Kollontai: ‘Weren’t we women first out on the streets? Why now … does the freedom won by the heroic proletariat of both sexes, by the soldiers and soldiers’ wives, ignore half the population of liberated Russia?’14 Queried about women’s suffrage on 7 March, Alexander Kerensky, the only socialist in the Provisional Government, declared: ‘I am a partisan of complete equality of right for women.’ But while Kerensky intended to sign an order abolishing the death penalty, he refused to take immediate action on women’s rights.15 Dissatisfaction over the failure of the Provisional Government to act quickly and decisively on the issue of suffrage led to the second major foray of women into the public arena, on 19 March1917. The 19 March Petrograd women’s suffrage demonstration remains largely invisible in histories of 1917, as do regional suffrage demonstrations.16 Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, the first female gynaecologist in Russia and the President of the League for Women’s Equal Rights, organized the 19 March demonstration. Ninety organizations joined in sponsoring the action; an estimated thirty-five to forty thousand women took part. Newsreel footage of the march shows the cross-class nature of the participants. Those wearing hats (signifying the more affluent) and those wearing kerchiefs (the head coverings of female workers and peasants) mingled freely. Marchers carried banners with slogans such as: ‘If women are slaves there can’t be real freedom’, ‘Without women’s participation, suffrage is not universal’ and ‘Land rights to peasant women’. Men, soldiers and civilians are in the crowd; a military band plays, and there is a festive air. The march began at the City Duma on Nevsky Prospekt, in the heart of the city, and headed towards the State Duma, at the Tauride Palace. Shishkina-Iavein and the revolutionary heroine Vera Figner led the march, standing in an open car.17 The symbolism of Shishkina-Iavein choosing Vera Figner to lead the women’s suffrage march complicates political pigeon-holing of the Russian feminists. The notion that someone involved in the successful plot to assassinate a ruler would lead a demonstration demanding women’s suffrage would be unthinkable in Britain or the United States. Imagine the Russian-Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (if she supported votes for women) leading suffrage parades in Washington, DC. Most Russian feminists were closer to democratic socialists than liberals. In the inaugural issue of Soiuz zhenshchin (Union of Women), the largest circulation pre-revolutionary feminist journal, editor Mariia Chekhova declared that the full liberation of women could occur ‘only when all exploitation of one person by another is ended, that is, under socialism’.18 The march and its consequences offer an opportunity to see how the Provisional Government and the Soviet worked together in the early days of the Revolution. The feminists were determined and militant, and they were in a relatively powerful position. In the fluid situation of the first weeks after the revolution, the Soviet and Provisional Government leaders had few options. The use of force against a women’s march so soon after the revolution was unthinkable and impossible. The women striking in earlier actions in 1917 have never been identified by historians. The demonstration on 19 March is the first time a woman leader is

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named and confronts powerful men at a public demonstration. A contemporaneous account by League for Women’s Equal Rights member Olga Zakuta provides details of the interaction between Shishkina-Iavein, the Provisional Government and Soviet leaders. Shishkina-Iavein led the crowd in chants demanding that the Chair of the Soviet Nikolai S. Chkeidze and the President of the Duma Mikhail V. Rodzianko give a definitive answer on the issue of giving women the right to vote. Both Chkeidze and Rodzianko were at first hesitant, and it took a while before they even agreed to appear before the crowd. In the end, with the concurrence of Prince L’vov, head of the Provisional Government, the women won their demand. At this time the leaders of the Provisional Government and the Soviet were more inclined to work together, especially on non-military issues.19 Attention to the relatively quick and successful achievement of suffrage in Russia in 1917 enriches discussions of citizenship and complicates notions of Russia’s backwardness. The successful campaign in Russia for women’s suffrage is rooted in the nature of Russia’s opposition movements. From the mid-nineteenth century, Russian radicals and dissidents, unlike their counterparts in most other countries, made the ‘woman question’ a major concern in their writings. Russia was not isolated from the west; Russian women participated fully in international women’s suffrage conferences and Russian female students enrolled in western European universities, often outnumbering local women students. Women were prominent in the revolutionary movement and their agency was critical in extending the vote and the right to run for office to women.20 Provisional Government and Soviet leaders did not simply grant suffrage to women. They responded to demonstrators’ demands. Why did the Provisional Government leaders capitulate after one demonstration when in many of the established Western democracies countless suffrage demonstrations achieved little and activists were subjected to sexual violence and force feeding? In Russia, several factors came into play. The activist roles of women like Vera Figner in the opposition struggle against the Tsar created an image of women as strong leaders. Unlike politicians in many of the older democracies, neither the Provisional Government nor the Soviet leaders were anti-women’s suffrage. Even those like Kadet leader Paul Miliukov, who initially opposed the female vote, had long since changed their positions. Support for women’s rights became standard in the platforms of socialist and other left parties.

THE WOMEN’S BATTALION, THE WAR AND CITIZENSHIP Rodzianko, like others in the government, probably contemplated granting women citizenship rights as a way to aid the continued military effort which the Provisional Government continued as an ally of the British and the French.21 Indeed, many feminist leaders, having gained the promise of full citizenship after the 19 March march, also tied the cause of equal rights to victory in the war. They organized a number of meetings dedicated to both equal rights and support for the troops. Buoyed by their new equal status, some women responded to appeals to adopt

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the full range of citizenship roles. In May, Rodzianko ‘discovered’ the decorated woman soldier Maria Bochkareva and approached her about starting a women’s battalion.22 The idea was not new; it had been bandied about in Petrograd society and military circles. But the deteriorating military situation and the hopes raised by the revolution combined to push the notion forward. Recruitment for the Women’s Battalion emphasized women’s new rights and obligations as citizens. The Battalion also provided a means of linking the Allied cause with the international suffrage cause. Emmeline Pankhurst, the British feminist leader, encouraged by British Premier Lloyd George to aid the campaign for suffrage at home by bolstering Russian women’s support for the war, visited the Women’s Battalion barracks and attended the consecration of the Battalion’s colours at Petrograd’s St Isaac’s Cathedral.23

RUSSIAN WOMEN VOTE: THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY ELECTIONS By the time Lenin arrived in Petrograd at the Finland Station on the evening of 3 April, with his April Theses denouncing any Bolshevik cooperation with the Provisional Government and/or other socialists, women’s suffrage was well on its way to becoming law. Six and a half months later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in the second and decisive revolution of 1917. In most accounts, the night of 24 October, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, marks the end of democracy in general, as ‘under a one-party system, the right to vote had little political substance’.24 But the imposition of one-party rule took time. In the initial post-October period, the direction of the revolution was not so clear. Hopeful for a popular mandate, Lenin permitted the Constituent Assembly elections to be held, beginning on 12 November and extending through most of that month. In realizing women’s suffrage Russia was ahead of the other wartime powers. It is not clear if the Russian Revolution was a decisive factor, but by March 2017, all the major British leaders, from Herbert Asquith to Lloyd George to Andrew Bonar Law, after vigorously opposing the female franchise, moved to support women’s suffrage, citing women’s contribution to the war effort.25 US feminists noted Russian women’s suffrage victories in protest banners and in their publications. While Russian women were voting, US suffragists protesting in front of the White House were arrested, force fed and subjected to ‘the night of terror’ on 14 November 1917 in the Occoquan Workhouse. President Woodrow Wilson, nicknamed ‘Kaiser’ by suffragists, came out publicly for the women’s vote only in January 1918.26 Russian women taking to the streets powerfully influenced the course of events in 1917, but these actions, although they had ramifications for the entire country, initially took place in Petrograd. Voting affected all adult Russian women. The Constituent Assembly elections were the first elections in which Russian women over the age of twenty could not only vote but run for office, the freest elections held in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over 40 million votes were cast.27 Oliver Radkey estimated the voter participation rate as about 55 per cent. This is remarkable given the chaos and uncertainty of the period, immediately after

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the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.28 Factors such as male peasant resistance, voter intimidation and minority group mobilization all influenced female voters’ turnout. Despite the obstacles, large numbers of women seized the opportunity to exercise their newly won rights as citizens. As they prepared for the elections, how did the parties treat women’s rights? Left and liberal party platforms were notable for their initial lack of attention to the issue. The SRs did not mention women at all; the Mensheviks promised equal rights for both sexes, and special restrictions on women’s work; the Bolsheviks didn’t publish a platform. Nor did the parties do much to place women on their national candidate lists; of the total of five thousand candidates on the ballots, women were no more than a handful.29 Of the twenty-six candidates proposed by the Bolshevik Central Committee as mandatory, to be included on all of its party electoral lists, only one, Kollontai, was a woman. Of the 118 recommended candidates, seven were women (Nadezhda Krupskaia, Maria Ulianova, Elena Rozmirovich, Elena Stasova, Varvara Iakovleva, N. Ostrovskaia and Liudmila Menzhinskaia). Of the fifty-eight mandatory Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party candidates there were four women (Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, E. Ratner, Maria Spiridonova and Vera Figner). The feminists got short shrift from the group which had been their strongest supporters in the First and Second Dumas, the Trudoviks. This peasant party had broken away from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, opposing their boycott of the First and Second Dumas. For the Constituent Assembly elections, the Trudoviks did not run one mandatory female candidate, although Shishkina-Iavein was active in the party and the literary critic Liubov Gurevich, who was on its Central Committee, participated in the joint meeting uniting the Trudoviks and the Popular Socialist parties on 21–22 June 1917.30 Editors of the pro-feminist journal Zhenskoe delo (Women’s Cause) angrily reported on the Popular Socialists’ Congress in Moscow, held in late September to discuss tactics for the Constituent Assembly electoral campaign. In their lead editorial, ‘Still One More Injustice’, they condemned yet another attack on women as fully equal citizens in ‘the world’s freest country’, and this from their supposed closest allies, ‘true-believing socialists’. The Popular Socialist Central Committee had selected an electoral list of thirty mandatory candidates, including many of the elder statesmen of the populist movement, such as Miakotin and Mikhailovskii. When one delegate, probably Shishkina-Iavein, protested the lack of even a token female, the congress majority failed to support her. She was forced to withdraw her objection. Condemning this ‘celebration of male egoism’, the Zhenskoe delo editors claimed that ‘women voters will scarcely agree to vote for such an exclusively “male” party’.31 The League for Women’s Equal Rights fielded a feminist slate. Those on the list included Shishkina-Iavein, Chekhova, Kuskova, Bestuzhev courses lecturer and historian Ekaterina Shchepkina, Liubov Gurevich, the populist historians Alexandra Efimenko and Alexandra Kalmykova, L.M. Gorolits-Vlasova, a Women’s Medical Institute instructor, a Kiev doctor and a trade union activist. A list for the ‘Women’s Union for Aid to the Homeland (Zhenskii soiuz pomoshchi rodine)’ also was posted in Petrograd.32

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Efforts to influence female voters to support particular political parties took many forms, from gentle persuasion to intimidation. As the elections drew near, armed and radicalized soldiers travelled around to many villages, threatening to destroy crops, homes and livestock if peasants did not vote Bolshevik. A Riazan province priest reported that peasant women who sought his advice ‘cast fearful glances over their shoulders’. In Tambov province an SR activist reported that Bolshevik soldiers had threatened soldiers’ wives that: ‘If you don’t vote for No. 7 [the Bolshevik list in that province] just wait till your mate gets home─he’ll beat the hell out of you!’ In Pskov province male peasants beat up the local priest for influencing village women to vote for ‘the class enemy’.33 The Bolsheviks did not hold a monopoly on intimidation; neither did men. Schoolteachers, often female, sometimes sought to influence votes. In Samara province, for example, the schoolteacher Bolshakova, teaming with the local priest, grabbed Bolshevik lists from peasants’ hands and threatened their arrest if they protested. Despite such efforts, one SR observer claimed that women accounted for much of the rural Bolshevik vote, in part because they viewed the Bolsheviks as most likely to bring their men home from the war.34 Appeals to women voters extended across many constituencies. The potential for increasing vote tallies and political influence by capturing the female vote led to the balancing of tradition with the new reality. The All-Russian Muslim Soviet passed a resolution stating that: ‘Going to the ballot box is a moral duty for every woman.’ But the resolution also mandated that: ‘The votes of the men and the women must be separated and the votes tallied.’ The new Bolshevik Government initially refused to heed this resolution, but objections from the leaders of the Muslim Soviet caused them to authorize separate voting days for women and men.35 Some women were confused by their new rights. Pauline Crosley, married to a US diplomat, cited the suffrage achievement, writing to a friend about ‘the suffrage being suddenly given to women here – so far as I can learn it was not asked for by the women, but one morning they woke up to learn that they could vote’. According to Crosley, her maid, who was literate, ‘tried to learn from me what it really meant “to vote”’.36 Others, overwhelmed by the difficulties of their lives, resisted any involvement in politics. Tver’ women mocked voter mobilization efforts: Girls, with democrats don’t gad about. Democrats will only teach you To read proclamations through and through.37 What about female voter turnout? Women’s low participation rate in local elections earlier that year did not bode well. In these, the first elections in which women could vote, they encountered male resistance, especially in rural areas. In Platonovka, in Kozeletskii district and in several other villages, women were turned away from polling places. In the village of Novo-Troitskii, Berdianskii district, in Tavricheskii province, male peasants went one step further, nullifying the first election in which women took part, and holding a second one only for men.38 The low female turnout in these first elections caused great concern among Constituent Assembly supporters.

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One lamented in a local newspaper on 5 October, that in wartime conditions, ‘who will take part in elections in the countryside, where only women are left?’.39 The same newspaper called on all members of the working intelligentsia, ‘especially male and female teachers and cooperative members’, to prepare peasant women for their responsibilities as independent voters.40 Despite the misgivings, in the nationwide elections for the Constituent Assembly women’s participation exceeded all expectations. Historian Lev Protasov has done the most extensive research on this subject, using evidence primarily from local newspapers of the time. In the countryside, women voted in surprisingly high numbers, especially compared to the municipal elections. Witnesses described a festive atmosphere at the polls, with peasant women coming to vote dressed in their finest, and like their menfolk leaving a trail of sunflower seed hulls behind them.41 Problems with men blocking women’s vote did surface; some peasant men forbade women to vote. In Tomsk province, one peasant assembly decreed that: ‘Under no circumstances are women to vote; in each family the head should vote for the entire family.’42 But other men encouraged women to vote. The Bolsheviks, having just won power, were particularly effective in this regard. They initiated a campaign for soldiers at the front to write home to their wives, urging them to vote for the Bolshevik list. The SRs organized a similar but less effective campaign.43 Among non-Russian nationalities, the turnout was mixed. The percentage of Dagestani women who voted was only 15 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum, the Crimean Tatars went to great lengths to get women to the polls, even carrying a bed-ridden centenarian to the nearest electoral location. In urban areas like Baku, the number of Muslim women voting totalled 77 per cent, with overwhelming majorities for the Muslims of Russia list.44 Protasov cites newspaper articles reporting gender differences in turnout. According to these sources, the percentage of rural female voters reached 77 per cent; the male total was 70 per cent. Urban centres, with their much higher concentration of educated and politically aware women, were expected to have higher female participation. Even so, the gap between male and female turnout was wider than expected. In the cities of Moscow province, for example, 56 per cent of women voted as compared to 50 per cent of men. In Iaroslavl 46.5 per cent of men voted, and 67.5 per cent of women.45 The male turnout was no doubt affected by the number of soldiers still at the front, but overall, despite wartime conditions, Russians went to the polls at higher rates than in the United States, an established Western democracy which held its first national election in which women voted in peacetime. Scholars of the US Presidential election of 1920 estimate that the female turnout averaged about 37 per cent while men’s participation averaged about 55 per cent.46 The high Russian female turnout did not translate into electoral success for those who fought hardest for women’s suffrage. Although the sources do not agree on the vote tally for the feminists, those who cast their ballots for this list were but a fraction of the over 40 million who voted. Oliver Radkey gives a total of 7,676 votes: 5,310 votes from Petrograd, and 2,366 from the Pskov electoral district. L.M. Spirin’s total of 7,994 includes Radkey’s 7,676 plus 318 votes in Petrograd for the Women’s Union for Aid to the Motherland (Zhenskii soiuz pomoshchi rodine),

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apparently not counted by Radkey. It is remarkable that such slates emerged at all, especially after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd.47 At least one feminist ran on a traditional party slate. Ariadna Tyrkova, on the Kadet list in Novgorod, was defeated by a Bolshevik slate which included Trotsky.48 In all, ten of the 767 deputies elected were women. They included the Bolsheviks Evgeniia Bosh (1879–1925), Elena Rozmirovich (1886–1953), Kollontai, and Varvara Iakovleva (1884–1941 or 1944) and the SRs Breshko-Breshkovakaia (1844–1934), Figner, Spiridonova, M.D. Perveeva and O.A. Matveevskaia. Anastasia Sletova, ‘one of the key figures in the SR organization in the black-earth zone’ and the wife of the SR leader Victor Chernov, was elected a deputy from Tambov province. On 5 January1918, the opening day of its session, the ten women appeared in the great hall of the Tauride Palace alongside their male colleagues.49 The great hopes for Russia’s first fully representative Parliament were for naught. Sitting with Lenin in the balcony, Kollontai watched as Bolshevik sailors, led by her lover Pavel Dybenko, dispersed the Constituent Assembly after its initial session.50 Did women across Russia care about their rights? The high level of voter turnout for the Constituent Assembly elections in November indicates that voting was an issue of importance to the female masses as well as the elites. Russia’s female voters became pioneers not only in their own country, but also in the world, as the citizens of the first major power to approve women’s suffrage. The February Revolution, then, both reflected and unleashed the expectations leading to a democratic revolution that extended political rights to both sexes. This was a significant step towards the gender-neutral concept of citizenship that is now the norm for the modern nation-state.51 Female participation often exceeded that of men.52 In contrast to countries, such as the United States, where formal and informal racial and class barriers to voting affected the total vote, few such barriers existed in multi-ethnic revolutionary Russia. In urban areas like Baku, the number of Muslim women voting totalled 77 per cent, with overwhelming majorities for the Muslims of Russia list.53 Women’s suffrage (the vote and the right to hold elective office) is one of the great democratic reforms of the twentieth century. If suffrage in Russia did not achieve as much as had been hoped for, this should not diminish the significance of the struggle.54 There is a direct link between the events of February 1917, when Petrograd women took to the streets on International Women’s Day to spark the revolution, the March suffrage demonstration and the July electoral law that granted full democratic rights to Russian women. Russian feminists thus achieved their chief goal before the Provisional Government was swept away by the October Bolshevik Revolution. Indeed, women’s suffrage is among the few lasting achievements of the Provisional Government.55 While suffrage for both women and men meant little in the Soviet era, when most elections had one candidate for each office, the government went to great lengths to maintain democratic trappings and ensure that everyone voted. Voting may have been merely a formality, but it was part of the definition of the modern state.56 The suffrage victory was submerged into the narrative of socialist women’s liberation trumpeted by the Bolsheviks once they assumed power. Adopting a

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sweeping programme for women as an important part of the revolution enhanced the Bolshevik claim to be the most advanced of modern states. No one within Russia would publicly contradict such assertions. As part of the elimination of autonomous political centres, feminist organizations and publications were shut down.57 Some feminist leaders fled; those who remained either supported the new government or stayed silent. Feminist leaders in emigration also stayed silent. Western and Soviet historians joined in rendering invisible the 19 March 1917 demonstration which won the female vote. Women’s suffrage was either minimized as a ‘bourgeois’ goal or credited to the Bolsheviks as part of their campaign for women’s liberation. Thus, both the date of the actual suffrage victory and the government which enacted it were changed to suit the narrative of the new state. The critical role of independent female agency in the pioneering Russian achievement was rendered invisible. Years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik narrative too often remains unchallenged. Links between the events of February 1917, when Petrograd women took to the streets on International Women’s Day to spark the revolution, the 19 March suffrage demonstration, the creation of the Women’s Battalion, the July electoral law that granted full democratic rights to Russian women and the Constituent Assembly elections deserve further exploration. Indeed, as noted above, women’s suffrage was the most consequential achievement of the Provisional Government. And as a result of the suffrage victory, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained control of a state in which women already had experience of formally performing citizenship through voting and running for electoral office. Integrating information about women’s entry into the public sphere in 1917, through study of their participation in demonstrations, marches with a political purpose, the various forms of female activism and the battle for women’s suffrage, enhances the understanding of the revolutionary year in relation to questions of citizenship, democratic reform, and conceptions of gender and female agency. The history of 1917 in Russia requires a full range of voices.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Masculinity in 1917 SIOBHÁN HEARNE, UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

By the time protestors took to the streets in February 1917, Russia was in the midst of a gender revolution. This revolution had little to do with achieving equality between men and women and was more about the emancipation of young men from the stifling restrictions underpinning traditional generational patriarchy.1 Like the broader political, social, cultural and economic developments of 1917, this gender revolution had deep roots in the late imperial period. In the late nineteenth century, rapid industrialization, urbanization and modernization shook the traditional patriarchal gender and family order to the core. Following the introduction of universal military conscription in 1874, military officials attempted to take a more active role in defining appropriate masculine behaviour. Rising consumerism and the proliferation of mass media in the early twentieth century gave rise to multiple new definitions of manliness based on leisure activities and dress. The outbreak of war in 1914 brought about an acceleration of these earlier trends, which reached a crescendo in the revolutionary year of 1917. This essay traces the trajectory of this gendered revolution from the final decades of the nineteenth century until just after the Bolshevik’s seizure of power in October 1917. In doing so, it will examine the multiple, shifting ideas about what it meant to be a man in revolutionary Russia.

PATRIARCHY CHALLENGED? THE ROOTS OF RUSSIA’S GENDER REVOLUTION Rural social and cultural life was rapidly evolving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Traditional peasant structures were profoundly challenged by modernity and mobility and this brought about the erosion of both real and symbolic patriarchal power. Before 1917, the majority of the Empire’s population lived in the countryside where the authority of older men reigned supreme. Peasant society was rigidly patriarchal and hierarchical, structured to endow older men with ultimate authority and responsibility over the lives of their extended families. The male head of the household (known as the bol’shak) managed the household’s economic resources, divided labour between family members, and was in charge of protecting the reputation of his household. Parents were largely in charge of arranging and negotiating the marriages of their children.2 When a son married, his wife came to live in the household of his parents, enhancing the household’s resources and

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labour capacity.3 Married sons were only able to form separate households with the bol’shak’s permission, or after his death. This patriarchal household structure was replicated in the governing body of rural society, the peasant commune. Each household in the community was represented by its male head in the communal assembly, who had the power to mete out punishments to community members, as well as determine how communal land ought to be used and how taxes ought to be paid.4 The Russian imperial government held peasant communities collectively responsible for taxes, so the bol’shak played a key role in ensuring that his household fulfilled their communal obligations to the state.5 The patriarchal structures of peasant households and the peasant commune mirrored the ideal relationship between the all-powerful Tsar and his subordinate subjects. Elite narratives mythologized the Tsar as a ‘little father’ whose power was holy, indisputable and sanctioned by God. The ideology of autocracy outlined the ideal relationship between the Tsar and his people as that of father and son: the Tsar was obliged to protect his subjects and they were to obey him unquestioningly. The patriarchal authority of the bol’shak and the Tsar steadily eroded as the Empire lurched towards modernity throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The gradual relaxation of restrictions upon peasants’ movement, development of new transportation networks and increasing affordability of train tickets offered new opportunities for young men and women to leave the patriarchal stronghold of their peasant households.6 Millions of rural dwellers (most of whom were men) left the countryside in search of wage labour, settling in provincial towns and cities on a temporary or more permanent basis.7 Mass migration for wage labour began to undermine the economic underpinnings of generational patriarchy, as it provided young men (and to a lesser extent, young women) with greater leverage in negotiations with their parents about their choice of spouse.8 Increased economic independence and greater contact with urban life encouraged self-assertiveness and enabled young peasants to shape village culture by bringing the fashions, attitudes and ideas home with them to the countryside.9 The image of the Tsar as the authoritative but benevolent patriarch of the Empire was also shaken to the core at the turn of the twentieth century. Nicholas II’s coronation celebrations in 1896 were marked with disaster, as over one thousand people were trampled to death at a poorly organized event at Khodynka field in Moscow. Public discussions of Nicholas’s disastrous handling of the Khodynka catastrophe called both his ability to rule and his masculinity into question. He was cast as hysterical, inexperienced, uncaring and too weak to cope with the burden of rule.10 In January 1905, the violence unleashed against peaceful demonstrators processing to the Winter Palace to present Nicholas with a petition (who were reportedly singing hymns and carrying pictures of the Tsar and religious icons) further undermined one of the core tenets of autocratic ideology: the myth of the caring ‘little father’. Thereafter, the multiple waves of violence, strikes, mutinies, pogroms, assassinations and protests that broke out across urban and rural spaces of the Empire forced Nicholas to reluctantly grant basic civil liberties to his imperial subjects. One such concession was the partial repeal of the law on pre-publication censorship for newspapers and periodicals in November 1905, after which a deluge of

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anti-government publications denouncing the Tsar, his family, and his government, flowed across the Empire.11 In satirical postcards and cartoons, representations of Nicholas categorized him as unmanly and incapable. While government ministers like Dmitri Trepov and Sergei Vitte appear as bloodthirsty, calculating villains, the ‘all-powerful patriarch’ was frequently depicted as unintelligent, physically weak and even a crying baby.12 This erosion of both real and symbolic patriarchal power in the final decades of the old regime marked the beginnings of Russia’s gender revolution. The Russian Empire was a society in flux at the turn of the twentieth century, as social boundaries, identities and mentalities were negotiated and violated on the civic stage.13 Models of masculinity were also in flux, as the processes of industrialization, urbanization and rising consumer culture generated new perspectives on masculine identity and offered multiple meanings about what it meant to be a man that would continue to reverberate throughout 1917 and beyond.

NEW MODELS OF MASCULINITY IN MODERNIZING  RUSSIA Around the turn of the twentieth century, rural-to-urban migration for men resulted in separation from women and immersion within new homosocial spaces, like the factory, tavern or dormitory. Low wages and the high cost of living within the urban environment meant that many male migrants left their wives behind in the countryside. If couples migrated together, high rental prices and the contrasting geographies of sites of male and female labour forced most to live apart.14 In order to minimize board and lodgings expenses, young male migrants rented corners of apartments or beds in all-male factory dormitories, or even pooled their resources with other migrant men to form arteli, common communal living and working arrangements in late imperial cities.15 For single men or those living apart from their families, acquiring workplace skills, drinking with peers in the tavern, regaling work colleagues with tales of sexual conquest or beating an opponent in an organized fist fight all served as markers of manliness.16 These practices both drew on and deviated from traditional models of masculinity that were prominent in the countryside, as they de-emphasized procreation and fatherhood as markers of manliness, while continuing to valorize labour capacity and physical strength. A small minority of urban workers strove to forge new models of masculinity based on self-control, personal autonomy and rationality, and in doing so, explicitly rejected what they perceived to be the backwards traditions of the countryside.17 In the final decades of the old regime, ideas about masculinity became more acutely focused on the physical body. The gaze of the Russian imperial state was cast over millions of male bodies following the introduction of universal military conscription in 1874. In the decades that followed, military officials pried the production of masculine ideals out of local hands and endeavoured to create a ‘single, militarized, form of masculinity’ that would unite male Russian subjects from across the multilingual and multi-ethnic space of the Empire.18 After the Russo-Japanese War, military and medical authorities gestured to the poor physical and moral health

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of recruits as the primary explanation behind such a humiliating defeat at the hands of an enemy deemed to be racially inferior. Recommendations for reform included prioritizing the physical shape of recruits during the drafting process, as well as organizing physical and spiritual education for adolescent boys to prepare them as future soldiers.19 Fear about the declining physical health of the Empire’s men was not just confined to the military. Disease was a topic of frequent discussion in the mass circulation newspapers and periodicals before 1917, and illnesses like cholera, venereal diseases and alcoholism were all seen as physical manifestations of the detrimental impact of Russia’s rapid confrontation with modernity on the Empire’s subjects.20 Sports organizations sprung up across the Empire throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting a wider European interest in the physical body and efforts to create a healthier nation. The Sokol movement reached Russia in the early 1900s, and its various branches promoted gymnastics as a method for instilling discipline and improving physical fitness in order to alleviate some of the negative consequences of urbanization.21 The number of sports organizations and amateur sports clubs exploded around the turn of the twentieth century and the first all-Russian Olympic games was held in 1913 in Kyiv.22 The celebrity status of professional world-champion wrestlers like Vladislav Pytliasinskii, Georg Lurich and Ivan Poddubnyi reflected evolving notions of masculinity that were centred upon physical strength, self-discipline and athleticism.23 The proliferation of media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled easier circulation of competing ideas about masculinity and offered men new opportunities for self-representation and expression. The commercial publishing industry rapidly expanded as a result of falling printing and distribution costs and rising literacy levels among lower-class rural and urban populations.24 The turn of the twentieth century marked the beginnings of the mass circulation press, as the number of newspapers and periodicals in circulation across the Empire increased by over 500 per cent between 1889 and 1908 and continued to rise in the decade thereafter.25 In this context, self-help brochures and exercise manuals poured into the Russian mass market press instructing men how to attain the physical and mental ‘steeliness’ (zakal) required to thrive in modern life.26 Such discussions of self-improvement connected men’s exertion of individual willpower with the more general commitment to transforming the ‘backwardness’ that was perceived to permeate Russian culture and society.27 This emphasis on individual qualities reflected a shift away from models of masculinity that rested upon subordination and deference to superiors (like the patriarch of the household) and moved towards the celebration of the entrepreneurial ‘self-made man’ who thrived in the capitalist workplace.28 The rapid development of the Russian film industry from the 1900s onwards generated an insatiable appetite for foreign and domestic cinema among urban dwellers.29 As a mass medium, film served to further diversify representations of manliness in popular culture. Men attending cinemas in the late imperial period might see themselves reflected in silent film stars like romantic idol Vladimir Maksimov, bourgeois dandy Max Linder or the neurasthenic Ivan Mozzhukhin, who was most famous for shedding tears.30 The development of mass media also generated a proliferation of sexualized images in popular visual culture, of which

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men were both the subjects and consumers. Mass-orientated periodicals, like the wrestling journal Hercules, reproduced photographs of semi-naked wrestlers and athletes for a predominantly male readership. Wrestler Georg Lurich appeared in a publicity shot wearing nothing but a fig leaf.31 Adverts for pornographic postcards constructed a homogenous male community that transcended class and ethnic boundaries, addressing themselves to ‘all men’ or ‘men only’.32 Constructions of masculinity were deeply embedded in the processes of buying and selling in late imperial Russia.33 Tobacco advertisements played on tropes of masculinity to create a ‘shared masculine world’, urging men of all social classes to see themselves as part of a fashionable urbanite community with shared tastes and habits.34 As the retail industry and garment trade grew, clothing increasingly became a means with which to assert or complicate masculine identities.35 Men, especially unmarried younger men, spent more and more money on clothing and footwear, reflecting the development of a more ‘individualistic style of masculinity, associated with urban sophistication, polished manners, and self-display’.36 After shooting to fame, Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky played with the conventions of acceptable masculine dress and engaged in ‘male plumage’ by sporting capes, large floppy hats and open shirts.37 Men who developed a sense of style were encouraged to put themselves on display, even if only for limited audiences. Innovations in photographic technology, including the production of new, smaller and more durable equipment, generated an explosion in the number of photography studios in major urban centres.38 This ‘commercialized culture of self-representation’ offered new opportunities for the performance of masculinity through the visual cues of clothing, posture and expression, rather than the more fixed attributes of age, marital status, ability to create and support a family.39

WARTIME MASCULINITIES The outbreak of war in 1914 turned social, cultural, economic and political life upside down. Like other belligerent countries, experiences of war in the Russian Empire were marked by colossal mobilization, destruction and dislocation. Millions of Russian subjects participated in war relief, donating their time, energy, money and other resources to the war effort.40 The western provinces of the Empire became war zones. Russian military commanders ordered the forced deportation of ‘suspicious’ populations (namely Germans and Jews), as well as the complete destruction of villages and evacuation of their populations upon their retreat to the interior in summer 1915.41 Around 18.6 million men served in the Russian imperial army throughout the war.42 The mass mobilization of troops westwards and the mass movement of civilians from the front line to the Russian interior caused widespread social dislocation and by 1917 an estimated 5 per cent of the Empire’s total population was refugees displaced from their home regions.43 Despite wholescale economic, social and political disintegration, the war did not mark a definitive rupture in the history of masculinities in Russia.44 Rather, the conflict brought about an acceleration of earlier trends that had deep roots in the late imperial era and would continue to reverberate throughout 1917 and beyond.

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In the context of total war, the military gained a more prominent role in the cultivation of images of manliness, which became more focused on the physical body. The Tsar and Council of Ministers quickly threw millions of roubles at initiatives intent on improving the physical fitness of school-age boys to prepare them to be future recruits.45 Wartime posters reflected the connections between physical fitness, courage and masculinity, contrasting the muscular, physically dominant and heroic soldiers of the Russian imperial army with the feminized and feeble enemy.46 Mass mobilization brought a plethora of new experiences for men and it had a lasting impact upon normative conceptions of masculinity. The scale of mobilization meant that the vast majority of extended families across the Empire contributed soldiers to the war effort. For the state, honouring and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice became a unifying method of promoting investment in the national cause while sidestepping any inherent tensions in the multinational state.47 Providing financial support for soldiers’ families constructed a reciprocal relationship between the Russian imperial state and its subjects, whereby soldiers and their families demanded financial support in exchange for the wartime sacrifices on male members of the household behalf of the state.48 This served to foster notions of national belonging that were explicitly gendered as masculine and hinged upon soldiering. Not only did this recast Russian manhood as something achieved only through military service, it also framed women’s wartime contributions entirely in passive terms, as their entitlement to demand rights was achieved through the ‘giving’ of their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Women replicated these discourses throughout and beyond 1917 in their efforts to obtain state support.49 War also provided opportunities for the disruption of gender boundaries and the loosening of sexual mores. Hundreds of women joined the Russian imperial army as armed combatants subverting the tsarist military’s explicitly masculine ideals.50 For some POWs captured in the Russian Empire, camp theatres were places where definitions of masculinity could be tested as they permitted a measure of homoerotic intimacy and degree of acceptance of transgender behaviour both on and off stage.51 Through mobilization, millions on unmarried young peasant men left the stifling patriarchal environment of the village and found plenty of opportunities to engage in casual and paid sex at the front.52 The increased visibility of prostitution and casual sex in the context of wartime resulted in widespread anxiety about women’s declining morality and men’s widespread contraction of venereal diseases.53 The destabilization of peacetime understandings of sexuality and gender would have far reaching consequences during and beyond 1917, as wartime experiences sparked concerted efforts to restore the gender order and enforce specific standards of sexual morality in the years that followed.54 War significantly increased the number of veterans with disabilities and their visibility within the public sphere, which challenged images of the physically dominant and hypermasculine military hero. By 1917 estimates of the number of disabled veterans of the First World War ranged from 700,000 to 1.7 million.55 Wounded male bodies played a prominent role in wartime visual culture, as posters of veterans with disabilities were produced to generate sympathy, raise funds and highlight the heroism of Russian soldiers.56 Leonid Pasternak’s 1914 poster ‘To Help War Victims’ featured a distressed wounded soldier clutching a bloody handkerchief to

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his forehead and it was so popular that it was reproduced on hundreds of postcards, confectionary wrappers and labels.57 Visual representations of disabled veterans frequently objectified them as victims in need of charity and paternalistic care, but there are a handful of examples that characterized disabled veterans, especially amputees, as the embodiment of heroic masculinity and self-sacrifice. In a wartime fundraising campaign for a shelter for disabled veterans in Kazan’ (Figure 18.1), city residents were implored to donate to help the ‘glorious warriors’ and ‘heroes [who] have preserved your peace at a high price’. The image features an amputee wearing a

FIGURE 18.1  ‘For the honour, glory, and prosperity of our great Homeland …’

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military uniform and decorated with various medals, suggesting that wounds did not necessarily diminish military masculinity. Documentary films and newspaper articles depicted disabled veterans’ continued participation in the war effort even after undergoing amputation through their work at special manufacturing workshops in the rear.58 These images of amputee veterans in mass media support Laura L.  Philips’s observation that the ‘intersection between gender and dis/ability was always contextual’ in Russia.59 In her study on the treatment of psychiatric casualties in the Russo-Japanese War, she found that the ‘perceived abnormality of modern war ensured that mentally-ill soldiers remained masculine and able’ in the eyes of physicians and the patients themselves.60 These images obscured a darker reality, as disabled veterans faced immense financial, medical, social and personal challenges when returning from the front, not least because the support offered to disabled veterans by the tsarist state was completely inadequate. The limited representations of disabled veterans tended to feature amputees, which may have served to establish a hierarchy of disability within public consciousness whereby amputees were deemed more worthy of support than individuals with visual, hearing or cognitive impairments. Nevertheless, the existence of these images suggests that there were alternative models of military masculinity in circulation during wartime.

1917: MASCULINITIES IN REVOLUTION The erosion of real and symbolic patriarchal authority reached a crescendo in 1917 when the Empire’s patriarch, Tsar Nicholas II, was forced to abdicate. Various sectors of society criticized the incompetence of the Tsar and his government both before and during the First World War, but censorship rules prohibited the publication of overt criticism or ridicule.61 Nevertheless, rumours circulated that the Tsar was incapable of ruling the country and being an authoritative figure his own family. Such rumours attacked the Tsar’s masculinity, branding him a weak puppet that was controlled by his wife Alexandra and her alleged lover, Grigorii Rasputin.62 After the tsarist government collapsed in February 1917, so too did censorship and satirists went gunning for previously untouchable targets. The wave of ‘political pornography’ flowed that called the Tsar’s masculinity into question, mocking him for failing to live up to the roles of patriarch of Russia and head of his family.63 Journalists frequently claimed that Nicholas was sexually impotent, reflecting a broader trend in the scandal-driven reportage of the boulevard press of the late imperial era, whereby journalists used discussions of sexuality as a method for stripping away a man’s credibility, especially in the eyes of other men.64 As well as eradicating censorship, the February Revolution also unleashed an ‘orgy of iconoclasm’ as portraits of the Tsar were torn down and ripped by shreds by soldiers’ bayonets.65 Patriarchal authority also unravelled in the military. Officer-soldier relations in the Russian imperial army were inherently patriarchal and regulations established a relationship of command and subordination. Soldiers were to address officers, colonels and generals in formal and respectful language or face punishment, whereas recruits could be addressed using the informal and condescending ty.66 Wartime

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propaganda propagated the myth of ‘the great military family’ whereby fathercommanders cared for and disciplined their obedient soldier-sons, but these images obscured the bitter resentment that many soldiers felt for those in charge, as well as the steady erosion of discipline and rising number of mutinies at the front.67 The notorious mutinies of 27 February 1917, when various regiments in the capital refused to fire at demonstrators, delivered a fatal blow to the patriarchal authority of the autocracy and its loyal representatives in the military.68 Elsewhere at the front and the rear, military personnel challenged established patriarchal authority by refusing to salute officers, demanding that their insignia be removed, fragrantly flouting military regulations, or simply by deserting.69 Order No. 1 (issued 1 March 1917 by the Petrograd Soviet) and the Declaration of the Rights of Soldiers (approved 11 May by the Provisional Government) formalized the collapse of patriarchal authority in the army by abolishing the old modes of deferential address and by shifting power away from officers to elected representatives of soldiers’ committees. The new ideas, concepts and institutions that emerged immediately after the February Revolution were quickly gendered masculine or dominated by men. The concept of citizenship was an integral part of the revolution and the Provisional Government was quick to confirm that all former subjects of the Empire were citizens of the new Russia. Ideas about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were contested throughout 1917, but individuals across the social spectrum broadly agreed that citizenship guaranteed the right to national democratic political participation.70 Despite rhetoric about equal political participation across class, ethnic and political lines, citizenship was initially gendered as male. Neither the Provisional Government nor Petrograd Soviet immediately guaranteed women’s rights in their respective political programmes. Frustration at this absence prompted an enormous women’s suffrage demonstration in Petrograd on 19 March, after which both organs of power quickly ceded to the protestors’ demands.71 Even when women were included in process of democratization that swept across all levels of society, this overwhelming meant putting men into power.72 Very few women held positions in factory committees and trade union organizations, even in femaledominated industries.73 Rural politics was also ‘re-masculinized’ after February 1917. The new rural committees and soviets that were established the revolution were male dominated, despite the fact that women had been representing their families in the pre-revolutionary communal assembly while the war swallowed up their male relatives.74 Only one woman served in the cabinet of the Provisional Government, Sofia Panina, assistant minister in the Ministry of State Welfare.75 Out of the 767 deputies elected to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917, 98.7 per cent were men.76 Despite rhetoric about equality and inclusion, the formal structures of political power and authority remained masculine domains across the revolutionary divide. Amid the collapse of the traditions and structures of the old regime, the personal authority of politicians and the popular appeal of their image became important sources of power. The public personas cultivated by political leaders offer important insights into the complexity of masculine ideals in circulation in this period. Take, for example, the cult of Alexander Kerensky, a charismatic, eloquent politician who

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occupied the most important posts in the Provisional Government before becoming Prime Minister in July 1917. His carefully cultivated image of the ‘leader of the revolution’ permeated mass political consciousness in the months that immediately followed the February Revolution.77 Kerensky had renal tuberculosis, which led to him having a kidney removed in 1916, and he suffered from extreme fatigue thereafter. However, his poor health and physical weakness did not diminish his reputation as a ‘strong man’. Instead, his willingness to endure constant pain was regarded as evidence of his dedication to the revolution and cemented his status as a mythical hero, which illustrates that moral qualities alone were deemed sufficient for cultivating manliness in the Russian context.78 Kerensky’s public persona as theatrical, emotional and spontaneous delighted his many enraptured audiences and earned him his lauded reputation as a ‘politiciancum-artist’.79 The valorization of Kerensky as an artist-politician reflected deeprooted Russian cultural traditions and more recent shifts brought about by modernization and consumerism. In the late imperial period, restrictions imposed upon public political life by the tsarist government meant that the arts became a ‘surrogate for politics and ideology’ for Russian intellectuals.80 The explosion of the Russian entertainment industry and mass circulation press in the early 1900s coincided with the rapid development of celebrity culture, whereby actors, writers, poets and artists cultivated public personas and enjoyed enormous fame across various sectors of society.81 Just like a film star, Kerensky was greeted by crowds and presented with flowers wherever he went, his image was circulated on badges and medals, and photographs of him were constantly reproduced in mass circulation publications.82 He was evidently attuned to the importance of dress and gesture in cultivating his image as ‘strong man’ and liberal politician, quickly deciding to appear without a jacket, frock coat or tie in photographs and at public events in order to set himself apart from his colleagues and appear more ‘democratic’ and ‘proletarian’.83 Kerensky adopted specific poses in photographs to appeal to his audience, tucking his right hand into to his jacket in an imitation of Napoleon.84 Perhaps this was an attempt to encourage visual comparisons between himself and another notorious ‘strong man’ politician and military leader, although it is also likely he tucked his hand into his jacket because he had injured it through excessive hand-shaking.85 The February Revolution forged even stronger ties between masculinity and military service. Because of wartime mass mobilization, ‘soldier’ was an expansive identity that included a wide range of different occupational, ethnic and social groups, but who were all united by gender. Although hundreds of women served in combat positions during 1917, soldiering was gendered as exclusively masculine. Decorated soldier Maria Bochkareva formed the first women’s battalion with the explicit intention of ‘sham[ing] the men in the trenches by letting them see women go over the top first’.86 Women who volunteered for combat units intentionally shed any outward markers of femininity upon enlistment as they donned men’s uniforms and had their heads shaved.87 Soldiers underwent a dramatic transformation in status after February 1917, from the morally stigmatized enforcers of (or cannon-fodder for) the autocratic order to popular heroes charged with defending the revolution.88 This shift in status

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was reflected not only in the growing confidence of military personnel to formulate demands, but also in their recognition of their power to shape the political and social landscape more generally. Soldiers also used the authority afforded to them through their status of defenders of the revolution to police the boundaries of acceptable masculinity. In October 1917, the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies of the 12th Army penned an urgent appeal addressed to the entire country requesting that more men be sent to the front. The appeal included searing criticism of the ‘base cowards’ who remained in the rear and the ‘idle, full-bellied, and carousing soldier[s] in reserve units’, all of whom were labelled ‘traitors of the revolution’.89 The group’s authority to decide appropriate models of masculine behaviour was rooted in their participation in military service, as they explained that ‘someone who is dying, someone who has sacrificed everything and is going to his death, has a right to make demands, and his demands should be met’.90 The centrality of military service to masculine identities was also reflected in the actions of political figures. After his appointment as Minister of War in May, Alexander Kerensky was proclaimed the ‘leader of the revolutionary army’, after which he began dressing in military-style clothing and embarked upon a three-week tour of the front in an attempt to boost morale.91 In the Declaration of Soldiers Rights, Kerensky described his pre-revolutionary anti-government activities in militarized terms, referring to himself as an ‘old soldier of the revolution’ who exercised ‘severe discipline’ in his underground activities and therefore could demand discipline from military personnel in return.92 The February Revolution presented opportunities for disabled veterans to enter the political stage and play a visible role in public life. Their participation in military service cemented their status as citizens and ‘real men’, which granted them an authoritative voice and confidence to push for a variety of social and political goals. In Petrograd, throughout spring and summer 1917, disabled veterans took to the streets en mass to demand that those avoiding military service to go immediately to the front, even calling for Lenin be ‘returned to [Kaiser] Wilhelm’ (Figure 18.2). In other regions, groups of disabled veterans protested the continuation of war.93 Physical or cognitive impairments did not diminish the authority that disabled veterans were able to claim as former military servicemen. Disabled veterans were able to collectively shape policy, most notably in relation to pensions. Under the tsarist system, disabled veterans could receive a meagre pension only after undergoing the lengthy and complicated process of being legally recognized as an invalid. The amount that they received decided upon official understandings of the impact of their disability on their capacity to earn a living through wage labour.94 At the first All-Russian Congress of Invalid Soldiers held in Petrograd in June 1917, delegates voiced searing criticism of the pension system, which they believed to be indicative of the tsarist government’s ‘criminal neglect [of] and indifference’ towards disabled veterans.95 Like other groups of soldiers and their families, they constructed their relationship with the state as reciprocal and called for the Provisional Government to give what was owed to the ‘defenders of the fatherland’.96 Their demand for recognition had a lasting impact upon disability support in the months and years that followed. The Provisional Government formed inter-ministerial committee two

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FIGURE 18.2  ‘The Fatherland is in danger, the blood that we shed demands a war until victory. Comrade soldiers, to the trenches immediately! Return Lenin to Wilhelm!’

days after the end of the congress to discuss revising pension laws, and disabled veterans comprised half of the committee’s membership.97 Shortly after, the Union of Wounded Warriors (Soiuz uvechnikh voinov) was formed and began agitating for the creation of regional branches across Russia.98 On 11 October, the Provisional Government issued a decree sharply increasing the size of pensions for disabled veterans.99 After seizing power, the Bolsheviks liquidated all existing societies that provided support to disabled veterans, formed a new committee under the authority of the Commissariat for State Charity, and published a legal directive on state support for individuals with disabilities based upon their capacity to engage in paid labour. Given that this directive was formulated in the context of war and the heightened visibility of disabled veterans, initially only those injured in war could be classified as ‘invalids’ and receive support.100 In summer 1917, the authority of the Provisional Government rapidly eroded across Russia against a backdrop of political crisis, deteriorating living conditions, economic collapse and a devastatingly unpopular military offensive at the front. The streets of the capital thronged with crowds of demonstrators and violent clashes broke out between armed demonstrators and government troops in the July Days.101 The central government responded by restricting civil liberties and by reconfiguring ideals of military masculinity more explicitly around images of discipline and obedience. The death penalty was reinstated at the front for desertion, treason,

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refusal to fight, mutiny and disobeying orders. Kerensky also appointed General Lavr Kornilov as the new Commander in Chief, a decorated military hero and stern disciplinarian who was believed to command an unsuccessful putsch against the Petrograd Soviet in late August. Disobedience and disorder were not only condemned by representatives of the government. Soldiers at the front voiced their anger at their comrades’ ‘constant disobedience to military orders’ and ‘violent settling of personal scores’.102 Other groups of lower-class men asserted their willingness to sacrifice their personal interests for the revolution and chastised those who they believed misinterpreted freedom in hedonistic terms, ignoring the ‘order, responsibility, sense of duty, and moral self-discipline’ that came with ‘real’ freedom.103 In instructing men to exercise restraint and self-control, these appeals promoted masculine ideals that were popularized in advice literature, the physical culture movement, and in public discussions about male sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Stemming the social anarchy of summer 1917 required disciplined men who rose above excess and moral decay to ensure the future of the nation. Throughout the ‘summer of discontent’, the right-wing, conservative and liberal press all launched attacks on Kerensky, employing the same tactics to de-legitimize Kerensky that had been used for Tsar Nicholas II during the First World War. Just as his supporters had lauded his moral strength months earlier, now he was criticized as an arrogant dictator, immoral drug user and womanizer.104 Critics described Kerensky as effeminate, weak and emotional, and rumours circulated that he even slept in the former Empress’s bed after relocating to the Winter Palace.105 After the Provisional Government were overthrown by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, a rumour spread that Kerensky had escaped the Winter Palace dressed in a nurse’s uniform.106 The ‘feminization’ of Kerensky was a core component of his delegitimization and it would have far reaching consequences.107 Kerensky was to spend most of his life after 1917 denying that he had fled Petrograd dressed as a woman.108 In contrast the other political personalities in 1917, the Bolsheviks initially appeared uninterested in cultivating manly personas. Unlike the theatrical Kerensky, the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin was more interested in emphasizing weight of the political message, rather than the ‘personal charisma of the men delivering it’.109 Women’s emancipation was a core part of the Bolshevik’s political message, which theoretically removed ‘the opposing identity against which masculinity defines itself’.110 Nevertheless, the Bolshevik’s seizure of power generated new opportunities for masculine performance. In the politically charged atmosphere of 1917, ‘bourgeois’ became an elastic term used to condemn a wide spectrum of socioeconomic conditions, behaviours or clothing choices, including starched collars, ties, gentlemen’s suits and specific types of hat.111 After the Bolshevik revolution, it became fashionable to dress like agents of the Cheka in top-to-toe leather.112 Leather became the uniform of the Bolsheviks after October 1917, marking a visual rejection of the ‘dapper intelligentsia style of fashion’ popularized in the pre-revolutionary era and the cultivation of a militant image of manliness.113 After seizing power, the Bolsheviks attempted to eradicate institutions that had traditionally played a significant role in the construction of masculine identities.

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Following Marx and Engels, the Bolsheviks saw the patriarchal family unit as an institution through which capitalism and patriarchy were maintained and professed a desire to emancipate women from the ‘domestic slavery’ of the household. Two decrees issued in December 1917 struck a blow to practices that maintained patriarchal authority within the family. Civil marriage was introduced, religious marriages were declared invalid, no-fault divorces could now be obtained by the request of either spouse, and children born out of wedlock gained the same rights as those born within marriage.114 Through the revolution, the Bolsheviks believed that men and women would ‘overcome gender’ and thereafter exist not as gendered beings, but as workers on an equal economic, political and social footing.115 However, a strong rhetorical commitment to gender equality, the Soviet government remained a boy’s club and the communist ethos was implicitly coded as masculine. The proletariat was consistently gendered as male and Soviet politicians regarded women as more likely to be ‘backwards’, susceptible to corrupting influences, and in need of transformation.116 Building a new society was implicitly presented as ‘a task for men’ and for those women who were prepared to adopt roles that were traditionally deemed to be masculine.117

CONCLUSIONS The year 1917 was not a rupture, but instead marked the crescendo of a much longer gender revolution in Russia, wherein masculine identities were made and remade amidst frenetic political, social and cultural change.118 In the late nineteenth century, industrialization, urbanization and mass rural-to-urban migration began to erode the traditional generational patriarchal structures of village life. Markers of manliness diversified from being focused exclusively on procreation, labour capacity and physical strength to include qualities like self-discipline, restraint, entrepreneurship, consumer taste, and the visual cues of clothing, posture and expression. Following the introduction of universal conscription, the military gained a more prominent role in cultivating masculine ideals. This role became even more pronounced in the context of total war, when manhood was redefined as something achieved only through participation in military service. War also created the conditions for the increased visibility of men with disabilities, who both complicated images of the physically dominant military hero and took to the political stage in 1917 to demand recognition. After February 1917, soldiers underwent a shift in status from enforcers of the autocratic order to beloved defenders of the revolution. This further cemented the link between military service and masculine identity, which would continue to reverberate for decades to come.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Childhood and youth in the Russian Revolution ELIZABETH WHITE, UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND, BRISTOL

INTRODUCTION In 1918 Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars), the highest executive authority in the new Soviet government, declared that ‘concern for the child is the direct responsibility of the state’.1 Indeed, the revolutionary transformation of childhood, family life and youth was an essential part of Bolshevik Party plans for the new state, the future socialist civilization that would develop within it and the new Soviet person who would eventually emerge. The Party also viewed children and adolescents as key social groups who could support the new state, defend the revolution against its enemies and legitimize Bolshevik rule. From the very inception of the Soviet government therefore, plans were drawn up – and attempts were made to execute them even under the extremely difficult conditions of the Civil War – to change the status and lives of children and young people, to encourage their support and appeal to them as a social group and to bring them fully into the unfolding historical processes of the Revolution. To this end, the mass movements for children and youth, the Komsomol was formed in the early revolutionary period. Institutional bodies representing the perceived needs of children were embedded in the highest bodies of the Soviet state. The Soviet state undertook to provide and enact free paediatric medical care, a child-focused welfare state, childcare and maternity benefits, universal and compulsory education, reforms to the juvenile criminal system and child protection legislation and establish state institutions for the tens of thousands of children abandoned or orphaned in the violence and chaos of the revolutionary period of 1917–21. Leading Bolshevik theorists, as well as non-Party children’s rights activists, wanted to reverse the hierarchy of status, which had placed children below adults and in the complete legal power of the father and children’s rights became a subject of debate and legislation in the emancipatory atmosphere of those years. In reality, the state collapse and violence that engulfed the former Russian Empire between 1917 and 1921 had a catastrophic impact on the lives of children and young

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people and it was the millions of starving and homeless children, the victims of the 1921 famine and the bezprizorniki (children ‘without shelter’), that were captured globally as the image of childhood in revolutionary times.

EDUCATION, MODERNIZATION AND REVOLUTION The Soviet state prioritized childhood and youth as a category and showed commitment to turning young people into what it later described as ‘the only privileged class’. This effort was strongly influenced by their ideology, but also part of a wider transnational shift in seeing the provision of privileging childhood as a key indicator of progress and modernity. An additional factor was the legacy of the theories and practices of the progressive Russian intelligentsia in the late Imperial period. The Russian intelligentsia were participants in a transnational movement of a child-centred and emancipatory philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced by the specifics of the late Imperial social and political environment. In their radical educational and, as will be discussed below, their legal goals for Soviet children, the Bolsheviks were drawing on long-standing progressive Russian thinkers and activists who had seen the transformation of childhood and education as key to transforming (or ending) the autocracy. Long before the Russian Revolution, universal primary education was seen as ‘a solution to the core problems associated with the transitional phases of modernization’ and seeped into debates about Russia’s place in the world, particularly vis-a-vis the West.2 In 1864, as part of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, primary education for Russia’s millions of peasant children was finally supported through the new local government network (zemstva). Although the Tsarist bureaucracy hoped to create loyal Orthodox subjects from peasant children, zemstvo activists, liberal reformers and progressive educational theorists hoped that if peasant children were educated they would bring future enlightenment and progress to Russia. In the second half of the nineteenth century, debates among the Russian intelligentsia about the nature of Russian childhood and education became enmeshed with demands for radical reform and with the revolutionary movement. Progressive Russian educational thinkers and organizers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Dobroliubov developed radical visions of ‘individual emancipation from the authoritarian constraints of school and family and the creation of a free community of equals’.3 Attacks on the authoritarian Tsarist educational system were attacks on the regime itself. For example, in his article ‘On the Meaning of Authority in Education’ (1857) Dobroliubov described the education system in Imperial Russia as ‘killing the inner man in the child’. He criticized the established age hierarchy that demanded total obedience from a child and uncritical acceptance of authority. He called for recognition of the essential dignity of the child and stated that the aim of education should be the independent and free development of the mind and will and the development of the ability for critical thinking for an unknown future. Another argument he made, progressive for the time and with enormous implications, was

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that children possess innate reason.4 At a similar time, between 1859 and 1862, Leo Tolstoy was experimenting with anti-authoritarian child- centred schooling on his estate in Iasnaia Poliana. Dissatisfaction with the elite schooling network, in particular the classical gymnazia run by the state with a centralized curricula and regulations, also fed into opposition to Tsarism in the last decades and led to calls for wide-scale restructuring of the education system. The ‘counter reforms’ of the Minister of National Enlightenment, Count Dimitry Tolstoy (1866–80), turned the gymnazia into the so-called Tsarist ‘bureaucratic police school’, in which the teaching of classical languages predominated. Even stricter regulation and surveillance of pupils’ behaviour and character were instigated. Opponents of the school system claimed that the oppressive nature of the gymnazia was producing young revolutionaries rather than the loyal subjects which was their ostensible aim. Progressive educators described gymnazia as the ‘dearly beloved daughter of the Russian bureaucracy’.5 In his autobiographical novel Tema’s Childhood (1892) the writer and essayist Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovskii wrote: In its current form, the gymnazia reminds me of a courtroom with a judge, a prosecutor, and a perpetual defendant. All that’s missing is a lawyer to defend this little defendant, who, precisely because he is little, is in particular need of defence.6 Voices from civil society (obshchestvennost’) expressed general dislike of the Imperialist secondary school system, particularly the surveillance of pupils and enforced religious attendance, but also the bifurcated system of classical gymnazia for the children of urban elites and technical vocational colleges for those in the provinces. By the turn of the century, the Tsarist government noticed that gymnazia pupils were forming discussion groups with the intention of challenging the ‘detestable school regime’ and there were growing concerns about discipline.7 During the 1905 Revolution, public petitions called for a decentralized secondary school system. Gymnazia pupils joined in strikes and demonstrations, including against the war in Japan, and were attacked by the Black Hundreds and the police. In February 1905, six gymnazia pupils were killed and forty injured by the police during a demonstration in Kursk, while other pupils rioted in Minsk.8 Meanwhile, parents in Kharkov explained the political activism by young people as a result of the ‘existing pedagogical regime, which is simply an extension of the universal police-bureaucratic structure of the state’.9 In 1906 the Ministry of Public Education drew up a ten-year plan for the implementation of universal primary education and in 1908, the Third Duma (1907–12) passed an educational law on extending primary education. Great advances had been made by the Revolution. Between 1900 and 1917, the number of schools rose seventeen-fold and the number of pupils more than doubled.10 Expenditure on education as a proportion of the regular state budget doubled between 1900 and 1914.11 In 1915 there were 80,801 state primary schools across the Russian Empire with 5,942,000 pupils, while the Russian Orthodox Church operated 34,000 parochial schools, with 1,900,000 pupils.12 It seems that around 8

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million children aged between eight and eleven years were receiving some form of official schooling. This was about half of the primary school age cohort, although boys dominated by two-thirds.13 Peasant girls were less likely to have any meaningful primary education. Further evidence of growing literacy is that while in 1885 factory inspectors had reported that only 35 per cent of young workers were literate or semi-literate, by 1918, it increased to 93.6 per cent of workers aged between fifteen and nineteen years.14 Educationally, Russia was rapidly ‘catching up with the West’ but it was too late. The entire Tsarist educational infrastructure of state, private and church schools at primary and secondary level was destroyed in the Revolution. Returning to Bolshevik plans, they could also draw on their Marxist heritage. Marx and Engels had argued that social education should replace private education and viewed the education system under capitalism as part of the superstructure, supporting class divisions and creating pliant subjects for the bourgeois capitalism. In 1847, in a draft programme for the Communist League, The Principles of Communism, Engels wrote that in the socialist future there would be ‘education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost; children should be educated collectively by the nation and society should be responsible for all children’.15 Following Marx and Engels, leading Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii wrote in their ABC of Communism (1920) that in the new socialist system children were no longer the property of their parents as they had been under capitalism.16 They belonged to society and it was society, and not the family, which had the right to educate them. As well as a revolution in education, then, once the Bolsheviks took power, there were radical and serious attempts to redefine the status of childhood in law, and therefore in discourse, thought and life. Although Marx did not elaborate a full theory of education, he posited a radical and transformative educational praxis in which the aim of education was to produce fully developed human beings, revolutionary subjects, capable of creative actions and conscious participation in the historical process.17 Drawing on all these varied legacies, the main Soviet theory and principle over the entire period would be that of polytechnical education. Early Soviet educational theorists claimed that the aim of polytechnical education was to produce a fully rounded emancipated human personality, in line with Marx’s writings about education and human development under socialism. Polytechnical education was envisaged as far more than the acquisition of specific practical skills. Soviet education was to include knowledge and understanding of the productive processes and relations of natural and social phenomena in line with the Marxist materialist view of history. Theory and practice were to be linked as a general educational principle, just as the new Soviet school was meant to be linked with the social world outside, the village and the factory. On taking power, the Bolshevik Party prioritized the destruction of the Imperial education system and creation ex nihilo of a new revolutionary education system to raise the new generations of builders of communism. In November 1917, the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) was established with Anatoly Lunacharsky appointed as People’s Commissar. Lunacharsky saw education as a creative process and key to the success of the revolution. Nadezhda Krupskaia,

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Lenin’s wife and leading Bolshevik Party member, was also a key figure in educational policies in the early Soviet period.18 Narkompros employed many nonParty progressive educationalists who built their careers before the Revolution. Thus, many of the principles and plans for early Soviet education, lasting until the mid to late 1920s, drew not only on Marxist – or Bolshevik – thinking about education, but were also heavily influenced by Russian and international progressive educationalists, such as John Dewey and Georg Kirschensteiner. The early Soviet educational system then was also part of a modernizing transnational approach to education and childhood, and not only a result of Bolshevism. As with all their policies for children and youth, the Bolsheviks though did have radical ambitions. In a vast state, with a long standing (though diminishing) educational lag, the new education system would be universal, free, compulsory and coeducational for all Soviet children from aged eight to seventeen. These were indeed revolutionary aims and they were not achieved in full until after the Second World War. The revolutionization and modernization of the education system, at least on paper, began soon after the Bolsheviks took power. On 16 October 1918, Narkompros issued the Decree on the Unified Labour School.19 This heralded the inauguration of a comprehensive system of free, compulsory, co-educational, secular schooling for children aged eight to thirteen at primary level, and then aged fourteen to seventeen at secondary level. Under the new regime, the role of the school was to transform society and raise a revolutionary new generation rather than transmit a fixed body of knowledge and ensure social replication. Radical progressive educators and their Bolshevik supporters believed that children learn through experience and so the Soviet school was meant to be an educational commune linked closely with the surrounding world. There was to be no central curriculum and no homework, formal assessments and exams in line with theories of progressive education about the role of education as being to produce critically thinking individuals rather than the mastery of a body of knowledge affirmed by the previous generation. Work (‘socially useful labour’) was to be part of a child’s life at school, as well as at home and in the community. Creativity, music, exploration, discussions and game playing were encouraged. The traditional conservative prioritizing teacher authority was to be dismantled and children’s agency to be encouraged, through their participation in school councils. In rural areas, the village school was intended to bring the revolution into peasant communities. ‘Socially useful labour’ outside school for rural pupils could include, for example, involvement in adult literacy campaigns and organizing village libraries. In 1919, Narkompros set up a series of what were called Experimental Stations, clusters of model schools testing out these new methodologies. The progressive educational theorist and activist Stanislav Shatskii (1878–1934) ran the First Experimental Station in Kaluga. Shatskii adopted the approach of those that childhood should be valued for itself rather than viewed as a stage in the preparation for adulthood. The idea of practical work as an essential part of education did not arise solely from Bolshevik productionism or the demands of a collapsing economy in the conditions of Civil War and War Communism. As noted above, Narkompros officials in the early Soviet period were influenced by European and American progressive educational theorists, particularly Dewey,

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Kerschensteiner and Maria Montessori. The American philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey’s theories that the acquisition of knowledge is an active process and the school is as part of the wider social environment were enormously influential at this time, including in Soviet Russia.20

A REVOLUTION IN CHILDREN’S RIGHTS? The hierarchical structure of late Imperial Russian society had allowed for ‘broad personal authority, unquestioning obedience, filial duty, paternalistic obligations and male preference’.21 Despite some limited attempts at liberal judicial reforms, children had remained subordinated to parental power and in particular, that of the father. Challenges to patriarchy were viewed as attempts to limit the power of the autocracy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the child-centred theory of ‘free upbringing’ (svobodnoe vospitanie) had become popular among the progressive educationalists described above in the section on education. One of its leading proponents was Konstantin Ventsel’ (1857–1947), who also argued for freedom and equality for children within the family. Ventsel’, the chair of the Pedagogical Society at Moscow State University, believed like Dobroliubov that the aim of education should be to liberate and develop the individual human personality and not to dominate and train the child.22 To test his theories, between 1906 and 1909 he ran the House of the Free Child (Dom svobodnogo rebenka), an experimental self-governing educational collective, in which children’s creativity and inclinations were at the centre of the educational process. Ventsel and others established summer colonies, clubs and schools for children along these principles and called for the liberation of children as part of attacks on the Tsarist patriarchal system. As stated earlier, many of these principles of ‘free education’ underpinned early Bolshevik educational practices. Ventsel’ was also interested in children’s rights. He wrote that The contemporary family is in general an unfree family, and in particular it is the family of the unfree child. In the contemporary family, the child is the slave, and the parents are slave masters. In the contemporary family only the parents’, not the children’s, rights are realised. In the family as it is, equal rights do not exist: the parents are almost always the ruling party.23 Konstantin Ventsel’s influence continued into the early Soviet period, when he and others saw the revolution as the opportunity to promote an emancipatory vision of children’s rights as well as progressive child-centred education. Some Bolsheviks were also questioning how children could be liberated from their families and from a Marxist stance assumed that the family was a perezhitka, a survival or vestige of the outmoded superstructure and would eventually wither away under communism. Ventsel’ hoped that the new revolutionary state would be the first state to issue a Declaration of Children’s Rights.24 The first international declaration on children’s rights was the 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations. The Declaration ‘recognized that mankind owes the Child the best that it has to give’, but was not actually a declaration of rights, but an assertion

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of vulnerability of children and of the responsibilities and duties of adults.25 Ventsel’ and others in early revolutionary Soviet Russia, including in the Bolshevik Party had a much more radical view of the rights of the child, broadening out a picture of this period as full of utopian and emancipatory movements in broader society and the Party. Ventsel’ published a draft Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which he hoped to also put before the Constituent Assembly26 when it was due to meet in January 1918.27 He also presented his Declaration to the Moscow Proletkult Conference on 23–28 February 1918. Ventsel’ believed that children should be seen as equal to adults. He wrote that the state and the family should provide children with the conditions for living and learning. Children should have the freedom of choice in their education and religion, freedom of expression and organization and the right to be heard in all matters that affect them. He argued as well that children should have the right to take part in ‘public productive work’, which can give their life meaning and agency and establish them as citizens who have value in the present rather than only in the future. These ideas are clearly very close to Marxist theories on education as well as those of Dewey and Kirschensteiner. In fact, this declaration is close to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was only ratified in 1989 and was initiated by the socialist bloc. However, back in Soviet Russia it was rejected at the Proletkult conference as not sufficiently Marxist, anti-collective and ‘speaking with the voice of natural law’.28 No full declaration of children’s rights was promulgated by the Bolsheviks, although they did make fundamental changes to children’s rights as part of their revolutionary attack on Tsarist law. Like Marx and Engels (and Ventsel) the Bolsheviks believed that ‘the rights of the children had to be proclaimed, because their parents were exploiting them’.29 Marx and Engels had attacked the bourgeois family in 1848 The Communist Manifesto: ‘Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.’30 Marx and Engels also wrote that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children would be abolished, as a blow against private property. This, as will be seen below, was immediately achieved. For more radical Bolsheviks, the aim was to remove the child from the private sphere almost entirely, as the family was seen as a vestige of the old way of life. In 1918, Zlata Lilina, a long-standing member of the Bolshevik Party who was in charge of school administration in the 1920s, famously announced at a conference on education that the Bolsheviks should rescue children ‘from the nefarious influence of family life’. ‘In other words’, she went on, ‘we must nationalise them. They will be taught the ABCs of Communism and later become true communists. Our task is now to oblige the mother to give her children to us  – the Soviet state.’31 Aleksandr Goikhbarg, the People’s Commissar for Justice, suggested founding self-contained towns and settlements for children, in which they would be bought up collectively by experts. More productively, the feminist thinker and activist Alexandra Kollantai suggested founding a state fund for raising children. A revolutionary new Code of Laws on Acts of Civil Status, Marriage, Family and Guardianship Law was passed in September 1918, building on an earlier Decree issued in December 1917. The Code introduced radical changes in children’s legal status, above all the equalizing of the rights of all children regardless of the circumstances

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of their birth. The abolition of the concept of illegitimacy was radical for its time and in its implications for the family.32 The Commissar for Justice responsible for drawing up the Code was Alexander Goikhbarg, one of the Bolshevik radicals who hoped that the individual family would be surpassed and encouraged parents to reject their ‘narrow and irrational love for their children’.33 In the new Soviet state, children would no longer belong legally to their fathers, be forced to take his name or his nationality. In the event of parental separation, children could live with either parent and consensual agreements were encouraged. Where separating parents could not agree on issues of children’s upbringing, local courts could decide what was in the best interests of the child. Parents were legally obliged to ensure their children received an education and training. One of the most significant clauses of the new Code was the abolition of the legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children, which had been earlier decreed in December 1917. This distinction, along with inheritance, was viewed by socialists as one of the major underpinnings of private property. The Code stated instead that ‘actual descent is regarded as the basis of the family, without any difference between relationships established by legal or religious marriage or outside marriage’.34 The new Code also abolished adoption. This has been viewed as another revolutionary attempt to destroy the family, and motivated by ideology, but it arose partly from a desire to end the economic exploitation of adopted children, particularly in rural communities. They were often viewed simply as a source of exploitable labour. Legal adoption was gradually reintroduced later in the 1920s and then became a major state policy during and in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War, when there were hundreds of thousands of children in need of family care. By that time, the Soviet family was considered one of the pillars of the state. In April 1918, inheritance was also abolished in Soviet Russia, with the estate of the deceased passing to the state apart from property (farmhouse, furniture, wages) worth under 10,000 roubles: ‘Children have no rights to the property of their parents, or parents to that of their children’. This too was gradually reversed, particularly as material rewards and possessions were increasingly validated under Stalin. More progressive legislation was passed concerning juvenile delinquency, building on liberal attempts at judicial reform before the Revolution. A Sovnarkom Decree of January 1918 abolished prison sentences and court trials for minors. Commissions on the Affairs of Minors (Kommissiya dlya nesovershennoletnikh) were established instead to deal with youth crime, with the idea of rehabilitation. These bodies were usually made up from of doctors, teachers, social workers and judges. In 1918, the age of criminal responsibility was raised to eighteen although it was reduced back to sixteen in 1922.

BOLSHEVISM AND YOUTH: THE KOMSOMOL AND REVOLUTIONARY CULTURE Like other political movements coming out of the destruction of the old order in the Great War, the Bolsheviks sought to link themselves with youth and therefore to strengthen their claim on the future. It would be the new generations of Soviet

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citizens who would aid in the destruction of the old order, in which they were supposed to have less investment and who would be the future builders of socialism and then communism in the coming decades. So young people and children as social groups had extraordinary significance for the Bolsheviks from the beginning. In October 1918, the Communist Youth League (Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi), commonly known as the Komsomol, was founded, with an initial 22,000 members.35 The Komsomol would go on to be a crucial force in the making and stabilization of the new Soviet state. Historians have argued that the early radical core membership, although numerically insignificant, formed a key generational cohort who helped create an influential revolutionary culture, which had a significant impact on mass identity formation for later generations, and more specifically impacted later on the rejection of NEP at the end of the 1920s and the transition to a more militant political culture under Stalin. Although the Komsomol has sometimes been viewed as another ‘top down’ organization created by the Party for the purposes of control and indoctrination, the organizational roots of the Komsomol went back to groups of socialist youth movements forming in revolutionary centres during 1917, as young workers, in common with other social groups, became increasingly radicalized. Many young people, not only workers, were drawn by the utopianism, radicalism and internationalism of 1917 and the colour and spectacle of the demonstrations and sought to inscribe themselves into the historical process by participation in the revolution and then the Civil War. In May 1917, a non-party socialist youth organization was established in Petrograd, Trud i Svet (Labour and Light), which had around 50,000 members. An estimated 100,000 young workers took part in May Day demonstrations. It was the Bolshevik Party which moved to encourage them in this aim and cultivate what was one of many emancipatory movements in 1917. The Party formalized its support for working with socialist proletarian youth organizations during its Sixth Party Congress in July and August 1917 and Trud i Svet was taken over by the pro-Bolshevik Socialist League of Young Workers as part of a ‘Bolshevization from below’.36 By the time of the October Revolution, 15,000 to 35,000 young people belonged to communist youth groups, although most of those disappeared later due to the subsequent waves of unemployment and processes of de-urbanization from 1918.37 The Socialist League of Young Workers then became part of the new Bolshevik state bureaucracy, supported by the Narkompros until October 1918, when the Komsomol was officially founded at the First All-Russian Congress for Communist Youth Leagues, organized and dominated by young Bolshevik activists. Membership was for young people aged between fourteen and twenty-three. In the atmosphere of the escalating Civil War and War Communism, Komsomol members were encouraged to see themselves as the builders of communism, ‘the avant garde of the avant garde’, a shock force, a revolutionary vanguard. The Komsomol was specifically set up to support the new Soviet state with agitation and propaganda, the spreading of communist ideas, participation in the promotion of proletarian culture, the revolutionary construction of the new state as well as the ‘creation of new forms of life’, as expressed by the First Programme of

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the Komsomol.38 On October 2, 1920, Lenin gave a speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol, telling the assembled audience: The generation of those who are now fifteen will see a communist society, and will itself build this society. This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a communist society …. The Young Communist League should teach all young people to engage in conscious and disciplined labour from an early age. In this way we can be confident that the problems now confronting us will be solved. We must assume that no less than ten years will be required for the electrification of the country, so that our impoverished land may profit from the latest achievements of technology. And so, the generation of those who are now fifteen years old, and will be living in a communist society in ten or twenty years’ time, should tackle all its educational tasks in such a way that every day, in every village and city, the young people shall engage in the practical solution of some problem of labour in common, even though the smallest or the simplest. The success of communist construction will be assured when this is done in every village, as communist emulation develops, and the youth prove that they can unite their labour.39 Political education for young people, and by young people to other social groups, was to be carried out through traditional methods such as reading and assimilating texts and visual material, but also through practices and activities, and new ways of living; meetings, clubs, hostels, collectives, sports and military education, large-scale demonstrations, subbotniki (voluntary and unpaid work), recruitment campaigns for the Red Army, and participation in campaigns for literacy, greater productivity and grain requisitioning. In terms of the Komsomol, military and economic work was to prioritize at this time. Komsomol membership grew rapidly in conditions of the Civil War, and from an initial 22,000 members in 1918, by 1920 it had almost half a million, 480,000.40 Possibly only around 30,000 Komsomol members served in the Red Army during the Civil War, and there were an estimated fifty Komsomol detachments.41 The relative smallness of the number of Komsomol activists does not matter; what was significant with the Bolshevik Party in general was their ability, as their rivals the SRs noted, to ‘grasp the link which pulls the chain of events’.42 The Komsomol was one of those links. Although the official conscription age was eighteen, many volunteers in the Red Army and Guards were younger. Furthermore, the military exigencies of the Russian Civil War upturned the age-based authority within the Bolshevik Party (to say nothing of Russian traditions of patriarchal authority) and created spaces for young men to achieve positions of dominance. Historians have argued that a key generational cohort of radical youth, members of the Komsomol who joined voluntarily in the difficult years when it was not clear the Revolution would succeed, and others of a similar age who volunteered for the Red Guards and Red Army was forged by their experiences between 1917 and 1921. This generational cohort helped then to form the revolutionary political culture of Soviet state and society, with the emphasis on militarism, sacrifice, class struggle, heroism and violence. This myth – and in fact, a cult of the Civil War – went on to

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be embedded in literature and culture for children and young people throughout the Soviet period, playing an important role in the identity formation of future generations. For example, the famous Soviet writer, Arkadii Gaidar, who went on to write two of the archetypal texts of Soviet children’s literature (‘The Tale of the Military Secret’ and ‘Timur and His Team’) joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became a Red Army Commander at the age of sixteen. As an adult many years later, before dying at the front of the Great Patriotic War, he wrote in his diary: ‘I dreamed of people I killed as a child.’43 Sean Guillory’s research shows how the Komsomol organization tried to use the myths of Civil War heroism from the 1920s to unify young Soviet people.44 In December 1920, as the war was coming to an end in the Bolsheviks’ favour, it established a Commission for the Study of the Russian Youth Movement. Many of the Civil War life writings by Komsomol members that were elicited though showed a darker and more ambivalent memory of their participation in war, in particular a questioning of heroic ‘agency’ and a suggestion of a sense of powerless and hopelessness; ‘a whirlwind of struggles’, ‘at sea during a storm’. This mirrors the life writings of Russian refugee youth in the 1920s, who described their experiences of the Revolution with a sense of powerlessness, writing that it was a noise, a wave, a storm, a fiery mass, a hurricane, a fire, a red serpent, Satan’s red laughter.45

HEALTH AND WELFARE; THE MODERNIZATION OF CHILDHOOD IN CRISIS In common with other European states, the Soviet state realized that the medicalization of childhood was key to the imposition of modernity. Late Imperial Russia had had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe. As late as the 1890s, less than 50 per cent of children born in European Russia reached their fifth birthday.46 In Moscow in 1912, 28 out of every 100 children died within the first year of life.47 For critics of tsarism, the causes of infant mortality were embedded in the socio-economic and political situation (‘backwardness’) of late Imperial Russia. In 1904, the Ninth Congress of the Pirogov Society, which was formed by leading tsarist medical experts, adopted a resolution that ‘since the principle reason for the abnormally high rate of children’s mortality in Russia is the material insecurity and inadequate mental development of the population, this Congress expresses its deep conviction that the successful struggle against this evil is possible only on the basis of broad social reforms’.48 The Bolsheviks agreed, but sought revolution and not reform. As with tsarist reformers, they aimed at a reduction in infant mortality and the elimination of childhood diseases such as scarlet fever, diphtheria and cholera, but also the introduction of a comprehensive welfare state and public health apparatus. As with the education system, much of this remained on paper, in theory or extremely variable for some decades, but foundational principles were laid. At the beginning of 1918, the Office for the Protection of Maternal and Infant Care (Okhrana materinstva i mladenchestva, OMM) was established. The OMM gave advice and support on maternal and infant health as well as providing crèches for working

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women, continuing the tradition of late Imperial philanthropy and socialist grass roots support for working women. During the Civil War, the government issued increased food rations for children and prioritized for them certain food products.49 The new children’s institutions being set up – orphanages, kindergartens, creches – were meant to encourage new hygiene practices, which ‘emphasized the child’s entry into a new space structured by “scientific” norms’.50 Handwashing, teeth cleaning, the use of individual towels and linen, laundry routines, naps and walks, and open windows for sunlight were to be the small daily practices with which the revolution in daily life (‘byt’) was to proceed. On a higher level, in January 1919, Sovnarkom created the Council for the Defence of Children (Sovet zashchity detei), which included representatives from the Commissariats of Enlightenment, Social Welfare, Health, Food Supply and Labour. Its main responsibility was to organize the supply of basic essentials to children in urban areas, then suffering from major food shortages due to the Civil War, and to arrange the evacuation of groups of children from the starving cities into agricultural areas. Quite soon though, it would be children in those areas who would be more at risk. By 1921, due to the Civil War breakdown and a poor harvest, there was a major famine across Southern Russia of such magnitude and suffering that it became a global event and spurred the development of the international humanitarian sector in the twentieth century. The Civil War breakdown created not only famine conditions for children, but also mass homelessness and child abandonment, creating what were the iconic early children of the Russian Revolution; the bezprizorniki. Estimated numbers of children living in the famine-affected areas of the Soviet Union range from 7.5 million to just under 10 million.51 The 1921 famine became an international event. Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration (ARA), the Save the Children Fund, Red Cross societies, Mennonite and Quaker organizations, among many others, were allowed in by the Bolsheviks to help with famine relief, despite the reservations of some governments and their citizenry as to the wisdom of helping the Bolshevik regime. Ten million children met the criteria for support from the American Relief Agency.52 The Soviet state meanwhile was feeding 1,500,000 children. The efforts of international organizations, who were simultaneously involved in helping Russian refugee children living in poverty in the Baltics and the Eastern Mediterranean, to deal with the famine formed a major contribution to the growing internationalization of child suffering and the development of transnational and professionalized humanitarianism at the beginning of the twentieth century.53 As well as starving in the famine areas, by 1921 several million children and adolescents were outside of traditional family structures  – either fully or partly orphaned, abandoned by families, or having struck out on their own for survival. Known as the bezprizorniki, these predominantly adolescent boys originally from rural areas became a highly public and worrying phenomenon in early Soviet Russia.54 They grouped around transport points and links, markets and bazaars and survived by crime and generational solidarity. The Soviet authorities had occasionally ambiguous attitudes to the bezprizorniki (were they criminals, ‘defectives’, victims, resourceful re-forgeable models of new Soviet youth or a mixture of all ?) but did prioritize setting up an array of shelters, colonies, registration points, assessment

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centres, organizational bodies and welfare structures to get them off the streets and into a ‘Soviet’ productive life in the labour force.55 In this way, the early Soviet state tried to turn the crisis of the bezprizorniki into a positive evaluation of its attitudes towards children, in contrast with the treatment of street children in capitalist countries. In these conditions caused by war and famine an alternative model for Soviet education and childcare was developing, which under Stalin would push out the more emancipatory and child centred theories and practices of the early revolutionary period. In late 1920, a radical and newly qualified Ukrainian teacher, Anton Makarenko was made director of the Poltava Labour Colony for bezprizorniki. Makarenko renamed the colony after Maxim Gorky, the Soviet writer and began to create there with the assorted juvenile delinquents what later became the dominant model for Soviet approaches to the child. Makarenko rejected many of the progressive pedagogical theories about the ‘liberated child’ exemplified by the Narkompros experts. Although he also encouraged children’s agency and involvement, and believed in their capacity for reason, Makarenko believed that children’s institutions should be run along disciplined, almost military lines, with clear established rules and a strong collectivist ethos. Under Stalin, Makarenko would become the leading Soviet expert on family life, childhood and education and continued to be so long after his death in 1939.

CONCLUSION Throughout the duration of the Soviet Union, the state described children as its ‘privileged class’, and claimed and appropriated the support of this social group for its own legitimacy. Some historians agree that in the early Soviet period there was indeed the creation of a generational cohort of children and young people conscious of their role in the historical process and enthusiastically committed to the transition to the Bolshevik model of modernity, whether through the Komsomol or the Soviet school. These may have developed a sense of generational group identity (a ‘new childhood identity’) based on allegiance to the Soviet cause, castigating their opponents as ‘dark’.56 This generational solidarity was strengthened by participation in group activities such as the anti-religious campaigns. Some children and young people were involved in the creation of a new modern identity based on a belief and mastery of the natural sciences and new daily practices. In terms of the Komsomol, the first generation of this period would turn on the ‘revolutionary fathers’ (not only Bolsheviks, but also ex-Mensheviks, ex-Narodniks and ex-SRs) from the second half of the 1920s during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Turn, in what has been described as a ‘regime encouraged purge’.57 In the leadership struggles of the 1920s, the various Bolshevik leaders appealed to the Komsomol for support. Stalin’s attacks on Trotsky suggested to the revolutionary generation that they were the carriers of Leninism now. The new generation recast the older generation of revolutionaries as ‘bourgeois’ vestiges of the past and a block to the revived radicalism of the Revolution under Stalin. In general, the Cultural Revolution at the end of the 1920s revived the cult of youth and the Civil War period.

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After the initial revolutionary period, the Soviet educational system shifted from one which placed pedagogical experimentation and the autonomy of the child at the centre to a traditional classical educational system with Party control, a centralized curriculum, teacher authority and strict discipline. A major breach took place in the early 1930s during Stalin’s Revolution from above. Key elements though remained the same: primary and secondary education was to be universal, compulsory, co-educational and free.58 Also, by 1920, a basic organizational framework had emerged to look after vulnerable children without family care that lasted until the end of the Soviet period. Infants and children aged up to three were the remit of the Commissariat/Ministry of Health, while the leading role for those over three was given to the Ministry of Education as the state took responsibility for their education and upbringing (vospitanie).59 Some historians have argued that the Bolsheviks did not necessarily have one coherent policy towards the family or one understanding of youth in this period. Corinna Kuhr-Korelev argues that there was no ‘youth question’ in 1917, as there was a ‘woman question’.60 The Bolsheviks concerned with culture change and a total transformation of everyday life (‘byt’) were most concerned with youth. However, it is also true to say that the children and youth were key to the Revolution, both as actors and as subjects of the Bolsheviks and co-creators of the new Soviet state. Emancipatory and radical ideas about education, rights, the family, citizenship circulated within and without the Bolshevik Party, drawing on the Russian progressive educational heritage and a contemporary transnational one, reinforcing the category of child and youth as key to understanding the revolutionary period.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Culture and revolution: Destruction, creation and preservation in the decade after the revolution FELICITAS FISCHER VON WEIKERSTHAL, UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG

From the beginning, the Bolshevik revolution was more than a political coup. The Bolshevik idea of socialism would reach into many spheres of life, aiming at creating a new society – however vague this new society was defined. The cultural programme of the Bolshevik revolution included a reformulation of values and norms, fundamental changes in the way of life and a reorientation in the cultural sphere. The so-called ‘petty bourgeois’ culture was to be transformed into a proletarian one, and art, music and literature served to precisely achieve this goal. Culture was, thus, both a target and an instrument of the Bolshevik project. As Michael David-Fox has noted, Bolshevik cultural policies encompassed a destructive, anti-‘bourgeois’ as well as a civilizing and enlightening agenda.1 Iconoclasm, destruction and exclusion of dissenters on the one side met with cultural innovation, creative élan and including policies on the other. The dualism of destruction and creation, of staryi and novyi obscures yet a third element of Bolshevik cultural policies in the aftermath of the revolution often ignored: the preservation and incorporation of cultural heritage.2 This chapter will outline all three of these elements of the post-revolutionary cultural project and, thus, the plurality of cultural developments in the aftermath of revolution and its often-conflicting results. This will be done by adopting a broad understanding of the term culture: Culture is not only comprehended as an artistic manifestation, as art, literature and science but as a set of values, habits, rituals, customs and a way of life.3 In research, not only such a broad definition of the term ‘culture’ but also the perception of a Bolshevik cultural project that goes back well into the early 1920s, if not into the direct aftermath of the revolution, led to new thematic orientations in regard to culture in revolutionary Russia. To this, a growing interest in Soviet subjectivity is

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added and thus the abandoning of an exclusive top-down perspective.4 Research is, thus, no longer limited to political decision-makers as for example the Commissariat of Enlightenment or major cultural agents such as the avant-garde or Proletkult (Association for Proletarian Culture). Instead, the interaction and confrontation of different groups of actors, their respective understanding of the cultural dimension of the revolution came into focus in order to better understand the scope and results of the Bolshevik cultural revolution.5 Studies on ‘internal sovietization policies’, like that of Michael David-Fox, show that the Red Army, the Komsomol (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League) or the League of Militant Atheists often had their own ideas of Soviet culture and thus frequently clashed with the Bolshevik leadership. Moreover, these groups were far more heterogeneous and less politically controlled than often suggested.6 Furthermore, regarding a broader public – in Bolshevik terminology, the ‘masses’  – we not only find passive recipients of Bolshevik external, enlightening tendencies but active protagonists who re-interpreted Bolshevik or Soviet culture in their own terms. Peasants and workers accepted the new Soviet culture, while at the same ‘translating’ it into their own more traditional norms, values or cultural rites.7 Even those who stood on the losing side of the October Revolution – e.g. ‘former people’ or non-Bolshevik intellectuals,8 but also conservative artists – were not totally excluded but found niches and means of adapting to the ‘new’ society.9 The longevity of traditions and the integration of old elites and conservatives raise the question of how ‘new’ post-revolutionary culture actually was. As research bridging the divide of 1917 has shown, culture in the first decade after the Revolution was seldom uncompromisingly new but rather an amalgamation of prerevolutionary traditions with post-revolutionary culture as well as a continuum of pre-revolutionary trends.10 At the same time, though, analysis of different cultural stakeholders suggests that the New Economic Policy (NEP) entailed much more curtailment and control early on than previously assumed.11 At the centre of most of this research is the question of how well and thoroughly the cultural revolution of the Bolsheviks was implemented. With reference to financial and personnel problems and the tenacity of traditions, the answer to this question is often negative. The early years after the Revolution, but also NEP-era, have often been perceived as a big disappointment. This disappointment is traced backed to the false assumption of the Bolshevik leadership that the ‘masses’ would quickly and easily develop towards the desired goal.12 However, if we want to assess post-revolutionary culture, Bolshevik politics should not be the only benchmark. Neither is cultural development only to be attributed to one single social actor, nor should one display the same impatience as the Bolsheviks.13 Moreover, even Bolshevik cultural policy was far less intended to turn everything upside down than it liked to pretend.

FIGHTING ‘PETTY BOURGEOIS’ CULTURE Much like other revolutions before and after 1917, both the February Revolution and the October Revolution triggered unpolitical vandalism and politically motivated iconoclasm. The old order had to visibly give way to the new, revolutionary

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order. Rooted both in pre-revolutionary traditions of rural anti-landowner, antiintellectuals and anti-urban resentments of a predominantly peasant society and in socialist inciting propaganda, the destructive element of the Russian Revolution went far beyond the demolition of buildings, signs and objects.14 For decades, socialist groups in Russia had fed the resentment of the population towards the wealthier classes with an aggressive ‘anti-bourgeois’ rhetoric. The socialists had propagated the image of an irreconcilable (class) struggle in which workers and peasants and their ‘exploiters’ were placed on the opposite side of the barricades. Both in words and in pictures, landowners, employees, and factory owners had been dehumanized as parasites and bloodsuckers.15 The terminology used by this kind of propaganda remained, however, quite vague, and left room for arbitrariness and different interpretations. Especially among the general population, the term ‘bourgeois’ had a less economic or social connotation than the socialist parties had had in mind. It rather classified an extremely hostile ‘other’, which could be identified by clothing, language, lifestyle and manners.16 After the February Revolution, both revolutionary iconoclasm and vandalism began immediately. The revolutionary crowd removed tsarist insignia and demolished police stations and courts as symbols of pre-revolutionary oppression. It looted shops of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and set manor houses on fire, while the new municipal authorities renamed streets and squares.17 The Bolshevik seizure of power gave a further impetus to iconoclastic and malicious destruction. Symbolic for this is the looting of the Winter Palace in the night of 25–26 October. Paintings, wall hangings and furniture fell victim to the knives and bayonets of the Red Guards. Other palaces around Petrograd and in Moscow suffered a similar fate in the days that followed.18 Now, and to a much greater extent than before, destructive tendencies were not only directed against monuments, paintings, buildings and cultural heritage but against the ‘bourgeoisie’, the ‘former people’ and their way of life. Waves of spontaneous, bottom-up violence were aimed at people and property seemingly belonging to an alien world. While the Bolshevik regime criticized any and all spontaneous, ‘anarchist’ actions against pre-revolutionary culture and its representatives, the new government nevertheless further incited hate and resentments of the ‘masses’ by a policy that clearly identified the former elite as the diabolic enemy of the population and of its revolutionary achievements in particular.19 On the basis of a series of decrees, the new state pushed the former elites and wealthy citizens out of their traditional fields of occupation, often even out of their homes. It exposed them to various forms of discrimination well into the 1920s and ‘nationalized’  – i.e. confiscated  – their belongings.20 Similar to the aristocracy and the ‘bourgeoisie’, members of the clergy, merchants and  – to a lesser degree  – the non-revolutionary intelligentsia found themselves exposed to increasing pressure, even to the degree of being denied the right to exist and to own property. These policies side-lined all those who had previously played a decisive role in the cultural and political life of Russia. Before the Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church wielded influence in most territories dominated by the Russian ethnicity. The church provided far more than spiritual care; it was deeply

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embedded in Russian culture, shaping many spheres of life, and even organizing social routines. In Bolshevik ideology, the Russian Orthodox Church in particular, and religion in general, symbolized political, economic, as well as cultural backwardness. Anti-religious propaganda and anticlerical policy therefore played an integral role for the Bolshevik’s cultural programme of destruction. Once the Bolsheviks had seized power, they removed valuable items in countless numbers from the places of worship of all faiths, ordered the killings of clergymen and parishioners or detained them in the newly formed concentration camps.21 Furthermore, the church was deprived of its former influence on schools. Religious education was entirely removed from the curriculum. The exhumation of saints and the de-sacralization of relics destroyed important landmarks of Russian Orthodox culture.22 A substantial portion of the intelligentsiia fell subject to arrest and extradition – philosophers, historians, writers and poets, scientists, literary critics, journalists, and, to a minor extent, also engineers and agronomists, among them the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, the publicist and writer Mikhail Osorgin, and the writer and religious philosopher Fedor Stepun.23 The expulsions in 1922 – and of course also the voluntary emigration of some intellectuals before and after – caused a veritable ‘brain drain’ for the new state. At the same time, this ‘humanitarian’ method of removing undesirable parts of the population shows that NEP was less plural and conciliatory in cultural spheres than it appeared. This argument is further supported by the fact that a reorganization of higher education in 1921 broke the autonomy of universities and that the establishment of the censorship agency (glavlit) in 1922 reintroduced content monitoring even for those publications that were potentially in line with the new rulers. All non-Bolshevik newspapers and magazines had already been banned in the autumn of 1917. Instead of fostering plurality, Bolshevik cultural policies during the NEP rather resulted in a limitation of the participants as well as possible arguments in cultural discourse. The regime excluded those – or sometimes they excluded themselves – who expressed dissenting opinions or simply advocated the autonomy of the arts and sciences.24 At the same time, these destructive traits were not all-encompassing. Lenin, for example, acknowledged the importance of religion for the population. Much to the offence of militant atheists and some Komsomol members, the Bolshevik leadership, therefore, curtailed a too aggressive approach against worshippers. This balancing act would, even in the long run, allow religion to play a certain role in Russia’s post-revolutionary culture. The same can be said about the ‘bourgeoisie’ and nonBolshevik intellectuals. In order to maintain its own power and to be able to govern properly, the regime integrated former elites and specialists into its state agencies. For the more militant strata of the new rulers, this was clearly a betrayal of the revolution. Thus, it can be asked whether the destructive side of Bolshevik policies was indeed exclusively ideologically driven or whether power-political considerations prevailed. Equally, state ordered destruction of property and cultural heritage seems to have had less ideological but often practical or financial reasons. The expropriation of personal and institutional objects of value which was legalized by law in June 1918 primarily covered the financial needs of the new state as did

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the ban of the export of valuable art.25 Equally, the melting down of silver objects and the systematic sale of gold, silver, platinum, coins and precious stones as well as of Russian icons on the European antique market served primarily the goal of increasing the national budget.26 Consequently, during the famine of 1921 and 1922 and the period of forced industrialization, the government triggered the highest waves of ‘nationalization’ of golden and other valuable objects from Romanov and Church property and then even from state collections and museums.27 The same pattern of governance can be perceived if we look at the housing redistribution policies (kvartirnyi peredel) that ensued in the year of 1918 and were reiterated in 1923–4. Former home owners were officially deprived of their estate to eradicate private property and to fight against a ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle; however in fact, the driving force was often an acute housing shortage and economic hardship.28 And yet, the loss of privacy and space for those affected also meant a loss of traditions and of religious festivities, as Douglas Smith has pointed out.29 The ‘housing revolution’, therefore, indirectly provoked profound changes to the cultural habits of certain segments of the population. The marginalization and suppression of the culture and the ‘old’ way of life of the ‘former people’ were a drastic and visible result of the October Revolution. It was not mere propaganda or wishful thinking when Pravda noted in January 1919 that all the ‘wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, […] [the] rich barin in a fur coat’ had disappeared.30 Nevertheless, ‘bourgeois’ culture represented only a comparatively small segment of Russian cultural life. For the majority of citizens, the Revolution and the years that followed had not brought the same amount of annihilation and exclusion. Only in the course of the – second – cultural revolution of the Stalin years would rural lifestyles become the subject of violent re-modelling.31

‘NEW, PROLETARIAN’ CULTURE While many features of the culture of the aristocracy and the ‘bourgeoise’ vanished in only a couple of years if not months after the Revolution, manifold impulses triggered the creation of a new, supposedly Soviet and proletarian culture and thinking. On the surface, the changes were profound: new insignia, signs (hammer and sickle, the red flag) and songs (the International) replaced those of the Tsarist era; old hierarchies were turned upside down; the housing redistribution brought collectivity into everyday town life; revolutionary tribunals established ‘revolutionary conscience’ as the highest moral and legislative guiding principle; new styles and subjects were established in art, music, film, photography and theatre; new technologies like electricity, film and radio reached deep into rural life as did the multiple waves of literacy campaigns; the alphabet was transformed; the language was modified through neologisms and shifts in meaning; calendar reform and Bolshevik festivals restructured the course of the year; education was secularized, compulsory schooling introduced and the curriculum radically revised; relations between the sexes and within families were tackled; artistic production and its reception were democratized.

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If we take a closer look, though, revolutionary achievements are sometimes less pronounced and long-living than they seem and often also less innovative and new. Orthographic and education reforms, for example, were not only based on prerevolutionary drafts, but had already been largely worked out by October 1917. The radical art of the avant-garde, on the other hand, barely survived the 1920s. The majority of the population either ignored the new festival calendar, secularized weddings and ‘red’ funerals or transferred their traditional, religious ways of celebration and mourning and its celebration customs unto the new Soviet ones.32 The population translated new content into old forms, for example when they replaced the icons in the ‘red corner’ with a portrait of Lenin. And while communal apartments (kommunal’nye kvartiry or in short kommunalki) might have symbolized the revolutionary reconstruction of society and culture, within the confines of the kommunalka, former and new residents preserved their understanding of social differences as well as old social hierarchies in their day-to-day encounters with each other despite the dissolution of spatial segregation.33 Much of the problem of implementing any new ideas on the ‘cultural front’ is attributed to financial and staffing constraints, but also to the communication gap between rulers and ruled.34 A big hindrance in implementing new Soviet culture was probably also the fact that the Bolsheviks lacked ‘any uniform, state-established and enforced cultural plan’.35 Indeed, the word ‘culture’ had no doctrinal status until the early 1920s. Primarily, ‘culture’ was associated with progress and enhancement, enlightenment and governance. Although Alexander Bogdanov spoke of the importance of a cultural revolution for the proletariat even before 1917, Lenin did not outline the ‘third front’ of the revolution until 1923. In the years that followed, ‘culture’ became a concept for integration and to iron out any possible differences might they be of class, national, gender, regional, religious or educational nature.36 Still, the concept of this ‘cultural revolution’ remained a set of vague ideas and utopian visions which left room for unbound creativity. A multitude of discursive spaces developed, ranging from party ranks to the publications of the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment (Narkompros), to the journals of left-wing artists (LEF), to meetings of Proletkult or local Komsomol or amateur groups If one tries to crystallize the Bolshevik central idea of the utopia of Soviet culture from their writings and campaigns, the following rough picture emerges: The aspired new society was based on the virtues and values of the revolutionary underground of the late tsarist era, on heroism and self-sacrifice, self-fashioning and continued learning, atheism, collectivity, solidarity, discipline, and often masculinity and violence.37 All cultural campaigns after October 1917 reflect this adherence to the culture of the revolutionists, be it the campaign of free, communal labour on Saturdays (subbotniks),38 the campaigns to liquidate illiteracy (likbez)39 or to foster physical culture (fizkul’tura).40 Overall, the ideal appears more ‘revolutionary’  – in the sense of stemming from the revolutionary underground rather than being revolutionizing  – and ‘intellectual’ than ‘proletarian’. It was often markedly masculine and increasingly militarized.41 Even less pronounced than the goal was the question of how this goal should be achieved. By what means, what forms, what content and by whom could this

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new and allegedly ‘proletarian’ culture be created? The theorists of the Proletkult, Bogdanov first and foremost, emphasized collectivism, ensemble art and deprofessionalization. Proletkult and, in the late 1920s, the Russian Associations of Proletarian Writers and Proletarian Musicians respectively (RAPM and RAPP) relied on proletarians as constructors of Soviet culture. Proletkult, however, also spoke out in favour of a critical appropriation of pre-revolutionary culture.42 Such an approach did not go far enough for many artists of the avant-garde. They warned that hanging on to old forms would entail keeping old content and values alive at the same time. In their understanding, professional artists should influence the establishment of revolutionary culture through the fusion of art and politics in, for example, mass festivals or propaganda posters and by using new forms and aesthetics.43 Yet although the loudest calls for destroying the old came from the ranks of Proletkult and leftwing artists and writers like Vladimir Mayakovsky, neither should be labelled as reckless destroyers of pre-revolutionary culture, nor should they be understood as opposite poles. After the turn of the Left Front of the Arts towards rationalization and social utilitarianism in particular, the antagonism between them and Proletkult dissolved.44 All these artists developed a creative energy that often went beyond familiar forms, content and materials. To name just a few: Sergei Eisenstein disrupted the already young cinematic viewing habits through montage and repetition; Sergei Radlov combined pantomime and text improvisation into loosely connected theatre pieces; Aleksandr Rodchenko revolutionized perspective in photography; Arsenii Avraamov relied on steam pipes and bells to create a new ‘sound of the October Revolution’; and El Lissitzky combined political content with geometric forms in his suprematist art compositions.45 The majority of the population – and even the Bolshevik leadership  – remained predominantly ignorant to these revolutionary forms and formats.46 But also many of the official campaigns and trends aiming at profound changes of Russian culture and society ran into a void. This, however, does not mean that nothing changed. Individuals and groups transformed state concepts and ideas and translated them into their own – often more traditional – mindset. Such a survival of ‘remnants from the past’ was not completely unwelcome to the Bolshevik leadership.

PRESERVATION AND APPROPRIATION Against the background of the loud voices of the iconoclasts and the advocates of a new proletarian culture, the quiet voices of those who promoted the preservation of cultural heritage often remained unheard in historiography.47 This reluctance towards preservationist currents might be due to the fact that it seems to contradict our understanding of a radical Bolshevik rhetoric and its call for a total break with the past. In fact, however, Bolshevik decrees issued as early as 1917 show a clear understanding for the national importance of cultural heritage and the power of material culture.48 Cultural preservation was perceived as a crucial part for the aesthetic education of the ‘masses’ and as an element of the construction of a Bolshevik identity.49

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Both Lenin and Anatolii Lunacharsky, the head of Narkompros, did not want to create a people without history. They criticized any looting of Russia’s cultural heritage and – in the case of Lunacharsky  – acknowledged that ‘not all old art is bourgeois and even if it is  – not all of it is bad’.50 Already during the Civil War, Narkompros tried to sensitize the population for the value of cultural heritage. Many posters called for the protection of both immobile and mobile cultural goods.51 In 1923, the artist Sergei V. Chekhonin openly referred to the past as an important component of future society. Presenting various sculptures and buildings known to inhabitants of Petrograd, his headline was: ‘Help us preserve historical monuments in good condition. They tell us about the past. If we do not know the past, we will not build the future.’52 Facets of pre-revolutionary culture were, thus, accepted as being imperative for the building of socialism as a source of knowledge. Others were presented as valuable achievements of capitalism and imperial society which could now finally be made accessible to the population at large.53 In this argumentation Bolshevik preservationists followed its predecessors under the Provisional Government and met with the ideas of the museum staff, experts and pre-revolutionary preservationists.54 And thus, within the confines of museums, a fairly safe haven for both objects and living representatives of the old regime emerged.55 A survival of the preservationist arguments beyond the revolutionary divide corresponded with continuities in personnel.56 The artist, art critic and historian Alexander Benois; the painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art Igor’ Grabar’; or the publisher Petr Veiner57 and many more became members of commissions and agencies created by the new regime, such as the Board for Museum Affairs and for the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities (kollegiia po delam muzeev i okhrane pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny) headed by Natalia Trotskaia and the Commission for the Storage and Registration of Artistic and Historical Monuments (komissiia po okhrane i registratsii pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny) under the auspices of Maxim Gorky, Maria Andreevna and Leonid Krasin.58 These agencies united a destructive with a preservationist line. On the one hand, they account for the ‘nationalization’ of works of art and antiques. On the other hand, the museum fund protected numerous palaces and estates, icons and cultural assets of pre-revolutionary Russia from vandalism.59 Overall, heritage policy in the first post-revolutionary years was rather reactive than proactive. It focused on the prevention of destruction and was less concentrated on the preservation of cultural heritage.60 A shortage in personnel, lack of funding and the absence of a clear concept of cultural heritage including a scientifically based understanding on what should be preserved and how hampered any real policy of preservation. Moreover, the overall situation of the Civil War and the famine brought up the question of priority against the background of a general tight budget.61 Taken together, these factors led to a number of cultural treasures being lost forever. Nevertheless, the preservationist discourse incorporated many different protagonists with their individual agenda and helped to preserve many objects, monuments and buildings that in the eyes of the new rulers represented exploitation and religious superstition.62 At the same time, however, these cultural

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assets stood for creative power, knowledge and sciences and could be incorporated into Bolshevik narratives.63 Similarly, continuities and an appropriation of the old can be seen in the field of art, theatre, literature as well as festival culture. Although leading figures of post-revolutionary cultural policies, among them Nadezhda Krupskaia, members of the Proletkult and of LEF, furiously attacked ‘old’ forms, aesthetics and topics of cultural production as harmful remnants of the ideology of the exploiters and a hindrance to the development of socialism, there never existed a total ban on them. On the contrary, fairy tales, novels, theatre plays and music pieces from the pre-revolutionary era remained part of the repertoire especially after the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 had acknowledged the propaganda role of Russian classics.64 Instead, illustrations or accompanying explanations contextualized, annotated and re-framed the content in order to adapt it to the post-revolutionary context and to Bolshevik cultural policy.65 Equally, traditional folk forms of cultural expressions like the chastushka were co-opted and filled with the content of the Bolshevik message.66 Even Bolshevik mass festivals, which were so important for state-building and representation of the new state, were built on the tradition of autocratic spectacles.67 To the great dismay of some radical left-wing artists or members of the Komsomol, the Bolshevik leadership thus obviously remained in dialogue with tradition well into the 1920s.68

—– Although numerous historical sources attest to the dissatisfaction of the rulers with the speed and extent of cultural change after 1917, it would be misleading to determine cultural development solely through party discourse. Such a focus deprives the people of their cultural agency and repeats the Bolshevik narrative of the backwardness and stubbornness of the ‘masses’. Instead, we have to acknowledge that there existed diversity in the cultural discourse and in cultural production that reached beyond the dichotomies of avant-garde versus Proletkult, high versus low culture, ‘bourgeois’ versus workers’ culture. If we evaluate what took shape as post-revolutionary culture in the first decade after 1917, we find an amalgamation of old and new into a hybrid new-old Russian-Soviet culture. Part of this amalgamation was intentional as the Bolsheviks acknowledged the importance of cultural heritage even for a socialist society. Part of it was grumblingly and at least temporally accepted, part was due to Bolshevik weak assertiveness and part due to a lack of funding and cadres. But even if the reality remained far from utopia, many cultural aspects did change fundamentally after 1917. Changes in the understanding of law and reforms in the school system laid the foundation for new values and norms that were to define the new Soviet state. Art and propaganda, in turn, entered into a symbiosis that was to become the symbol of Stalinism. At the same time, not only the consumption of artistic, cultural but also scientific production no longer remained the preserve of a privileged group of the population. The – second – cultural revolution of the Stalin years brought a new push to the destruction of the old and the re-definition of a new Soviet culture. Peasant lifestyle

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came under attack. Churches and places of worship were destroyed or rededicated, monuments deregistered. Urban construction transformed the city space. Artistic expression was standardized and yet another round of the persecution of artists, writers, musicians and scientists started. But unlike in the economy, the Great Turn (velikii perelom) in the cultural sphere cannot be pinned down to the years 1928 and 1929. Instead, we can detect different turning points and sometimes a chain of smaller changes that finally condensed into the major shift. Malte Rolf, for example, argues that not 1928 but 1927 was the ‘catalyst of the cultural Great Turn’. When celebrating the successes of the Soviet power with the tenth anniversary of the revolution, ‘impatience with and intolerance of the “old”’ grew.69 G.A. Kruglikova goes even further back and stresses 1925 and the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks ‘On Party Policy in the Field of Art and Literature’ as the turning point towards the ideologization and bureaucratization of culture.70 The first limitations of artistic freedom, though, can be identified in the early 1920s, when the government channelled attacks on both modernist artists and Proletkult, dissolved the independent special departments for the individual arts within Narkompros, introduced censorship and placed cultural policy in the hands of party functionaries.71 The proclamation of Socialist Realism (sotsrealism) in 1932 was, thus, only the last nail in the coffin for cultural plurality.

PART FIVE

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CHAPTER TENTY ONE

The revolution and the provincial press FRANZISKA SCHEDEWIE AND DENNIS DIERKS, UNIVERSITY OF JENA

INTRODUCTION: REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY AS MEDIA HISTORY Modern print media played an important role in shaping the Russian Revolution. It was the media that framed the events in the capital (and beyond) by putting them into comprehensive narratives and, in so doing, gave them a meaning to their readerships. It was the media that made the agendas of the political protagonists as well as their concepts and slogans shared knowledge in regions and across the empire. And it was the media that shaped imaginations on the revolutionary events in 1917 by creating ‘visual worlds’ in the minds of the recipients.1 In this manner, the media ‘made’ events and contributed to the ‘mediated construction’ of reality.2 What is more, when reporting on the revolution, editors and writers often tried to impact on the course of the revolution itself by giving the actions of their recipients a certain direction. In this context, emotions played a crucial role: The media set a tone of emotionalization that echoed their audiences’ hopes and fears and, at the same time, aimed at channelling them. For all these reasons, revolutionary history is (also) media history. In view of such mutual, formative relationship, media history as a discipline seeks an holistic approach: It does not look at the media products and their textual and visual aspects and variations alone, but also interrogates people involved as makers, agents or audiences, as well as other contexts and trends like technical innovations, laws, finances, networks, or any processes of encounter, entanglement or transfer.3 Russian imperial society entered the Revolution of 1917 as a highly diversified, complex and multilingual media society:4 The media brought and created news in all regions and social spheres, the capitals of Petrograd and Moscow, the provinces (home front in 1917) as well as the combatted ‘shatterzone’-peripheries. In what follows, the multiple implications of the presence and role of the media shall be exemplified by cases of the provincial press issued in Russian and the languages of the empire’s Muslim populations.

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PRE-REVOLUTION (1906–17): CAPTURING THE FUNCTIONS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PRESS The most important medium in the late Russian Empire was the press. Newspapers and journals (like leaflets and pamphlets) served for spreading the news.5 They were even more effective in reaching their audiences than the other bodies, in which the unfolding civil society found means of expression: namely the institutions of municipal and rural self-government, the voluntary associations, and even, after its establishment as a result of the Revolution of 1905, the central elected legislative body, the State Duma.6 The ‘development of a vibrant press in Russia [had] preceded the adoption of a written constitution, the establishment of a parliamentary institution, and the formation of political parties’;7 despite serious censorship rules,8 the press had functioned as a ‘substitute for lacking parliamentary structures’, proclaimed a ‘haven’.9 After 1905, the three elements together – press, parliament, parties – synergetically provided for the further development of an ever more politicized public. This applied not only to the capitals and the upper strata of society, while there, the press was less distrusted and controlled by the government. Early research albeit focused mainly on St Petersburg/Petrograd and Moscow; the historiography investigating the correlation of civil society, the state and the press has claimed that ‘without exaggeration, after 1905, and before the caesura of World War I, the Russian imperial government felt pressure to legitimize itself before public opinion’.10 More recent scholarship on the provinces before 1914 partly accords with this picture.11 After the coup of 3 June 1907 and the incisive restrictions on the electoral law to the Duma, the impact and considerable freedom of the press continued and would even increase in the form of a ‘pre-parliamentary space’.12 Historians have highlighted this development and its advantages, but have also expounded the problems. Firstly, the regime made its own use of newspapers as indicators of societal support and generators of prestige for reform policies. Secondly, the political parties used the media to promulgate their objectives, especially in their own press, if the objectives were illegal; but also the rather permissible positions appear to have been more articulate and expressed more radically in the press outside the Duma than inside by the parties´ fractions, thus potentially undermining the practice of finding compromise and consensus in the already weakened institution.13 Thirdly, commercialization as a common phenomenon of the legal press as mass medium internationally was taking root in Russia, too, just like in general, developments in Russian media and journalism were not isolated, but participated in global, supranational structural changes.14 For the last months of the Russian Empire, under the conditions of the First World War (and after an initial patriotic outburst),15 in popular papers, a lust for sensational news and rumours was thriving, with the veracity of newspapers at the same time increasingly doubted by the people;16 other papers were marked by depoliticization,17 and yet others, especially among less well-heeled provincial papers, were unable to weather the severe economic pressures during the war.18 To be sure, literacy rates, moreover, constituted an issue, even after the turn of the century,19 as reading skills were very unevenly spread among the population,

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and all the more so in the countryside of the multitudinous provinces. Looking at the province, historians have pointed out the problems the elites faced seeking ‘to educate ordinary people, and to transform their cultural lives’.20 At the same time, metropolitan newspapers were also mocked for overrating their alleged superiority and ‘criticism of the province’,21 because small-towns at least had their libraries, too. Even in distinctly illiterate areas, texts found their audiences by being read aloud. Periodicals hint at this reality, as they often contained a significant share of rhyme and poetry. At the same time again, for the period of 1917 in particular, historians have observed for areas with rural, rather isolated non-Russian communities that these could remain cut off from information chains and their inhabitants even be presented by urban elites in Russian language regional press as especially ‘dark’ and hostile to sanctioned revolutionary measures.22 Next to the impact on an increasing politicized public sphere, the boom in the press of which one can speak for late-imperial Russia could also forge or reforge patterns of connectivity that transcended the political borders of the empire, as was the case, for example, with Russia’s Turkophone and Persophone Muslim populations. After the first long-living Muslim newspaper of the Russian Empire, Tercümān / Perevodchik (Translator) had been established in 1883, this paper also found considerable readerships in the Ottoman Empire, post-Ottoman Southeast Europe, Iran and British-India.23 The same holds true for periodicals that were issued in the cultural centres of Russian Muslims such as Kazan, Orenburg, Baku and Tiflis after 1905. However, the freedom provided by the Revolution of 1905 soon got curtailed, the imperial administration being haunted by diffuse fears of panIslamism and Turkish irredentism, which regularly made it ban Muslim periodicals. In response, Muslim publicists reissued their papers under new titles (which was a viable way of circumventing pre-revolutionary censorship for other presses, too), or they sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where they began contributing to existing journals and newspapers or founded periodicals on their own.24

THE PRESS IN 1917: EXISTING HISTORIOGRAPHY AND NEW APPROACHES For the revolution, even narrowly focused on the half year of 1917 between February and October, the questions of content, function, development and impact of the press are no less vital, but there exist even fewer monographs adopting a comprehensive claim and concentrated approach than for the preceding period.25 The reasons may be manifold. On the one hand, the press has always constituted a major source for historians of the revolution anyway, and there is a wide range of comprehensive literature relying on the press for centres and peripheries, but yet pursuing other research questions. After all, periodicals provide perspectivized prognoses, accounts and explanations of events with a ‘smoking gun’ appeal of unpredictable, unpolished immediacy;26 newspapers, publishing houses and printing presses were themselves disputed objects during the events;27 important protagonists were – almost by rule – also newspaper editors, publicists or journalists; and social groups have been examined and identified as readerships of certain periodicals.28

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On the other hand, in accordance with the exigencies of media history, the scope and spheres of interest in the media themselves have been also both expanded and at the same time more focused. This has resulted in a great number of case studies, including new source editions,29 but again, as pointed out above, in rather fewer comparative or generalizing overviews  – the latter (generalizations) perhaps not even being principally desirable for the present moment, in analogy to other fields like social or regional history, where for the sake of deeper, differentiated insight there has been a dynamic termed ‘splintering’.30 The first seminal studies of the press concentrated on a number of major, central newspapers reaching a large or in any way significant audience;31 it was argued that only these papers and the people behind them could exert influence on politics and public discourse. Without unduly equalizing and levelling the vast pool of periodicals in the Russian Empire, still the envisaged sample for analysis is much broader now. It comprises papers of all origins, topics and readership milieus, of different territorial or institutional anchorage,32 and in particular also of other languages and vernaculars of the empire than Russian. Case studies with mediahistorical research interests also extend the field into propaganda, or (revolutionary) culture in general.33 For the provinces, a close analysis of the press has many heuristic advantages. First and foremost, this research leads to reconsidering, on the one hand, the set of problems that in their entirety shape the revolution, but could be very different in content, character, urgency and weightiness for the people in various parts of the empire. The press reveals the multiple goals pursued, the needs and pressures answered to and also the ‘local heroes’34 come and gone in ‘distinctive parochial revolution[s]’;35 it can disclose the existence, changeability and competitiveness of ‘revolutionary scripts’;36 and the ‘visual worlds’ created in the media can make newspapers appear like multiple parallel microcosms, because, in (imaginary) dialogue with their readers (or be it listeners), in order to convince them with textual and visual means, newspapers wrote as if their worlds were real.37 At the same time, considering centre-periphery relations vital for inner-imperial dynamics, a close look at the contents of provincial press can put the notion of ‘provincial backwater’ into perspective. Indeed, the local, provincial press often served a significant function as a conduit for communicating important political messages from central party authorities to the likeminded activists as well as potential sympathizers across the country – sometimes even disseminating messages that those same (visiting) party functionaries could not or would not convey via central party newspapers.38 And not only did central headquarters of institutions and political parties exchange information and directives with local branches; local society and individuals also acted and connected themselves on the spots. Some internationally renowned papers like Saratovskaia zemskaia nedelia (Saratov Zemstvo Weekly) were based in the province, here in a provincial centre.39 And even the small district (uezd) zemstvo newspaper Ostrogozhskii listok (Ostrogozhsk Newssheet), located in the more remote environs of the agricultural province of Voronezh, provides an illustrative example of up-to-date connectedness, as this newspaper offered a number of articles that pressed for the introduction of women’s suffrage. In a

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spirited manner, it referred to the women’s movement’s actions in the capital and printed a feature by the famous ‘grandmother of the revolution’ Ekaterina BreshkoBreshkovskaia.40 Behind these articles was a woman, linked by surname to a member of the local zemstvo board, through which she had access to the newspaper as a mouthpiece. This example serves to illustrate that provincial newspapers must not be dismissed in the search of public space across the revolutionary Russian empire – again, to be sure, without generalizing or, as one may, ‘idealizing’. (Because the same progressive pro-women articles in the example of Ostrogozhskii listok also voiced quite traditionally prejudiced remarks about the ‘unenlightened’ peasant women, on whom the author looked with suspicion – even though this was a zemstvo newspaper, i.e. of the very institution that had set itself the task of rural development since 1864).41 The press serves as a magnifying lens through which to analyse communication, in this particular case also in addition to the communication in the zemstvo assemblies, that themselves underwent substantial changes in 1917.42 In general, the press as a ‘magnifying lens’ may thus help identify processes of inclusion and exclusion in society under revolution. A division implicit in newspaper articles into who could count as beneficial member of a new, progressive polity, and who allegedly remained just passive, if not hostile, recipient of the good deeds, can be of crucial importance not only for the revolution, but also for developments thereafter. The latter group rather often meant the peasantry. Besides, not only social and political topics in the narrow sense are important, culture too. This is seen not only in newspaper articles, but also in advertisements and pictures, on changes, for example, in consumer culture, or health and nutrition during revolution.43 Again, more than the metropolitan press, the provincial and peripheral press reflects the empire’s diversity in terms of multilingualism: newspapers printed and circulating in the Empire reported on the revolutionary events in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Finnish, Estonian, Armenian, Georgian, a great variety of Turkish vernaculars, Persian and even Arabic, to name but a few examples.44 Each of these languages was connected to a distinct sphere of communication with its very own notions and imageries. This could involve trans-imperial entanglements as the following example might illustrate: when newspapers in Turkish vernaculars wrote about the revolution, they applied the notion inḳılāb, which did not solely mirror the Russian term revoliutsiia, as it was also related to a long tradition of Ottoman political discourse, in which this expression had a negative connotation, meaning ‘turmoil’ in the original sense. Writers who wanted to give their readerships a positive outlook on the revolution had to keep this in mind – and the same applies for students of media history today. If we intend to understand the communicative dimensions of the revolution at large, we also need to reconstruct the histories and meanings of concepts used in the empire’s diverse language communities and track down in the media ‘travelling concepts’ transgressing the borders of the empire.45 Last, but not least, studying the press accords with the current conceptual trend to place greater emphasis on contingency, the assumed openness of historical processes and outcomes. The press represents a vital source in this regard, as it

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contains a mass of information that ideally can be identified and allocated to people and circumstances, but is often of a fluid, momentary, ephemeral character at the same time, especially in subjectively accelerated periods. Again, the press as a source provides the opportunity to study revolution as history of communication with all its complexities and insecurities, and, moreover, without teleological dictates. Bringing this to the fore by means of intensified research of local cases and new historiographical approaches, new studies can show that multiple outcomes of the revolution, indeed multiple futures were possible in the perceptions of the immediate contemporaries.46

LEGAL FRAMEWORK AND SOCIAL DIVISIONS The legal framework largely mirrors and is itself embedded in the social and political dynamics and divisions between February and October 1917.47 In very blunt terms, full freedom of the press was given and then taken away again. The course of the February Revolution was accompanied by the takeover of the essential means of communication through the Duma Committee,48 the printers´ strike and the ban (exercised through the Petrograd Soviet) on established newspapers to appear before the socialist parties’ press could catch up.49 In place of the previous newspapers, a newly installed Union of Petrograd Journalists and its Committee published the newspaper Izvestiia revoliutsionnoi nedeli (News of the Revolutionary Week) in ten issues between 27 February and 5 March.50 Full freedom of the press was granted in the ‘Declaration of 3 March 1917’ by the Provisional Government. Depending on respective newspaper, region, infrastructural and transport conditions and also other local circumstances, particularly the agency of individual officials, the first regular papers began to (re)appear around 5 March.51 Throughout the empire, the picture would be similar. In Saratov, for example, the governor was informed of the revolutionary goings-on in Petrograd on 1 March and tried to keep the news from the population, but to no avail. On 2 March, disregarding orders, newspaper editors assembled and began to spread the news that was trickling in by telegraph.52 Nevertheless the Provinces Section of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma assessed that the dissemination of news outside the capital was ‘exceedingly uneven’. The first inhabitants to receive the news of the revolution were those of the industrial centres and along the railways, but the report emphasized that there were also regions, primarily rural ones, that remained uninformed due to the ‘whole phalanx of the old power’ and ‘extreme ignorance’ of peasant masses. The province of Bessarabia was singled out in this report as a ‘hotbed of reaction’, with the situation ‘greatly complicated by the agitation of the Black Hundreds’.53 To be sure, such reports and atmospheric portraits need to be checked against empirical data. In any case, with the February Revolution, right-wing publications ceased to appear in the capitals and the provinces.54 In Petrograd, on 8 March, a special commission was installed to disband the previous censor´s office. Both bodies forming the new dual power set up their own news organs.55 The Petrograd Soviet founded Izvestiia as early as 28 February and seized the printing facilities of the popular Gazeta kopeika; the Provisional

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Government turned the official ‘Government Herald’ into its own new bulletin: Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik became Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel´stva (Herald of the Provisional Government). Similar appropriations took place in provincial centres, for example in Novocherkassk, where the local executive committee took over Donskie oblastnye vedomosti (News of the Don Region), the official organ for the area since 1872.56 This newspaper kept its name until 2 April 1917, when it was again taken over by the newly formed Cossack government and was now renamed Vol’nyj Don (Free Don). The appropriations underscore the notion that the old tsarist security law of 1881, though not expressly abolished, was de facto replaced, together with the old executives.57 New (party) newspapers were founded and competed with each other as early as March; in Saratov, for example, the Socialist Revolutionaries launched their Zemlia i volia on 12 March, followed by the Bolshevik SotsialDemokrat on 23 March and the Menshevik Proletarii Povolzh’ia soon after.58 As will be shown further in section 5, these were not the only periodicals published in Saratov in 1917; the city of Saratov alone offers a varied picture, although the number of forty-seven titles given in a standard bibliography must be relativized (as will be further explained below). The decree ‘On institutions relating to press affairs’ of 27 April protected the press and its distribution from administrative intrusions and regulated printing and publishing procedures. In particular, a Bibliographic Chamber (Knizhnaia Palata) was established, to which copies of new publications had to be submitted.59 Earlier, on 15 March, the Provisional Government had decreed that certain publications had to be shown to a military censor in advance. Even if this decree had never taken effect, the on-going dynamic was such that over the course of the year, censorship was becoming an issue again. On the one hand, censorship occurred in various forms in practice, as the distribution of publications was recurrently disrupted and prohibited: socialist newspapers were prevented from reaching through to the provinces and especially the front by officials and military officers; the printing and circulation of moderate, liberal newspapers in turn was often disturbed by provincial soviets. Both the Provisional Government on the one hand and the adherents to the radical, ‘anti-bourgeois’ press on the other pronounced protest and passed resolutions, but it was the July Days crisis that led to actual legal changes concerning the press. After the distribution of Pravda and the other Bolshevik newspapers Soldatskaia pravda and Okopnaia pravda (Truth from the Trenches) was banned for frontline soldiers on 7 July, on 13 July, by the ‘Temporary Regulations on the Special Military Censorship of the Press’, the Provincial Government took measures that allowed it to close down newspapers and journals opposing the policies of the government and the military. Editors could be brought before court.60 A few weeks later, severe attacks on press freedom came into effect again, but now directed against the ‘counter-revolutionary’ press, as a consequence of the Kornilov affair in August and as a symptom of further social division. These repressions have been called ‘a kind of dress rehearsal for those blows against the press which followed the October Revolution’.61 The new Soviet People’s Commissariat (Sovnarkom) adopted the ‘Decree on the Press’ against opposition publications on 27 October 1917 and furthermore passed the ‘Decree on the State Monopoly of Advertisements’

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

on 7 November, curbing in effect the financial income and thus the subsistence of the ‘bourgeois’ press in particular.62 The Communist Party erected its own press system according to its ideological principles and methods, namely by securing central organs, closing down ‘bourgeois’ newspapers and seizing printing presses. However, the task of building up a new press was not so easily accomplished, for reasons of the lack of paper.63 The Bolshevik press did not gain momentum until the middle of 1918, just when the previously popular non-Bolshevik newspapers with social and political content had been eliminated.64 As for assessments and interpretations of press-related developments, different aspects have been brought to discussion. The three-volume source edition of 1961, co-edited by Alexander Kerensky, contains a wide range of articles and editorials from key newspapers, the selection of which seems to imply and defend the view that the members of the Provisional Government had a sincere interest in collaboration with the press for the common good, while the latter contributed to the government’s destabilization with its alleged short-sightedness, insensitivity and unwillingness to show understanding.65 Other historical analyses have emphasized the dominant role of the soviets in practical provincial press politics.66 Besides, if the on-going war constituted a prominent, heatedly and emotionally disputed topic in domestic newspapers, it has been pointed out that the Russian Empire also became the greatest battlefield for foreign war propaganda.67 The multiple experiences of force and violence through war and revolutionary dynamics are multifacetedly processed and reflected in the press. At the same time, an assessment of impact and influence of press and public discourse in the course of 1917 should also take into account the notion of apolitism and growing weariness, especially on the eve of the October Revolution. This is described in the literature and was certainly reflected in more than one newspaper.68

THE SAMPLE The number of newspapers for 1917 is as significant as the bibliographical difficulty in collecting them.69 The highest figure given (more than 4,800)70 appears to be both exaggerated and incomplete at the same time. The problem with the various available Soviet press bibliographies has been assessed as this: they skip the nonBolshevik press altogether,71 or blur temporal, cultural, national, linguistic, territorial and other differences that might have challenged the Soviet Union’s selfimage, making research on the basis of these materials complicated and onerous. The 1986 bibliography which provides the basis for the calculations and presentation in Table 21.1 is one of the most recent and can be recommended; it focuses on 1917 alone and comprises newspapers and journals of all affiliations and orientations from across the Empire (and beyond)  – however only in the Russian language.72 (Another bibliography comprises eighty-seven languages, but only newspapers, and – alas – for the whole period of four decades from 1917 to 1960.73) Moreover, mere counting of entries only leads one so far, as the entries need to be examined in order to find, firstly, whether the individual titles survived throughout the year or were short-lived publications of perhaps just one issue. Secondly, many papers changed their names, some even a few times, but should not be double-counted.

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TABLE 21.1  Newspaper and journal distribution, according to the entries in Periodicheskaia pechat‘ v Rossii v 1917 godu. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’. Region74

Province / [City]

North-West

Petrogradskaia gub.

Central Industrial

Southern Blackearth

269

641

910

[637]

[872]

[Kronshtadt]

[12]

[2]

[14]

Moskovskaia gub. Kievskaia gub. Khersonskaia gub.

Middle Vol‘ga

349

474

[341]

[450]

48

86

134

[33]

[82]

[115]

78

56

134

[50]

[49]

[99]

[Kherson]

[10]

[3]

[13]

Khar’kovskaia gub. Ekaterinoslavskaia gub. [Ekaterinoslav]

Southern Steppe

125 [109]

[Odessa]

[Khar’kov] Southern Steppe

sum

[235]

[Kiev] Southern Steppe

journals

[Petrograd]

[Moskva] South-West

newspapers

Oblast’ Voiska Donskogo

47

55

102

[24]

[50]

[74]

65

21

86

[22]

[18]

[40]

45

32

77

[Rostov-na-Donu]

[22]

[17]

[29]

[Novocherkassk]

[4]

[11]

[15]

Permskaia gub.

46

28

74

[Ekaterinburg]

[10]

[13]

[23]

[Perm]

[11]

[9]

[20]

66

7

73

-

Sine locum

Southern Steppe

Tavricheskaia gub.

48

24

72

[Simferopol]

[9]

[12]

[21]

Saratovskaia gub.

45

21

66

[27]

[20]

[47]

Lower Vol‘ga

[Saratov] Baltic

Lifliandskaia gub.

44

17

61

[18]

[3]

[21]

[Iur’ev]

[9]

[13]

[22]

[Valk]

[10]

[Riga]

Siberia

Tomskaia gub. [Tomsk]

Siberia

Eniseiskaja gub.

[10]

26

32

58

[16]

[28]

[44]

38

17

55

[Krasnoiarsk]

[20]

[15]

[35]

[Minusinsk]

[11]

[1]

[12]

332

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Region

Province / [City]

Lower Vol‘ga

Kazanskaia gub [Kazan]

West

Minskaia gub. [Minsk]

Southern Caucasus

Tiflisskaia gub. [Tiflis]

Lower Vol‘ga

Orenburgskaia gub. [Orenburg]

Southern Blackearth

Poltavskaia gub. [Poltava]

Siberia

Irkutskaia gub. [Irkutsk]

Middle Vol‘ga Far East

Central Industrial

Northern Blackearth

West

55 [46]

45

9

54

[34]

[6]

[40]

25

27

52

[25]

[27]

[52]

33

18

51

[16]

[17]

[33]

39

12

51

[12]

[10]

[22]

33

16

49

[29]

[15]

[44]

16

48

[15]

[43]

30

18

48

[Vladivostok]

[17]

[11]

[28]

[Khabarovsk]

[7]

[6]

[13]

Tverskaia gub.

30

18

48

[12]

[14]

[26]

Primorskaja obl.

32

15

47

[19]

[15]

[34]

Vladimirskaia gub.

33

13

46

[Vladimir]

[8]

[5]

[13]

[Ivanovo-Voznesensk]

[6]

[6]

[12]

Voronezhskaia gub.

31

15

46

[18]

[10]

[28]

Samarskaia gub.

Iaroslavskaia gub. Akmolinskaia obl. [Omsk]

Northern Blackearth

24 [23]

32

[Iaroslavl’] Central Asia

31 [23]

[28]

[Voronezh] Central Industrial

sum

[Nizhnyi Novgorod]

[Samara] Central Industrial

journals

Nizhegorodskaia gub.

[Tver] Lower Vol‘ga

newspapers

Tambovskaia gub.

28

16

44

[14]

[11]

[25]

29

14

43

[26]

[14]

[40]

37

6

43

[Tambov]

[12]

[5]

[17]

[Borisoglebsk]

[9]

[1]

[10]

Mogilevskaia gub.

35

7

42

[Mogilev]

[13]

[4]

[17]

[Gomel]

[10]

[1]

[11]

THE REVOLUTION AND THE PROVINCIAL PRESS

Region

Province / [City]

Lower Vol‘ga

Simbirskaia gub.

Middle Vol‘ga

11

41

[11]

[21]

[Syzran’]

[16]

Viatskaia gub. Tobol’skaia gub.

[17]

38

[Ekaterinodar]

[17]

[12]

[29]

34

4

38

20

17

37

[20]

[17]

[37]

Chernigovskaia gub.

29

7

36

[Chernigov]

[8]

[6]

[14]

Pskovskaia gub. Riazanskaia gub. Vitebskaia gub. Kostromskaia gub. Terskaia gub.

24

12

36

[19]

[9]

[28]

24

12

36

[17]

[10]

[27]

32

3

35

[17]

[3]

[20]

26

8

34

[12]

[7]

[19]

24

9

33

[Piatigorsk]

[12]

[3]

[15]

[Vladikavkaz]

[7]

[4]

[11]

24

9

33

[15]

[8]

[23]

Novgorodskaia gub.

25

6

31

[Novgorod]

[6]

[5]

[11]

Tul’skaia gub. [Tula]

Lower Vol‘ga

[4]

12

[Kostroma]

Southern Steppe

[13]

26

[Vitebsk]

North-West

40

Kubanskaia obl.

[Riazan’]

Northern Blackearth

9

39

[Pskov]

Northern Caucasus

31

[38]

[Tashkent]

Middle Vol‘ga

41 [18]

15

Syrdar’inskaia obl.

West

11 [8]

[15]

Central Asia

Northern Blackearth

30 [10]

24

Petrogradskaia gub.

North-West

[16]

[23]

Bakinskaia gub.

North-West

Southern Blackearth

sum

30

[Baku] Northern Caucasus

journals

[10]

(Tobol’sk] Southern Caucasus

newspapers

[Simbirsk]

[Viatka] Siberia

333

Bessarabskaia gub.

22

8

30

[Kishinev]

[9]

[7]

[16]

Penzenskaia gub.

20

10

30

[11]

[8]

[19]

[Penza]

334

THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Region

Province / [City]

Lower Vol‘ga

Ufimskaia obl.

16

14

30

[Ufa]

[9]

[13]

[22]

South-West

Podol‘skaia gub.

23

6

29

North

Vologodskaia gub.

19

10

29

[Vologda]

[6]

[8]

[14]

Northern Blackearth South-West

23

5

28

[8]

[4]

[12]

Volynskaia gub.

17

11

28

[11]

[9]

[20]

Astrakhanskaia gub. Kurskaia gub. [Kursk]

Central Industrial

Kaluzhskaia gub. [Kaluga]

Siberia

Zabaikal’skaia gub. [Chita]

Siberia Far East North

13

27

[13]

[25]

19

7

26

[11]

[6]

[17]

20

5

25

[15]

[5]

[20]

16

8

24

[12]

[8]

[20]

19

4

23

[Barnaul]

[9]

[4]

[13]

Amurskaia obl.

11

11

22

[Blagoveshchensk]

[7]

[11]

[18]

Arkhangel’skaia gub. Estliandskaia gub. [Reval]

Siberia

14 [12]

Altai

[Arkhangel’sk] Baltic

sum

[Orel]

[Astrakhan] Northern Blackearth

journals

Orlovskaia gub.

[Zhitomir] Lower Vol‘ga

newspapers

Iakutskaia obl. [Iakutsk] Manchuriia [Kharbin]

12

9

21

[11]

[9]

[20]

15

4

19

[15]

[4]

[19]

14

5

19

[14]

[5]

[19]

6

13

19

[5]

[13]

[18]

Finland

Helsingfors

8

8

16

Central Industrial

Smolenskaia gub.

14

2

16

Central Asia

Ferganskaia obl.

13

1

14

Northern Caucasus

Stavropol‘skaia gub. [Stavropol’]

7

7

14

[6]

[7]

[13]

THE REVOLUTION AND THE PROVINCIAL PRESS

335

Region

Province / [City]

newspapers

journals

sum

Northern Caucasus

Kutaisskaia gub.

11

3

14

Southern Caucasus

Erivanskaia gub.

11

2

13

North

Olonetskaia gub

7

5

12

Central Asia

Semipalatinsk

9

2

11

Southern Caucasus

Batumi

8

1

9

Northern Caucasus

Chernomorskaia obl.

7

1

8

Central Asia

Semirechenskaia obl.

5

3

8

Central Asia

Uralskaia gub.

7

7

Northern Caucasus

Dagestanskaia obl.

6

6

Northern Caucasus

Karsskaia obl.

5

5

Far East

Sakhalinskaia obl.

5

5

Finland

Vyborgskaia gub.

4

1

5

Central Asia

Aschabad

2

2

4

Chernovicy

4

4

Central Asia

Samarkandskaia obl.

4

4

West

Vilenskaia gub.

4

4

Southern Caucasus

Elizavetopol’skaia obl.

3

3

Erzerum

3

3

Bukharskii emirat

2

2

Trapezond

2

2

Central Asia

Turgaiskaia obl.

2

2

Central Asia

Zakaspiiskaia obl.

2

2

Aleksandrovskaia railway

Nemchinovskii post

Central Asia

1

1

Khamadan

1

1

Moscow-Kursk railway

Liublino station

1

1

North-Western railway

Dachnoe station

Riazan-Ural railway

Mikhnevo station

1

1

Urmija

1

1

Sum

1

2327

1954

1

4281

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

A few conclusions can be drawn from these figures, but with caution. Firstly, outside the two capitals, the density of (here only Russian-language) newspapers was  – unsurprisingly  – highest roughly in the areas with also highest population density, and figures are generally high. A closer look at the entries and the indices reveals that editors were sometimes active in two or more newspapers (up to eleven),  and there was a significant share of female editors.75 Many periodicals were party-affiliated: The manual counts respectively at least, i.e. explicitly, 48  periodicals of Constitutional-Democratic provincial and local committees, at least 7 of Left Socialist-Revolutionary, 137 of Socialist-Revolutionary, 105 of Bolshevik, 108 of Menshevik, 6 of Social-Democratic-Internationalist and 17 of Trudovik committees.76 Besides, there were many periodicals of institutions like the Academy of Science and the zemstvos, which had survived from tsarist times, but many more of new local organs like the soviets, the executive committees, various committees related to the armies and to professional associations. If one looks further at the above-mentioned forty-seven entries for the city of Saratov, one finds that political party and institutional affiliations were also those associated with the longest existence quotient over the year. Agronomic or insurance expertise was apparently simply so important and indispensable in such a regional centre that newspapers like Vestnik Povolzhskago okruzhnogo strakhovogo tovarishchestva (Messenger of the Volga region insurance association), since 1916, or Sel’skokhoziaistvennyi vestnik Iugo-Vostoka (Agricultural messenger of the SouthEast), since 1911, remained in print in 1917, as did the newspaper of the Orthodox Church, Saratovskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti (News from the diocese of Saratov), and, for example, the daily, non-party-affiliated Pochta (Mail), since 1913, last issue 25 November.77 The famous Saratovskaia zemskaia nedelia existed in 1917, but with interruptions.78 The Saratov sample also shows a number of periodicals designed for diverse specific communities and groups, like Golos anarkhii (Voice of anarchy), Orkestrant Povol’zhia (The Volga Musician), Saratovskii teatral (The Saratov Theatre-goer), Sionistskii listok (Zionist Newssheet) and Staroobriadchestvo i kooperatsiia (Old Belief and Cooperation). Most of these papers were very short-lived. Some had been founded on the eve of the February Revolution, and there is evidence for their existence only for the first few months. This observation can be interpreted, on the surface, as a sign of revolutionary enthusiasm, or atmosphere of departure, and as resonance to a successful strife for democratization as envisaged by the new government authorities as of February.79 In order to scrutinize this assessment, the press topography over the year of 1917 still deserves more scholarly attention. In any case, the example of Saratov has also served historians to show ‘how crucial the battle over the printed word’ and the creation of a ‘language of power’ was eventually to become.80 In the spring of 1918, two protagonists of the Bolshevik press were killed in Saratov, the Press Commissar P. A. Alekseev, and shortly before him the editor David Tsyrkin of the Bolshevik Krasnaia gazeta (Red Newspaper), to whose memory as a ‘fallen revolutionary’ or ‘post-October political martyr’, the Saratov soviet dedicated an entire issue of the newspaper.81

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As late as September 1917, one of the new newspapers listed for the small-town of Kamyshin in Saratov province was titled K novoi zhizni (Towards a New Life).82 Such programmatic titles that evoke the question of plans and expectations nurtured in the provincial press for the future of state, society and life as a whole were not uncommon in the press across the empire. The spectrum of ideas about what a better future would be and should bring was very wide, differently motivated and differently developed from the processing of past experiences. To begin with, the presence of the Revolution of 1905 as a reference was present throughout, as far as can be judged from the sources so far examined, but the appraisals of this key event varied from ‘worst case scenario’ to ‘nostalgic memory of past heroism’.83 As for the reception of this earlier revolution and other developments in general, in the peripheries of the empire and other regions inhabited by Muslims, the February Revolution induced massive shifts in the media landscape. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Iranian Revolution starting in 1906 and the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the February Revolution was the fourth revolutionary event within a period of only twelve years that was to reshape views on society and politics and that, at the same time, impacted on the way such views could be articulated in the press. This might be illustrated with the example of the booming port city and oil town of Baku. Here, as was generally the case with the Muslim press throughout the empire, the liberalization of censorship practices of 1905 had led to a whole wave of newly founded periodicals. Because of its specific societal structure as an industrial centre, in this period Muslim papers were already being issued addressing the local working class, while the majority of the legal papers articulated political views that can be qualified as liberal. Being also consumed by Ottoman and Azeri readerships beyond the border and, due to their quality and the intellectual networks of their editors, also attracting collaborators from the Ottoman Empire, these periodicals were perceived as potential promoters of ‘pan-Islamism’ by the imperial Russian administration. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 increased such fears, which in fact lacked any foundation, and led to the banning of some of the most important Baku papers in the following year.84 Important intellectuals and publicists like Ahmet Ağaoğlu (Agaev) and Ali bey Hüseyinzade opted for emigration to the Ottoman Empire.85 It was not until 1917 that the Baku press could resume its dynamic development of before 1909. In March Açık Söz (The Frank Word), the organ of the centre-left party Musavat (Equality) was founded. It aimed at continuing Hüseyinzade’s programme of social and cultural reform summed up by the slogan ‘Turkification, Islamification, Modernisation’ and pleaded for a federalization of Russia as well as stopping the war immediately. This last demand it had in common with the socialist newspaper Hümmet (Solidarity) that was revived in July 1917 after having already existed as a clandestine paper for some time after 1905. Other actors within the socialist spectrum also founded papers such as a Baku-based group of Persian revolutionaries named Edālet (Justice) or the local branch of the Socialist-Revolutionaries which founded papers on their own. At the same time, the liberal Russian-language newspaper Kaspii (The Caspian Sea), which was founded as early as 188186 and

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owned by the Azeri magnate Zeynalabdin Tağıyev (Tagiev),87 continued to be published until the turbulent events of 1918, when Baku first witnessed a Bolshevik take-over, then British and Turkish occupation, until Azerbaijani independence was declared in August 1919. The same processes of diversification and increasing politicization as outlined for the case of Baku can be identified for the Russian Muslim press as a whole. Its output also grew in terms of numbers, with 258 Muslim periodicals counted that were published between February 1917 and 1920 as compared with 177 between 1870 and February 1917.88 Among the Russian Muslim press, the most dynamic was that of the Tatars, with thirty-three new periodicals published between February and December 1917 alone. Issued in the two capitals, but also in such diverse places as Kazan, Orenburg, Ufa, Astrakhan, Troitsk, Ural’sk, Saratov and Pskov,89 these new papers participated in negotiating the revolution in the provinces.

CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES If revolutionary history is in great part media history and the aim of this chapter has been to point at the diversity, polyphony and potential of the press not only in the two eminent capitals of Petrograd and Moscow, but also in the provinces, then the conclusion must be that a lot of research can still be done and needs to be done. To start with, further collection and development are needed of the sources, i.e. of the periodicals of 1917 in various languages, and of the historiographical literature, particularly the many case studies of individual newspapers which already exist. Both could stimulate the pursuit of new research questions, firstly on the overarching, potentially comparative, macro-levels and secondly on the very local, filigree micro-level. Analysing these periodicals helps us get closer to the complexity of the revolutionary process, by looking at the revolution in the most general term as a history of communication.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The revolution in Smolensk province MICHAEL C. HICKEY, BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY

Soviet histories of 1917 in Smolensk focused on Bolshevik leadership of the toiling masses in a triumphal struggle for Soviet power.1 That Smolensk lacked coherent Bolshevik organizations until late 1917 and Soviet rule came piecemeal after October meant even the best local histories offered highly selective accounts.2 Post-Soviet local studies often pass lightly over 1917 to emphasize violent imposition of Bolshevik rule in 1918–20.3 In contrast, recent non-Russian histories have decentred the Bolsheviks from the story of Smolensk’s 1917.4 While limited by extent sources, these offer a sense of the complexity of Smolensk’s revolution.5 Smolensk, thinly urbanized with little industry, allows examination of revolution in a small city and towns, and in villages where households depended on nonagricultural income and peasant smallholdings were relatively common.6 Its proximity to Russia’s wartime Western Front permits consideration of garrison soldiers’ politics and war’s impact on civilians in pre-front locales. Smolensk also casts light on ethnic politics, as its population included peoples from the empire’s Western provinces, particularly Jews. This chapter treats such issues in 1917 and spring 1918 with attention to political competition, popular mobilization and challenges to state administrative authority. It considers ways all-Russian developments structured events but focuses on local dynamics.

LATE IMPERIAL SMOLENSK Smolensk marked a border between Russia and the empire’s Western provinces. The 1897 census identified 90 per cent of its 2 million inhabitants as Russian, but Belorussian dialects were common in villages, and towns had Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Jewish enclaves.7 In 1912, over 18,000 Jews lived in the province; Jews accounted for 10 per cent of 75,000 inhabitants in Smolensk city, on the banks of the Dnepr River just thirty miles from the Pale of Settlement to which tsarist law restricted Jewish residence. Smolensk was overwhelming rural, with a 90 per cent peasant population.8 Peasant private landholdings – khutor and otrub farms – were common here even before the Stolypin land reforms.9 Flax and fodder crops, dairy and timber dominated agriculture and most families relied on supplemental income

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from handicrafts and labour outmigration. Smolensk was thinly urbanized: besides the provincial capital, in 1912 only four county (uezd) seats had 10,000 or more residents: Viaz’ma (28,000), Roslavl’ (27,000), Belyi (13,000) and Gzhatsk (10,000). Railroads transecting the province stimulated commerce in several towns: Sychevka, with just 6,000 residents, became a bustling flax trading centre. But urban Smolensk lacked large-scale industry. In 1912, fewer than 300 provincial manufacturers used electric, steam or diesel machinery, and the largest – the Khludov textile mill, with nearly 6,000 workers – was in a village (Iartsevo). Only 5 per cent of city residents worked in factories. Small manufacturers, artisanal workshops, warehouses and railroads, though, employed a quarter of the urban population; another third did non-manufacturing wage work. Smolensk’s elites had a reputation for non-revolutionary reformism. Its zemstvos, focal points for gentry promoting economic and social development, linked conservative Slavophiles to ‘progressive’ professionals. From 1900, zemstvo staff included exiled socialists, some of whom helped organize illegal Social Democratic (SD) and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party groups, which interacted with clandestine circles of radical students, artisans and factory workers.10 Intersecting social networks facilitated practical cooperation between socialists and liberals. In 1905, liberalreformist and socialist camps bitterly criticized one another yet jointly protested for constitutional reform and civil rights and worked together in the short-lived Smolensk Soviet. Professionals, clerical employees and students supported strikes by artisans, factory workers and shop clerks. Local SRs, SDs and smaller socialist parties worked as a socialist bloc, particularly in October–December 1905.11 Local defenders of the autocracy also mobilized: their frequently anti-Semitic rhetoric reverberated among some workers, who joined in three pogroms in 1905. While condemnations of antiJewish violence promoted revolutionary unity, popular violence exposed its limits. In November 1905, faced by peasant unrest, Smolensk’s governor warned the province was becoming a ‘bloody horror’.12 When in mid-December 1905 Smolensk’s soviet announced a general strike supporting the Moscow workers’ uprising, the governor declared martial law. Gendarmes smashed the soviet and socialist party organizations. Through 1906, provincial authorities met rural unrest with force. Gendarmes closed most Smolensk labour unions, and SD and SR activists shifted their energies to legal cooperative associations. Tactical differences divided older socialists and young militants, particularly SR Maximalists who organized terrorist actions. Gendarmes infiltrated and smashed the Maximalists and weakened vestigial SD and SRs circles in a series of arrests in 1907–8. Repression subdued but did not eradicate labour activism: in 1911–14, workers in several trades formed illegal unions and organized strikes, and clandestine circles of students, workers and artisans continued gathering.

THE GREAT WAR’S IMPACT The Great War’s impact on Smolensk paralleled that elsewhere in Russia. It elicited patriotism and expanded civic engagement while undermining the tsarist regime’s fragile legitimacy and accentuating economic and social grievances. Smolensk bore

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burdens shared by all regions, but proximity to the front brought problems endemic to borderlands: swelling garrisons strained local resources; waves of wounded soldiers and refugees created further pressures.13 In response, the state conceded greater latitude to voluntary associations and expanded public participation in local administration. As war approached, the military had expanded Smolensk’s railroad workshops and built field kitchens, supply depots and transit barracks near its rail junctions. In 1914, the city was home to Western Front administrative units; the Minsk military district staff located there after the 1915 Great Retreat. At points 600,000 soldiers garrisoned in the province, outnumbering civilians in many towns. Military workshops, engineering battalions and artillery units brought an influx of skilled workers, including socialist activists. In 1915, several enterprises relocated here from Lithuania, including the Vil’ia metalworking factory, a hotbed of worker radicalism. Dozens of firms shifted to defence-related production, but by late 1915, labour and materials shortages forced closure of nearly half Smolensk’s factories and workshops; supplies improved in 1916, but inflation undermined workers’ real wages. In the countryside, conscription caused rural labour shortages, while the war crippled flax exports. Military and railroad demand for timber and firewood  – a boon for commercial woodlots  – meant shortages for peasant households. Military labour levies took thousands from fieldwork. In 1916, large landowners – who previously described military provisioning as their patriotic duty – complained that requisitions decimated their herds. Provincial officials warned that war had put the province in a ‘very difficult position’.14 Waves of refugees (including Jews forcibly relocated from the warzone) after 1915’s Great Retreat compounded problems. In August 1915, nearly 10,000 refugees daily passed through Smolensk city; by 1916, a quarter million had transited the province. Tens of thousands remained in make-shift barracks in Smolensk, Roslavl’, Viaz’ma and smaller towns, taxing over-stretched aid agencies. Against that backdrop, responsibility for many civilian administrative tasks passed to public committees that married state agencies to voluntary associations. In 1914, voluntary associations provided medical services for wounded soldiers and collected donations for soldiers’ families. In July 1914 the Smolensk duma, anticipating shortages, formed a special commission on price controls and rationing; when in 1915 the commission added consumer cooperative representatives, socialists like Menshevik Solomon Shur joined its work. The refugee crisis begat similar commissions, coordinated by the local chapter of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and Towns (Zemgor). In 1916, primary responsibility for provisions, medical-sanitation and refugee programmes passed to these commissions. Leadership came from elites like Aleksandr Tukhachevskii, chair of Smolensk’s provincial zemstvo administration and Zemgor agency, but daily work depended on experts like Menshevik zemstvo statistician Mikhail Davidovich. As they took halting steps towards rationing and fixing prices, commission members echoed national debates over state economic intervention. The critical stance on state policies taken in these discussions, and in the local newspaper Smolenskii vestnik, did not elude the gendarmes, who closely monitored public associations and the local press despite being overburdened by wartime tasks.

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The war also created new fissures in already-fractious socialist parties. Staunch defencists welcomed a crusade against German militarism, but most local socialists opposed the ‘imperialist’ war while granting that Russia must defend itself pending a democratic peace. Small anti-war circles of students, metalworkers and leather workers leaned towards the Anarchists and left SDs, but gendarmes infiltrated and arrested their leaders in late 1915. Authorities also monitored garrison anti-war circles. In summer 1916, soldiers in the Smolensk garrison automobile repair shop formed a small anti-war circle with Vil’ia workers and cooperative activists; on 6 January 1917, gendarmes arrested it leaders.

FEBRUARY–MAY 1917: A FRAGILE LIBERAL-SOCIALIST COALITION The Minsk military district staff closely monitored the monarchy’s final crisis but did not apprise civilian authorities, who learned of Nicholas II’s abdication via telegraph late on 1 March. In Smolensk and several towns, this news bought a flurry of meetings among officials and local elites, but also in garrisons and among workers and employees. On 2–4 March meetings organized by local duma and zemstvo assemblies formally recognized the Provisional Government. With few exceptions, tsarist officials offered no resistance. The old order died peaceful in Smolensk’s towns. On 3–4 March jubilant crowds occupied town centres, waving red flags and singing revolutionary songs. Crowds briefly detained a few local officials but directed ire primarily at police, who they disarmed and arrested. In Smolensk, crowds freed inmates from city prisons. Soldiers arrested Minsk district staff officers in Smolensk and a few ‘monarchist’ officers in Roslavl’ and Viaz’ma. The only serious violence took place in Sychevka: on 3 March a crowd incited by rumours of hoarding looted shops, but a militia formed by the local duma and zemstvo quickly restored order. Wartime leaders moved quickly to stabilize authority. On 3 March Smolensk’s duma and zemstvo leaders formed a provisional executive committee (PEC) with representatives from public organizations. Kadets and non-party liberals dominated but agreed to ‘democratize’ the PEC by coopting representatives of workers’ and soldiers’ organizations. What emerged, then, was not ‘dual power’, but something more typical in provincial Russia: a coalition with socialists as junior partners. Smolensk’s nascent soviet legitimated this coalition. On 4 March, upon receiving the Petrograd Soviet’s Order No. 1, soldier activists called a garrison conference. On 5 March, the garrison elected a soldiers’ soviet with SRs as the largest party faction. On 6 March workers’ meetings chose deputies to a workers’ soviet, with Mensheviks as the largest party faction. On 8 March a ‘united’ soviet set up committees paralleling city agencies but recognized the PEC as Smolensk’s governing authority. Town duma and zemstvo leaders similarly organized executive committees, which in some cases coopted representatives from garrison committees and soviets (where they existed). Viaz’ma’s committee included deputies from a garrison soviet formed on 2 March and a workers’ soviet formed on 3 March. The same was true in Roslavl, where a soviet leader chaired the town provisions committee. In

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Dorogobuzh, Sychevka and El’nia, garrison representatives sat on county executive committees. El’nia came closest to ‘dual power’: its SR-led garrison committee claimed authority to ‘supervise’ local provisions matters and sent plenipotentiaries to organize district  (volost) executive committees; garrison representatives joined the county executive committee formed on 10 March but never conceded its full authority over local affairs. The façade of tsarist power also fell quietly in rural districts. News of the revolution spread unevenly, arriving first in villages near railroads and last in Smolensk’s isolated northwest districts. District government clerks, teachers and cooperative leaders met with peasant elders to announce the tsar’s abdication and the new government’s creation. Several meetings revealed fault lines in rural society: in Stodolishche – a railroad settlement with a sizable Jewish minority  – a telegraph operator warned peasants not to elect ‘Yids and foreigners’; in Sutkinsk volost (Dorogobuzh county), peasants rejected candidates who were not ‘their own people’.15 At the apex of provincial administration, Smolensk’s governor watched his authority vanish. When on 5 March the Provisional Government replaced tsarist governors with provincial zemstvo chairman, Aleksandr Tukhachevkii became Smolensk’s provincial commissar. Tukhachevskii, a non-party liberal, championed unitary state authority and insisted that local administration draw only upon ‘responsible’ public elements. Unlike Tukhachevskii, local Kadets insisted that stabilizing social order required coopting representatives from all public organizations. Most local Kadet leaders were educated professionals, business owners or veteran state administrators. Ostensibly non-party national minority associations, like Smolensk’s Jewish Public Assembly, aligned themselves with the Kadets, who had fewer than 300 members but in spring held a plurality in the PEC and city duma. Most of Smolensk’s moderate socialist leaders – SRs, Mensheviks, Trudoviks and national minority socialists – were established local activists, but a few were garrison soldiers and junior officers new to the city – like the SR Sergei Efimov. SRs had the city’s largest party organization, with 2,000 civilian and 1,000 soldier members by April; a ‘united’ SD organization had 800 members – almost all Mensheviks. Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish SD groups mobilized ethnic support for the Mensheviks, as did the Bund among Jews. A garrison-based Ukrainian SR group similarly supported the local SR organization, as did the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (SERP). (In provincial towns, too, SRs also had larger organizations than SDs; in Dorogobuzh and El’nia they completely dominated left politics.) On the critical issue of the war, Smolensk’s SR and SD organizations were revolutionary defensists. In spring anti-war left SR and SD tendencies had few local adherents: on 25 March a small garrison circle led by automobile mechanic Vadim Smolianinov and twelve civilians led by cooperative activist Vasili Sobolev formed a Bolshevik faction in Smolensk’s SD organization. In May, workers from Vil’ia and other factories raised the groups’ ranks to 200, but Smolensk’s Bolsheviks still did not break with the city’s Mensheviks. (The same was true in Gzhatsk, Roslavl’ and Viaz’ma.) Divisions over the war, however, did prevent creation of an all-socialist bloc. Among Jewish socialists, the anti-war Poalei-Tsion group refused to cooperate with the revolutionary-defencist SERP and Bund organizations. Other issues, too,

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fractured the Jewish left: SERP called for an autonomous Jewish territory within a Russian federated Republic, while Poalei-Tsion advocated Palestinian-oriented Zionism and the Bund rejected Zionism completely. Moderate socialists pushed for ‘democratization’ of the entire provincial administration, but on 15 March Tukhachevskii organized a commissar’s council based only on state institutions and Zemgor. Smolensk’s socialists railed against a city duma and commissar’s council ‘cut off from the democracy’; after much debate, the council agreed to coopt select public organizations into a Smolensk provincial executive committee (SPEC), while the duma gave such representatives a ‘consultative vote’. In early April the Provisional Government mandated democratization of commissars’ councils and executive committees and urged the same for municipal governments pending democratic duma elections. By late April, Smolensk’s duma and the SPEC included Mensheviks, SRs and Trudoviks. While Smolensk’s moderate socialist leaders frequently clashed with liberal duma members, they recognized democratized state institutions as the legitimate site of governance. In its resolutions, Smolensk’s soviet  – which balanced demands for workers’ and soldiers’ rights with gestures towards revolutionary unity  – closely followed the Petrograd Soviet. It also sent plenipotentiaries to help organize district committees, assuming the tutorial responsibility for spreading ‘political enlightenment’ in the countryside. Soviet leaders emphasized ‘conscious’ and ‘organized’ behaviour as keys to consolidating the revolution. As a 9 April resolution drafted by Sergei Efimov explained, ‘as representative of the toiling population’s interests, [the soviet] considers any disturbances [vystuplenie] by toilers – be they peasants, workers, or soldiers – and any arbitrary resolution of economic questions … injurious to the affairs of the revolution, freedom, and the people’s interests’.16 That same day the soviet criticized public drunkenness and brawling as ‘improper conduct for soldier-citizens’.17 Committees representing the Smolensk garrison’s 25,000 soldiers in March greeted the Provisional Government, pledged to defend free Russia and demanded recognition of their equal rights as citizens. Garrison commanders’ revolutionary gestures helped prevent serious disciplinary breaches: officers served on regimental committees and the soldiers’ soviet. From mid-April, when the military began granting soldiers home leaves for spring sowing, officers reported that soldiers complained of hunger in the villages, spoke critically about the war and challenged officers’ authority. Still, Stavka (the army’s Supreme Command staff) considered Smolensk’s garrison completely ‘reliable’. Soviets and soldiers’ committees were not the only forms of popular mobilization in spring 1917. In March in Smolensk city, dozens of associations of ‘citizens of free Russia’ greeted the Provisional Government and promised to support the army as it defended Russia’s new freedom. Ordinary people engaged vigorously in associational activities. The city’s Jews, for example, belonged to ‘general’ associations but also to specifically Jewish groups, which included over a dozen Zionist clubs, workers’ clubs and cultural enlightenment circles, as well as charitable associations and communal institutions. At least 7 per cent of the city’s Jews participated ‘visibly’ in Jewish associational life; thousands more participated without leaving traces for

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historians. Jewish associations were by no means exceptional: notices in Smolenskii vestnik for 2–7 May list more than sixty associational meetings in the city, including gatherings of national minority groups, ‘cultural enlightenment’ and arts groups, trade and professional associations, confessional associations, party organizational meetings and a meeting of the Non-Party Republican Women’s Union. Such activity continued through October 1917. Associational activity intertwined with class identity. Artisans, employees, unskilled and skilled workers participated in workers’ choirs and read newspapers at workers’ libraries. Workers’ clubs promoted class solidarity, unionization and socialism. Trade unionism also engendered worker identity. In unionizing, artisans, doormen, shop clerks, pharmacy clerks, credit union employees and even court employees publicly identified as workers. Postal-telegraph employees, for example, described their union as ‘one of the powerful political organizations of the workers’ army’.18 In April, labour conflict reinforced worker identity. Faced with rising food prices and responding to Petrograd events, workers demanded pay raises, an eight-hour workday and greater workplace control. Soviet leaders, concerned that strikes would disrupt the economy, insisted workers and employers recognize the ‘all state significance’ of their actions and negotiate agreements.19 Managers of large enterprises with defence contracts granted wage and hour concessions but rejected work control demands. On 15 April the soviet called for a city-wide eight-hour workday. When small business owners refused, unionized workers in the predominantly Jewish needle trades declared strikes. Pharmacy clerks went on strike on 16 April; unionized laundresses, cigarette makers, bakery and confectionary workers and butchers soon followed, while unionized cooks and waiters, domestic servants, governesses and tutors, hospital custodians, lumbermill and woodworkers, chemical plant workers, postal telegraph workers and bank employees threatened strikes. By mid-May, all had won raises and a shortened workday. This reinforced both worker identity and the soviet leadership’s authority. Other aspects of life accentuated class identities. When shortages drove food prices beyond wartime highs, many workers blamed ‘bourgeois speculation’. When in spring property crime increased precipitously, residents of Smolensk’s ‘elite’ first district complained loudly, but thefts of clothing and food took the greatest toll in the working-class third district, which suffered the city’s worst sanitary conditions and saw a steady rise in epidemic diseases and intestinal ailments. Socialist rhetoric emphasized the ‘classness’ of these problems and blamed them on ‘undemocratic’ government. Developments among Smolensk’s Jews also illustrate ways class identity shaped political competition. In appealing for support, the Zionist socialists labelled non-socialist Zionists as ‘bourgeois’. Jewish socialist parties similarly defined the popular Orthodox religious party Agudas-Israel as ‘bourgeois’, tainting its supporters – mostly artisans and small shopkeepers. When in early May Jewish liberals organized an ‘interparty, supra-party’ association dedicated to ‘nationalism and cultural enlightenment’, Jewish socialist leaders attacked it as ‘a closed gathering of propertied elites’.20 Similar associational activity took place in most towns, where zemstvo and public committee leaders initially confronted few serious challenges to their

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authority. In towns with more workers or large garrisons, though, social tensions weakened ‘census’ leaders’ authority. Roslavl offers an illustration. Roslavl’s soviet represented 2,000 artisanal, factory and railroad workers as well as 14,000 soldiers stationed in town and some 50,000 soldiers in units temporarily stationed in nearby villages along the Riga-Orel railroad. Soviet leaders all were garrison soldiers or relocated railroad workers with no local ties. Several were SRs and Mensheviks, but Roslavl had no SR organization until late April and no SD organization until mid-May. Still, Roslavl’s socialist club and Jewish workers’ club were well-attended and workers in several trades unionized in March and April. In April, the soviet helped negotiate wage increases, an eight-hour day, and improved work conditions in larger enterprises. In the predominantly Jewish needle trades, though, owners rejected workers’ demands, and tensions simmered. Garrison conflicts proved more corrosive to relations between the soviet and town officials. In-town garrison committees led by older soldiers had few discipline problems, but transitory reserve units had less stable leadership and were more volatile. After several incidents, on 10 April Roslavl’s executive committee ‘dissolved’ the garrison committee and appointed a new garrison council. The soviet balked: soldiers were to consider no order binding unless counter-signed by its own ‘control commission’. This clash significantly weakened the town executive committee’s authority. Across the province, village and district committees greeted the Provisional Government and pledged support for army. Their resolutions revealed aspirations for revolutionary change – most often, that the Constituent Assembly would abolish private landed property and pass land to the peasantry – but also emphasized the importance of order. Still, several incidents drew attention to the threat of rural violence. In mid-March soldiers on leave plundered wine cellars at the Vonliarliarskii family’s Krasnyi county estate; in Belyi county, peasants attacked the estate of a district marshal of the nobility and murdered its manager; in Zamenskoe (Iukhnov county), peasants burned a zemstvo clinic. Most reported violence took place in isolated northwest districts, with titled nobles, women property owners and Jewish renters as targets. While violence remained rare, its threat created anxiety beyond the countryside. Liberal and moderate socialist leaders responded anxiously to ways peasants used their new district committees, fuel committees, provisions committees, land committees and conflict arbitration committees. In March, several committees imposed special taxes on private land, claimed the right to ‘idle’ estate land and tools, turned estate meadows over to peasant communes and suspended commercial timber harvesting. Committees typically claimed such acts were in the interests of the revolution and the army and accused private owners of failing to use resources fully. Smolensk soviet leaders argued that ‘spontaneous’ land seizures demonstrated the need to organize the countryside: a 9 April soviet resolution rejected ‘unauthorized’ seizures; a 15 April resolution insisted peasants negotiate property disputes using district arbitration boards. Most rural disturbances reported in spring, though, were sanctioned by district committees – including strikes on woodlots and flax estates and claims on ‘unused’ forests and meadows. Debates over these claims sometimes divided committee members, and in many districts peasants ‘democratized’

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committees by removing the rural intelligentsia. In some counties, district committees, backed by town soviets, demanded re-election of county committees and organized peasant soviets. In Roslavl and other eastern countries, soviets backed efforts to control private land: the Roslavl Soviet’s chair, Menshevik soldier Osip Reznikov, called committee control over forests necessary to circumvent speculation and mismanagement by private owners. By early April local journalists described the situation in Smolensk not as dual power (dvoevlastie) but as multiple power (mnogovlastie)  – proliferation of competing and overlapping claims to authority. In Smolensk (as elsewhere) activists across the political spectrum preached that the people must organize. Some insisted this meant common people would develop their own authentic forms of democratic citizenship, but others took organization to mean tutorial institutions would teach the lower classes citizenship. Such calls often reflected technocratic-statist belief in hierarchical authority of institutions representing expertise. These views were not mutually exclusive, nor did they map neatly onto political party lines.

MAY–AUGUST 1917: THE MODERATE SOCIALISTS IN POWER Tensions over democratization and mnogovlastie came to a head in May. On 1 May an SR-led provincial peasant congress demanded reorganization of Smolensk’s administration as a ‘collective’ based on the soviets, while urging local committees to assert ‘full authority’ over agricultural resources. In mid-May the Smolensk Soviet called for election of the provincial commissar. The SPEC majority decried this as ‘separatism’; Tukhachevskii, outraged, announced his resignation. On 25 May, the commissar’s council heard a report on district committees’ ‘arbitrary’ measures. This sparked a days’ long debate during which most moderate socialist speakers favoured electing commissars. Liberals responded by rejecting socialist charges that the ‘census’ administration was ‘disconnected from the democracy’. An internal affairs ministry plenipotentiary called electing commissars ‘crude localism’ and demanded the council decide: ‘Will it take the Bolsheviks’ path or support the Provisional Government?’21 On 28 May, the SPEC agreed that local executive committees would elect commissars, but that the Provisional Government must approve the results. On 19 June, Sergei Efimov was ‘elected’ provincial commissar. Moderate socialists then took on administrative leadership roles and began to emphasize the primacy of state over class interests. As Smolensk’s new Menshevik labour commissar Solomon Shur explained, in the soviets he represented the proletariat’s interests, but as commissar he represented ‘the interests of the Revolutionary Provisional Government’.22 From late May, SRs and Mensheviks also began preparing for July’s city duma elections and formed a socialist bloc that excluded the Bolsheviks (who finally broke with Smolensk’s SD organization). The bloc accused the ‘bourgeois’ duma leaders of mismanagement and promised if elected to work ‘in the interests and for the needs of the toiling classes, the interests and needs of the proletariat’.23 Spring’s wage gains and successful labour arbitration had bolstered moderate socialist support among workers. Mensheviks, for example, led the bank employees’

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union, SRs the domestic servants’ union, Bundists the needle trades unions. Among ‘industrial’ workers, though, leatherworkers favoured Anarchists and Bolsheviks led the metalworkers’ union. On 28 June, at its first meeting, Vadim Smol’ianinov described the metalworkers’ union as ‘a weapon in the class struggle’.24 Still, left socialist influence in Smolensk remained limited, and July’s elections put moderate socialists in control of Smolensk’s duma. The socialist bloc, with 20,880 of 28,831 votes, claimed 54 of 75 duma seats (Kadets took 15 places, Bolsheviks 3). Moderate socialist blocs also did well in several town duma elections in July and August. The strongest left socialist turnout was in Roslavl, where reserve units faced transfer to the front: Roslavl’s SD Internationalists slate  – a coalition of Bolsheviks and Menshevik-Internationalists – won almost 50 per cent of ballots cast. But they had only eleven candidates, so six seats went proportionately to the other parties, giving the socialist bloc the duma’s largest faction. In contrast, in Sychevka an electoral slate of Kadets and property owners won a crushing victory, and in Dukhovshchina, where no party organizations existed, the merchants and homeowners list won eleven of twenty duma seats. By mid-summer, Smolensk province began facing serious food shortages. Grain deliveries dwindled, reserves waned and heavy rains ruined the rye crop, while Stavka gave the military unrestricted authority to requisition livestock and fodder across the province. In Roslavl, district provisions committees reported that ‘many families are near starvation’.25 In Smolensk city, the provisions administration halved rations. Food shortages, like the June offensive’s collapse, further weakened discipline in the city and town garrisons. In Smolensk several unit committees protested reduced rations and arrests of soldiers for property crimes increased. By late July, company and regimental committees were granting soldiers home leaves to do field work without commanders’ authorization. The Minsk district staff considered several of frontline artillery units relocated to Smolensk after the failed offensive ‘unreliable’ (many had refused orders to advance) and tried to isolate them from the garrison. Garrison conflicts proved sharper in smaller provincial towns. On 4 June garrison soldiers in Dorogobuzh plundered an alcohol storehouse as officers stood powerless. Officers blamed the riot on soldiers’ inactivity and ordered additional drills; soldiers then recalled officer deputies from the soviet and in their place elected transferred front soldiers who adopted a more aggressive stance towards the town officials and sent squads to search villages for deserters. On 27 June a regiment in Viaz’ma refused transfer orders, seized the rail station and sent squads to hunt ‘shirkers’. These arrested 2,700 townsmen, who soldiers subjected to humiliating mock trials. The Minsk district staff immediately disbanded the regiment’s committee, but relations between the garrison and town population remained tense, and fights between soldiers and civilians broke out at duma electoral rallies in July. In July Stavka transferred the most ‘troublesome’ regiment from Dorogobuzh and transferred the most politically radical regiment from El’nia’s garrison. But on 10 August, soldiers in the Eln’nia garrison searched the town for ‘deserters’ and arrested seventy townsmen as ‘shirkers’. When the Minsk district command ordered transfer of soldiers involved in the raid, the garrison committee and soviet refused to comply.

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Hunger’s spectre also reinforced peasants’ determination to control local affairs. District committees in several counties claimed authority to regulate all land transactions and forced landowners to lower rents. Socialist provincial officials, while sympathetic, demanded ‘balanced’ solutions to rural disputes: the provincial land committee insisted that ‘fixed [land rents] should be just and not injurious to either side’.26 District committees, however, pursued their own course. In June, the internal affairs ministry received twenty-two complaints of incursions on private land in Smolensk. Committees in eastern counties claimed ‘unused’ and ‘underused’ woods and arable on large estates; committees in the central counties pressed claims on meadows and pastures. Local committees’ actions elicited sharply contrasting responses from SR leaders at a provincial peasant congress held on 23–25 June. Father Georgii Kutuzov, a vocal SR champion of local activists, reported that May’s all-Russian peasant congress resolution on the land question gave district committees interim authority to supervise the rural economy with ‘complete freedom of initiative’. To Kutuzov, this meant ‘all interference by provincial and county commissars must end’. Sergei Efimov offered the congress a dramatically different vision: district committees must protect ‘the people’s property’; ‘piecemeal’ local resolutions undermined that goal, therefore local committees must strictly follow provincial committee guidance.27 Despite Efimov’s entreaties, the congress called for immediate transfer of agricultural land to district land committees, suspension of all land sales and redistribution of all fallow land to the peasantry. After the provincial congress, district committees intensified claims against private land. Most of the twenty ‘disturbances’ reported in Smolensk on 1–15 July involved committee-organized actions, including strikes against commercial woodlots and seizure of meadows. Committee members justified these as ‘in the spirit of resolutions of the Provisional Government and the All-Russian Peasant Congress’.28 Panicking landowners accused local authorities of failing to protect them from ‘criminal’ incursions. Local members of the conservative Union of Landowner, which by late summer had over a thousand members in Smolensk, claimed ‘Bolsheviks’ were behind violent unrest.29 Kadet leaders complained that ‘Leninists’ in the countryside were ‘pushing the village onto the path of violent anarchy’.30 Actual Bolsheviks, however, were rare in rural Smolensk. And while emissaries to villages from Petrograd’s union of Smolensk zemliachestva (rural migrants’ associations) reinforced SR influence, none of the socialist parties had village-level organizations.31 In July the provincial land committee issued directives instructing district committees to prevent strikes and requisition of private land and warning that the provincial commissar would arrest committees that seized private property. Nonetheless, fifty-three disturbances were reported in the province in July – mostly in eastern counties. While these ebbed in August, district committees continued to ignore provincial directives. Smolenskii vestnik’s editor, the SR Solomon Gurevich attributed this to the influence of ‘dark forces’, including ‘Bolshevist’ agitators, while Smolensk correspondents to national newspapers blamed ‘the absence not only of intellectuals, but simply of literate people on the district and land committees’, since only ‘fifty-year old codgers and illiterate women remain in the villages’.32 Evidence

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suggests, however, that committee members – including women (particularly soldiers’ wives) – were not ignorant of national affairs. Several district peasant assemblies, for example, passed resolutions criticizing the Bolsheviks after the July Days. Both Efimov and Smolensk’s SR land commissar Viktor Podvitskii repeatedly demanded local committees respect hierarchical state authority, and Efimov threated to treat anyone who put personal or class interests before those of the state and motherland as ‘an enemy of the people’.33 But events in El’nia county demonstrated the limits of hierarchical authority. In May, the county soviet instructed district land committees to confiscate ‘unused’ private land. On 19 May the county commissar declared this illegal, as did the SPEC on 1 June. But the soviet continued directing local committees to claim control over private property. When on 20 July Efimov ordered El’nia’s district prosecutor to prepare charges against land committees, the soviet claimed sole authority to review such complaints and instructed committee members to remain in their posts. Efimov then ordered arrest of seventy land committee members.34

AUGUST–OCTOBER 1917: THE COLLAPSE OF MODERATE SOCIALIST AUTHORITY From August, Efimov blamed Bolsheviks for fomenting rural anarchy. Early Bolshevik memoirists, though, admitted that peasants adopted ‘Bolshevist’ positions ‘almost without effort or agitation from our side’.35 Town-based Bolsheviks appealed to the party’s secretariat to send agitators to the countryside but with no success.36 Anxiety over worsening shortages, hostility towards private landowners and the influence of radicalized zemliaki, not Bolshevik party work, pushed district committees to reject the moderate socialists’ authority. By late August, Smolensk reportedly was ‘on the brink of starvation’.37 Irregular grain shipments fell short of needs and reserves disappeared, yet Stavka intensified requisitions. In September, even committees in previously ‘quiet’ districts in Smolensk’s central and northwestern counties requisitioned meadows and livestock, cut woods and organized strikes against commercial woodlots. Incursions on woodlots most concerned government officials, as these threatened railroad and military fuel supplies. On 1–15 October, eighty-nine ‘illegal cuttings’ were reported, spread across eleven of Smolensk’s twelve counties. Efimov’s demands that committees halt arbitrary cuttings fell on deaf ears. In a 21 September report to the interior ministry, he claimed that only military force could restore order.38 On 31 September he added that peasant committees were passing ‘Bolshevik’ resolutions with a ‘markedly negative attitude towards the coalition government’.39 Efimov looked to an 8–10 October provincial peasant congress to help restrain rural committees. The SRs held a solid majority, but left SRs voted for a failed Bolshevik resolution stating that the upcoming second all-Russian soviet congress should assume state power, and a counter-resolution accusing Bolsheviks of ‘threatening a civil war’ passed by only two votes. The congress called on peasants ‘to struggle energetically against pogrom disturbances and attempts to settle the land question before the Constituent Assembly’, but with an addendum (opposed

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by SR leaders) that district land committees must control all land, woods and agricultural resources, and that imprisoned land committee members ‘must be freed immediately’.40 This hardened Efimov’s resolve to use force in the countryside, a view he shared with Minsk military district commissar V. A. Galin (also an SR). Although he considered local militias ‘hopeless’, Efimov ordered arrest of anyone illegally felling private woods.41 On 16 October he complained to the interior ministry that arresting committee members had little effect, since local courts simply freed them. In a report to Galin, he proposed using ‘severe measures’ against ‘unruly revolutionaries’ and called for abolition of district land committees, whose functions would pass to ‘reliable’ new district zemstvos.42 On 20 October he asked Galin to use cossacks to ‘pacify’ the rural population. In the city, too, moderate socialists confronted administrative authority’s limits. In mid-August, workers responded to surging inflation by demanding higher wages. Labour commissar Shur sympathized but insisted on conciliation and warned workers against striking. When business owners refused to negotiate, unionized needle trade workers, restaurant workers, bakery and confectionary workers, and pharmacy clerks went on strike. Most strikes collapsed, hardening hostility towards the ‘counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie’ and undermining confidence in moderate socialist leaders. But strikes by lumbermill workers and leatherworkers  – whose Anarchist and Bolshevik union leaders rejected Shur’s conciliationism – won higher wages. On 29 August, news of General Kornilov’s attempt to take power led soldiers’ committee and union leaders in Smolensk city to form defence squads and a ‘bureau for the suppression of counterrevolution’, to stop rail movement of pro-Kornilov troops. The soviet, though, conceded coordination of Smolensk’s defence to military commissar Galin. On 30 August, soviet leaders joined a Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) with staff officers and government officials, which sent commissars to oversee rail and telegraph lines. It also refused to arm soldier-worker defence units and banned all street assemblies, sparking criticism from garrison solders. On 31 August, the Revkom called on the population to remain calm: Kornilov’s coup had collapsed, and soldiers must ‘return to their routine affairs’.43 On 3 September, though, speakers at a city-wide soldiers’ meeting criticized the soviet’s ‘weak and slow’ response to Kornilov. Workers’ soviet deputies also criticized attempts to restore ‘normalcy’ and accused soviet leaders of failing to protect their interests. On 5 September the soviet’s SR and Menshevik executive committee, citing deputies’ ‘elemental [stikhiinyi] mood’, threatened to step down.44 In several towns, moderate socialist authority eroded in fall. In Roslavl, inflation and food shortages heightened tensions in garrison reserve units. At a 17 September soviet session, Menshevik soviet chair Reznikov warned of counter-revolution from below, as food shortages had put the ‘inert masses’ in a dangerous mood. Soldier deputies responded by blaming Reznikov for mishandling provisions issues. In late September worker deputies, too, challenged the soviet’s leadership by endorsing the local railroad workers’ union decision to join a planned all-Russian railroad strike (subsequently cancelled). The Bolsheviks demanded new soviet leadership elections, but still had few active cadres: their leader, Nikolai Konopatskii, begged the party’s central committee and Moscow regional bureau to send assistance, but received none.

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Like Reznikov, Konopatskii served on Roslavl’s provisions committee. When on 1 October the soviet discussed his proposal for a committee to fight speculation, soldiers and workers accused local merchants of hoarding and speculation. The next day, workers and soldiers joined a large crowd that looted Jewish-owned stores and murdered three Jewish clerks. Looting subsided at nightfall, but soldiers continued searching Jewish merchants’ homes, terrorizing their families.45 Bolsheviks blamed the pogrom on ‘black hundreds’ agitators and demanded the duma impose price controls to prevent speculation, which won favour among hungry workers and soldiers. On 7 October, Roslavl’s Bolsheviks and Menshevik-Internationalists won a majority in soviet leadership elections. Konopatskii, elected soviet chair on 15 October, pleaded for all-socialist unity, but the soviet’s left and moderate factions continued to clash. On 19 October, moderates proposed that Roslavl’s all-Russian soviet congress delegate carry a mandate for a socialist coalition government excluding the Kadets. The plenum, however, supported the left’s proposal for a mandate to transfer power to the soviets. In October’s zemstvo election campaign, left socialists promised ‘tireless struggle against the bourgeois order, against the capitalists’.46 This strident tone resonated with garrison soldiers, whose votes on 22 October gave the left socialist bloc the zemstvo’s largest faction. Stavka ordered disbandment of Roslavl’s garrison on 24 October but delayed the order when the soviet appealed. Still, soviet leaders feared district military commissar Galin – who had just used cossacks against the Kaluga Soviet – would move on Roslavl. On 25 October, the left socialists organized a military revolutionary committee (MRC) to defend against an anticipated cossack attack. In the provincial capital, moderate socialist authority also collapsed in fall. On 3 September, Shur again warned workers that strikes were ‘impermissible’ and that they must ‘decide all conflicts through arbitration’.47 Four days later, after a month of failed negotiations, the Bolshevik-led metalworkers’ union declared a strike against Smolensk’s three largest enterprises. This began a cascade of strikes in smaller enterprises; in all 1,500 workers went on strike. Again, most strikes collapsed, but the metalworkers’ dragged on. Shur tried to broker an agreement, but owners claimed union demands ‘encroached on owners’ rights’.48 On 4 October, the city trade union bureau accused ‘capitalists’ of ‘disrupting the course of city life’.49 Management replied that workers put their class interests before ‘the interests of the country and the people’.50 On 6 October, owners threatened to close all the city’s factories and plants, while the union warned that if owners did not agree to terms it would halt tram operations and limit the city’s electrical supply.51 Why is still unclear, but on 8 October owners agreed to arbitration on all union demands, and the metalworkers declared victory. City tram and electrical station workers, who had joined the metalworkers’ union, now demanded higher wages from the duma, which refused to negotiate. A strike then shut down the tram system and some electrical service from 19 October until 25 October, when the duma agreed to arbitration. These strikes further eroded moderate socialist authority, and workers at several plants recalled and replaced Menshevik and SR soviet deputies with left socialists. By late September, the Bolshevik soviet faction had grown to eighty of two hundred

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deputies, and with left SRs and anarchists they formed a significant minority bloc. Jewish workers recalled SERP and Bund soviet deputies: some Jews gravitated towards the left SRs and anarchists but few towards the Bolsheviks, whose positions on nationality questions alienated both Bundists and Zionist socialists. Among Jewish  parties, non-socialist General Zionists gained most from the moderate socialists’ decline. Discipline continued to break down in Smolensk’s garrison: soldiers now ‘took leave’ even without committee authorization, and food shortages aggravated tensions. On 14 September the duma, with the soviet’s agreement, banned soldiers from buying bread at city bakeries. But the garrison already had reduced rations, and so hungry soldiers sold their boots and overcoats to buy food at market stalls. Arrest records reveal increased theft and violent crime by soldiers, who also helped lynch suspected thieves at city markets and the train station. On 6 October, soldiers ransacked a Jewish refugee agency warehouse and ‘requisitioned’ its food supplies. Military commissar Galin described soldiers’ mood as ‘disquieting’, discipline as poor and Cossack units as the garrison’s only reliable elements. Garrison committee leaders’ attempts at discipline simply reinforced the movement to recall and replace soldiers’ soviet deputies. As among workers, moderate socialist dominance eroded without a wholesale shift towards the Bolsheviks, who remained so poorly organized that the Bolshevik central committee had to inform them of a new party cell in the garrison. In a 23 October report, Galin attributed soldiers’ radicalism partly to Bolshevik anti-war propaganda, but more so to anger at hunger and worsening garrison conditions. From mid-October, the left socialist bloc openly challenged the Smolensk Soviet’s SR-Menshevik leadership.  When on 18 October the soviet discussed Smolensk’s deputation to the all-Russian soviet congress, left SRs and Bolsheviks insisted it support transfer of power to the soviets. Moderate socialists argued this would split the revolutionary democracy and trigger a civil war. The plenum’s vote was mixed: Bolshevik Vadim Smol’ianinov and left SR Mikhail Smolentsev were elected delegates but with a mandate for a coalition government without the Kadets. On 19 October soviet leaders warned that ‘counterrevolution has reared its head’ and called on citizens to fight ‘anarchy’ for the ‘salvation of the country and the revolution’.52 Left socialists feared counter-revolution more than anarchy: news Galin was leading Cossacks against the Kaluga Soviet triggered fears he would disband Smolensk’s soviet. On 21 October, Menshevik Semen Gal’perin opened the soviet session by resigning as chair; SR Petr Bukhshtab stepped in but resigned an hour later, calling it ‘impossible to remain at the head of an institution led by Bolsheviks’.53 Bolshevik Samuel Samover then became chair pending new leadership elections. When on 23 October Galin returned from Kaluga with an Orenburg Cossack regiment, several garrison unit committees accused SRs and Mensheviks of conspiring with ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and demanded that the soviet arm itself. On 24 October, a group of Bolshevik soldiers asked Samover to authorize distribution of weapons from the garrison’s arsenal. He refused, but they nonetheless commandeered the weapons. The stage was set for an armed confrontation.

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OCTOBER 1917–APRIL 1918: STUMBLING TOWARDS SOVIET POWER On 26 October, upon receiving Kerensky’s telegram calling for aid against the Bolsheviks, Galin declared martial law and Efimov asked citizens to rally behind the Provisional Government. That afternoon, Bolshevik Moscow bureau activist Semion Ioffe arrived in Smolensk to secure its rail junction against pro-Kerensky troop movements. After meeting with local Bolsheviks, Ioffe requested that an emergency soviet session support Lenin’s new government. When the plenum did so, moderate socialists walked out in protest and joined duma, zemstvo and peasant soviet leaders at the duma building, just across Blon’e Park. With Efimov and Galin, they formed a Committee to Save the Revolution (KSR). At the soviet, Samover insisted Soviet power must come through peaceful, legal means and resigned as chair. The soviet then elected a new Bolshevik chair and formed an MRC of Bolsheviks, left SRs, Latvian SDs and Anarchists. Instead of acting to seize power, the MRC appealed for support from key garrison units. Most units though, including the Second Heavy Artillery Division stationed just outside the city, remained neutral. For days the MRC and KSR negotiated while lobbying the garrison. The Second Artillery’s First Battery would back the soviet if cossacks attacked; a cadet battalion would join cossacks in supporting the KSR. On 28 October Stavka pushed the KSR to secure Smolensk but transferred the Orenburg cossacks to Moscow. The MRC meanwhile fortified the soviet with machine guns. That night the garrison committee called for an all-socialist coalition government; it would defend the soviet against attack but would not support a seizure of power. Ioffe begged the Bolshevik Moscow regional bureau to send ‘solid’ workers to lead the soviet. On the night of 30 October, the left SR Smolentsev returned from Petrograd, explained Lenin’s Government’s first decrees to a soviet session and demanded the MRC seize power. Cossacks meanwhile surrounded the soviet and the KSR delivered an ultimatum – surrender or face attack. A soviet delegation tried negotiating, but cossacks stormed the building. After a two-hour firefight, artillery rounds from the First Battery, five kilometres away, exploded near the duma. The cossacks retreated and the KSR called for a cease fire. Scattered fighting continued until morning, when it was agreed that the cossacks would withdraw from the city. On 1 November skirmishes continued in nearby villages, but the cossacks then withdrew. When on 1 November Bolsheviks again discussed seizing power, Samover and Sobolev convinced them that instead the soviet should enter a coalition Committee of Public Safety (CPS), to govern until the Constituent Assembly. The CPS structure, though, made the left socialists junior partners. The CPS declared itself the province’s ‘sole power’ and warned that ‘all arbitrary arrests, searches, seizures, violence, or riots are impermissible’.54 On 2 November Smolentsev, Smolensk’s new military commissar, formed a Red Guard to secure order. He banned alcohol sales and private possession of firearms and organized a ‘temporary public safety court’.55 But several violent incidents shook the city and Mensheviks and SRs complained of Red Guard intimidation.

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Against that backdrop, parties made final appeals for the 12 November Constituent Assembly elections, with the Mensheviks and SRs running on separate tickets but acting as a socialist bloc.56 The city election results shocked the moderate socialists. Bolsheviks won an overwhelming majority among civilians and soldiers – twice as many as the second place Kadets, who outpolled the SRs and Mensheviks combined.57 Thus fortified, the soviet left took small steps towards supplanting the CPS. It created a committee to fight speculation, which began arresting ‘counterrevolutionaries’. On 18 November the soviet voted for a gradual transfer of power locally’ and demanded the CPS implement Soviet Government decrees.58 The Petrograd and Moscow Bolsheviks pressed their Smolensk comrades to take power immediately and sent dozens of zemliaki to push them in this direction. On 2 December, the soviet resolved to speed implementation of Soviet decrees and disband the ‘counter-revolutionary’ city duma. On 4 December it voted to disband the CPS and claimed ‘unitary authority in Smolensk’.59 On 6 December a provincial soviet congress declared Soviet power and elected a Bolshevik-Left SR council of commissars. Reaction came quickly. On 6 December, a Menshevik-led protest gathered 2,000 people. Soldiers and Red Guards broke up the demonstration and beat participants, who they derided as ‘burzhui’ and ‘yids’ (as they did at a 10 December meeting of Jewish socialists). When in mid-December Menshevik-led employees went on strike against nationalization of banks, Smolentsev ordered their arrest for ‘sabotage’. When banks reopened, the new regime could not find ‘qualified employees’.60 When on 17 December court and prison employees declared a strike against a decree replacing courts with revolutionary tribunals, Red Guards arrested strikers. The soviet then could not find jurists to run tribunals until spring 1918. When on 18 December, unions of store clerks, tram engineers and bakers declared strikes to protest arrest of union leaders and demand the soviet address the food crisis, Red Guards arrested Shur for ‘slandering’ the soviet regime. Zemstvo and government employees and postal-telegraph workers then declared strikes. Again, Red Guards arrested strikers and intimidated opponents. They particularly targeted Jewish activists and routinely searched Jewish merchants’ homes. In late December, though, the soviet attempted placating striking workers: it released arrested socialist leaders and promised to increase rations, expand the city labour exchange and keep factories open. These promises, and perhaps more so hunger itself, ended most strikes; on 2 January 1918 government employees returned to their desks. In January 1918, demobilization and dispatch of Red Guards to Ukraine limited the force available to Smolensk’s soviet, but not its use. When on 5 January soldiers in transit looted a zemstvo alcohol warehouse, Smolentsev blamed ‘counterrevolutionary agitators’ and declared martial law. When on 9 January, Mensheviks and SRs organized a mass demonstration against closure of the Constituent Assembly, Red Guards beat protesters. The soviet’s primary base at this point  – soldiers  – approved, and the assembly’s dispersal led to no other actions by workers and employees preoccupied by ever-worsening food shortages. That week, Smolensk received a quarter of anticipated grain shipments; on 12 January, central

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government officials described matters as ‘nearly catastrophic’.61 Soviet leaders proposed confiscating goods at Zemgor warehouses and workshops to exchange for grain in the villages, but the provincial provisions administration refused and Tukhachevskii – still Zemgor chair – said he took directives from the zemstvo and duma, not the soviet. Red Guards arrested Tukhachevskii on 15 January. On 18 January, zemstvo and government employees began a protest strike, which the soviet declared ‘an act of sabotage’.62 On 19 January it shut down the Menshevik-SR newspaper Bor’ba for ‘lies and slander’ against the government.63 On 20 January the zemstvo assembly – still meeting despite repeated instructions from the Bolshevik central committee  – protested Tukhachevskii’s arrest and criticized the soviet’s ‘utopian’ provisions scheme. Its Bolshevik-Left SR minority demanded that the assembly formally recognize Soviet power then walked out in protest. The next day, when Shur argued cooperation alone could influence the soviet’s policies, the Kadets quit in protest. Socialists then voted to reorganize the zemstvo administration as an all-socialist coalition. This seemed to placate the left socialists, who rejoined the assembly on 25 January. But when, by a four-vote margin, the zemstvo voted against cooperation with the soviet, the left walked out in protest. Smolensk’s Bolshevik leaders described this as a step towards liquidating the zemstvo, which the soviet resolved to do on 14 February. But the zemstvo assembly continued meeting, and Bolsheviks and Left SRs continued attending. And although the soviet had assumed ‘control’ over city government, duma offices still functioned. On 18 February, hostilities resumed on the Eastern Front, and the following day, as the Germans advanced on Minsk, the Western Oblast soviet administration hastily retreated to Smolensk. On 21–23 February Bolshevik Aleksandr Miasnikov, chair of the Western Oblast soviet executive committee (Obliskomzap), placed Smolensk under martial law and demanded the soviet immediately disband the duma. The soviet promptly resolved to take over duma operations (and funds) and warned that obstructionist employees would face a revolutionary tribunal. It also banned ‘the Kadet and collaborationist press’ then closed Smolenskii krai and Smolenskii vestnik.64 To shore up Miasnikov’s new order, the central government dispatched 500 Red Guards from Moscow. The February 1918 retreat brought more refugees to the already hungry city. Violent crime soared, with refugees and Jewish shopkeepers its frequent victims. On 5 March, Red Guards suppressing a riot at the city bazaar killed twelve people. Soviet officials, without evidence, claimed that the ‘bourgeoisie’ instigated the riot; Miasnikov promised a ‘ruthless struggle against all enemies of the revolutionary people’.65 Citing ‘military necessity’, the Obliskomzap then voted to absorb Smolensk into the Western Oblast and the Bolshevik northwest regional committee put Smolensk’s party organization under its control. The Brest-Litovsk treaty, which made Smolensk’s western border the demarcation line between Soviet and German zones, did not alter this situation. At Miasnikov’s order, the soviet broke ties with oppositionist workers’ organizations and disbanded Smolensk’s Menshevik-led trade union council, replaced by a Bolshevik-controlled council of factory committees. Miasnikov also moved to enforce party discipline and control. At a provincial soviet congress in early March, at which Bolsheviks held the largest party contingent,

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he cut off debate with the moderate socialists as ‘idle chatter’, lambasted Smolensk’s Bolsheviks as weak, and criticized the provincial soviet’s failure to organize ‘firm’ Soviet power. In late March hardline Bolsheviks consolidated their hold on city government. Minsk Bolshevik Vasili Vashkevich, the new commissar for city affairs, declared that ‘eliminating saboteurs’ from city government would resolve food shortages, which he attributed largely to ‘political struggle’ against Soviet power.66 Shortage-related closures and demilitarization of industry had left over 2,000 workers unemployed, an estimated quarter of the population was eating surrogate bread, and typhus had broken out among refugees barracked in Smolensk’s outskirts. The soviet administration attributed all this to sabotage and ‘the laxity of Soviet power’.67 The solution, according to a 28 March Obliskomzap decree, was to crack down on ‘anti-Soviet’ institutions. On 1 April, the soviet disbanded the provincial zemstvo assembly and ordered zemstvo agencies closed. Some Smolensk Bolsheviks resisted absorption into Obliskomzap and appealed to Lenin’s government, which unconditionally supported Miasnikov. On 12 April, a Bolshevik-dominated Western Oblast soviet congress formalized Smolensk’s inclusion in the oblast. (The Obliskomzap would run Smolensk until December 1918.) The oblast congress also marked the breakdown in relations between Bolsheviks and Left SRs in Smolensk, as Bolshevik soldier delegates shouted down Left SR speakers as ‘traitors’. In essence, though, ‘firm Soviet power’ equated to Bolshevik rule. Firm Soviet power did not end hunger or ensure order: food riots erupted in mid-April, and the Obliskomzap used force to break up Anarchist led protests. On 21 April the Obliskomzap promised to ‘crush any further pogrom agitation’.68 It would not, however, arm Jewish anti-pogrom units, despite the Jewish community’s pleas. On 13 May, crowds looted shops and beat traders in the Jewish quarter; anti-Jewish violence and looting then continued for two days. Red Army soldiers refused to intervene. On 15 May two units demanded the soviet expel Jewish members. The Obliskomzap restored ‘order’, and then blamed the riot on anti-Soviet agitators from the ‘old’ city administration. Extension of Soviet power to Smolensk’s towns was neither uniform nor rapid; events in Roslavl reflect its complexity. In Roslavl on 28 October the soviet voted to recognize Lenin’s government and set up railroad pickets to prevent pro-Kerensky troop movements but took no steps to disband the local duma or zemstvo. Bolsheviks then won a plurality among Roslavl’s civilian and soldiers in Constituent Assembly elections, with 60 per cent of all votes cast in the town. Buoyed, the soviet’s left faction forced the garrison commander to resign and elected a Bolshevik in his place. In early December, though, the local Bolsheviks had barely fifty members; transfer of Konopatskii and other party figures to other provinces then reduced that number, yet local workers continued supporting Soviet power as ‘the people’s rule’.69 In mid-January Roslavl’s Bolsheviks purged Mensheviks and SRs from the soviet executive committee. Demobilization of garrison units, though, weakened the soviet: on 13 January its forces failed to stop passage through town of Polish Legionnaires moving across Smolensk to join General Dowbor-Muśnicki’s rebellion against Soviet power. After this debacle, the Red Army Western Front command reinforced Roslavl’s rail junction with Red Guards from Petrograd and other

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provinces. The soviet’s provisions commission, desperately short on reserves, then cut civilian rations by a third, and rumours spread that Red Guards received larger rations than workers. In February and March, more than 7,000 Red Guards and soldiers fell back to Roslavl during the German occupation of Belorussia, further straining the rationing system. The Roslavl Soviet, though, did little to address worsening hunger and unemployment. When in late March the Bolsheviks agreed to new soviet elections, Mensheviks and Bundists won a majority among workers’ deputies and on the executive committee. Having lost the elections, on 3 April the Bolsheviks and Left SRs disbanded the soviet, placed Roslavl under martial law and appointed a new soviet executive committee. Hunger and hostility towards the soldiers’ privileges exploded into violence on 18 April, when a fight between soldiers and railroad workers at the town market spun out of control. After two days’ fighting, Red Army reinforcements attacked the railroad workers, who then agreed to recognize the new soviet executive. But on 21 April soldiers arrested and murdered five railroad worker leaders. In subsequent weeks, a new Bolshevik military commandant established a local Cheka and ‘reorganized’ the local Bolsheviks, who then manipulated elections to a county soviet congress and declared the establishment of firm Soviet order. In the countryside news of the Bolshevik seizure of power spread unevenly, reaching eastern county districts first and isolated northwest districts last. Its carriers most often were returning labour migrants, soldiers and sailors who helped propagate support for Soviet rule. Reception varied, but much of Smolensk’s rural population equated ‘Bolsheviks’ broadly with government of ‘toilers’ rather than ‘gentlemen’ and expected the new regime to fulfil aspirations regarding property redistribution, self-governance and peace. This helps explain why the Bolsheviks – despite their negligible presence in villages and peasants’ limited awareness of ‘Lenin’s’ land decree  – won 57 per cent of rural votes in provincial Constituent Assembly elections (compared to 42 per cent for the SR list).70 Land redistribution was central to peasant aspirations: from November 1917 through Spring 1918, rural committees redistributed property seized from private owners, often before local soviets existed; in some cases, their efforts faced resistance from regional soviet officials. Land redistribution did not, however, mean wholesale expropriation of all private land or elimination of private peasant farmsteads. In winter and spring 1918, attempts to ‘rationalize’ rural governance and the rural economy, together with hunger and disease, bred hostility towards Soviet rule even before the Communists’ ill-fated attempts to foment social class divisions in the villages. The provincial soviet administration, pushed by the central government, tried to control the land redistribution but with limited effect, as local committees continued to act independently. Pressured by the central government and by Obliskomzap, on 13 March 1918 the provincial administration ‘dissolved’ all land committees and ordered that their functions pass to county and district soviet departments. But the gap between decrees issued by the April 1918 Western Oblast soviet congress and their implantation reflected the limited success of efforts to standardize and control rural affairs. The oblast congress stipulated the structure of soviets and mandating electoral guidelines, but few rural soviets followed these regulations. Moreover,

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direct party influence on rural affairs remained minimal. In May 1918, only 2 per cent of Smolensk’s rural soviets had any Left SR party members and 9 per cent any Bolshevik party members. The oblast congress also set guidelines for use of large estates as Soviet farms and norms for allotments held by non-communal peasant landowners. But attempts to ‘nationalize’ large estates had limited success: in May 1918, Smolensk had only four dozen labour communes and Soviet farms, mostly on large flax and dairy estates in the central and eastern counties, and these accounted for just 1 per cent of all redistributed private land in the province. The congress stipulated that otrub and khutor farms, which had proliferated in 1917, must use family labour and could not exceed size norms set by county soviets. But local committees and soviets often allowed division of entire villages into farmsteads – and moreover permitted nonpeasants, including gentry, to hold land based on norms set for peasant farmsteads.71 Redistribution norms typically determined allotments of the land and livestock based on the number of household members, which tended to reinforce existing strata of ‘strong’, ‘middling’ and ‘weak’ households. But most documented conflicts over redistribution involved competing claims of villages or districts to land and inventory of the same estate. At best, redistribution of estate resources temporarily held off hunger. In November and December 1917, hunger hit villages even harder than towns, but the new central government, while it noted the looming crisis, provided no substantive assistance. In January, the provincial provisions committee devolved responsibility for food supply to district committees, which competed with one another for grain; complaints of committees commandeering other districts’ shipments became commonplace and shortages drove prices higher. In many districts, peasants depended on ‘bagmen’ who travelled to and purchased grain in Ukraine. By late March 1918 the internal affairs commissariat estimated that a quarter of Smolensk rural households had no food. Typhus ravaged villages as well, and the Smolensk provisions commission described the peasants as ‘starving’ and ‘panicking’.72 Peasant responses to hunger sometimes brought them into direct confrontation with the Soviet state. When in late March a labour commune in Krasnyi’s Pogostinsk district slaughtered its livestock, the county soviet declared them kulaks and sent troops to arrest their leaders. By late spring, hunger and frustration at the government’s failure to improve rural conditions undermined support for left socialists in some districts: on 10 May in Krasnyi, the majority of delegates to the county soviet congress elected a Trudovik as its chair. An Obliskomzap plenipotentiary sent to the congress declared its majority ‘Rightist’ opponents of Soviet power; the provincial soviet then recognized only ‘pro-Soviet’ delegates as constituting the authoritative congress.

CONCLUSIONS Within the context of national events, local dynamics shaped the 1917 Revolution in Smolensk. Cooperation between liberals and moderate socialists in the revolution’s first months reflected local patterns of political culture. Bolsheviks in Smolensk and

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garrison activists in provincial towns, as ‘outsiders’, were alien to that culture. The revolution heightened associational activity as people from all social strata pressed the state to protect their corporate interests. Among workers and employees, and particularly Jews and other national minorities, associational activity contributed to class identity that resonated with moderate socialist politics in spring and early summer, during which moderate socialists’ leadership of garrison committees strengthened support among soldiers. Demands for ‘democratization’, meaning inclusion in government institutions of representatives of workers and soldiers committees, put Mensheviks and SRs in control of most regional state institutions by July. At the same time, rural mobilization through district committees undermined the provincial administration’s hierarchical authority. Neither liberal state officials in spring, nor moderate socialist officials in summer and fall could control the countryside. Peasants – supported by zemliaki, returned soldiers and labour migrants – used local committees to organize strikes, place limits on private owners’ use of their property, and seize and redistribute privately owned woods, meadows, livestock and tools. Smolensk’s SR provincial commissar tried to impose order by cajoling rural committees, then arresting their leaders, then authorizing punitive military force. Simultaneously, inflation, unemployment, war weariness and hunger – a dangerous combination for the region’s Jews – helped erode worker and soldier support for the moderate socialists, who now defended state interests against demands of the very social groups they represented. In early fall the influence of Bolsheviks – along with left SRS – extended far beyond the party’s small organizational presence, but the province’s left socialists showed little zeal for seizing power during the October Revolution. In the city, and in several towns, a tense all socialist coalition prevailed for months after creation of Lenin’s government. Pressure from ‘outside’ – in some towns from rural committees, but in the city and most towns from the Bolshevik party centre and Western Oblast officials driven from Minsk by the late February German advance – led finally to the dissolution of the democratic state institutions created in 1917. As conditions in the city and towns deteriorated, ‘firm Soviet power’, backed by force, meant repression of strikes and protests and an end to open, democratic contestation for control over local administration. In the countryside, establishment of Soviet institutions proceeded unevenly, in some cases through force, but peasants, under conditions of rampant hunger and disease, continued reorganizing the rural economy according to local norms.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

1917 on the Volga SARAH BADCOCK, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

While revolutionary narratives often focus on Petrograd as the seat of political power, and more broadly on urban and military arenas, this chapter will explore the lived experience of revolution in the Volga region, around 1,500 kilometres from Petrograd. The five Volga provinces considered here (Nizhegorod, Kazan, Samara, Saratov and Simbirsk) had an area of 400,000 square kilometres, which is equivalent to modern Germany.1 This chapter uses two lenses to explore the revolutionary year in ways that transcend the traditional narratives of 1917. First, it looks at the experience and impact of population churn on the region in 1917. Although the Volga region was far from the frontlines of the First World War, that conflict shaped almost every aspect of life, not least by its role in forcing unprecedented population mobility. Second, it will make a particular study of the dynamics of revolution in rural areas, where more than 90 per cent of the region’s population lived. This study will emphasize the diversity of experience in the countryside, and it will explore the ways in which local decisions about land use and grain production impacted national politics. These approaches glimpse at a different way of seeing the revolutionary year. Other chapters look in detail at the unfolding chronology of 1917, at the February Revolution, the multiple crises in government through the revolutionary year, the dramatic shift to the left during 1917, political radicalization of the urban population and the destabilization of the military. This chapter does not displace these important narratives, but it does offer us an alternative way of seeing. By focusing on land and food use, we can see the ways in which the revolution was defined and experience in the Volga countryside, and this focus moves us away from emphases on political centres and high party politics. By focusing on population mobility, our gaze is drawn towards the impact of the First World War on revolutionary narratives and everyday life. The 10 million people who lived in this region as counted in the 1897 census were diverse in their languages, occupations and religious faiths. Around 1.5 million Tatar people made their home in the region, 800,000 Chuvash, as well as Mordvinians, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Volga Germans and other ethnic groups. These minority ethnic populations lived overwhelmingly in rural areas and were geographically clustered – some districts of Kazan province, for example, had majority Tatar populations.2 The landscape and topography of this region ranged from broad, flat, fertile grasslands known as steppe, which grew wheat and rye for market and export, to mountains

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and forests. While the area was one of Russia’s biggest grain-producing regions, it was also home to pockets of significant industrial economy. The Volga river and its tributaries were key arteries for trade in Russia, carrying grain and goods from the south and east of the Russian Empire, to the more heavily populated north and west. The river routes were supplemented in the late nineteenth century with the development of railways that crisscrossed the region, and which enabled more rapid transport of people and goods.3 This role as a trading hub was politically charged in 1917. Russia’s capital, Petrograd (St Petersburg until 1914), was fed by grain imports from the Volga region, and Russia’s military forces stationed in the western borderlands needed feeding and supplying. Tsaritsyn and Saratov towns were the most important national hubs for grain trade. Wheat grown in the Volga region was exported to the cities and the northern regions from these hubs. In 1917, this trade was fractured by political crisis and by the strains of the war on the economy.

THE VOLGA ON THE MOVE It is hard to imagine a single individual that was not directly impacted by population displacement by 1917, either losing a family member to military mobilization, or encountering displaced people from across the Empire in their own home space. The steady erosion of central governmental authority and control in the course of 1917 enabled both dynamism and chaos in population mobility. The Volga region in 1917 witnessed an extraordinary churn of people in and out, in movements forced by war. Some of this movement was known and to some extent controlled by State authorities, and much of it was not. Military men came to the Volga in multiple forms, as soldiers in the reserve garrisons, as prisoners of war and as deserters. Refugees moved steadily into the region, pushed out of their homes in the western borderlands by the frontline conflict there. Whole factories and their workforces were relocated from the Baltic regions and Petrograd to the safety of the Volga, far from the war’s frontlines. This section will look at the experience and impact of two key groups, military men and refugees, which help us to conceptualize lived experience of the revolution during 1917 as one which is heavily framed by populations on the move. Military mobilization is viewed here as a form of forced population displacement, in some respects analogous to the status of refugees.4 The largest group of displaced people in the region were the soldiers posted to reserve garrisons. In 1917 there were between 300,000 and 400,000 soldiers and officers stationed in the region. These troops were clustered in the region’s population points and made up a formidable new cohort of the urban population. Reserve garrisons shifted location and numbers frequently through 1917, which make any precision about numbers difficult, because troops were transferred in and out of active frontline war zones. In Saratov, for example, there were 130,000 soldiers and officers stationed in the region in January 1917. By July 1917, that number had increased to 153,000, but by October 1917 had dropped to 93,000.5 These huge numbers of incomers joined in the life of the region and interacted with resident populations. Soldiers and officers comprised a core part of local government and political organization. Some soldiers proved to be invaluable contributors to

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overstretched local organizations, particularly if they had specific skills, like mastery of a locally spoken language. Sergei Ilin’s case is a good illustration of the roles that soldiers could play. Ilin, a peasant from Iadrinsk district, was a Chuvash, and when on short leave from his reserve regiment he quickly became involved in local administration, from the peasants’ union to the county land committee. His request to be freed from military service to pursue local affairs was accompanied by a petition from the citizens of the county.6 Alongside these active and structured contributions, the presence of reserve soldiers contributed more amorphous and pernicious elements to local life in 1917. The presence of tens of thousands of additional people, in addition to the refugees and evacuees who filled the towns, put enormous pressure on urban amenities and infrastructure. Housing shortages in urban areas were accentuated by the need to house soldiers. The town bathhouses were inundated with dirty soldiers as well as the townspeople they had been meant for, with the result that prices rose, standards fell and establishments closed.7 The overstretched transport system often provided a flashpoint for pressure on amenities and soldier-civilian tensions. Nizhnii Novgorod’s town administration reported cases of armed soldiers stopping trams, piling on board, refusing to pay and preventing other passengers from alighting.8 These problems endured and escalated through 1917, as military discipline dwindled and local governments increasingly lost authority. In September in Kazan, a group of soldiers demanded tickets without queuing, and eventually beat up their own soviet deputy who was sent to negotiate with them.9 Crime and public fear of crime were highly charged political issues and were among the most potent vectors of everyday crisis in 1917.10 The presence of soldiers in towns raised the crime rate. Soldiers participated in the meetings and public events that characterized the revolution. In their free time, soldiers strolled around town, went to teashops, bars, cinemas and theatres. Their position as part-time civilians was one that could be, and was, abused. Soldiers on duty were reported wandering around town without convoy or uniform.11 Soldiers contributed to a lively black market in their kit and weapons, which further heightened this sense of disorder and lawlessness. Even before the February Revolution, the commander of the Kazan military region requested that measures be taken to halt soldiers’ extensive trade in illegally brewed alcohol.12 Soldiers’ goods were sold in the ubiquitous street side stalls and found their way into local shops. Extra patrols were proposed by the Soviet of soldiers’ deputies on one Nizhnii Novgorod street to try and control soldier-traders.13 This trade continued unabated through 1917. In November, the soviet of soldiers’ deputies announced that anyone caught buying or selling state property would be arrested. This desperate measure indicated that soldiers’ illicit trade was entirely out of control.14 Hooliganism, illicit trade, pressure on public services and particularly pressure on the transport system all heightened a sense of crisis in provincial urban life, but the soldiers’ most significant contribution to civilian life was their importation of military violence. The presence of soldiers raised the likelihood of violence, and correspondingly reduced the administration’s chances of doing much to restrict violence and disorder. In Tsivilsk town, Kazan province, the soldiers stationed

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there demanded that they be sold wine and beer at the local tavern. When they were refused, they seized the cellar key and started to drink the beer reserves. The garrison was very drunk for a couple of days, until the district executive committee resolved the crisis by adding kerosene to the beer to spoil it.15 Local government had to wait for a punitive expedition from a neighbouring barracks to curtail the garrison’s actions. Such alcohol related problems were replicated elsewhere. The district commissar of Spassk district, Kazan province, noted that soldier disorders often flared up after alcohol seizures had been made in the town.16 As well as alcohol fuelled violence, arbitrary violence was increased by the presence of armed men on the streets. Local papers reported incidents like the shopkeeper murdered in a robbery of just ten roubles by two soldiers, or the bloody retribution exacted on a soldier accused of shoplifting by fellow soldiers in Kazan town.17 Some soldier disorders were not general and disarrayed hooliganism, but trenchant political gestures that challenged town administration directly. In Nizhnii Novgorod town, the 62nd reserve regiment, which included many convalescing soldiers, resisted their direction to the Front at the beginning of July. F.E. Golov was a peasant who had entered the army in 1912 and was wounded in the leg during frontline battle during 1917. He was sent to the rear for three months to recuperate with the 62nd reserve regiment.18 The night of 5 July saw a culmination of the threat to public order, with reports of robberies and threats to alcohol stores. The soviet of workers’ deputies also distributed arms to workers, soldiers and private individuals, for self-defence and the formation of militias.19 Troops from Moscow military region, led by General Alexander Verkhovskii, the head of the region, entered the town on 6 July and reestablished order. After ‘two days of fierce terror in the town’, with Cossacks and armoured cars patrolling to restore order, Verkhovskii succeeded in disarming the soldiers. The 62nd and the most active elements of the 182nd and 185th regiments were sent to the front on 7 July. More than two hundred soldiers were arrested, though all but nine were freed soon afterwards.20 This episode gives us a sense of the level of crisis large soldier populations brought to the towns of the Volga region – civilians had limited means to contest the actions of massed armed men. The reserve garrisons were large in number, but they were at least in principle counted and controlled, as part of the serving army. Soldiers in other guises provided another layer of power dynamics and disruption. The number of soldiers in the region on leave with permission, or without permission as deserters, is impossible to estimate with any accuracy. Soldiers on leave included those being given holiday from the front or active regiments, and those given summer leave for working the fields.21 Kerensky had given soldiers over the age of forty-three leave for fieldwork in July 1917.22 The authorities were inundated with requests from soldiers asking to return home for fieldwork throughout the spring and summer. There were numerous reports of soldiers on leave inciting violence and disobedience to government orders. Mamadyshsk district commissar reported that both the large numbers of deserters in the area and soldiers on leave were a thoroughly pernicious influence.23 Where force or violence featured in local conflicts, soldiers were invariably involved. Rydnovskii, a member of the old State Duma, was fiercely beaten along with his wife by a gang of fifteen armed soldiers who searched his Kazan estate, and threatened his children

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with revolvers.24 In some cases, soldiers acted not just against unpopular individual landowners, but threatened the village community more generally. Soldiers on leave stole horses in Zhediaevsk county, Spassk district, threatened the village committee and forced them to accept the theft.25 In other cases, however, the local community actively colluded in soldier violence. The Kazan landowner Natalia Neratova, for example, was forced to leave her property after a crowd of soldiers accompanied by local women and their children made repeated threats.26 These examples show that in some cases, soldier-deserters acted against local communities, but that in other cases, they colluded with or led the local community. Public attitudes towards deserters varied significantly, reflecting the fact that some deserters had returned home to their families, who protected and supported them, while others roamed through the countryside as strangers to the local population. Some villages passed fiery decrees condemning deserters and pledging their utmost assistance in capturing absconders. The very first decree of Tepelovo village’s meeting in April 1917 was that measures must be taken to bring deserters to justice.27 This public face against desertion was not uniform or complete. Some deserters were protected by their families or their communities. In Mamadyshsk district, the total number of deserters was listed at 104, but the district commissar declared that this was way below the real figure, as many were in hiding, often in the nonRussian hill villages that were particularly difficult to search.28 Local government records catalogue a losing battle in controlling deserters in the countryside. Regional administrations lacked the armed force to tackle deserters and their lawlessness, which left the rural population exposed. The task of tracking down deserters, even with the best efforts of the local population and militia, was a difficult one. This is reflected in the paltry 270 deserters captured in Nizhegorod province by September 1917.29 Administrative disorder made documentation difficult to verify, and escape and evasion relatively straightforward. Unlike soldiers on leave and deserters, the number and locations of prisoners of war were known. They formed a significant presence in the provincial countryside. Prisoners of war numbers are estimated at some 2 million nationally, and many were stationed in rural areas, either on work details or in makeshift camps.30 The Volga region was prioritized as a site for prisoners of war because of its need for working agricultural hands – there were 32,457 prisoners of war stationed in Saratov province by the summer of 1916. Like refugees, prisoners of war were housed in residents’ homes or in empty buildings if special barracks had not been constructed.31 In 1917, these prisoners of war were swept along with the revolution, and those stationed to work on large private estates were commandeered by local peasants to work on peasant land. The seizure of prisoners of war by peasant communities was particularly prevalent in Simbirsk and Samara, perhaps because these regions had among the highest levels of peasant owned arable land. In Samara, for example, Buguruslansk executive committee of people’s power declared on 19 May 1917 that they would seize all prisoners of war from the landowners and would transfer their labour to the county committees.32 Many prisoners of war had a surprising degree of personal freedom in 1917, not least because their position as captives of a state at war was blurred by the

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revolutionary rhetoric of proletarian solidarity and civil rights for all. The Minster of War Alexander Guchkov’s circular on 16 April 1917 reiterated the appalling conditions of Russian prisoners of war held in Germany and demanded that prisoners of war be treated as captives.33 In practice, close supervision of prisoners of war was difficult, not least because they were usually stationed in small groups in rural areas.34 Local government officials submitted numerous reports of prisoners of war escaping or of enjoying too much freedom around their billets. The Nizhegorod provincial commissar sent a note round the militia captains and district commissars noting the ‘epidemic’ of prisoner of war escapes. There was no clear central system for supervising prisoners of war, and the commissar himself did not know how many were in the area, or what they were doing.35 In Spassk district, Kazan, measures had to be taken in June to restore order because of the ‘excesses’ of prisoners of war stationed in the town.36 Though it was not stated specifically, ‘excesses’ in this case probably referred to merrymaking and sleeping with soldiers’ wives. We rarely hear the voices of the prisoners of war themselves in the narratives of revolution. Where we do, it is often in praise of Russia’s revolution, or requesting access to the revolutionary free press. Austrian prisoners of war working in a nearby factory attended the May Day celebrations held in Kliucha, Kazan province; ‘One of the prisoners of war held up a red flag with tears in his eyes and said that if Germany and Austria did not take the Russian example and overthrow their monarchy, there would be nothing to return home for.’37 Military men, as serving soldiers, on leave, as deserters and as prisoners of war, were a massive presence in the Volga region and shaped the political discourse and the sense of crisis during 1917. We will conclude this consideration of population displacement by looking at the experience and impact of refugees in the Volga region. The Tikhanovs, a Russian Old Believer peasant family, sought refuge in Saratov in 1915. They had travelled an extraordinary 1,800 kilometres from their home province Suval’skii, in the Polish lands. Of their eight children, six were aged between one and eleven. The Tikhonov family’s journey was replicated by tens of thousands of displaced people who moved into and through the Volga region through the war years. The Volga provinces were a key destination for refugees from the active war zones to the west of the Empire, and groups travelled down the Volga on barges and steam ships. Simbirsk province was home to nearly 40,000 refugees as of 1 January 1916, Samara homed around 30,000 in 1916 and Nizhnii Novgorod had around 20,000.38 Refugees were ‘processed’ at arrival and supervision points, often near the train or steamer stations.39 They were then dispersed across the region unevenly and were settled disproportionately in urban areas, sometimes in residents’ homes. These refugees inspired charitable efforts from local communities, and themselves organized to support and defend their needs. While the situation was tenuous and challenging for displaced peoples throughout the war, their situation deteriorated rapidly in 1917, as food shortages, economic crisis and administrative disorder escalated.40 References to refugees from official and newspaper sources in the Volga region between March and May 1917 were generally sympathetic. The majority Tatar district Tsarevokokshaisk in Kazan province, for example, requested in May that refugee allowances be increased because the refugees were in a ‘piteous state’.41

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By summer 1917, however, refugees faced an increasingly hostile environment; in July 1917, local government in Tsarevokokshaisk petitioned for the removal of refugees, despite having been sympathetic to them just two months earlier.42 Increasing hostility towards refugees exposed the ways in which food shortages and overcrowding pinched local communities and incomers alike. The arrival of refugees in the region had a profound impact on local communities. Overcrowding and inadequate resourcing facilitated the spread of disease. There were cases of typhus in Saratov among refugees in 1915, and the epidemic escalated at the start of 1917 because of food shortages, a partial closure of public bathhouses because of fuel shortages, and inadequate medical supplies.43 Refugees housed in a district in Saratov town known as ‘Bezhensk town’ petitioned Saratov Town Council in April 1917, asking for supplies of provisions, especially sugar, flour and soap, and warning of poor hygiene as a result of overcrowding.44 Things clearly did not improve  – by August 1917, the Saratov committee for the assistance of Russian refugees reported that the waste pipes from Bezhensk town were blocked and overflowing, and caused filth to gush all along the street to the tram stop.45 By July 1917, the situation was critical for many of the region’s refugees. The sense of crisis evoked by food shortages caused local communities to withdraw support from newcomers to their areas and demand their removal. Local government in Nizhegorod province proposed in September that the 63,000 refugees in the province be moved by barge to the neighbouring provinces of Viatka, Ufimsk and Simbirsk.46 Everyday life, and the shape of the revolutionary year itself, was profoundly shaped by the interactions between Volga citizens and mobile populations. The points of tension between local communities and the colossal numbers of incomers into the region enable us to recreate the sense of crisis that developed in the region through 1917. While this tension was intimately connected to the course of the First World War, and the political developments that unfolded in Petrograd, it also developed its own dynamic, forged by relationships between mobile populations and local communities and strained by the economic crises of 1917.

GOVERNING THE COUNTRYSIDE On 19 October 1917, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Aleksei Nikitin, wrote to the now War Minister Verkhovskii, and asked him to send mounted troops to suppress the peasant movement in our five Volga provinces.47 This intention to use soldiers against the home civilian population reflects the severity of the crisis in governance that this region faced. It also reminds us that the 1917 revolution was not a single turn of power, but rather reflected an ongoing series of multiple, multi-faceted regionally and locally defined revolutions, as the power of the political centre melted away, and multiple different agents sought to define their own revolutions. This section will look at the areas of food supplies and land use to explore why the region posed such a challenge to the Provisional Government’s attempts to govern. The economy of the Volga region was dominated by agriculture, and 90 per cent of the population was categorized as ‘peasants’. Peasant was a legal category (soslovie, or estate) used by the Imperial Russian state. While we usually associate

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peasants with occupation (farming in various forms), an individual could be legally categorized as a peasant but work in a town as a factory worker, or be conscripted into the army as a soldier, or be engaged primarily in trade. What agriculture entailed varied enormously according to the soil types and traditions of the areas – handicrafts, trade, small industry and seasonal migration were all baked into the lived experience of the Volga region. Some areas saw heavy in-migration of agricultural workers during harvest time, especially Samara and Saratov; 38,000 hired hands were employed in Samara during 1917.48 Other areas were reliant solely on local family labour and did not have much outside hired labour. The nature of land use was, then, defined at a very local level by the geography of the area, and the traditions and history of ownership and handicrafts. While political developments and shifts in central policy did provide certain punctuations and cues, these local variations defined the shape of the revolutionary year for many rural Volga residents. We cannot reflect and explore every layer of individual and local experience, but we can make some broader observations about the shape and nature of rural revolutions, which help us to understand why national government was left impotent in its attempts to shape the revolutionary narrative. The Volga region’s role as a grain producer was of critical political and strategic significance in 1917. Of the sixty-one regions and provinces across the Russian Empire, only twenty-five were categorized as ‘surplus’ provinces  – that is, those areas that produced more grain than residents consumed. Of our five provinces, Nizhegorod was the only deficit province, while Samara was one of the top two largest surplus producers in the Empire.49 The First World War gravely disrupted the usual mechanisms of grain trade. First, the needs of providing for the army significantly increased demand for food products. Second, transport of provisions around Russia, from surplus to deficit provinces and from the south to the north and west, proved to be a significant challenge in wartime. Finally, the mechanisms of trade were disrupted by government intervention in grain prices and movement, and because of shortages of consumer goods available for producers to buy. In 1917, a combination of trade breakdown, government policies, lower sown areas and greater demand for food (from the army) meant that many surplus provinces faced shortages of their own. The provision of grain for deficit areas and the army proved to be one of the Provisional Government’s biggest political challenges. The rural residents of the Volga region played a massive role in these challenges – their responses to the grain crisis played a deciding role in one of the Provisional Government’s biggest political failures. The tsarist regime had restricted its involvement in wartime food supply to supplying the army, and fixed grain prices only on army supplies.50 The Provisional Government took over the tsarist government’s provisioning structures in March 1917, but vastly expanded their scope and superseded the needs of supplying the army with the needs of supplying the country at large. There had been consensus for a grain monopoly, with fixed prices on all grain, not just that supplied to the army, before the February Revolution.51 A comparison of the government’s fixed grain prices with market values, however, immediately reveals the problems such a system faced. The Provisional Government established its first fixed price on 25 March 1917.

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Market prices were higher than the fixed prices in the mid-Volga region and increased more rapidly in the course of 1917 than almost anywhere outside the industrial region and Belorussia.52 These figures show the chronological dynamic of the food crisis, which became progressively worse in the course of 1917. By the autumn of 1917, there were widespread food shortages across our Volga provinces, alongside a failure of the surplus regions to meet their export targets. There were reports of grain being used to brew alcohol in Saratov and Simbirsk, of unauthorized sales of food products at inflated prices in Kazan, opposition to the grain census in Saratov, Simbirsk and Kazan and violence towards provisions committee representatives in Saratov, Nizhegorod and Kazan. In Simbirsk, military units were ordered from the centre to seize grain by force because the local community refused to release their reserves. Simbirsk’s provincial commissar refused to allow the export of grain.53 The Volga region’s spiralling prices came in part from the intermingling of surplus and deficit regions. Kazan, with its unrealizable surpluses, and Nizhegorod, with its unfulfilled wants, were located alongside one another. Individuals referred to as ‘walkers’ and ‘sack men’, because of the bags they carried to lug grain home, were commissioned by communities with food deficits to go and buy grain independently in neighbouring districts. These ‘sack men’ between provinces and districts characterized relations between the two provinces, and provide evidence of the ways in which lived experience of individuals transgressed the carefully laid-out plans of the state.54 Alongside formal requests from one provincial commissar to another to provide grain, and personal letters from starving Nizhegorod citizens printed in the local press appealing to the Kazan peasants to release their grain, Kazan was inundated with individuals seeking to buy grain. A telegram from Kazan’s provincial provisions administration to the provincial commissar on 5 July encapsulated the hopelessness of trying to control grain movement: Situation desperate. Militia powerless to struggle with the speculators and needy from Nizhegorod province. This morning a crowd of several hundred people gathered at the building of the provisions administration demanding distribution of grain from town reserves. Disorder threatened. We ask for help. Please send soldiers rapidly.55 The grain purchasing commission that was established in Nizhnii Novgorod to buy grain from neighbouring provinces failed to deliver, as the neighbouring Volga provinces refused to cooperate, leaving Nizhegorod acutely short of foodstuffs.56 The breakdown of trading relationships in the Volga region had profound and fundamental consequences for the course of political developments in Petrograd. The Provisional Government’s inability to secure reliable supplies of grain to the army and to deficit areas led to shortages and fear of hunger. This undermined trust in government and left it exposed and vulnerable to alternative political narratives. In this light, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 was unwittingly facilitated by the refusal of rural communities in the Volga to support Provisional Government policies on food. In this exploration of food supplies, local action, defined by local concerns, shaped the political alternatives and outcomes available at the centre. Moving on to

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land use in 1917, we see the same narrative of local actions defining regional and national outcomes. The land question dominated peasant revolutionary discourse and priorities in the Volga region during 1917 and saw some of the highest levels of reported peasant disorder in 1917.57 Rural communities across the Volga region interpreted the collapse of the Romanov dynasty as an opportunity and justification for them to re-balance their access to and use of land and resources. The norms of private land ownership and the rights associated with it were challenged and transgressed repeatedly through 1917. Land use evoked emotional and heartfelt responses from rural communities in the Volga region that transcended economic need and political demands. This appeal from a peasant community in Tsarevokokshaisk district, Kazan province, encapsulates the centrality of the land question in the Volga’s rural narratives: The most important question … is the life of the peasantry and their riches. Their riches are the land. A peasant without land is like a person without hands.58 Around 70 per cent of land in Samara, Saratov and Simbirsk was laid to arable, as was around 50 per cent of the land in Kazan and Nizhegorod.59 Both the Provisional Government and the soviets demanded that peasants wait for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly for a decision on how land use would be re-shaped by the revolution. Much of the Volga population did not accept this policy of waiting. Individuals and communities tested and contested their rights to the use of land and natural resources. Peasant farming in the Volga region was dominated by communal land holding. The commune was an organization that enabled collective land holding and responsibility for taxation and dues, and which had been reinforced by the terms of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. In the commune, while individual households owned their own homestead and garden, arable land was owned and managed by the commune, and households were allocated land from the communal land fund according to need. This land would be occasionally repartitioned to reflect changes in households’ size and need. The commune provided risk sharing and collective resource management for peasant farmers. It also constituted an important cultural and political space in rural life. The shape of peasant protest and action during the 1905 revolution indicated that the commune facilitated peasant collective action and undermined respect for private property. Overall, a significant proportion of peasant revolutionary activity during 1917 was framed collectively, as communes or village communities acted together.60 Reforms to peasant land holdings were attempted by Peter Stolypin as Minister of Interior in 1906, which sought to reinforce private peasant landowning and fracture the power of the commune. These reforms led to some peasant households ‘separating’ from the commune and attempting to farm independently. Separators were targets for communal peasant action throughout 1917, whether they were pressured back into the commune, had ‘surplus’ lands requisitioned or were driven from their land. These attacks confirmed communal peasants’ desires to maintain traditional land-holding patterns, and to resist the changes of the last fifteen years.61 In Alatyrsk district, Simbirsk province, the peasants of Mishukovsk county redistributed

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separators’ land, threatened arson and did not permit them to graze their cattle on communal pasture.62 In Kazan province, there were numerous reports that communes seized separators’ land.63 Separators from Makar’evsk district came in person to the provincial meeting of district commissars, to complain about threats and violence against them by peasants from the commune. Despite a supportive hearing at this meeting, reports of violence against separators continued into October.64 Provisional Government, soviets and local government were unanimous in their support for separators who worked their own land but had limited means available to intervene on their behalf. Communal attacks on separators were not simply anarchic assaults on the better off. They reflected deeper notions about justice, land holding and society. The peasant assembly (skhod) of Zakharav village, Semenovsk district, Nizhegorod province, declared on 17 April that there would be no more separate landholding in the commune, but allowed separators to return their land to communal use only after the harvest of the spring sowing they had already planted, and that they would be guaranteed the use of their pastures for one year. This allowed for a period of transition for separators but was emphatic in concluding that after the transition period, ‘all separator land will again be made communal’.65 The patterns of peasant action in this area share characteristics shown in other regional and national studies of peasant direct action, which included seizure of land and wood, attacks on peasant separators and enthusiasm to ‘validate’ peasant actions and infractions. The nature of this disorder was shaped by historical and geographic context, the quality and type of land locally, the history of serfdom in the region and the extent of rented and privately owned land. These general trends, when explored more closely, reflected local conditions, and varied from district to district within each province. The seizure of privately held land by peasants is an enduring image of 1917, but the stereotype of violent seizure and even destruction of landlords’ property was relatively rare. Across the region, 85 per cent of arable land was already in peasant hands before the revolution.66 Much rural tension was between peasant communities, both across villages and within village communities. While violence and hostility towards noble landowners was a feature of some rural action, it was not the dominant form of activity. Peasants utilized a range of pseudo-legal and intimidating tactics to gain use of land, and often acted rationally in their attempts to resolve land relations in their favour. They utilized the language of revolutionary rights and citizens’ norms to justify and vindicate their own behaviour.67 The Volga region had pockets of noble owned arable land, much of which was rented out to local peasants. The setting of rents was an important area of revolutionary action and contestation, and as with the use of land, peasant communities used the revolution to re-shape relationships, and to themselves set rental prices which they regarded as fair. For example, in Anastasovsk, Kurmyshsk district, Simbirsk province, the county committee declared that it was taking the land of the local landowners Brandt and Panov, because they had refused to agree an acceptable rent, and that they themselves would name a fair rental price.68 Peasant communities often sought written approval and affirmation either from local authorities or from landowners. The President of Nikolaevsk district council

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in Samara province reported on 26 June 1917 that there had not been any seizures of land or property in the district, but that a full inventory of all private land and property had been taken, and that this property would be redistributed according to need around the community.69 A report from Vasil’sk district, Nizhegorod province, in April commented on the careful list making and organization that accompanied peasant demands and actions: ‘The population made up a list of private landowners’ provision reserves, calculating according to them what they, the peasants, were to receive in their decree.’70 These reports make us critically reflect on what we mean when we talk about peasant disorder – local government and local communities went about the business of counting and redistributing goods and land in a systematic way, which was far from the burning manor houses of our imagination. There are multiple reports in Kazan of peasants acquiring written validation of land transfer from ‘harassed landlords’.71 On 26 April, Pavlovsk village commune in Khvalynsk district, Saratov province, declared that it had requisitioned 240 desiatins (648 acres) of haymaking land from the landowner Ia.A. Mironov, forbade him from grazing his cattle on the hayfields, and to top it off fined him the steep sum of 150 roubles ‘for incorrect behaviour towards Pavlovsk executive committee of people’s power’.72 In this case, the village community sought to underline the new order with the imposition of a fine. This demonstrates the ways in which revolution was sometimes brought to the village with a pen not a pitchfork. In the enactment of these ‘pseudo-legal’ decisions, peasants often used coercion by means of threatened violence. The peasants of Ivanovko village in Kazan district, for example, made a formal declaration in May that the landowner Bashkirov had agreed, in the presence of the president of the county executive committee, to transfer all his land to peasants except for five desiatins (13.5 acres) for his own use, and that he would supply the peasants with grain. He was to be paid with part of the 1918 harvest.73 Bashkirov, however, in a letter to the Union of Agriculturalists, asserted that the peasants had forced him to agree to this transfer, and that he feared a beating or murder if he had refused. Though the president of the county executive committee destroyed the protocol on 19 May, peasants demanded that the agreement be remade.74 The actions of peasants from Aryshkadza village, Kazan province, is a typical example of peasant seizure of land by threat of violence rather than by its actual application. Acting under the auspices of the village assembly (skhod), Aryshkadza peasants declared on 26 August that the land of the local owner Korsakov would be sown by them for winter grain, and that Korsakov’s employees had one day to leave the property. The peasants worked the fields the following day.75 Landowners were virtually powerless to resist incursions on their property, though they protested vociferously to regional and central government. The Provisional Government supported private landholders’ claims in principle, but in practice could not prevent peasant incursions. Local government tended to be more hostile to landowners’ claims and would not allow them to hold arms for self-defence. In one district in Kazan, the military committee issued a decree in the spring announcing that all landowners were to be disarmed and left only with small arms for hunting.76

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Applied violence was more likely when there was a history of bad relations between peasants and a landowner. These poor relations often stemmed from the terms of emancipation, as we see in this appeal from residents of Staroe Vsevolodchino village, a community of around a thousand people in Saratov province. They wrote to the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers’ deputies at the very first news of the revolution, on 16 March 1917. In their letter they outlined the grounds of their deep-seated hostility and grievance towards their local landowner. When released from serfdom, they received only a tiny parcel of land on which their homes and gardens were sited. They had to rent all their plough land from their former owner Lev Semenovich Indiakov. The Indiakovs doubled their rent in 1916 from 15 to 30 roubles per desiatin. This ‘threatened them with starvation’ as they had no access to other land.77 It was in these contexts that violent action was most likely. The nature of landscape across the region defined the shape of rural protest. Nizhegorod and Kazan provinces saw very high rates of illicit woodcutting, because the provinces were heavily forested (32 per cent in Kazan, and 23 per cent in Nizhegorod), while Samara was only 5 per cent wooded.78 Several thousand telegrams reporting agrarian unrest in Nizhegorod province referred predominantly to woodcutting.79 Woodcutting did not occur at specific times of year, as seen in the seizure of arable and meadowland, but could take place whenever the cutter had time and inclination. Non-peasant woodland became the prime target for peasant seizure. Fuel shortages offered a prosaic explanation for woodcutting. Laishevsk district, Kazan, the district commissar appealed to the provincial commissar on 27 April to permit some wood cutting, to satisfy the population’s urgent needs. He warned that there would be major disturbances because of winter fuel shortages if measures were not taken to ameliorate the situation.80 In some areas peasants cut wood in order to stockpile or sell. In Nizhegorod, much of the population urgently needed money in order to purchase grain at 1917’s ever-inflating prices, which made the felling of wood for sale particularly attractive. Whole villages participated in woodcutting in Semenovsk district and cut wood for sale as well as for personal use. Peasants resolutely ignored the appeals and imprecations of the local land committee, and the militia was unable to cope.81 As with the seizure of private land, regional administrators recognized that regulation rather than unenforceable prohibition was the best way to deal with the crisis. They were unable to prevent the wanton cutting of wood from private and state woodlands. As in other aspects of rural governance, few practical measures were available to protect woodland. xxxxxxxxx By October 1917, the Provisional Government was ordering military troops in to control the Volga countryside, as central and regional political authority fractured, seeming irreparably. Local communities both capitalized on and engendered this fracture through their transgressions of private property in a range of forms, and through their unwillingness to support the state grain monopoly. We are forced to question the very notion of peasant disorder and unrest, however. Local communities wantonly or discreetly rejected national and regional directives to remain calm and

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to leave decisions on land for the Constituent Assembly. They acted, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, to make their own revolutions. They demonstrated an acute understanding of revolutionary narratives but sought to make these narratives in their own mould. This left private landowners and separators dispossessed and vulnerable, but empowered local communities. This chapter has emphasized the local and regional specificity of rural politics and crisis, but the weakening of the links between centre and provinces was an empirewide phenomenon through 1917. Rural protest and concerns were locally defined and directed, but across the Empire their common feature was the leaching of power and authority from central authorities to local actors. The Volga’s role as a food producer for Russia’s cities and armies meant that the region took on significant strategic importance, but the disintegration of structures of central power there was mirrored across the Empire. Indeed, the loss of power from centre to localities was also a defining feature of the civil war that raged in Russia from 1918 till 1921. Lenin’s decree in November 1917 announcing the transfer of private land to the hands of peasant communities only provided formal recognition to a process of transfer that had already largely taken place in the course of 1917. Features of the population churn described in this chapter were seen all over the Empire to various degrees. Mass mobilization was a national phenomenon, and reserve garrisons were stationed in all the European provinces of Russia. Refugees and soldiers in various guises were present in significant numbers across European Russia. The Volga region was however one of the more acutely impacted noncombatant regions in the Empire  – refugees were directed there down the river routes, and soldiers of all hues were intensely concentrated as reserve soldiers, as labouring prisoners of war, and on leave or as deserters making their way home. Our glimpse into lived experience in the Volga region during 1917 reframes the well-known political radicalization that developed through 1917 by giving a sense of the everyday challenges presented by the political, economic and military crises besetting revolutionary Russia.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The Ukrainian revolution in 1917: Successful failure NATALIYA KIBITA, UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

THREE REVOLUTIONS: UKRAINIAN, RUSSIAN AND BOLSHEVIK On 19 March 1917, about a hundred thousand people poured into the streets of Kyiv to join a Ukrainian demonstration: ‘a grand explosion of national feeling, demonstration of national feeling, praise to the liberation Revolution’.1 Less than a year later, when by then independent Ukraine faced an existential threat, no thousands of people leapt to her defence. Enthusiasm and confidence turned into apathy and despair. The first information about revolutionary events in Petrograd reached Kyiv in the afternoon on 28 February. The next day, the Committee of the South-Western front of the All-Russian Union of towns received a telegram from commissar of the Provisional Government Aleksandr Bublikov that confirmed the rumours and announced that power in Russia now lay with the Provisional Government. On 3 March, the news appeared in Kyiv’s newspapers.2 Revolution started spreading in the nine provinces in the South of Russia that would in less than a year be formed into a new state, the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), or Ukraine. In Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, the city dumas and zemstvos formed councils of united civic organizations and executive committees. Mirroring the dual power in Petrograd, soviets of workers and soldiers’ deputies, dominated by Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were formed as well. During 3 and 4 March, a group of prominent Kyiv-based Ukrainian liberal moderates from the Society of Ukrainian Progressives (TUP) that included, among others, Evhen Chykalenko, Serhii Efremov and Dmytro Doroshenko, joined by students, Ukrainian Social Democrats headed by Dmytro Antonovych, and representatives of other public and professional organizations decided to create their own All-Ukrainian national organization called Tsentral’na Rada, or Central

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Council (Central Rada hereafter), a platform to unite Ukrainians in the effort to secure cultural autonomy for Ukrainians. A prominent historian and the leader of the Ukrainian national movement Mykhailo Hrushevsky was elected Chairman of the Central Rada. By June 1917, the Central Rada was prepared to claim territorial autonomy for Ukraine in a federative Russia. Since the end of the 1980s, Ukrainian historians have agreed to interpret all events on the Ukrainian territory between 1917 and 1920 (1921, 1922) as part of the Ukrainian revolution.3 Indeed, as Yekelchyk observed, thanks to the Ukrainian national movement all forces that operated in Ukraine’s territory in 1917–20 had to account for the Ukrainian revolution and ‘formulate their attitude to the national rights of the Ukrainian people’.4 However, if we approach the revolutionary events in the territory of Ukraine as not being determined by their geography or the existence of the Ukrainian movement, but by the number of competing authorities and the aims or policies that these authorities pursued, then beginning with the moment the Central Rada announced its existence and lasting until 7 November 1917, the population of Ukraine was submitted to at least two revolutions, Ukrainian and Russian. Those who viewed the Provisional Government as the only state authority did not believe that major changes should be introduced into the existing administrative structure and consequently did not support the claims of Ukrainians for autonomy, those people would join the Russian revolution.5 Those who believed that the time had come to change the administrative structure of the Russian state and that Ukrainians had the right to self-governance would join the Ukrainian revolution. The Provisional Government took over the existing provincial (guberniya) administrations and appointed its commissars. Whereas the supporters of the Ukrainian revolution formed new Ukrainian local rady, or councils, and committees all over Ukraine. The priorities of the Provisional Government and the Central Rada, and the local authorities or organizations loyal to them, diverged. The Provisional Government sought to postpone the imperial reform and instead to focus on bringing victory for Russia in the First World War. The Central Rada sought to unite Ukrainian lands into one administrative unit, securing autonomy for Ukraine in the new democratic and federative Russia, and to negotiate peace.6 On 25 October, the Bolsheviks removed the Provisional Government. In Russia, the Russian revolution ended. Like the Russian democratic revolution, the Bolshevik revolution would spread to Ukrainian lands. However, the Ukrainian revolution would continue. After a number of small and large wars between the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian state, the Whites and Ukrainian peasant republics (the so-called Greens) that would last until 1921, the Ukrainian revolution would fade away. Witnesses, participants and scholars would later argue that the capture of Ukraine by Bolsheviks in 1920 was the ultimate proof of the failure of the Ukrainian revolution. The only consolation was that after years of exhausting and devastating wars, the Bolsheviks had no other choice but to accept Ukraine as one administrative unit and even acknowledge, if only formally and half-heartedly, the fact that Ukrainians were not Russians. In 1919 Lenin would agree to create the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.

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A NOTE ON HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography has never treated these revolutions equally. Soviet historiography, while paying due attention to the Russian revolution in Petrograd and the politics of the Provisional Government, did not focus on the activities of the commissars of the Provisional Government in the Ukrainian provinces, or the executive committees that acted on its behalf.7 After the fall of the Soviet Union, attention to the Russian revolution in Ukraine increased; however, it still remains the least studied revolution,8 not least because some aspects of the Russian revolution are studied today through the prism of the Ukrainian revolution. The best example would be the rural revolution, a ‘component part’ of the Russian revolution. The particularities of the Ukrainian rural revolution are often interpreted in isolation from the rural revolution elsewhere in the Russian Empire.9 At the same time, since around the 2000s, there has been an increasing interest in the functioning of zemstvos, dumas and local executive committees, democratized organs of local administration of the Provisional Government, as well as the Russian-speaking cities of Southern and Eastern Ukraine that remained under the jurisdiction of the Provisional Government until November 1917.10 The Ukrainian and Bolshevik revolutions got the most attention from scholars. Soviet historiography prioritized the Bolshevik revolution in Ukraine, while viewing it as an integral part of the Russian socialist revolution.11 The Ukrainian revolution, labelled by Soviet historians as ‘nationalist-bourgeois’, was mentioned. Furthermore, as Myroslav Shkandrij explains, early Bolshevik historians who wrote in the 1920s ‘described [its] complex story with candor’ and a certain open-mindedness.12 However, as the regime solidified, the significance of the Ukrainian revolution in the history of Ukraine was reduced to a ‘footnote’.13 Western historiography also viewed the Bolshevik revolution in Ukraine as integral to the revolutionary developments elsewhere in the Soviet space; however, it more readily acknowledged the Ukrainian revolution.14 The memory of the Ukrainian revolution of course did not die out. Quite to the contrary, the Ukrainian national revolution was studied and debated by Western historians, mostly Ukrainian émigrés. Based on memories, memoirs and documents brought by Ukrainians who fled Ukraine scholars systematized as much knowledge about the events on the Ukrainian lands in the period between 1917 and 1920 as they could without access to the archival materials that remained on the territory of the Soviet Union. They offered different interpretations of certain aspects of the revolution but, as Mark Baker observed, they all worked within the framework that underlined the national approach to history: ‘whatever promotes the national cause is thereby historically relevant’. All other phenomena and events were ignored.15 The first efforts to change the approach to studying the Ukrainian revolution within Ukraine were made at the end of the 1980s.16 With the fall of the Soviet Union and communist ideology, historians were free to drop the class-struggle paradigm. However, historiography, certainly in Ukraine, did not become immune to politics. Quite on the contrary, the political realities of the 1990s, when Ukraine was asserting its statehood, pushed historiography to adopt the paradigm of national

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state-building, often ‘to the detriment of an authentic social and labour history, or the transnational history of Eastern Europe’.17 Today, the Ukrainian revolution is generally interpreted as the struggle for an independent Ukraine.18 Scholars working on the Ukrainian revolution readily accept the effect of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik wars, or the Russian Civil War on the radicalization of politics and the evolution of Ukrainian political identity. Nonetheless, the same authors, as observed by Mark von Hagen, insist that the revolutionary process in Ukraine was different ‘and – in many senses – challenged the course of the revolution in Russia’.19

UKRAINIAN REVOLUTION IN 1917 From day one of its existence, the Central Rada did not hide its agenda: to obtain recognition from the Provisional Government that the Ukrainian people had the right to organize their public life. In their first public address on 9 March ‘To the Ukrainian people’, Ukrainian leaders announced that they represented ethnic Ukrainians, that they recognized the supreme authority of the All-Russian General Assembly and expressed certitude that the General Assembly would allow the Ukrainian people to run its affairs. In the meantime, they called on the Ukrainian people ‘to form political, cultural and economic unions[…]and elect Ukrainians to administrative posts’. The immediate task was to introduce Ukrainian in all schools, courts and governmental administrations.20 On 19 March, four days after the demonstration to celebrate the ‘Holiday of the Revolution’ that was held in Kyiv on 16 March and was welcomed by the Kyiv Executive Committee of Civic Organisations, the Central Rada called on Ukrainians to participate in the general Ukrainian demonstration that same day and to send their representatives to the first All-Ukrainian National Congress on 6–8 April.21 The demonstration and the All-Ukrainian Congress were a great success for the new Ukrainian leaders. Some 100,000 people participated in the Ukrainian demonstration on 19 March. Whether it was due to the enthusiasm of large crowds, or because he had already decided to take the agenda of the Ukrainian national movement further, but already when addressing the assembled crowd at the Sophia square, the leader of the Central Rada Hrushevsky called on his audience to prepare for Ukraine’s autonomy.22 The assembly passed a resolution that supported the Provisional Government, demanded that it recognize ‘wide autonomy of the Ukrainian land’, and ‘immediate[ly] conv[ened] the [All-Russian] General Assembly to validate autonomy for Ukraine’. The assembly, called viche, instructed the Ukrainian Central Rada to start negotiations with the Provisional Government.23 The All-Ukrainian National Congress, attended by at least 700 voting delegates representing all Ukrainian provinces and various organizations, political parties and local authorities ‘from within as well as outside of the Ukraine’ and another some six hundred non-voting delegates, provided the Central Rada leaders with as much legitimacy as was possible in revolutionary times and the mandate to seek autonomy for Ukraine in Petrograd.24

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In early spring, the Central Rada had reasons to expect the support of the Provisional Government for its claims. After all, the revolution was democratic, the Ukrainian people expressed their will to the extent possible under the conditions of a mid-war effort with no scheduled elections. Furthermore, the Kyiv provincial commissar of the Provisional Government Mikhail Akimovich Sukovkin spoke at the National Congress in support of the Ukrainian national movement.25 A few days after the National Congress, the Executive committee of the Central Rada received a telegram from the minister of finance in the Provisional Government M.I. Tereshchenko addressed to the National Congress, asking its delegates to help raise funds for the ‘liberty loan’. The very fact that the Minister of Finance addressed the congress indicated that Petrograd recognized that the Central Rada was a political actor in Ukraine, at the very least. The Provisional Government further acknowledged the authority of the Central Rada when at the end of April, it appointed member of the Central Rada D.I. Doroshenko to be the Krai (regional) Commissar of Galicia and Bukovyna.26 Yet the positive dynamic of what promised to be a cooperation turned into a struggle between the leaders of the Ukrainian movement on the one hand and the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers on the other. In May, the Central Rada sent a delegation to Petrograd to ask the Provisional Government to recognize the legitimacy of the claim of the Ukrainian people to have political, economic and cultural autonomy and to agree to the creation of a Territorial Council consisting of representatives of nine Ukrainian provinces and chaired by a Territorial commissar who would also represent the Provisional Government in the Territorial Council. The Provisional Government, however, refused to negotiate. The Petrograd Soviet did not support the request of the Central Rada either.27 Petrograd’s refusal of what was believed to be a just and fair request was not well received by Ukrainian peasants and soldiers. Beginning with the National Congress, Ukrainian leaders presented autonomy and the new distribution of power between the All-Russian and yet to be formed Ukrainian authorities as the key to the land issue.28 At the First All-Ukrainian Peasant Congress on 28 May–2 June 1917, Mykhailo Hrushevsky emphasized the centrality of Ukraine’s autonomy for the economic, national and political well-being of the people and the land reform in particular.29 So the Peasant Congress issued its support for Ukraine’s autonomy.30 Soldiers expressed support for Ukraine’s autonomy at their First All-Ukrainian Military Congress on 18–21 May. Armed with the appropriate resolutions of the two congresses, the leaders of the Central Rada felt confident to officially declare their intention to prepare for autonomy. On 10 June, they issued the First Manifesto (this and subsequent manifestos are often referred to as ‘universal’) which announced that despite the absence of an authorization from the Provisional Government, the Ukrainian people should proceed with preparations for autonomy. More importantly, certainly from the perspective of peasants, the First Manifesto reflected the Central Rada’s intention to make sure, still through the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, that the

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land issue was solved by Ukrainians. On 27 June, the Central Rada presented its first executive organ, the General Secretariat, under the leadership of a prominent intellectual Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The General Secretariat was instructed to prepare Ukraine for autonomy. Creation of secretariats for internal affairs, finance, the judiciary, food, land, education, international affairs, work, roads, military affairs, trade and industry indicated the areas where Ukrainian leaders sought policy-making powers. The Secretariat for Land had to correctly organize local land committees and councils of peasant deputies. Based on the resolutions of the Peasant Congress, it had to prepare a draft land law that would include a provision to separate the jurisdiction of the Russian parliament and a proposed Ukrainian assembly, the Seim.31 A response from the Provisional Government followed shortly. After negotiations between a delegation from the Provisional Government that arrived in Kyiv on 29 June and the leaders of the Central Rada and separate negotiations between the Petrograd delegation and the non-Ukrainian democracy in Kyiv, the Provisional Government recognized the General Secretariat as a Kraevoi, or regional, representative organ of the Provisional Government.32 The formal recognition of the General Secretariat by the Provisional Government, publicly announced in the Second Manifesto on 3 July 1917, did not put the end to the division of power between Petrograd and Kyiv. Quite on the contrary, until the last days of the Provisional Government the General Secretariat would try to fill its formal status with de facto authority.33 The first conflict was in July, when Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians together drafted a new Statute on Supreme Power in Ukraine. Among other things, the new Statute subordinated all state organs in nine Ukrainian provinces to the General Secretariat. Laws in Ukraine were to be written by the Central Rada, the Provisional Government would only have to sanction them.34 The Provisional Government  – now under the leadership of Kerensky  – rejected the Statute and instead on 4 August issued a ‘Temporary Instruction of the Provisional Government to the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada’ that limited the authority of the General Secretariat to five instead of nine provinces and reduced the number of general secretaries from fourteen to seven, four of whom had to be non-Ukrainians. The General Secretariat had to submit every draft law first to the Provisional Government for approval. Local state organs were to contact the General Secretariat on issues that fall within its jurisdiction, but the General Secretariat was obligated to consult the Provisional Government and only then ‘pass the directives and orders of the latter to local administrations’.35 Instead of a policy-making body, the General Secretariat was reduced to a ‘messenger’ of the Provisional Government. More importantly, it was now accountable to the Russian government rather than to the Central Rada.36 After the Bolshevik seizure of power, on 7 November the Central Rada felt free and indeed obligated, considering the anti-democratic nature of the Bolshevik action, to issue the Third Manifesto in which it declared Ukraine a People’s Republic, an autonomous part of the Russian Federation that was yet to be formed. The Third Manifesto revoked private property rights on the lands of the so-called netrudovi hospodarstva, or non-labour ‘economies’ that included privately owned lands, and

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transferred these lands to the toiling people without compensation. The last word on the land reform was left to the All-Ukrainian Constituent Assembly. Until then, the lands were to be distributed by the land committees based on a law that was yet to be drafted by the General Secretariat of Land Affairs. On 21 November, the General Secretariat decided to begin armistice negotiations on behalf of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and in agreement with the Allies. By then, Ukrainians wanted peace at once, with no regard for the terms. However, the General Secretariat did not act on its 21 November decision. It believed that ‘the peace could be signed only by the power recognised all over Russia’.37

STRUGGLING TO CONSOLIDATE THE REVOLUTION Similar to the popular uplift in spring 1917, the proclamation of Ukraine’s autonomy in November was greeted with numerous meetings, celebrations and demonstrations, ‘illustrating the second peak of the Ukrainian national-political life in 1917’.38 The General Secretariat had not yet fully asserted its authority in all nine Ukrainian provinces when a new conflict over power ensued, now with the Bolshevik Government, Sovnarkom. The Central Rada refused to recognize the Bolsheviks as heading an All-Russian Government, whereas the Sovnarkom declared the Central Rada ‘bourgeois’ and denied its legitimacy. By the beginning of December, they ‘were in conflict over control of military affairs’, and about the Central Rada’s assistance to the Don Cossacks under the ‘Kadet Kaledin’. The Bolsheviks viewed the Don Cossacks as a threat to their power ambitions.39 On 4 December, the Sovnarkom issued an ultimatum to the Central Rada where it demanded, among other things, that the Central Rada stop disorganizing the common front by recalling Ukrainian divisions; stop letting troops leave the front to relocate to the Don, the Urals or other places without permission of the Russian High Command; start providing assistance to Bolshevik troops in their struggle against the counter-revolutionary Don Cossacks; and stop disarming soviet troops and Workers Red Guards in Ukraine. If the Central Rada did not fulfil these demands, the Sovnarkom would consider it in a state of open war.40 The General Secretariat refused to fulfil the demands of the ultimatum. The relationship between the Central Rada and the Sovnarkom began to rapidly deteriorate. The negotiations between the Sovnarkom and the General Secretariat were still ongoing when, in mid-December, the Bolshevik and Ukrainian military detachments began sporadic fighting.41 In the meantime, on 7 December, the Sovnarkom began peace negotiations with the Central Powers on behalf of Russia as a whole. At this point, the Central Rada felt it had no choice but to also consider negotiations with the Central Powers. On 9 December, the leaders of the Central Rada instructed the General Secretariat to immediately start drafting provisions for general democratic peace.42 On 12 December, the Central Rada found out that Bolshevik activists in Ukraine had staged a Congress of Ukrainian Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasant Deputies and formed a Ukrainian Soviet Government, the People’s Secretariat. With military struggle against the Bolsheviks in sight, no army of its own and rapidly

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spreading Bolshevization of its troops, at the meeting of the General Secretariat on 26 December Ukrainian SRs insisted that only a declaration of independence could protect Ukraine against Bolshevism. Independent from Russia, Ukraine would be able to sign a peace treaty with the Central Powers and create a Ukrainian army.43 On 11 January 1918, the Central Rada issued its Fourth Manifesto that declared the Ukrainian People’s Republic an independent, free and sovereign state of the Ukrainian people. It informed the population that a Central Rada commission that had been working on the land reform since the Third Manifesto had already drafted a law that would legalize socialization of land, abolish private property rights over land and transfer the land to the toiling people. At its plenary session on 18 January, without any deliberations but with an agreement that a proper discussion would be undertaken later, the Central Rada unanimously voted the draft land reform into a law. Land was socialized, private property rights on land abolished. As promised, land was to be transferred to all toiling people. The reason for the hasty vote was the unfolding Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv and the Bolshevik troops approaching the Ukrainian capital.44 Lack of procedure and the timing of the land law could not but imply that the Central Rada must have believed that the land law would motivate peasants and soldiers to rise in defence of the Ukrainian state and the Central Rada. The appointment of a new Council of People’s Ministers, dominated by the Ukrainian SRs, the party representing Ukrainian peasantry, and under the leadership of Ukrainian Social-Democrat Vsevolod Holubovych, must have been expected to further reinforce the appeal of the Central Rada to peasants and workers. However, the Fourth Manifesto and the Land Law generated a weak response from the population.45 No popular uprising in defence of the Central Rada and its socialist government against Bolshevik troops followed. The contrast between the March 1917 demonstration that welcomed and greeted the Central Rada and the apathy to its destiny in January 1918 was staggering. With no regular army and the  unwillingness of the population to join the ranks of the volunteer army, the Central Rada had no choice but to sign a peace treaty with the Central Powers and humiliate itself by asking its former enemy to defend it. The demise of the Central Rada was yet to follow.46 However, the de facto defeat of the Central Rada happened in January when after almost a year of work in the name of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian people did not defend it, despite that the Central Rada finally connected ‘national and social’, and after Ukrainians reconfirmed their choice for Ukrainian self-governance by giving 77 per cent of votes in the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly at the end of November, i.e. after the Third Manifesto, to Ukrainian parties and only 10 per cent to Bolsheviks.47 Indeed, by January 1918, the land issue, the central issue of the Ukrainian revolution in 1917, lost its urgency for peasants. As far as they were concerned, the Third Manifesto had already granted them the land and Bolsheviks would not take it away: the Sovnarkom’s Decree on the Land declared the same socialization as the Third and Fourth Manifestos.48 Thus, the ongoing war and deep economic crisis, fatigue from fighting and no obvious personal benefits for the peasants if they joined the Ukrainian voluntary army, made apathy a reasonable reaction to the Bolshevik invasion.

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Yet there was another motive for the Ukrainian population to not rise up. Neither peasants, the main power base of the Central Rada, nor Ukrainian workers or bourgeoisie felt that the Bolsheviks were attacking their state. The reasons for this view extended beyond the connection between the social and autonomy, beyond ‘national identity’, or lack thereof.49 ‘Peasants did not lack an identity’, observed Gilley, ‘rather they had one that did not fit into the categories of the Ukrainian nationalists or Bolsheviks and did not translate into acts of class or ethnic solidarity or unswerving support for institutions created by the institutions’.50 By January 1918, neither the Central Rada, nor the Ukrainian government had the trust of its population.51 Without trust in their state, no socialist policies, or consolidated state vertical, could motivate the population to mobilize in its defence. The reason for the broken relationship between the Central Rada and the population was best explained by the General Secretary Vynnychenko himself, after the defeat of the Ukrainian revolution. We knew only one state  – the bourgeois, current state with all its outdated agencies and offices. […] And indeed, how much energy, effort, work, blood and life did we use in order to create … not our statehood, but a statehood that was inimical and pernicious to our nation!52 Indeed, from March 1917, the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement took a top-down centralized approach to state-building. While eagerly embracing the idea of democratization of the power organs since the beginning of the revolution,53 the leaders of the Central Rada aimed not only to organize and lead the revolution, they aimed for a state where the central government would retain centralized control over the periphery. As member of the Central Rada from the Central Committee of the Selians’ka Spilka Tykhon Osadchyĭ explained to the Ukrainian Congress in Chernihiv at the beginning of June: ‘each province should have a provincial Rada that would lead Ukrainian life in the province. Whereas the Central Rada will lead all the provinces through the provincial Radas.’54 After the Provisional Government recognized the Central Rada, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement formulated their views more clearly. In its Declaration on 29 September 1917, the General Secretariat of Ukraine expressed full support for the development of local self-administration and the expansion of the competences of the local organs. Yet at the same time, it placed ‘democratic organs of local selfadministration’ under the supervision and leadership of the General Secretariat of Internal Affairs. The General Secretariat made a provision for ‘Vil’ne kozatstvo’, or Free Cossacks, as local armed formations that would install law and order, but ‘correctly organised, organisationally linked’ to the General Secretariat.55 The declaration of wide local self-administration under the leadership of the General Secretariat for Internal Affairs did not translate into restored law and order. The Congress of Commissars convened on 16 October for the five, non-industrialized, provinces that the Provisional Government ‘left’ within the jurisdiction of the General Secretariat in its 4 August Instruction (Kyiv, Volyn’, Podillia, Chernihiv, Poltava) discussed the extent to which chaos and anarchy became grand. Peasants took control over the land committees, which were state agencies,

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elected, but nonetheless designed to implement orders from the top. With help of land committees, they ‘rent’ more land than the landowners agreed. Samosudy, or popular courts, became a common place.56 The increasing chaos and anarchy indicated that the provincial commissars had no trust from the population and little if any authority left. Yet the General Secretariat continued to rely on the old administrative system, now under its centralized jurisdiction. In the Third Manifesto, it confirmed the administrative vertical between the General Secretariat and commissars, calling the ‘organs of local self-administration’ which they headed ‘the highest authority’ in their territories. ‘The organs of the revolutionary democracy (i.e. rady and soviets), that must be the best foundations of the free democratic life’ were invited to cooperate but not to participate in administration.57 A witness to the events and member of the Central Rada Pavlo Khrystiuk explained in his documented memoirs that the General Secretariat positioning itself as the superior authority in the old system was an inadequate approach to restoring the bond between the Central Rada and the population. The Congress of Commissars that could with its different composition and under different circumstances give important instructions to the young Ukrainian power on how to fight the very “affrays, anarchy and violations of the law” that all commissars complained about, brought nothing in reality. Its resolutions were as far from the revolutionary life, as the commissars themselves with their old pre-revolutionary apparat and militia. Instead of bravely facing reality and point to the urgency of […] some social-economic reforms and even administrative reforms, the congress of commissars limited itself to patching holes in the old clothes.58 It took another month for the General Secretariat to accept that the old local administrations had lost the trust of the population. At the meeting of the Central Rada on 13 December, Vynnychenko announced that the ‘government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic is cancelling provincial and other old administrations, which are not suitable to life in the new Ukraine and instead promotes the creation and activity of [new] organs of local self-administration’.59 However, the new organs did not mean a new relationship between the centre and the periphery. The draft of the ‘Provisional resolution about administration in the localities’ that reached the General Secretariat on 30 December stated that the highest administrative organs in the provinces and districts (povity) would be democratically elected territorial government rady, these were coalitional organs that would include representatives of various public organizations designed to make decisions based on compromise. At the same time, the draft did not specify whether the head of the local rada, the provincial or district commissar, would be elected or appointed by the General Secretariat. The very name of these rady, ‘government’, indicated that their chairmen would be appointed by the General Secretariat. More importantly, the law allowed any member of the government rada to submit a protest against the rada’s decision to the General Secretariat of Internal Affairs. If there was a contradiction between the decision of the local rada and existing laws the commissar had to report

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to the General Secretariat of Internal Affairs. The draft even had a provision for a ‘state payment of 300 roubles per month’ to those members of the rada who ‘did not receive any other salaries from those institutions that delegated them’, a provision removed from subsequent drafts.60 More importantly, the draft remained silent on the functions of the already existing local rady and soviets.61 This draft never became law, however, for reasons which still have to be established. The preference of the General Secretariat for a system of centralized supervision instead of wide self-management of the localities as in the system introduced by the Provisional Government was understandable, not that this would have been practically achievable anyway given the lack of resources to finance local administrations and the absence of legal foundations, to name a few problems. The Ukrainian revolution came unexpectedly and, as Vynnychenko candidly admitted in 1920, they knew only one state. Still, the top-down centralized approach to statebuilding was at odds with the tendencies outside the walls of the Central Rada. The country was moving in the opposite direction, in the direction of not only wide, democratic self-administration, which was fully supported by the General Secretariat, but in the direction of minimum state supervision, which the General Secretariat did not support. Already in spring, peasants indicated that while expecting new land legislation from Kyiv, not all of them wanted Kyiv to supervise its implementation. Peasants gathered for the First Congress of Peasant Deputies of Kharkiv Province on 3 May 1917 did not even want to wait for the Constituent Assembly to solve the land problem, let alone allow any centralized authority to supervise the implementation of the land reform. Land was to become community property.62 At the First All-Ukrainian Peasant Congress (28 May–2 June), the majority voted for the abolition of private property rights on land and for transferring all land into the Ukrainian Land Fund, ‘managed by the people themselves through the Ukrainian Seim (Parliament) and democratically elected district and parish (volost’) land committees’,63 and voted for ‘a quota of land holding’ (zemel’naia norma). However, in reflection of the variations in land tenure throughout Ukraine,64 not everyone agreed that the land be managed by the land committees subordinated to the Ukrainian Seim. A delegate from Kharkiv Province, for example, argued against transferring all land to the Ukrainian fund: ‘the foundations of socialisation of land is a [peasant] commune which should run land affairs from below; the General Assembly or the Ukrainian Seim would lead to centralisation’. Ironically, the soonto-be General Secretary Volodymyr Vynnychenko also argued in favour of autonomy for the district land committees. On the other hand, a delegate from Volyn, a region with poor land, argued that the land should be distributed centrally, through the Ukrainian land fund ‘from which each dweller of Ukraine could take as much land as he was capable to cultivate’. The voices against centralized control over land distribution were sufficiently loud for the member of the Central Rada and leader of the Ukrainian SRs Mykola Kovalevsky to deny that ‘his party suggests implementing the agrarian reform from the top’. However, his statement that ‘the land issue would be solved at the Seim by representatives from the parishes and districts, and would thus be a demonstration of the will of … those from the bottom, who are

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living on their land, and the Seim will implement the reform through parish and district communes’ suggested exactly the centralized nature of the implementation of the land reform. In any case, Kovalevsky carefully avoided specifying that peasant communes would have flexibility to adjust the reform to their regional specificity.65 His party comrade Gavrylo Odynets was more open at the Chernihiv Ukrainian Congress when he said that all land should be run by the Ukrainian Central Land Committee.66 On local administration in general, however, the First Peasant Congress was less equivocal. The Resolution on the Organisation of Peasantry stated that ‘all administrative, civic, zemstvo institutions, as well as land, food and other committees that are technical organisations that service the peasantry, are subordinated in their activity to the rady of peasant deputies and the executive committees of the peasant union (spilka), as the representatives of the toiling people’.67 Throughout 1917, autonomy of peasants only increased. The instructions of the higher authorities were put in practice only if they were in the interest of the village. The decisions of the village assembly (skhod), or local rada, or local peasant union or All-Russian peasant union (krest’ianskiiĭ soiuz), including on food supplies to the cities, had more value than any instruction that arrived from the top.68 The Third Session of the All-Ukrainian Council of Peasant Deputies, convened on 18–23 November 1917, embraced the declaration of Ukraine’s autonomy and even agreed to the government’s idea of coalitional provincial committees that would include representatives, one from each, of the ‘Provincial People’s Rada’, the city duma, the land committee, the rady of workers and soldiers deputies; four, instead of two as the government proposed, representatives from the rady of the peasant deputies; and one representative of the provincial commissar. However, in stark contrast to the intention of the General Secretariat to appoint commissars, the Central Rada insisted that provincial and district commissars were elected by the rady of the peasant deputies and representatives of the rady of the workers and peasant soldiers.69 The most famous illustration of the tendency of peasants towards autonomy were, of course, the so-called peasant republics, Gulyai-Pole in the southeast under Nestor Makhno being the largest of them. In summer 1917, Makhno concluded that to solve the land problem, to eliminate inequality and to maintain public order, he had to unite peasants and convince them that in order to defend land and freedom they had to rely on themselves, which he successfully did, as his part in the civil war on the Ukrainian lands in the following years demonstrated.70 Makhno’s attitudes to the relationship with the state would not change after the Gulyai-Pole territory became part of Ukraine. After a ‘counter-revolutionary’ intermission when Hetman Skoropadsky would try to build a Ukrainian state (29 April–14 December 1918), the peasantry would once again revolt against a centralized state. The tendency towards self-administration was manifested all over Ukraine when in December 1918 the new socialist Ukrainian Government, the Dyrektoria, was forced to rely on local otamans (popular leaders) to overthrow Skoropadsky. To obtain their support, the Dyrektoria both empowered them and indulged their ambitions. Once the uprising was over, the Dyrektoria was

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too weak to reclaim authority over the otamans, and they were in no hurry to give up their newly obtained military and civic powers. Yet more importantly, they had no reason to give up their powers. There was nothing that the Dyrektoria could offer them that they could not take themselves, nor could it prevent them from acting as they did. During the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–21, there would be a total of eighteen peasant republics in the Ukrainian provinces. They all expressed different political views; however, the underlying idea behind each was the same: unity and self-administration in order to obtain land and defend its acquisition. Under conditions of continuing deep social crisis, with no obvious power-centre, without a state to rely on and in a fragmented society, self-administration and selfdefence seemed like the best strategy.71 The tendency towards autonomous self-governance among workers was famously summed up in the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’ Because of its Bolshevik origins, this slogan became primarily related to the class struggle between the toiling people and the bourgeoisie, and, in view of the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine, to the national struggle between the Russian-Bolshevik imperialism and Ukrainian nationalism. However, while for Bolsheviks ‘All power to the Soviets!’ meant first ‘All power to the Bolsheviks’ and later ‘All power to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, RSDRP(b)’, for Mensheviks, Left SRs or other non-Bolsheviks, the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’ meant exactly what it said.72 ‘Local Bolshevik organisations, once they received information about the victory of the armed uprising in Petrograd, called toilers to energetically support the revolution and actively struggle for power in the localities (na mestakh), for the implementation of the decrees and resolutions of the Soviet Government.’73 This tendency towards centralization was explicitly manifested by the Bolsheviks at the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, which re-convened in Kharkiv on 11–12 December, when they took the majority of seats in the newly formed Central Executive Committee that would lead the struggle, or so they believed, proclaiming the formation of a Ukrainian Soviet Government. However, non-Bolshevik soviets aimed first and foremost to solve urgent socioeconomic problems without any leadership or assistance from the top, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletariat’. Until the July Days crisis and the appearance of the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’, the soviets of workers, soldiers and peasant deputies closely cooperated with the local civic executive committees. The latter even often financed the former. After July, in many localities, the soviets remained the main authority.74 The resolutions passed by the soviets of workers and soldiers’ deputies and the soviets of peasant deputies at the beginning of December 1917 could include a protest against the authority of the ‘bourgeois’ Central Rada, thus suggesting the ‘social versus national interpretation’ of this protest. However, ‘bourgeois’ was just as much associated for them with the old, centralized tsarist state. So, their resolutions emphasized ‘power to the Soviets’, not ‘power to the Sovnarkom’.75 The resolution of the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets that stated that the soviets accepted ‘all decrees and instructions of the Russian Soviet government’ did not mention any formal connection between the soviets and the Sovnarkom. Power in the cities, they decided, belonged exclusively to the elected soviets.76 It was for

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‘All power to the Soviets!’, not the Bolshevik Sovnarkom, that those troops of the Central Rada located in Kharkiv in mid-December fought alongside the Bolshevik troops against the Don Cossacks, instead of ‘trying to liquidate the government of the “Soviet” Ukraine.’77 In December 1917–January 1918, as Soldatenko explains, ‘[t]he vector of [the] pursuits [of the Soviets] coincided with the positions and actions of the Bolsheviks. [italics added] This is why the power of the soviets spread so rapidly – the process that V. Lenin called a triumph march of the socialist revolution’.78 In 1917 of course nobody, certainly not non-Bolsheviks, could anticipate that the soviets would become a mechanism by which the Bolshevik Party would not only seek to dominate the political landscape but would also impose a centralized state. It first became clear when Bolshevik troops occupied Ukrainian territory in winter 1918, and obvious in 1919 after Ukrainians fully experienced the discrepancy between Bolshevism and soviet power, not to mention Bolshevik policies. It would be at this point when Ukrainian peasants would rise in defence of ‘All power to the Soviets!’, but against Bolsheviks.79 As the already-mentioned congress of provincial commissars showed, the cities of the five provinces that the Provisional Government ‘carved out’ for the General Secretariat did not object to the General Secretariat replicating the old state model. Lack of finances, lack of industry, destruction of economy by almost 50 per cent and proximity to the front, and thus the presence of troops who looted and committed crimes while not recognizing the power of local authorities, made the cities in these provinces dependent on the General Secretariat, or any central government that could restore law and order. In the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, Tavria and Kherson provinces, which remained under direct control of Petrograd until the Bolshevik coup, local autonomy was more in demand.80 Odesa had sought economic autonomy already in the nineteenth century. In December 1917, having found itself under the authority of the General Secretariat, the city sought political autonomy as well, so the city duma strongly considered turning Odesa into a ‘free city’, regardless of whether it would remain within Ukraine, or within a Federative Russia.81 In January 1918, Donbas would declare for soviet autonomy.82 The conditions for such claims for local autonomy were indeed favourable. Not least, because the Ukrainian Government, its rhetoric aside, remained distant from the problems of periphery cities, and, as Velychenko observed, city duma and zemstvo leaders became ‘accustomed to independence from central control’.83 Probably no other group or organization felt the inadequacy of the top-down centralized approach of the Ukrainian Government to state-building as the Jews. The relationship between the Central Rada and the Jews of Ukraine was mutually beneficial throughout 1917. Ukrainians supported their aspirations for autonomy. The General Secretariat was the first territorial administration in Eastern Europe that formed a Jewish Ministry. When Jewish pogroms started to spark in October  1917, the Ukrainian Government took measures to halt them. However, neither administrative actions, nor ‘dispatching regular troops to the pogrom locations’ could stop the wave of violence against the Jewish population. And yet, the government ‘strictly opposed the attempts of the Jewish representatives

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to organize centralised Jewish self-defence, to institute anti-pogrom units within the Ukrainian army, or any other form of organized civic response to the pogroms’.84 When Germans brought the Central Rada back to power, the socialist government of Holubovych continued with the policy of centralized administration. In March 1918, it clearly indicated its intent to limit any influence of the professional or class organizations on the activity of the state organs and continue building the state ‘from the top’.85 The Constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic adopted on 29 April 1918, when the Central Rada was ceding power to Skoropadsky, formalized ‘wide self-administration’, based on ‘the principle of decentralisation’. Still, ministers retained the right to control their activity, ‘directly and through the officials appointed by them, while not interfering in the affairs of the rady and administrations’. Who would stop them from interfering was left unspecified. As Lysiak-Rudnytsky observed at the time, the new constitution did not bother to clearly divide the competence of the central and local organs of administration.86

CONCLUDING REMARKS A prominent scholar of the Ukrainian Revolution Vladyslav Verstiuk observed: ‘the Central Rada never aimed for a full destruction of the old world. It propagated constructive, not destructive values … constructive improvement, that included the idea of decentralization of power in Russia and its transformation into a federal democratic state that guaranteed Ukraine’s national-territorial autonomy.’87 Ironically, while advocating decentralization of power in Russia, the Central Rada failed to appreciate the need for decentralization in Ukraine. After the devastation and misery caused by the First World War, the administrative chaos with a myriad of civil and military administrations who all wanted to take but never give, exhausted Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and Poles wanted to be left alone to decide how to live. If the state was unable to solve these many crises, then they expected the state to empower them to solve them themselves. The Central Rada and its government failed to do either. Not only did the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement pursue national goals at the expense of social by devoting their time to securing autonomy for Ukraine in negotiations with the Provisional Government, thus allowing ‘[t]he agrarian revolution [to] gr[ow] apace outstripping the Central Rada’.88 Not only did they fail to perform the basic function of the state to install law and order. They also failed to recognize that peasants and workers needed a new state just as much as they needed new policies and were prepared to participate in state-building. Instead, the Central Rada set the Ukrainian Revolution on a path of recreating ‘the only kind of state they knew – the tsarist administration’ and thus doomed its social and national agenda.89 It was a wrong strategy for a noble cause that resulted in a lack of popular support for the Ukrainian state in 1919 and in what Ford called a ‘striking’ situation in 1919 when, after having experienced the devastations of the Bolshevik invasions, ‘there was [still] no decline for the soviet idea’ among Ukrainians.90 Still, in its defeat, the Ukrainian Revolution achieved a success. In 1917, for the first time in centuries, there was formed a centralized administration in Kyiv for the

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Ukrainian provinces that until then had been administered separately and directly by the Russian imperial government. Centralized administration in Ukraine for Ukraine, largely powerless during revolutionary times, and, as many would agree, hardly representative of the Ukrainian people during Soviet times, would not only survive the Bolshevik takeover in 1920–1, but would lay the foundations for the Ukrainian state which in its turn would survive the very state that the Bolsheviks built. It is for this achievement that the Ukrainian Revolution was a successful failure. And if ‘1917 […] had been a wrong turn’ in Russia’s history,91 as Graziosi put it, it was a right turn in Ukraine’s history.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Revolution in Turkestan, 1916–20 GERO FEDTKE, UNIVERSITY OF JENA

‘Turkestan entered the revolution of 1917 on a completely prehistoric level. The revolution reached Turkestan by telegraph.’ The author of this often-cited verdict – referring to the fact that the news of the Tsar’s abdication and the formation of the Provisional Government indeed reached Turkestan in the first days of March 1917 ‘by telegraph’ – was Georgiĭ Safarov,1 a high-ranking Bolshevik, close collaborator of Lenin. Safarov continued to lament that there had been ‘no revolutionary ideology’, ‘no revolutionary organization of the masses, no revolutionary tradition’. Revolutionaries from Turkestan claimed the opposite: a Turkestanian revolution independent from the centre. They also provided a timeline of the revolution differing from the one established for Central Russia. The Kazakh Mustafa Chokaev,2 one of the most important political figures in 1917, stated from his French exile in 1932: ‘The year 1916 [was] the year of terrible unrest, the year of the true revolution in Turkestan.’ One year earlier, the Soviet Tajik head of government Abdurrahim Hojiboyev explained to French communist Paul Vaillant-Couturier: ‘The Bolshevik revolution erupted in September 1917, even before Leningrad and Moscow.’3 Hojiboyev also referred to 1916. He called this year’s revolt the work of ‘bourgeois nationalists’ like Chokaev, which had been unsuccessful, but ‘the seeds of revolution had been spread. The revolutionary movement grew roots in all peoples of Central Asia’.

AN APPROACH TO INTERPRETING THE REVOLUTION IN TURKESTAN The three persons quoted above represent two of the many groups of actors which shaped the course of the revolution in Turkestan: the central power (Safarov) and Muslim intellectuals, some of whom became communists (Hojiboyev), while others positioned themselves as anti-Soviet (Chokaev). The revolutionary event of September

Russian names are transcribed according to the Library of Congress System. Central Asian Turkic names are written in their modern Uzbek or Kazakh spelling, or transcribed in a corresponding way. I use established latinized spellings, as e.g. Chokaev.

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1917 Hojiboyev referred to was the work of socialist settler revolutionaries, mostly railway workers and soldiers, a third important group of actors. In 1918, they indeed celebrated the first anniversary of the ‘October Revolution’ on 12 September without any reference to Petrograd or Moscow. Members of these three groups came to form Soviet power in a complex pattern of cooperation and conflict during 1917–20. Their differing narratives of the revolution highlight their conflicting ideas about the place of Turkestan in a new Russia. What united them were shared ideas about progress, as well as a shared host of adversaries: Muslim urban actors who identified as proponents of tradition, rural groups fighting against the cities – both Muslim and peasant settlers – and many more. Turkestan was a colony, conquered by Russia between the 1850s and 1900, and organized as a province under a governor general. It covered 1.7 km2, roughly seven times the area of the UK, with a total population of 6.5 million people in 1913.4 Natural conditions were very diverse  – including steppe, deserts, oases and high mountains – as were the indigenous population and its lifestyles. Settlers were a clear minority, about 7 per cent of the total population. Most of them lived in ‘new cities’, which were often erected next to the ‘old cities’ inhabited by the local population. Rural settlers in considerable numbers were to be found only in Semirech’e and parts of the Fergana valley. The overwhelming majority of Turkestan’s indigenous inhabitants were Sunni Muslims; ‘Muslim’ therefore became the common denominator for indigenous Turkestanis with the quality of an ethnonym, regardless of whether they were really Muslim by belief. Seen from Turkestan, Central Russia was clearly a part of Europe; ‘European’ was used as the common term to identify settlers, regardless of whether they were Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian or German. I will use both terms that way in this article. Muslims and Europeans lived as a rule segregated from each other and knew very little about the other’s lives and mental universe. The story of the revolutionary years in Turkestan is extremely complex. This article focuses on the capital Tashkent and the Fergana valley, a densely populated key area of Turkestan, and on the interaction between main groups of political actors laying claim to represent and rule all of Turkestan. Four main political cleavages structured the patterns of cooperation and conflict between these actors: indigenous versus settler, progress versus tradition, centre versus periphery, urban versus rural. The first cleavage referred to the question who had the right to rule Turkestan. Europeans generally looked down on Muslims as backward ‘Asians’ not fit to govern themselves. Settler revolutionaries were as a rule no different from tsarist officials in this respect. Often, settler interests displayed colonial dimensions, those of Muslims anticolonial. The cleavage progress versus tradition reflected a highly contested issue especially in Muslim society. Efforts towards reform and modernization which were undertaken as a response to the Russian conquest had led to many heated debates in the years before 1917. The question how Muslim actors positioned themselves in this respect became an ever more important political identifier during the revolution. Centre versus periphery obviously related to the question of the degree to which Turkestan should become more self-determined. Bitter and violent conflict emerged around the cleavage urban versus rural, partially

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as a result of differing cultures, but especially as famine broke out in Turkestan. Depending on the changing constellations in different locales and over time, these cleavages could be overlapping or cross-cutting, which led to changing alliances even across the indigenous-settler divide. Although language of class was used intensively by all actors of revolution, a cleavage of class in terms of social stratification did not play an important role.

1916: ANTICOLONIAL REVOLT On 25 June 1916, Tsar Nicholas II signed a decree to conscript Muslims from Turkestan, the Steppe Governorate, Siberia and the Caucasus, which had been exempt from military service before, for work in the rear of the World War’s frontlines. The war effort had put the empire’s resources under intensive strain and it was in desperate need of manpower. The decree had not been well prepared and was poorly communicated. It led to considerable resistance and to open revolt especially among nomadic population in Semirech’e, but also sedentary as in the district of Jizzax, as well as in parts of the Steppe province. The insurgents targeted government officials, both European and Muslim, and settler communities. They attacked farms and villages, railways and telegraph lines. The colonial administration lost control. Troops from Central Russia had to be called in to quell the revolt. Arms were distributed to settlers, who took revenge for the attacks and used the opportunity to seize new land. Marco Buttino has called the joint violence of settlers and army against Kazakh and Kyrgyz an ‘ethnic cleansing’.5 By the end of 1916, about 10,000 settlers and between 100,000 and 200,000 Muslims had lost their lives in Turkestan; about 250,000 Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads fled to neighbouring China. The revolt brought enormous sufferings to large parts of Turkestan’s Muslim population. But it was neither the beginning of the revolution nor its prelude. Recent research has highlighted the regional diversity of its course, causes and leaders.6 The revolt made the many shortcomings and weaknesses of tsarist colonial rule visible. The leaders of the insurgency reacted to acute problems resulting from it – which differed from region to region – but did not provide a vision to replace or revolutionize this rule. They were primarily motivated by tribal and local perspectives, they relied on a political language and practices of mobilization predating colonial rule and they did not create forms of organization which would have united larger regions or transformed the revolt into a sustainable movement.7 The revolt can be understood as consisting of many separate acts of anticolonial resistance. From the 1920s onwards, the revolt was incorporated into narratives of the revolution by both soviet and anti-Soviet actors. Soviet historiography inscribed the revolt into the history of the revolution as its prelude, as a ‘preparation’ for 1917 that allegedly had mobilized ‘proletarianized elements’ against both tsarist colonial oppression and their own bourgeoisie, as in Hojiboyev’s statement.8 Muslim intellectuals like Mustafa Chokaev had actually supported the conscription. They saw it as a possible step towards achieving full civil rights for Turkestan’s Muslims as citizens of the Russian Empire.9 Chokaev, an opponent to Soviet rule from the

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beginning, incorporated 1916 as a revolution in the sense of national resistance against Russian oppression in his writings in exile. The conflicts between settlers and nomads continued into 1917, when returnees from China found their lands occupied and violence sparked again, aggravated by a famine. This issue became an important item on the political agenda of urban Muslim actors of the revolution in the sedentary areas of Turkestan’s core provinces. They understood these conflicts along the settler – indigenous divide, which found its expression in demonstrations of solidarity and political demands to return land illegally seized by settlers. The revolt of 1916 was a symptom of crisis of the old regime, but not the only one. During Russian colonial rule, Turkestan had developed into the empire’s main producer of cotton. Turkestan’s food production had become too small to feed its population. During the war, the state failed to organize compensating imports from other parts of the empire.10 The resulting food shortages took mainly women demonstrators to the streets in the new cities throughout the year. The activists of these ‘women’s revolts’ (baby bunty) descended on food traders, whom they accused of hoarding and usury, plundering and destroying their shops.11 As the shortages aggravated during the year, European workers and soldiers started to raid surrounding villages and requisition food illegally. All these settler actions aimed primarily at Muslim traders and peasants, who were not responsible for the shortages. The indigenous-settler divide thus shaped these conflicts, too: European traders were hit much less than Muslims. Both insurgent nomads and settler demonstrators challenged the authority of the colonial administration, which reacted by forcibly re-establishing control towards the end of the year.

TASHKENT, 5 MARCH 1917: LIBERTY In early 1917, the situation in Turkestan seemed stable, although only on the surface. Neither the food supply problem nor the conflict between peasants and nomads was solved. Upon the Tsar’s abdication, Governor General Kuropatkin, fearing new unrest, organized a public meeting and parade of Tashkent’s garrison on 5 March with thousands of spectators from the new and old city population, committing them to the new Provisional Government and to keeping order.12 This event became the starting signal for an intense political mobilization and self-organization of Turkestan’s population. Railway workers in Tashkent went ahead with establishing the Tashkent Soviet of Workers’ Deputies already on 2 and 3 March, followed by the Tashkent Soviet of Soldiers on 4 March. Directly after Kuropatkin’s ceremony, the Tashkent City Duma instituted an Executive Committee of Civic Organizations. It had nineteen members, seven of them from Tashkent’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviets, only two representing the indigenous population from the old city. On 13 March, Tashkent’s Muslim population in the old city formed their own Muslim Soviet (sho’roi islomiya) and elected a new commissioner for the old city, Islombek Xudoyarxanov, grandson of the last Khan of Qo’qon (Kokand). This choice was symptomatic: Muslim leaders in the revolution mostly came from noble and wellestablished families. But the fact that Tashkent’s Muslim population elected its

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own head of police, replacing the head (nachal’nik) of the colonial administration, was revolutionary and pointed at a fundamental change of order. Kuropatkin did not object, Xudoyarxanov received control of the police force with uniforms and weapons peacefully. The designation of the Muslim Soviet as ‘Muslim’ in opposition to the European’s workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets reflected the fundamental indigenous-settler divide. In tsarist Russia, Turkestan’s indigenous population had been deemed too backward and uncivilized to be allowed a share in power. Now, indigenous representatives claimed that power in the name of the whole Muslim population. In this first stage of the revolution, Turkestan’s main actors, Muslim and European alike, seemed to prefer a peaceful transition to a new order. The rest of Turkestan soon followed the pattern set by Tashkent, with local Public Committees, Executive Committees and Soviets even in small towns. In Tashkent, it took less than a month for major tensions between the actors to materialize – and the rest of Turkestan followed suit in this respect as well. Liberty was the slogan of the day, but it was interpreted by the actors in differing, and partially mutually exclusive, ways.13 Tashkent’s Soviets of Workers and Soldiers pressurized Kuropatkin to introduce fundamental reforms quickly, such as replacing the city’s police by an elected militia. They united on 28 March to form the Tashkent Soviet, which decided to strip Kuropatkin of power and arrested him on 31 March. In his stead, the Tashkent Soviet appointed a new Commander of all troops in Turkestan, General Leontii Cherkes. It organized Turkestan’s First Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies on 7–15 April. Delegates from several cities attended, but Tashkent’s deputies clearly dominated. The congress elected a Turkestan Regional Soviet (Kraevoi Sovet – Kras). Muslims followed suit with their regional congress in Tashkent on 16–22 April, which elected the Regional Soviet of Turkestan’s Muslims (Kraevoi sovet turkestanskikh musul’man  – Turkiston Milliy Markaz Shurosi). The majority of delegates to both congresses spoke in favour of the Provisional Government and the planned Constituent Assembly. The Provisional Government appointed a Turkestan Committee to replace the ousted governor general. Four out of its nine members were Muslims, but only one of them of Turkestan origin. Their powers were limited. They had no command of troops; General Cherkes kept his post. Their attempts at alleviating Turkestan’s most urgent problems tragically failed: they neither managed to facilitate a peaceful return of the nomads who had fled to China nor could they organize the supplies necessary to feed Turkestan’s population. The Kras turned out to be the Committee’s main opponent, either obstructing or trying to direct its actions in accordance with the needs of its own clientele, Tashkent’s European workers and soldiers. Already in June, the leading members of the Turkestan Committee resigned. The Kras and the Tashkent Soviet intervened in Petrograd to prevent the appointment of Vadim Chaikin as new president of the Turkestan Committee. Chaikin, a Socialist Revolutionary from European Russia, had lived for several years in Andijon in the Fergana valley, possessed strong ties to Petrograd and collaborated with Muslim intellectuals, actively trying to bridge the settler-indigenous divide. This made him an unsuited candidate in the eyes of Tashkent’s worker and soldier representatives.

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They enforced the appointment of Vladimir Nalivkin, a widely respected orientalist, who however, as its president, had already failed to turn the Tashkent committee of civic organizations into a powerful organ and proved to be a hapless president of the Turkestan Commission as well. There was no ‘dual power’ in Turkestan, but a multitude of political actors  – as in other parts of the Russian Empire away from the capitals Moscow and Petrograd. The Provisional Government hardly had any authority in Turkestan. The Tashkent Soviet and the Kras laid no claim to formal rule, but continued to restrain the Turkestan Committee. As the food crisis intensified, settler communities became rivals. Tashkent retained its position due to its size and strategic location as Turkestan’s main railway hub. The segregation between European settlers and Muslims deepened, with the new cities’ population renewing their requisitioning of food in the old cities and their environs. The few attempts to overcome the segregation between European settlers and Muslims failed. A permanent conference on the region’s affairs with representatives from European and Muslim organizations, which the Tashkent Muslim congress managed to implement with the Turkestan Commission, proved to be as hapless as the Commission itself.14 Political tensions also split the Muslim organizations. The broad spectrum of Muslim political positions had become visible at the first Tashkent Muslim congress in April 1917 with delegates voicing visions about the future position of Turkestan in the Empire ranging from independence to subordination. The majority of Muslim political actors reached agreement to support the Provisional Government and strive for an autonomous Turkestan offering political participation to both the indigenous and the settler population. But a bitter struggle soon erupted about the question who should take the lead in Muslim society. Mustafa Chokaev, the president of the Muslim Soviet, from a Kazakh noble family, had studied law in St Petersburg and worked in the office of the state duma’s Muslim faction. He represents Muslim intellectuals (intelligentsia) as a group of actors: educated at universities of the empire, fluent in Russian and well versed in the world of Russian imperial institutions and habits.15 He distinguished himself from Muslim actors with a background in Islamic educational institutions (maktab and madrasa), who also took an active part in the Muslim Soviet. Two major Muslim groups formed, the delimitation between them being articulated in terms of the tradition-progress cleavage. In June 1917, a group of ulamo (Islamic clergy) seceded from the Muslim Soviet and founded the Society of the Ulamo (ulamo jamiyati), also known as Soviet of the Ulamo (ulamo sho’rosi). This designation expressed their claim to represent the rightful ulamo defending Islamic tradition, based upon which they should lead Turkestan’s Muslims into the future, striving to (re)establish Sharia law as the legal basis.16 Their opponents can be labelled as progressists, although they did not unify under a single slogan. They presented themselves inter alia as agents of progress and enlightenment (taraqqiyparvar, ziyoli, etc.) and also, increasingly, as representatives of workers and poor (zehmatkash, ishchi, kambag’al, etc.). They could belong to the intelligentsia as well as have a background in Islamic education. Some of this group of actors turned into Muslim socialists and communists, who appear in greater numbers from mid-1918 onwards. The semiotics of this confrontation built, on the one hand, on intense debates in

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Muslim society about progress and reform, which have been studied in the framework of jadidism.17 A wide pre-revolutionary spectrum of reformisms was transformed into a dichotomic confrontation, as rivalling groups of solidarity tried to demarcate their claims.18 On the other hand, this semiotics built on revolutionary concepts and forms of representation, such as staging demonstrations with red flags. Despite the class language, this confrontation was not a class issue: Ulamo from noble families played an important role on both sides, as well as did intellectuals such as the ulamo jamiyati’s president Ser Ali Lapin, who had studied law in St Petersburg just like Mustafa Chokaev. There were hardly any industrial factories in Turkestan and, as a consequence, hardly any factory workers. The European workers represented in the workers’ soviets were mostly railwaymen. In the Muslim workers’ organizations, tyloviki (rear soldiers) played a leading role: activists from the about 120,000 indigenous Turkestanis who had been conscripted in 1916 despite the revolt, forced to work in European Russia, returned home in spring 1917 and now successfully claimed worker status. Members of Muslim worker organizations came from a great variety of social groups. In Turkestan’s political arena of the revolutionary years, ‘worker’ was not a social category, but a political choice.19 During 1917, manifold political organizations formed in Turkestan, representing a multitude of interests and groups. During the year, people had to survive in a famine. Violence became more widespread, which led to intensified conflicts and a harsher delineation of political camps. In August 1917, the Samarkand Workers’ Union (Samarqand musulmoniya zehmatkash ittifoq jamiyati) put it this way: ‘Our whole country has become a battlefield. Each society, each party (har jamiyat, har firqa) is forced to fight for its own interests (manfaat).’ In view of the famine, the Union claimed food supply (ozuq ishi) to be the most important workers’ right.20 Muslims claiming worker status were the only Muslim political force which European revolutionaries recognized as being entitled to their support. They faced a common adversary: the European workers viewed Muslim clergy as their class enemy and blamed the food shortages on them. But such Muslim-European alliances functioned only in special situations. Generally, European socialists were not willing to grant Muslims a share in power and did not admit them into their workers’ soviets. The indigenous-settler divide seemingly dominated the crosscutting progress-tradition cleavage. But at the same time there was a strong element of traditionalism in the European socialists’ refusal to change the colonial distribution of power between settlers and Muslims. In colonial Turkestan, especially skilled railway workers constituted a privileged group.  Their argument that Turkestan’s Muslims were too backward (temnyi) to rule even themselves stood in the colonial tradition. This attitude found symbolic expression in their not toppling the monument to Turkestan’s first Governor General von Kaufman whereas their comrades in Central Russia removed the statues of the old regime. The majority of Turkestan’s indigenous population supported the traditionalist clergy. This became visible when the Provisional Government introduced organs of local self-government (zemstvo) for Turkestan in June and July 1917. As the population elected representatives to town dumas, the ulamo jamiyati or corresponding electoral lists clearly won the day. In Tashkent, they gained the

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absolute majority with 62 of 112 seats, the election list of the Muslim Soviet only 11. Among the European population, the Socialist Revolutionaries had a clear majority. In the Tashkent duma election, they won twenty-four of the thirty-eight seats reserved for the new city, the social democrats only four.21 This came as a surprise to Tashkent’s socialists, who had voted for electing a united duma for the whole city instead of separate dumas for the ‘old’ and ‘new’ districts. But the ulamo jamiyati could not turn the electoral victory into real political power, which rested with the Europeans workers and soldiers, for the obvious reason that they controlled lines of communication and firearms. As food shortages intensified during summer, old Tashkent received less supplies than the new city, its representatives reported frequent deaths from starvation. Nevertheless, European Tashkent townspeople suspected Muslims in the old city of hoarding supplies and began to plunder Muslim grocers.22 Army commanders officially prohibited these actions but had to admit internally that they were no longer able to feed their troops and also suggested requisitioning food from Muslim merchants.23

TASHKENT, 12 SEPTEMBER 1917 – QO’QON, 22 FEBRUARY 1918: AUTONOMY It was this scarcity of food supplies that led to Tashkent’s ‘Bolshevik revolution in September’. The hunger caused increasing tensions in Tashkent’s new city which prompted the Turkestan Commission to forbid public gatherings on 11 September. But it could not prevent workers and soldiers from gathering anyway in Tashkent’s Alexander Square (now Jakub Kolas Park) on 12 September. From early September on, demands had become more frequent that workers and soldiers should take power into their own hands in order to solve the food supply crisis. Now, a majority in the crowd decided it was time to do so and elected a revolutionary committee which should take ‘all power’ into its own hands the following day and make sure a ‘proper distribution’ of food and goods.24 General Cherkes managed to have some members of the revolutionary committee arrested. But the same evening, they were freed by disobedient soldiers. Violence erupted again in the new city, Cherkes himself suffered severe beating. The failed attempt to take over power resulted in a tense stalemate. The formal authorities were no longer in control, but the revolutionary committee had no real power either. It was supported by the Tashkent Soviet, but not recognized by the Kras, whose leading members fled to the town of Skobelev in Fergana valley. The Second Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on 30 September–10 October 1917 ended in bitter strife. The delegates could not agree to elect a revolutionary government, not even to re-elect the Kras, which ceased to exist. The Provisional Government sent in troops under the command of General Pavel Korovichenko, but he failed to gain full control and could not offer a solution to the food crisis either. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd, he had leaders of the Tashkent Soviet arrested and tried to disarm those troops supporting it. With these measures, he only provoked the unrest he tried to prevent. After a few days of fighting in the city, troops supporting the Tashkent Soviet

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beat Korovichenko’s forces and had him arrested on 1 November. An executive committee took over until an extraordinary Third Congress of Soviets (15–22 November 1917) established a new government, the Turkestan Council of People’s Commissars (TSNK).25 What did Bolsheviks have to do with these events? In Turkestan, socialist party organizations were effectively non-existent before the revolution. Turkestan’s Socialist Revolutionaries claimed to have been organized since March 1917 and managed to reach a 5,000 membership by September. The Social Democrats came second. The activists of the September events came from both parties. They had no organizational ties to the all-Russian party organizations of the same name. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd named the Socialist Revolutionaries as instigators of the September coup d’état, but nevertheless declared their support, while the Socialist Revolutionaries in the centre condemned it and called it a Bolshevik affair. Turkestan’s revolutionaries acted very much on their own. Social Democrats in Turkestan adopted the term Bolshevik for themselves only after the October Revolution in the centre, founding the first Bolshevik party organization on 22 December 1917. Its leader Ivan Tobolin was also head of the Tashkent Soviet, but not a member of the TSNK. When the party in the centre changed its name to the Russian Communist Party, Tashkent’s Bolsheviks followed suit, renaming themselves the Communist Party of Turkestan (CPT). This was not a sign of central control but an expression that the Tashkent Soviet wanted to be recognized by the centre and receive its support. Likewise, Turkestan’s Socialist Revolutionaries turned into Left Socialist Revolutionaries, while there were no Right SRs. In the beginning, they dominated the TSNK.26 On the eve of the 12 September coup d’état attempt, the Muslim Soviet had held the Second Muslim Regional Congress (7–11 September 1917). The delegates argued strictly against a possible takeover of power by European workers and soldiers and for a ‘truly democratic policy’ conforming to the interests of the Muslim majority population.27 Consequently, the Muslim Soviet condemned the revolutionary committee and its supporters. Shortly after the events, the Tashkent ulamo jamiyati convened its congress (17–20 September 1917), which it presented as both an alternative to the Muslim Soviet’s congress and a legitimate representation of all Turkestani Muslims. Both congresses formulated similar demands about the political structure of an autonomous Turkestan as a part of the Russian State, in which the Muslim majority population would have the decisive voice. At the same time, the ulamo asserted their claim to be leaders of Turkestan’s Muslims by establishing a new ‘Muslim Union’ party (ittifoqi muslimin) under their command which the members of the Muslim Soviet and other Muslim organizations should join, dissolving their own organizations.28 Muslim reactions to the Tashkent Soviet’s victory over Korovichenko repeated this pattern. Ulamo representative Serali Lapin spoke at the Third Congress of Soviets and demanded the creation of a mixed Muslimsettler Turkestan government, but to no avail.29 The TSNK remained a completely European affair. The Muslim Soviet reacted by conducting an extraordinary Muslim congress in Qo’qon on 26–29 November 1917, which proclaimed Turkestan an autonomous republic. A Turkestan constituent assembly was to decide on the

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future political system. Until then, a provisional People’s Council and a provisional autonomous government were to rule Turkestan. One-third of the seats in both bodies were reserved for representatives of the settler population, but never filled. Mustafa Chokaev was elected minister of foreign affairs. In January 1918, he became prime minister. The Turkestan Autonomous Government lacked all the resources necessary to exercise power, but it had many enemies: the TSNK, traditionalist ulamo, Qo’qon’s influential Armenian community, warlords in the Fergana valley, to name just the most important of them. After less than three months, it came to a bloody end. The Tashkent Soviet government forged a coalition of European soviets, which sent armed forces to Qo’qon in early February. An increasingly tense situation with repeated violent clashes and attacks on settlers and Muslims, the instigators of which as a rule could not be clearly identified, escalated in a storm of violence. On 18 February 1918, Mustafa Chokaev resigned as head of the Provisional Government and fled. In the summer he went on to represent the no longer existent government in the ‘Komuch’ anti-Bolshevik administration established in Siberia by the SRs, and eventually emigrated to France. In Qo’qon, after heavy fighting, the Tashkent government dictated peace on 22 February 1918. About 10,000 Muslims were said to have been killed and one-third of the old city’s buildings destroyed.30

TASHKENT, 1 MAY 1918 – MŪǦALJAR, 13 SEPTEMBER 1919: THE TURKESTAN SOVIET REPUBLIC The settler revolutionaries were victorious, but understood they could no longer exclude Muslim participation in power. The decisive event was a huge demonstration in Tashkent on 13 December 1917 in support of the Qo’qon government which they had not been able to confine to the old city. Beginning on 14 December, they declared themselves proponents of the peoples’ right to self-determination. At the same time, they used the principle of proletarian autonomy to delegitimize their rival government and its supporters. The argument went, in short, that only Muslim workers’ organizations could be the basis of Muslim participation in power, but the Qo’qon government was bourgeois. Having annihilated its Qo’qon rival, the Tashkent government tried to provide itself with an all-Turkestan legitimation via a congress of workers’, soldiers’, peasants’ and Muslim soviets. Nearly half of the delegates were Muslims. It ended with the proclamation of the Turkestan Soviet Republic on 1 May 1918.31 Recognizing Muslim soviets as such continued the segregation of the population, left the question of class-differentiation among Muslims open as well as which soviets European socialists were prepared to recognize. Muslim soviets laying claim to participation in Soviet power were soon redesignated as ‘old city soviets of workers’ and peasants’ (dehqon) deputies’. They also started to appropriate the designations ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’, and set up Muslim communist and Muslim Bolshevik organizations. The European socialists’ position was contradictory: on the one hand they had condemned the Qo’qon government for not representing Muslim workers and declared Muslim soviets to be one of the bases of Soviet power. On the

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other hand, they were very reluctant to recognize Muslim communist organizations, insisting on the absence of a Muslim proletariat. They tried to obstruct Muslim participation as much as possible. Nevertheless, the new Soviet government boasted four Muslim people’s commissars. Toshxo’ja Ashurxo’jayev, now a Bolshevik and commissar for nationalities, had been a member of the Qo’qon People’s Council. It was he and not the European socialists who shortly thereafter banned the ulamo jamiyati. This move intensified tensions in Tashkent’s old city, where the ulamo had much more support. On 22 June 1918, the Muslim People’s Commissar for Interior Affairs, Ismail Gabitov, just managed to survive an assassination attempt. He blamed Xudoyarxanov for having acted in league with the ‘ulemists’ (ulamo). One week later, he moved to the new city, not feeling safe in old Tashkent any more. This move was symbolic: Soviet power remained mainly a European affair. As some Muslims decided to become a part of Soviet power, the split in urban Muslim society deepened. Soviet Muslims were clearly a minority. Progressist Muslim intellectuals who were not willing to opt for Soviet power could cooperate to a certain extent, but had no political representation in the traditionalist-dominated old cities. The TSNK on the other hand could not even control all of New-Tashkent, let alone Turkestan. To a large degree, it merely simulated governmental activity, reproducing decrees from the central government without any possibility of implementing them. Its actual activities were limited to attending to its members’ and clientele’s immediate needs. Remnants of the colonial administration not jeopardizing them were left untouched, as in the district courts, where Prince Aleksandr Nikolaevich, great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, could serve undisturbed until January 1919.32 Soviet power also remained an urban affair. Despite their formal inclusion into the Turkestan Soviet system, both European and Muslim peasants were in fact excluded from it. The food supply situation continued to be critical; famine plagued large parts of the region again and again from 1917 to 1920, aggravated by epidemic plagues such as cholera or typhus. The new cities continued to requisition food from Muslim and European peasants.33 Impoverished Muslim peasants resorted to joining armed groups, the so-called Basmachi. Often portrayed as a united front of national antiSoviet resistance, the commanders (qo’rboshi) and members of these ‘gangs’ had very diverse motives. They never merged into a single movement. ‘Their activity was the expression of rural particularity, in many ways a struggle against the power cities cast over the countryside. In that sense, they represented a truly alternative vision of politics that had little in common with the cities and their politics.’34 Turkestan thus witnessed a bitter civil war of its own. Depending on the local situation, alliances and enmities changed. In Fergana valley, peasant settlers formed a ‘peasant army’ to fight Basmachi ‘gangs’. As urban settler pressure grew in intensity, the ‘peasant army’ forged an alliance with qo’rboshi Madaminbek, laying siege to the city of Andijon in spring 1919. Only the superior forces of the centre’s Red Army brought an end to this war, which continued into the late 1920s in some mountain areas. The death toll of the civil war in Turkestan is estimated at one million. From 1916 to 1920, Turkestan’s population shrunk from 7.3 to 5.3 million due to emigration and death.35

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For almost two years, Turkestan’s adversaries were fighting without much involvement from Moscow. The civil war isolated Turkestan from central Russia. From November 1917 to September 1919, the railway line from Orenburg to Tashkent was blocked by White forces, with two short exceptions in early 1918 and in March 1919. The much longer way via the Caspian was no longer available from June 1918 to April 1920, when European socialists in Transcaspia set up their own Soviet government. The Tashkent Soviet government and the Bolshevik government in Moscow were allies against White forces. The central government was also interested in Turkestan’s cotton and  – as the hopes for a revolution in Europe faded – in Turkestan as an example for revolution in the colonized parts of the world. Contrary to pre-revolutionary statements, the centre was not willing to grant independence to Turkestan. Quite the opposite: both military interests and the acquisition of cotton motivated a centralist policy against autonomy rights for Turkestan. On the other hand, the idea of Turkestan as a showcase for revolution in the orient made the centre both support Muslim claims to autonomy and participation in Soviet Government, and pressurize Turkestan’s European socialists to admit Muslims into their ranks. These contradictory basic principles led to inconsistent central policies. As long as the civil war lasted, the central government could only indirectly influence Turkestan’s politics. Lacking its own specialists on Turkestan, it appointed representatives such as the Tatar soldier Garif Klevleev, who had been a member of Turkestan autonomy’s people’s council, and Petr Kobozev, an engineer of the Orenburg-Tashkent railway. The mandate from central government gave them much power in Turkestan, but they acted independently of Moscow. Both Klevleev and Kobozev helped Muslim communists to organize. Kobozev tried to mediate the conflicting interests of the centre and Turkestan’s European socialists. He ended up being distrusted by both and finally dismissed by the centre in late 1919. In June 1918, the newly proclaimed Turkestan Soviet Republic dispatched a delegation to Moscow to negotiate their mutual relationship. The centre-periphery cleavage proved to dominate the settler-indigenous divide: the four delegates including Muslim communist Sobir Yusupov, who had been, like so many others, a member of the Qo’qon people’s council, demonstrated their unity vis-à-vis the centre. The talks were aborted after only a few meetings. Their only result was to make clear that Turkestan wanted far more autonomous rights than Moscow was willing to give. In October 1918, therefore, Turkestan’s socialists adopted their own constitution which spelt out extensive autonomous rights for Turkestan. This clearly upset the centre, which never acknowledged it.36 When Muslims joined Soviet power, they at first adopted a submissive stance. They expressed their gratefulness to ‘the Russian proletariat’ for bestowing autonomy. Klevleev declared: ‘Our older brothers, the Russians, will teach us.’37 Although Muslims were now part of the government, organized in workers’ soviets and socialist parties, and flocked to the European socialist parties – Muslim membership in the CPT reached 45 per cent by December 1918 – they did not manage to increase their share in power. The European socialists were engaged in bitter strife both between factions of the CPT as well as between CPT and the Socialist Revolutionaries. But

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they still were in unison about excluding Muslims, even from their strife. The conflicts culminated in a putsch by War Commissar Konstantin Osipov in January 1919 which left almost the whole TSNK dead, but failed within a couple of days. It provoked excessive violence against ‘enemies of the revolution’ resulting in about 4,000 dead in Tashkent alone. As the survivors reorganized, they also closed their ranks: in March 1919 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries joined the CPT as a body.38 The failed putsch provided Muslim communists with an opportunity to increase their influence in Soviet government. Osipov had not targeted them, but their opponents in the old city had eagerly tried to seize the opportunity and get rid of them. Muslim communists therefore were among the first to fight Osipov’s forces. They also allied themselves closely with Kobozev who lost the European socialists’ trust at this time. With his support, they managed to establish the ‘Muslim bureau of the RCP(b) in Turkestan’ (Musbiuro) in March 1919. Formally, it was the management body of all Muslim organizations within the CPT with the right to conduct its work independently, but in accordance with the decisions made by the ‘regional committee’ of the CPT. Its name symbolized the Muslim communists’ willingness to be subordinate to the Moscow leadership in exchange for support against the European socialists. Turar Ryskulov, a Kazakh having studied in colonial schools in Bishkek and Tashkent, became president of the Muslim bureau. Within a few months, he managed to turn it into a de facto independent Muslim communist party with branches in many of Turkestan’s provinces. This organizational structure provided a ‘safe space’ for Muslim communists to openly discuss the disastrous situation and the ongoing discrimination. The Muslim bureau conducted its own party conferences, which officially voiced all the problems and tasked the bureau with solving them. This also put an end to submissive communications. At the party congresses, Muslim delegates now openly and even aggressively criticized their European comrades.39 In March 1919, the railway connection between Turkestan and central Russia briefly fell under Red Army control, and a communist delegation came to Turkestan, where they formed a group call the ‘centrists’ (tsentroviki). They joined forces with the Muslim communists, at the same time trying to tie the CPT closer to Moscow’s leadership. In July 1919, the central Soviet government instructed Turkestan’s Soviet government to ensure that Muslim representation in government was in proportion to their share of Turkestan’s population. This would have resulted in completely depriving the settlers of power, since their share in population was generally put at 5 per cent. From July to October 1919, centrists, Muslim communists and quarrelling factions of settler revolutionaries were entangled in a fierce power struggle involving accusations of corruption and treason, mutual arrests, investigative commissions and lawsuits. German and Austrian prisoners of war, many of whom fought in the ranks of Turkestan’s Red Army, organizing communist sections of their own, constituted an additional party to these conflicts. The settler communists eventually lost, but there was no clear winner. This stalemate was embodied by the existence of three communist party centres representing settlers, Muslims and POWs. Muslim representation in the government increased to about one-third, but did not reproduce the Muslim majority in the overall population.40

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Muslim communist success was symbolized by the removal of the memorial to Governor General von Kaufman in October 1919. But there was no corresponding change on the ground. The main reason for the limited opportunities for Muslim communists was the lack of military forces at their command. They demanded the creation of Muslim Red Army units, but the European socialists clung to the prerevolutionary exemption policies and only paid lip service to the idea of arming Turkestan’s Muslims.41 Since late 1918, Turar Ryskulov had organized a commission to help the hungry, trying to alleviate the situation for the indigenous population, especially for Semirech’e’s hard-pressed nomads. But the commission brought about almost no change, as European socialists kept control of the food supply available in their own hands. The Europeans gave their Muslim comrades their head only when they saw settler interests untouched. Therefore, Muslim communists achieved some success in setting up ‘soviet schools’, continuing the pre-revolutionary modernization attempts in the educational sphere known as jadidism. The limiting factor here was their marginal position in Muslim society, lack of funding and the overall chaos of the civil war.42 Their efforts to reform the Islamic judicial system failed.43 As both European socialists and their adversaries in Muslim society kept gaining the upper hand, Muslim communist hopes lay with the centre. In August 1919, the high command of the Red Army grouped troops from the Eastern front into the ‘Turkfront’ under the command of Mikhail Frunze; these finally smashed the White forces in the Kazakh steppe. On 13 September 1919, units of the Turkfront met with troops of the Turkestan Red Army at the Mūǧaljar railway passing loop near the station of Birshoǧyr (now in Kazakhstan). Turkestan’s communist newspaper celebrated this event with the headline: ‘Red Turkestan and Soviet Russia are united!’44 The centre’s forces came in the shape of Muslim soldiers, obviously a message to settlers and indigenous people of Turkestan, for the vanguard of the Turkfront was the First Volga Tatar Rifle Brigade: 14,000 Muslim soldiers under the command of Yusuf Ibragimov, a Tatar from Turkestan.

TASHKENT, 4 NOVEMBER 1919–MOSCOW, 29 JUNE 1920: TURKESTAN IN SOVIET RUSSIA The Moscow government set up a Turkestan Commission as its representative, which arrived in Tashkent on 4 November 1919, equipped with a friendly letter, handwritten by Lenin to the Turkestan comrades, asking for cooperation. It was welcomed with a submissive address from Ryskulov and other Muslim communists, but it clashed with Tashkent’s European communists on its very first day. The commission itself acted in a rather uncomradely manner; it put Turkestan’s strategic infrastructure and institutions under its command, forced Tashkent’s CP members to hand in their firearms, and replaced party committees and executive committees of local soviets with newly appointed revolutionary committees. European communists trying to resist were dubbed ‘colonizers’, a terminology applied to them first by Turkestani Muslim communists. This was a process that took more than half a year.45

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The Turkestan Commission also soon clashed with Turkestan’s Muslim communists. It replaced Muslim communist people’s commissars with communists from the centre, dissolved Tashkent’s old city party committee and requisitioned quarters in the old city. The commission ordered the Muslim bureau to liquidate itself, but the Muslim communists resisted. The conflict escalated when the commission filed a lawsuit against and arrested Ryskulov in late December 1919. Supported by the commanders of the Tatar brigade, Muslim communists called for his release and demanded the right to veto any government decision. At the height of this conflict, on New Years’ Day 1920, the Tatar brigade paraded through the streets of Tashkent – a Muslim demonstration of strength. The commission gave in and had the lawsuit dismissed.46 Yet the Turkestan Commission continued to press for abolishing the three separate party centres. Ryskulov now linked this issue to the status of Turkestan’s autonomy. He suggested to declare Turkestan an autonomy of its indigenous inhabitants (Uzbek, Kazakh and Turkmen), which he presented as the ‘people of Turkestan’. He could hope for acceptance by the central power, which had indicated its willingness to acknowledge national autonomous territories in the nascent Soviet state. In Ryskulov’s proposal, Turkestan was to be the ‘Turkic republic of the RSFSR’, the united party centres would form the Central Committee of the Turkic Communist Party. The Turkestan Commission’s members, following the opinion of its president Eliava, agreed. The fifth conference of the CPT then adopted the declaration on 27 January 1920. Muslim communists now constituted the majority of the party committee; the Turkestan Commission had alienated not only settler communists but even centrists who supported the declaration even though it substantially diminished their status. Ryskulov became Turkestan’s head of state. But the Muslim communists still lacked the resources necessary to turn the declaration’s words into reality. They tried, finally, to return the land occupied by settlers in Semirech’e to the indigenous population, a Muslim demand since 1916, but were upset by the refusal of the Turkfront under Frunze’s command. On the ground, the Turkestan commission often favoured settler over Muslim interests. When Frunze arrived in Tashkent, he initiated a change of mind in the Turkestan Commission. It now decided to override the decisions of the party conference, but the Muslim communists refused to obey. The conflict had to be decided by the Politburo in Moscow, which heard reports from both the Turkestan Commission and a delegation led by Ryskulov. On 22 June 1920, it denied Turkestan the degree of autonomy the January declaration had envisaged. But on 29 June 1920, the Politburo issued a decision fulfilling Muslim Communist demands to a large extent. It contained strong statements against settler colonialism and the first substantial response of a Russian government to the concerns of nomad victims of the 1916 revolt, including the return of pastures. It also addressed the food supply issue in urban areas, commanding an equal distribution between settlers and Muslims. It staffed the Turkestan Commission and Turkfront command with new functionaries who were to implement these policies. Muslim communists therefore could record the decisions of 29 June as their success.47

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Turkestan’s place in Soviet Russia was codified in a new constitution, adopted by Turkestan’s Ninth Congress of Soviets on 19–25 September 1920. It replaced the 1918 constitution, which had been adopted by settler revolutionaries in opposition to the centre, with a constitution by grace of the central power. The new constitution left Turkestan with limited autonomous rights. These rights, however, included the authority to dispose over water and land resources and draw internal borders without the centre’s interference, which theoretically put the settler-indigenous relationship into Turkestan’s hands. The concluding session of the congress was held in Tashkent’s old city, in order to demonstrate the close relationship between Soviet power and indigenous inhabitants. In view of the conflict between Muslim communists and their opponents in Old Tashkent, it was a demonstration of power: in 1918 the first Muslim people’s commissar had to flee the old city. Now, Muslim communists returned to it in a ceremony of triumph.

CONCLUSION After four years of revolution and upheaval, Turkestan’s place in the new Russia had been determined and took on the form of an unwritten contract relationship.48 Hopes of autonomy nourished by both settler and indigenous revolutionaries did not become reality, not even to the degree the 1920 constitution would have allowed for. Party rule and party discipline would keep Turkestan under central control. Cotton remained at the centre of Moscow’s interest in Turkestan and its successor republics, especially Uzbekistan. But in exchange for cotton, Central Asia’s Muslim communists received the centre’s support to implement cultural and technical modernization.

PART SIX

Civil War

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Civil War: An overview EVAN MAWDSLEY, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

The key events of the 1917 Russian Revolution largely took place in Petrograd – and to some extent Moscow. In contrast, the events of the Russian Civil War were fought out over the truly vast territory of the former Russian Empire.1 This space might be conceptualized – crudely – as three concentric circles, based largely on geography, but also partly on history and ethnicity.2 The core or ‘central zone’ was central European Russia, all or part of two dozen provinces (gubernii) around Moscow and Petrograd. This heartland was the territory controlled by the Bolshevik government throughout the Civil War, from the winter of 1917–18 onwards. Opponents gave this space the nickname ‘Sovdepia’, after the Soviets (sovety, ‘councils’) of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies in whose name Russia was ruled. Sovdepia had a population of nearly 60,000,000 people, consisting mainly of peasants, but it also included most of the industrial centres of the old Empire. The majority of the population were ethnic Russians, or Russianized members of ethnic minorities. This central zone was not greatly different from the lands controlled by Grand Prince Ivan III (1462–1505), which extended east as far as the northern Urals.3 In the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries this central core had expanded to include weakening neighbours, especially Tatars in the southeast and east; a network of cossack hosts  – military settlers  – was set in the southeast to safeguard the new perimeter. Against Sweden, Russia finally gained secure access to the eastern Baltic, where the new settlement of St Petersburg became the capital in 1713. Some of these regions were sparsely settled and or inhabited by non-Slavs, but Russian settlement went on over several centuries before 1917. Physically surrounding to the central zone was what might be termed the ‘inner periphery’. Proceeding clockwise, this included northern Russia, western Siberia, the middle Volga region, southeast Russia, the ‘left-bank’ (eastern) Ukraine, Belarus and the Pribaltika (modern Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). Unlike the central zone this inner periphery was not under ‘Soviet’ control for much of the Civil War. Contested between Red, Whites and national minorities, it was the main battle zone of the Civil War and the base area for some counter-revolutionary groups. Several regions in the inner periphery succeeded in breaking away from the Russia Empire and achieving national independence.

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Historically, these territories in the inner periphery were added to Russia in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.4 This was at the expense of Poland, Sweden and the Tatars, or by an advance into frontier territories without a large settled population. In many cases the inhabitants of the inner periphery were ethnically and culturally different from those of the central zone; many were not ethnic Russians or Orthodox Christians. The era of Empress Catherine II had special impact. Gains were made at the expense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 and 1793 and Crimean Tatar khanate (a vassal of the Ottoman Empire) in the 1780s and 1790s and. As a result the latter conquests the northern coast of the Black Sea became known as ‘New Russia’ or Novorossiia), with the Crimea, and the sites of future ports like Odessa, Sevastopol and Rostov. Beyond lay the ‘outer periphery’. Again proceeding clockwise, this would include central and eastern Siberia, Central Asia and Transcaucasia (with Georgia, Azerbaidzhan and Armenia), central Poland and Finland.5 As was true of the inner periphery, many of the indigenous inhabitants here were not ethnic Russians, but in some cases there had been many Russian settlers. In the Russian Civil War, parts of the outer zone became a base area for the Whites and provided access points (ports) for foreign intervention. The last battles of the Russian Civil War took place here, as Soviet forces achieved final victory over their enemies. These territories had also been part of the Russian Empire, but they were acquired or settled later than the inner periphery, much of it during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historically, this was the culmination of the expansion of the Empire in the west. In 1796 the Polish Commonwealth was extinguished in the Third Partition (between Russia, Prussia and Austria), with the Russian Empire now extending west beyond Warsaw and creating the Kingdom of Poland (Korolevstvo Pol’skogo). In 1809 Finland was annexed from Sweden and became a Grand Duchy (Velikoe kniazhestvo Finliandskoe) within Russia. A related aspect of geography, essential for the understanding the course of the Civil War, was the railway and river steamboat network developed in the Russia Empire from the 1840s. This linked the centre and the inner and outer peripheries. Most obvious was the Trans-Siberian Railway, built in 1894–1916. Also significant was the railway across the north Caucasus, from Rostov to Vladikavkaz, with the trunk line built in the 1870s. Another line ran from the Black Sea, south of the Caucasus mountains to Baku, and was completed in the 1880s. Two lines ran into Central Asia, from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian in the 1880s and from Orenburg to Tashkent, completed in the 1900s. Even more important, however, was the railway system in European Russia, centred on the central zone and on Moscow itself. The first primitive phase of the Civil War was the ‘railway war’ (zheleznodorozhnaia voina), in which the revolution was spread out from Petrograd and Moscow along the railway lines by revolutionary detachments. As the months passed and the Red Army grew, the Soviet government was able to deploy troops to points of threat around the circle of fronts, transferring armies and supplies from one front to another and from the central depots and storage facilities in central Russia. The railways also had a direct role in the fighting at the operational and tactical levels; one of the iconic weapons of the Civil War, for

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all the combatants, was the armoured train (bronevik). The Russian railways ended up in bad repair by 1921, due to fighting and lack of maintenance, but they had paid a crucial role in the victory of Soviet power and in maintaining the territorial integrity of much of the Russian Empire.

THE FIRST PERIOD: OCTOBER 1917 TO NOVEMBER 1918 After the October Revolution and short-lived skirmishes around Petrograd and Moscow, the revolutionary swell spread rapidly. In the power vacuum that followed the fall of Kerensky’s Provisional Government, left-wing forces supportive of Soviet power – Bolsheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and non-party radicals – seized power in localities across the territory of the former Russian Empire. In what V.  I.  Lenin termed the ‘triumphal march of Soviet power’ the new authorities were often supported by flying columns of armed workers (‘Red Guards’) and revolutionary soldiers and sailors fanning out along the railway lines. Potential resistance to the Bolshevik takeover outside Petrograd and Moscow was stunned and ineffective, a result both of the October Revolution itself and of the preceding eight months of turmoil. The peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR), the opposition party with the widest popular base, was split into two or three conflicting factions and unable to create political strongholds in the central zone. Its potential institutional base, the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, assembling in Petrograd, was forcibly closed down by the outvoted Bolsheviks in early January 1918. At the other extreme were conservative and nationalist Russian elements, often hostile even to the February Revolution, not to mention the October one. They were opposed to social revolution, to the humiliating Soviet withdrawal from the First World War, and to ‘separatism’ within the former Russian Empire. At first they were unable to create or hold a defendable base, even in the inner and outer periphery. The Russian Army headquarters at Mogilev (in Belarus) and the Don, Kuban’, Orenburg and Ural’ Cossack centres were all quickly neutralized. Potentially the most important counter-revolutionary base was in the southeastern, inner periphery of European Russia, the North Caucasus. There the Don and Kuban’ Cossack ‘host’ territories (voiska) seemed to offer a safe haven among the Cossacks, who combined a conservative outlook with military training. A number of the most senior officers of the army of the Russian Empire made their way here from the disintegrating First World War front. In the end, however, war-weary younger cossacks were unready to fight against Soviet power, and Red Guards expelled the counter-revolutionary officers deep into the empty frozen steppe. A new counterrevolutionary armed force, the Volunteer Army, officially formed at the end of December 1917 under General M. V. Alekseev, the former commander-in-chief of the Russian Empire’s army. For months it could do little but hide in the wilderness. Its first military leader was Gen. L. G. Kornilov; he had been a right-wing figurehead in 1917 but was killed in action in April 1918. Another and quite different type of centre of early opposition to the Bolshevik government was in the city of Kiev (now Kyiv). There, a national council, the Central

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Rada (Tsentralna Rada), formed in 1917, had attempted to create a breakaway Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). But Ukrainian nationalist activists lacked armed forces and arguably the national ‘awakening’ lacked strong popular roots. The Rada were forced to flee Kiev on 27 January, again in the face of advancing Red Guards. Local governments in the inner and outer periphery which accepted the central Soviet government remained in place where there was no foreign intervention. This included the towns strung out along the Trans-Siberian railway from the Urals to Vladivostok. Soviet power also survived in Central Asia, where a Turkestan Soviet Republic survived, based on ethnic Russian railway workers and settlers. They held on to power for two years when cut off from Sovdepia proper by counterrevolutionary forces. It almost seemed in November and December 1917 that the civil war within the Russian Empire had been won by the adherents of Soviet power, almost before it began. But then other factors came into play. Civil wars often involve foreign participants, occupying part of a contested territory, or supporting one or both sides. During the Russian Civil War Soviet propaganda made much of foreign ‘interventsiia’, especially by what they knew as the ‘antanta’, the ‘Entente’, the First World War alliance of Britain, France, the United States and Japan; Allied intervention was later stressed by Soviet-era historians. In reality, the first and most important foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War was by the Central Powers  – the main elements being Germany, AustriaHungary and the Ottoman Empire. Obviously, the situation was complicated by the state of war that had existed between the Russian Empire (and, briefly, the Russian Provisional Government) and the Central Powers. A huge conventional inter-state war had been going on for three years by the time the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. A significant part of the Russian Empire’s western outer periphery (notably the Russian ‘Kingdom of Poland’ in 1915) had already been occupied by the armies of the Central Powers, even before the overthrow of Emperor Nicholas II in February 1917. (Indeed, the humiliating Polish defeat of 1915 fatally damaged the prestige of the autocracy and contributed to its fall.) Dealing with the Central Powers was one of the first tasks of the new Soviet government. The enormous Russian Army created during the World War was collapsing in a process of self-demobilization, abetted by the new rulers in Petrograd. Negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk and an armistice was agreed on 2 December, which was supposed to bring an end to the fighting while peace terms were worked out. However, the stalled negotiations, overseen by L. D. Trotsky, led the Germans and their partners to resume the offensive, gaining considerable ground and forcing a capitulation. The Central Powers had also on 22 February signed a separate peace at Brest-Litovsk with the refugee Ukrainian government of the UNR, recognizing it and agreeing mutual borders. The humiliating terms signed by Soviet Russia at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 forced Moscow to abandon any authority beyond an agreed demarcation line. This involved the loss of extensive territories in the inner periphery to the west and south, notably what is today the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. Most significantly, German troops restored – for a time – the government of the Central Rada in Kiev.

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German and Austro-Hungarian troops continued to march east across Ukraine in the spring and early summer of 1918. German intervention also affected Finland. That region, historically in the outer periphery, is a neglected yet significant part of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Finland was historically and legally something of a special case, and with German help was the first part of the Russian Empire to successfully break away.6 The Soviet government, remarkably, recognized Finland as an independent state very soon after the revolution, on 18 December 1917; this was in anticipation that a left-wing government would run the country. In the end Finland was the scene of bloody fighting from January to May 1918, with only limited involvement by ethnic Russian forces of the right or left. Ethnic Russians made up only a small part of the population, and the ‘White Finns’ had strong bases in the northern countryside. White Finn volunteer units trained in Germany were brought in by sea, as well as regular soldiers from the German and Swedish armies. The White victory did not end the potential importance of Finland in the greater civil war in Russia. Lenin had insisted on his government signing the humiliating peace with the Central Powers. It promised a ‘breathing space’ (peredyshka), and a check on the further advance of the German army into central Russia (if not Finland and Ukraine). Lenin’s government itself was hurriedly evacuated from Petrograd, a few days’ march from the German front line to the relative safety of Moscow. The territory now controlled from the new Russian capital was certainly smaller than before, but it included the core central zone, as well as a vast hinterland in the east – the Urals and the sub-continent of Siberia, as well Turkestan in Central Asia. Moreover, taking the long view from Moscow, the Central Powers could be expected to have internal and external problems of their own, and the period of Soviet weakness and loss of territory might well be short. For its part, the German high command did not want to move further east into Russia. Troops were needed for an offensive on the Western front, and Russia now presented no threat. Lenin’s government was regarded in Berlin as the ideal body to ‘govern’ Russia at that moment. It seemed weakly organized and supported, and it had no way of interfering with the activities of the Central Powers. As for the Allied powers, the international revolutionary programme of the firebrand Bolshevik government, and its capitulation before the Central Powers in the winter of 1917–18, put it beyond the pale. Lenin and his comrades were widely portrayed as treacherous usurpers and German stooges. The Allies did still have a small wartime presence in ports on the outer periphery, in North Russia and far distant Pacific coast. British and Japanese troops came ashore in Vladivostok in April 1918, removing the local Soviet authorities. In May a force of Allied soldiers, the Czechoslovak Legion, took action against Soviet power in the middle Volga region. This action that would have extraordinary consequences, notably the Soviet governments loss of control of the Urals region and Siberia; it was probably not, however, organized from the Allied capitals. (The Czechoslovak ‘mutiny’ is discussed further below.) A small British-French force came ashore at Arkhangel’sk in August 1918. The stated objective of all these initiatives in Russia’s ports was to maintain order and prevent munitions stores from falling into enemy hands,

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although small detachments were sent ‘up-country’ from Vladivostok, as far as central Siberia, when Soviet power collapsed there. In the wake of revolution and foreign intervention two simultaneous and contradictory developments would take place in the spring, summer and autumn of 1918. Following the loss of territory to the west and southwest to the Central Powers, and ports in North Russia and eastern Siberia to the Allies, nearly the entire inner and outer periphery would break away from the Bolshevik-held central zone, a rupture which would have drastic consequences in 1919. But on the other hand, Sovdepia remained intact, gaining military strength and cohesiveness. To take the second development first, it is clear that the first twelve months of Soviet power were critically important. Despite some chaotic internal politics and great economic hardship  – much self-induced  – the new Bolshevik rulers of the Russian Empire were able to lay out a reasonably secure base area in the central zone. What was essentially a one-party state carried out the most severe measures against internal ‘class enemies’, using repressive organs like the Cheka (VChK). However, the Bolsheviks inherited a substantial state apparatus; they also enjoyed a considerable degree of mass support, having withdrawn Russia from the unpopular World War and decreed a comprehensive land reform. In any event, the crucial explanation of Bolshevik survival in the course of 1918, and success in the two years that followed, was the near-continuous hold on the central zone. By August 1918, after the armies of the Central Powers had completed their advance after Brest-Litovsk, the Allies had taken control of the northern ports, and Czechoslovak detachments had blocked access to Siberia and Central Asia. All the same, Soviet territory was still vast by the standards of any other European country. In the northern part of the Soviet-controlled central zone (Sovdepia) were Novgorod, Olonets (most), Petrograd, Pskov (most) and Vologda provinces. In what geographers described as the ‘central industrial region’ were Iaroslavl’, Kostroma, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tver’ and Vladimir. In the ‘central agricultural region’ were Kaluga, Kursk (most), Orel, Penza, Kazan’ (part), Samara (part), Saratov and Simbirsk (part) provinces. In Ukraine was Chernigov province (part). Finally, in the western part of the central zone were Mogilev (part), Smolensk and Vitebsk (part) provinces.7 (Another way of thinking about Sovdepia was that it occupied the same territory as the modern Russian Federation, but had lost Siberia, the North Caucasus and Crimea.) Soviet victory in the Civil War fighting was eventually made possible by the raising of a powerful the Red Army (RKKA) in this central zone, with its abundance of trained manpower, arsenals and factories able to arm, clothe and support the troops. To be sure, for much of 1918 this was only a potential asset; the strength of the Red Army was still very limited, following the chaotic demobilization of its predecessor and an understandable war-weariness among the population. The other development of 1918, aside from the consolidation of Sovdepia, was an overwhelming loss of territory by the Moscow government on the outer and inner periphery. The Civil War, especially in this year, was marked by singular events. One of the most remarkable and consequential of these was the uprising of the Czechoslovak Legion (Československé legie); it began on 14 May 1918, two and a

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half months after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. The Legion had been formed from Czechs and Slovaks living in Russia before the war and supplemented by POWs captured from the Austro-Hungarian army. As fellow Slavs the Legionnaires were sympathetic to the Russian involvement in the First World War, in addition to embracing the cause of national independence for their homeland against a Germanic government in Vienna. By the end of 1917, the Legion was a cohesive body of 40,000 men, organized at corps strength, with two divisions (eight regiments). Following the December 1917 armistice on the Eastern Front and then Brest-Litovsk, the Czechoslovaks had been eager to leave Russia. The was partly to continue fighting with the Allies on the Western Front and partly to avoid punishment for desertion and treason to Austria-Hungary if they fell into the hands of the Central Powers in Russia. They had originally hoped to leave the country through the northern ports (Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk), but this escape route was changed to a much longer one through Siberia, to Vladivostok. At the critical moment units of the Legion were strung out along the Russian railway system. The rising began with an incident at Cheliabinsk in the Urals, where a bloody skirmish with Hungarian POWs led to demands by the Soviet government that the Legionnaires disarm. Once their uprising began, the Czechoslovak units furthest west supported the founding of an anti-Bolshevik government in the central Volga town of Samara. Created in early June 1918 and dominated by Russian SRs and some members of the Menshevik Party, this new authority claimed its legitimacy from the popularly elected Constituent Assembly. It was known as the ‘Committee of Members of Constituent Assembly’; the Russian title of the committee was abbreviated as Komuch. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Soviet power on the edge the central zone was confronted with a new threat. A new Eastern Army Group (Front) of the Red Army was hurriedly created under a trusted Latvian former colonel, I. I. Vatsetis (Vācietis). The most dangerous moment came when the Komuch People’s Army advanced up the Volga and captured the industrially and strategically important town of Kazan’ on 7 August. Kazan’ was 450 miles from Moscow, but the Red Army was still weak; whatever strength it possessed had been concentrated in the western ‘screens’ facing the Germans. Fortunately for the Bolsheviks the People’s Army progressed no further than Kazan’. Within four weeks it was falling back to the south and then to the east, having been confronted by hurriedly transferred Soviet forces. Especially important in these battles were regiments of Latvian Riflemen; these units had originally been raised up by the Tsarist government, but they served as a Bolshevik praetorian guard and maintained internal coherence after the October Revolution. Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Military Affairs since March 1918, was directly involved in these battles. Komuch was forced to move its seat from Samara and move it east up the railway to the town of Ufa, with the People’s Army withdrawing behind it. Meanwhile, the Soviet hold was loosened on another part of the inner and outer periphery, the southeast of European Russia. In the winter of 1917–18 Red Guard detachments had overrun the Don Cossack host territory; now the Don Soviet Republic was crushed. More conservative Cossacks under Ataman (chieftain) P. N. Krasnov regained control, aided by the arrival of German troops in eastern

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Ukraine. Paradoxically this German-supported Cossack stronghold provided a screen for Gen. Alekseev’s pro-Allied Volunteer Army to rally further south. The Volunteers were able to gain control of the Kuban’ region of the North Caucasus, including the potentially vital coastal sector on the Black Sea. Unlike what would happen in the Volga region and Siberia, ‘democratic’ elements did not play a significant in the anti-Bolshevik movement in the North Caucasus. Alekseev died of cancer in October 1918, and Gen. A. I. Denikin became both the military and political leader of the Volunteers. An able military commander, Denikin made little active attempt to win wider support among the population. He nourished an opposition to socialists of all shades (Mensheviks and SRs, as well as Bolsheviks), whom he and his comrades judged responsible for the Russian turmoil. He also stressed the notion of ‘Russian, One and Indivisible’. This narrow perspective was not a liability in the operations of 1918 and early 1919 in the North Caucasus; it became one later. Although much is made of foreign intervention in the Civil War, the Volunteer Army and its Cossack co-belligerents developed a large base in the depths of southeastern Russia, without any support from Allied sources. Siberia in 1918 was a different part of the outer periphery. The small number of British and Japanese troops that were in place at Vladivostok did little to move west. The key, again, was the Czechoslovak Legion, spread along the railway system from the Volga to the Pacific. In late July 1918 they were able to capture Ekaterinburg in the western side of the Urals; their advance on the town precipitated the murder of Nicholas II and his family. In August other Czechoslovak units finally broke through weak pro-Soviet forces in Transbaikal (east of Lake Baikal) and linked up with fellow Legionnaires coming from Vladivostok. Siberia was less of a hotbed of revolution than central Russia. It was sparsely populated. There was no legacy of serfdom; land hunger, so important elsewhere, was not major factor. Few industrial centres existed, and few workers. Most Siberians were ethnic Russians. In late June, after the collapse of Soviet power – induced by the Czechoslovaks – a Provisional Siberian Government (PSG) was set up in Omsk. This was a third of the way east across Siberia from the Urals. Time was needed to put together an overall anti-Bolshevik authority in the east. Besides the distances involved, there were important political differences. The PSG in Omsk was a provincial backwater dominated by Kadets (centre-right Constitutional Democrats) and conservative ‘regionalists’, while Komuch at Samara was a centre-left body in which the main elements of the SR Party were important. Under pressure from the Czechoslovaks and Allied representatives, the leaders of the two governments came together in September 1918 at a ‘State Conference’ in the town of Ufa, on the railway in the western foothills of the Urals. The Komuch leaders were the larger element, but the successful advance by the Red Army from late August made them desperate to obtain reinforcement from the east, where anti-Bolshevik military officers had emerged from hiding to begin forming a new Siberian Army. News that the Komuch People’s Army had been forced to give up Kazan’ and Simbirsk arrived in the early days of the conference, and it would soon be clear that Samara itself – the seat of Komuch – was under attack. The compromise

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reached was the creation of a body called the Provisional All-Russian Government (PA-RG). This was led by a five-person Directory (Direktoriia), modelled on the Directoire exécutif of the French First Republic (1795–9). This government was forced to pull back by train to the east, into Siberia. On arrival in inhospitable Omsk, its members were harassed by local right-wing elements. On 18 November 1918 Russia’s Directory met its Bonaparte, in the form of Admiral A. V. Kolchak. A dictatorship was installed by a military coup, with Kolchak taking the title of Supreme Ruler of Russia (Verkhovnyi pravitel’ Rossii).

THE SECOND PERIOD: NOVEMBER 1918 TO MARCH 1920 Almost simultaneously with Admiral Kolchak’s coup came the Armistice. Signed on 11 November 1918 at Compiègne by the Western Allies and Germany, it marked the effective end of the First World War and the defeat of the Central Powers. For the participants in the Russian Civil War the end of the World War presented both grand opportunities and grave dangers. Much the most important opportunity, at least for the top leaders of the Bolshevik party, was the prospect of the spread of Russia’s ‘proletarian revolution’ to other countries, in effect an ‘internationalization’ of civil war. The most fruitful prospects seemed to be in Central Europe, where the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies had already collapsed. A second opportunity, for the Soviet government, related more directly to the Russian Civil War. This was the extension of political and social revolution to the inner and outer periphery of the former Russian Empire, and the lands that had occupied by the Central Powers during the World War. These included the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea and perhaps even Poland. On the other hand, the grave danger was that large forces of the victorious Allies might in turn intervene in this power vacuum. For the Whites and for the national minorities the opposite was true. The Whites, one of whose core beliefs had been the continuation in the war against the Central Powers, believed they had earned the support of Russia’s wartime allies. The Whites also mistakenly assumed that without the prop of German assistance the Bolshevik government would be fundamentally weakened. Meanwhile, nationalist leaders of the minority regions sensed fertile opportunities for independence, especially with Allied stress on new nation states in dealings with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. For the Bolshevik leaders the main thing that tied the October Revolution and the Civil War together was internationalism, and expectation of European revolution. Four months after the Armistice, in March 1919, Lenin succeeded in assembling in Moscow the foundation congress of the Third International, better known as the Communist International or Komintern. But, as in 1917, the spread of the revolution proved to be chimera. There were no strong revolutionary political parties in Europe or elsewhere able to take power on their own, even in the post-war crisis. Meanwhile Bolshevik Russia lacked the means to communicate with such groups in central and western Europe, let alone provide political or military help. The Red Army could play no part, even in central Europe, partly because of distance, and partly because

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it was fighting counter-revolutionaries at home. A Communist government took power in Hungary in March 1919, but after five months it collapsed. Extending the revolution to Kiev, Riga or Minsk (all within the old Russian Empire) did not compare with making revolution in Vienna or Berlin, let alone Paris and London. But even this task proved impractical. The most significant objective was Ukraine, in the inner periphery, where there was a brief success: Soviet forces took Khar’kov (now Kharkiv) in the middle of December 1918 and Kiev at the start of February 1919. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians had supported a puppet right-wing government under Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii (a former Tsarist general) in Kiev, in 1918, but this regime collapsed with the withdrawal of their troops. Genuinely nationalist forces briefly took Kiev in mid-December. They resurrected the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), governed by a Directory (Dyrektoriia) effectively headed by its military commander Symon Petliura. The UNR had little control over large parts of the territory it claimed, and only the most limited armed forces. Meanwhile, a Bolshevik-led Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) was set up in Khar’kov and Soviet troops took Kiev, forcing Petliura and his government to flee to the southwestern Ukraine. Like the government of the UNR, the government of the UkSSR also had only limited control over the regions. Aggressive food requisitioning policy and tactless behaviour by Red Army units set the population against both against it and the Moscow government further north. The Red military forces in Ukraine were overextended and relied too much on local military leaders, self-styled atamans. One of these warlords, N. A. Grigoriev, who had taken control of part of the southwest, changed sides in May 1919, further weakening the Soviet position. Meanwhile it was becoming clear that this was a three-sided struggle. The Whites, under Denikin and Kolchak, were completely opposed to Ukrainian ‘separatism’, either of the nationalist or of Bolshevik variety. In May 1919 the Volunteer Army under Gen. Mai-Maevskii (part of Denikin’s forces) launched an offensive into the Donbas region (Donets river basin) from the Kuban’ and quickly took control of much of eastern Ukraine, including Khar’kov. Kiev itself would fall in August. The Soviets had even less success in Estonia (Estliand province). A weak Soviet thrust into the country in the month after the Armistice was effectively parried. Once the Germans occupiers of Estonia had begun to depart, a centre-left nationalist government took power in Tallin (Reval’), supported by a British naval flotilla. The region, incorporated into greater Russia in the early eighteenth century, had been a distinct part of the Empire, overseen by the ethnic-German land-owning nobility, but with a non-Slavic, peasant population. The situation in neighbouring Latvia (Lifliand and Kurliand provinces) had a similar historical background to that of Estonia, but the Soviet cause had rather more success. A weak nationalist government was set up in Riga, against which Red Army units thrust forward at the start of December 1918, spearheaded by the Latvian Riflemen. A Soviet Republic was created, and at the end of January advancing Red troops captured Riga. The remnants of the Latvian nationalist government and some remaining German troops were pushed west to the Baltic coast. In the next few months new the Latvian SSR found it hard to rally popular support, and the veteran Riflemen dispersed. In the end, the advance of

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small Estonian nationalist forces from the north cut the main railway line back into Soviet Russia. Thanks partly to the interference of a German Freikorps, Riga was recaptured in May 1919, and the Latvian socialist state was terminated. Most of the territory, except the eastern edge, now came under nationalist control.8 The situation north of Ukraine and south of Latvia – in modern Lithuania and Belarus – was even more complicated, with the involvement of newly independent Poland (not a factor in the Estonia and Latvia). This western borderland of the inner periphery had become part of the Russian Empire after the Second (1772) and Third (1793) Partitions of Poland. In the course of December 1918 and January 1919 the winter surge of Soviet power did extend as far west as Vil’na (Vil’nius, Polish Wilno), the main city in Lithuania and Minsk, the main city in Belarus. Active popular support for the Soviet cause was small; nevertheless a Lithuanian-Belorussian SSR (known as Litbel) was created in February 1919, based first in Vil’na and then pulled back to Minsk. Litbel was overrun by effective new Polish forces bent on restoring their country to their pre-partition borders. Vil’na fell to the Poles in April 1919; Minsk itself would be taken by them in August 1919, bringing (for the moment) an end to the ephemeral Litbel Soviet state. By this time, the high summer of 1919, the Red Army had other tasks, and could take no defensive action here. The third impact of the Armistice on the Civil War in the first half of 1919 was the extended role of the Allies. The opening of the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea meant that Allied influence, first naval and then in the form of troops and supplies, could be extended. The Whites hoped, and the Reds feared, that the victorious Allies would send a significant body of troops. The role of the British Royal Navy in the Baltic has already been mentioned. The British fleet would blockade Soviet Russia for more than two years. As far as of land forces were concerned, however, the British confined their main activity to North Russia, where they reinforced existing garrisons put in place in 1918. As the demobilization of the mass wartime armies progressed, there was very little appetite by the governments or by soldiers for more fighting. The only large British units sent to the former Russian empire went to the Transcaucasus, to secure the strategic Batum-Baku railway. In contrast, the French did – briefly – oversee the deployment of an expedition of ground troops – mostly divisions from the army of their Greek allies. Despatched to the southwest Ukraine, they landed at Odessa in late December 1918, and at Sevastopol’, Kherson and other points shortly afterwards. With no effective White or Ukrainian nationalist local forces on hand, the ineffective and poorly led French force failed to rally the local population. By February 1919 the expedition was under pressure even from the shambolic Soviet troops of Ataman Grigoriev. At the beginning of April, the French ordered a complete and humiliating evacuation. With that their active involvement in the Russian periphery – except in Poland – largely ended. In the northeastern coast of the Black Sea, arriving British personnel were in the happier position of having friendly forces already in place, in the form of Denikin’s well organized White armies. A considerable amount of arms and equipment were sent by sea, mostly from British wartime stores in the Middle East. The first supplies only arrived in late May 1919, and the bulk came in the autumn. The main Allied presence in the eastern Siberia took the form of troops

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from Japan and the United States. The Americans made no effort to move forward, and although Japanese troops were present in larger numbers, they still had little positive military role, By June 1919, then, it was clear that the conflict in Russia would be an internal struggle. There would be no Bolshevik breakout against Central Europe. At the same time large-scale troop intervention by the European powers (and the United States) was not going to occur. The main development would be the growth and activities of internal counter-revolutionaries, especially in Siberia and southeast European Russia. In the south, Gen. Denikin had achieved important political and strategic successes in the winter of 1918–19. As it happened, these followed Red attacks against Krasnov’s Don Cossacks, which recaptured the northern part of the Don Region. Defeated in battle, with mass desertion from his army, and compromised by previous collaboration with the Germans, Krasnov had been forced to accept Denikin’s overall command. The consolidated forces of the Volunteer Army and the Cossacks were known as the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR), with their headquarters in Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar). Meanwhile elements of the Volunteer Amy under Gen. P. N. Vrangel’ overwhelmed a whole Red army group (front) of 150,000 men which had been positioned on the Caspian side of the North Caucasus; the catastrophe was to be the worst Red military defeat of the entire Civil War. By May 1919 Denikin controlled all of the North Caucasus including much of the Don Region and was in a position to strike further north. The first real threat to Sovdepia in 1919 had come earlier, from the east. The Red high command was again distracted, this time by the battles in the south. The threat was unexpected; for the Soviet government the situation in Siberia in the winter of 1918/19 had not seemed especially threatening. This was true despite the creation of the Kolchak government in Omsk, and the unexpected capture of the city of Perm in the Urals, on the northeastern edge of Sovdepia, in December 1918. Then, at the beginning of March 1919, Kolchak’s armies launched an offensive beyond the southern Urals, and through the town of Ufa. By the end of April, the main force had covered 250 miles and spearheads were only 75 miles from the Volga. Kolchak always faced a huge challenge. His base with thinly populated, with about 8 million inhabitants between the Urals and Lake Baikal; it faced a population of 60 million in Sovdepia. His military ‘line of communications’’ stretched 3,500 miles east to Vladivostok. He has been criticized for throwing his armies into battle before they were ready. The explanation is that Kolchak assumed Red forces and internal cohesion were weaker than they actually were. Meanwhile, he needed victories to attract further Allied support and gain influence for Russia at the Paris Peace Conference. The Reds, however, were able to redeploy forces of their own to the eastern front. In May 1919, just as Denikin’s advance towards Khar’kov began, the ‘Ufa offensive’ was rebuffed. By early June Ufa had been lost, and the White armies were in retreat. In the spring of 1919, the Soviet government still faced multiple threats. Kolchak’s forces were retreating but remained in the western Urals. Denikin’s armies were emerging as a serious threat in the southeast of European Russia. Nevertheless, the

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Soviet central zone was substantially stronger than it had been in the previous year. Sovdepia might not have successfully expanded, but Lenin’s government still had the advantage of its large, securely held central zone of 60 million people, which after seeing off the Komuch threat on the Volga suffered no further losses. Time saw a gradual consolidation of power, as the new rulers of Sovdepia gained experience. The soviets continued to serve as ‘front’ organizations for one-party rule. The Bolsheviks like their predecessor in the French Revolution had shown a readiness to use harsh methods of control. On the positive side the party of the urban proletariat attempted to broaden its appeal in the countryside by calling for a focus on the middle peasant (seredniak); in 1918 it had based its agrarian policy on inciting a struggle between poorest peasant (bedniak) and the better off ones (kulak). Probably most important, the Red Army was further developed in 1919. This was especially after the Eighth Communist Party Congress in March 1919, which marked a victory of Trotsky’s centralist approach over that of the ‘Military Opposition’. Lenin now accepted Trotsky’s view that the largely (middle) peasant army would require conventional structure and discipline, including the use of former officers, albeit with a high degree of party control. The resources of the central zone provided personnel, equipment and supplies. By June 1919 the Red Army numbered 1,500,000 personnel, of which about 350,000 could be classed as front-line combat troops. In May, Denikin’s AFSR began the most important operation of the Civil War. The initial advance only stopped when the Whites had advanced north 200 miles and (on 25 June) taken Khar’kov, one of the main industrial centres of southern Russia. The early summer Soviet retreat was partly explained by G. Z. MaiMaevskii’s brilliant campaign in the Donbass and by the distraction of the Red Army brought about by the battle against Kolchak. In any event, for the first time in the Civil War the heartland of Sovdepia was seriously threatened. On 1 July 1919, Lenin issued the famous order, ‘All Out for the Fight against Denikin!’ At the same time the command structure of the Red Army was shaken up. Vatsetis, the Latvian colonel, who had worked alongside Trotsky as Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army since September 1918, was removed. The Bolshevik Central Committee decided to replace him with S. S. Kamenev, a former tsarist colonel; as commander of the Red Army’s Eastern Front, Kamenev had just successfully turned the tide in the battle against Kolchak; Kamenev would remain in this central post until April 1924; Trotsky’s position in the Red Army was significantly weakened. On 3 July 1919, Denikin had drafted a secret ‘Moscow Directive’. His best troops were committed to the drive north towards the Soviet capital. The AFSR advanced roughly along the axis of the main railway lines. The Whites also took advantage of the powerful mobile forces of the Don and Kuban’ Cossack cavalry. One of the most dramatic events was a raid in August across Tambov province, southeast of Moscow, by a White cavalry corps under Gen. K. K. Mamontov. Denikin’s offensive was renewed in September 1919, by which time the White armies of the AFSR were larger and better equipped than any other time in the Civil War. The high point of the military campaign was the capture of the province capital of Orel by the Kornilov Division on 16 October 1919. Orel was only 100 miles south of the Red

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Army arsenal at Tula, and only 240 miles south of Moscow. But the Whites could only hold the place for six days and were then driven back. The secondary element of the summer 1919 Civil War military crisis was the threat to the former capital of Petrograd by the Northwestern Army. This small force had taken shape in Estonia with some British assistance, and in May 1919 it moved east out into the western part of Petrograd province. This first attempt to advance on Petrograd itself was repelled, but a more dramatic and unexpected attack was mounted at the end of September. This was under the direct command of Gen. N. N. Iudenich, who had been one of the Russian Empire’s more successful wartime commanders. The Red defence of ‘Red Piter’ had been weakened by the transfer of local Red Army units to the developing Denikin front. The attacking, White ‘army’ was actually quite small and with a weak base; redeployed Soviet troops were able to see it off in a counter-attack which began on 21 October. Both south of Moscow and west of Petrograd the White attacks had been halted. Iudenich’s army had had little chance of success. Denikin was a different matter: his advance ended up occupying – for a brief time – a territory of 40,000,000 people, which is about five times the population of his AFSR base area in the southeast. The balance of strength, however, remained on the Soviet side. White governance in this whole occupied region was weak, and the population was alienated by the White necessity to live off what they could loot. They had no political or social programme to appeal to the populations they passed through. With their slogan of ‘Russia. One and Indivisible’ they had little chance of gaining the sympathy of minorities on the periphery or the military support of the new Polish state. Denikin’s overall combat strength was about 100,000 men, but they were directly facing a Red force nearly half again as large. The White force advancing directly towards Moscow numbered only about 20,000. The late autumn and winter of 1919–20, from November to March, saw the defeat of the main White armies on all fronts. The back of Kolchak’s army had been broken in the summer of 1919. The Red armies counter-attacking in midsummer rapidly broke through the Urals mountain range, in the north and south; it was a stunning success which surprised even the Soviet high command. There had been a heated debate about pursuing Kolchak, and one of the reasons for the dismissal of Vatsetis had been his opposition to pursuing the retreating Whites to the Urals and beyond into Siberia. For the Whites, the Urals should have been a defendable barrier. However, by the late summer and autumn 1919 they had been chased east to the Tobol’ and Ishim rivers, halfway between the Urals and Omsk. On 14 November, four days short of the anniversary of Kolchak’s coup, Red spearheads took Omsk without a fight. Thousands of White conscripts being trained in the city were captured, and the remnants of Kolchak’s army fled east, in disorder. As they did so, they came under attack from partisan bands; these were based in the thinly settled forest (taiga) north and south of the Trans-Siberian, provoked to take action by White conscription and misrule. Only limited Red units continued the pursuit across Siberia, but, advancing across the now-frozen great rivers they made steady progress. The seizure by SR led anti-Kolchak forces of the railway town of Krasnoiarsk, east of the retreating White army, led to its effective disintegration. The

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end for Kolchak himself came when other opposition forces took control of Irkutsk, far to the east of Krasnoiarsk. The Supreme Ruler was tried there and executed on 7 February 1920. It actually would be another month before the pursuing Red Army units reached the city, but then the Red conquest of western and central Siberia would be completed. Another White collapse was taking place in South Russia, with Denikin’s retreat from late October 1919 to January 1920. The White debacle was furthered by a new development, the creation of the Red Army’s mobile force, partly in response to the Mamontov raid and under the slogan. ‘Proletarians to horse!’. S. M. Budennyi’s new Cavalry Army (Konarmiia) played a decisive role in harrying the White retreat and defeating the enemy on the Don. The final battles in the North Caucasus near Rostov in February and early March were led by the young M. I. Tukhachevskii and his Caucasus Army Group. Rostov was lost and remnants of the AFSR had to be evacuated by sea to the Crimea from the port of Novorossiisk at the end of March. The secondary White threats in the north and northwest had also been eliminated. British military reinforcements arrived at the northern ports of Murmansk and Arkhangel’sk in the summer of 1919. Their attack south in August was intended only to cover the withdrawal of existing Allied troops; this operation was completed in September and October 1919. The small White forces which subsequently wintered in the north were no threat to the Reds, and they were overrun in February and March 1920. Having failed in its quixotic attack on Petrograd, the Northwestern Army of Iudenich was pushed back into Estonia, where it was disarmed. The Estonians agreed an armistice with Soviet Russia on the last day of 1919; in the Tartu peace treaty of 2 February1920 Moscow accepted the country’s independence. The treaty was important as the first settlement between Soviet Russia and a new border state; it lasted until 1940. The formal situation with regard to the independence of Latvia and Lithuania was less clear in the winter of 1918–19, but unlike Estonia neither presented any immediate threat to important places in Soviet Russia.

THE THIRD PERIOD: APRIL TO NOVEMBER 1920 In early spring 1920 the Russian Civil War seemed nearly over. The survivors of the main White Armies slipped out onto the edges of the outer perimeter, Kolchak’s remnants to Transbaikal and Denikin’s to Crimea. The all-important White base area in the Cossack lands of the North Caucasus had been lost. The Siberian White Army had effectively been eliminated at Krasnoiarsk, and Kolchak executed in Irkutsk. Peace negotiations were progressing with the newly formed Baltic states. The Allies’ enthusiasm for involvement in Russia, never strong, was waning. The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had signalled in November 1919 a move towards more normal relations with Russia, and active British involvement on land had largely ceased. The rhetoric of the French government was still strongly anti-Soviet, but the emphasis was on building a strong Poland as a cordon sanitaire, rather than involvement elsewhere on the periphery of the old Russian Empire. So, no mortal threats to the core territory of Sovdepia seemed to exist.

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The onset of peace was delayed, and the third period of the Civil War triggered, by the Polish invasion of Ukraine on 25 April 1920. The Poles had been making incremental advances in the western borderlands in 1919, taking territories that had been historically – prior to 1791 – part of Poland. Overseen by Josef Piłsudski, the head of state and armed-forces commander, they now began a more ambitious operation, driving forward rapidly as far as Kiev. Piłsudski had now formed an alliance with Petliura’s Ukrainian government-in-exile: Poland would support an independent Ukraine, on condition that the new country’s western border would be set on the Zbruch (Zbrucz) River, the old border between the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Galicia). Petliura received Polish military help, but had to accept the abandonment of many fellow Ukrainians to the new Poland.9 Was the Polish-Soviet War actually part of the Russian Civil War? The new Polish state had been formally recognized by the victorious Allies  – at the Paris Peace Conference in June 1919  – without Russian participation. On the other hand, the larger part of Poland had been part of the Russian Empire in 1914. Polish nationalists had revolted against Russian control in 1830, 1863 and 1905; 1918–20 could be seen as the last chapter in a struggle for national liberation. In 1920, the Poles were not trying to destroy the Soviet state, and they differed in this from the Russian Whites  – and this was one reason they had given no support to Denikin and Kolchak in 1919. On the other hand, the government in Warsaw hoped to gain effective control – directly or indirectly – of the borderlands which had been part of the Russian Empire’s inner periphery. The Soviet government had been planning an offensive of its own in 1920, in response to the creeping Polish advance in 1919, once the Red Army was no longer tied down on other fronts. (Pilsudski’s invasion was in part an attempt to pre-empt this Red Army offensive.) But this Soviet offensive was  – probably  – originally intended to secure the western borderlands rather than to capture Warsaw and extinguish the Polish state. It turned out that the hubris of Piłsudski and the Poles had led them to a serious miscalculation. The Red Army successfully counter-attacked in the southern (Ukrainian) sector of the front in early June and the northern (Belarusian) one in early July. The success of these Red counter-offensives was coupled with revolutionary events in Germany (notably the Kapp Putsch of March 1920), the growing strength of the Red Army and the apparent defeat of internal enemies, and all this greatly raised the stakes of the campaign. The Soviet aim was now to destroy ‘bourgeois Poland’ and break through to the oppressed masses of Germany. Lenin and Trotsky had decided to export the Revolution using Red Army bayonets.10 On 12 July the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, speaking for the Allies, demanded that the Soviets accept the ethnic and historical dividing line later known to history by his name. The Curzon Line was set on the Bug River, 280 miles east of Warsaw and 180 miles west of Minsk. A week later, the Soviet government decided to reject this ultimatum and to pursue the Poles back to the Vistula River and beyond. As it turned out the Red Army was not strong enough. The ‘Miracle of the Vistula’, fought in the middle of August, saw another turn of fate. The large, Frenchequipped Polish Army, the best organized force the Soviets had encountered, was

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able to stop the overstretched attackers. The Red Army was forced to retreat, and to fall back well east of the Curzon Line. The end result, as set out in the PolishSoviet Treaty of Riga of March 1921, was that Poland survived and retained (until September 1939) extensive territories with Belarusian or Ukrainian minorities. The Soviet government had fought another campaign in which it had not succeeded in any of its successive objectives – retaking the western borderlands, defeating White Poland or spreading the revolution to Germany. The other major Civil War battles of 1920 came with the resurrection of a White army in Crimea, now under Gen. Vrangel’. White forces broke out to the north through the Perekop isthmus in June, two months after the Polish invasion of Ukraine threw the Red Army off balance. Vrangel’ made common cause with the Polish invaders. To be sure, he did not envisage a future Russia with the western borderlands, including Belarus, dominated by the Poles, and with an independent Ukraine. But he was prepared – like Petliura – to make a tactical concession, in his case to defeat Bolshevism. The Soviet leadership had mistakenly neglected Crimea during the Red Army’s great southern counter-attack in the winter of 1919/20. The core elements of the Volunteer Army had found a safe haven there. Denikin’s successor, Vrangel’, was aware that the 1919 campaign had failed partly because of the lack of a White political and social programme; he declared himself ready to introduce ‘leftist policies with rightist hands’. The French provided diplomatic support but little military aid, and the British had now washed their hands of the Whites. Meanwhile, there was no sign of a popular ‘upsurge’ against the Bolsheviks within Sovdepia. Even greater strength had been accumulated there; Vrangel’ ‘the last born’ – as Trotsky called him – was completely outnumbered. Vrangel’s forces made progress into the Tauride province, on the steppe north of Crimea, but that was the extent of his success. The stabilization of the Polish-Soviet front in September and the armistice with Poland, signed in mid-October, meant the full attention of the Red Army could be devoted to the southern counter-attack; this came under the overall command of M. V. Frunze. Despite the arrival from the Polish front of Budennyi’s Cavalry Army, Vrangel’s key formations escaped encirclement north of Perekop.  A better-planned evacuation than the one at Novorossiisk in March 1920 was carried out from several Crimean ports. The White Army sailed into its final exile abroad; the biggest evacuation of anti-Bolshevik soldiers and civilians involved nearly 150,000 people. The defeat of Denikin in the Kuban’ in the spring of 1920 had opened up the route over the Caucasus mountains, and to three regions on the outer periphery that had emerged as independent states. Armenia, Azerbaidzhan and Georgia had not been involved in the main campaigns of 1919 in the Civil War, but unlike the three Baltic republics, they did not survive. The Transcaucasus had only been part of the Empire for 120 years, and the ethnic Russian element in the population was smaller than elsewhere. They were a strange appendage to the Russian Empire, their core population not even Slavic. Georgia, in particular, had a strong Social Democratic tradition; Georgians were very prominent in both the Menshevik and Bolshevik factions; in the future Georgians like I. V. Stalin, S. K. Ordzhonikidze and L. P. Beriia would play a major leadership role in Soviet history.

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The Transcaucasian states suffered from disputes with one another, from the ambitions of Russian Reds and Whites, from threats from a resurgent Turkey and, latterly, from Allied disinterest. Red Army forces took over most of the future Azerbaidzhan in April 1920, immediately after Denikin’s defeat, and following an uprising in Baku on the Caspian; an Azerbaidzhan Soviet Socialist Republic was immediately created.11 The Armenian SSR followed in November 1920, when the government in Erevan summoned Soviet support after being threatened by a resurgent Turkey. In February and March 1921 the Georgian Bolsheviks took over the country as the Georgian SSR, with some support from the Red Army. All three small states were restive in the post-war period, but from1922 to 1936 were merged into Transcaucasus Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The retreat of Kolchak’s armies in 1919 had made possible another decisive advance in the southern outer periphery of the Russian Empire. In September, Soviet forces popped the ‘Orenburg cork’ to advance down the railway and make contact with the Tashkent-based Turkestan Soviet Republic.12 Soviet forces finally broke the resistance of the Ural’ Cossacks, although the later famous Red commander V. I. Chapaev was killed. The power of the Orenburg Cossack Host was also broken and scattered. In August 1920 a new autonomous soviet ‘republic’ within the Russian SFSR would be established, with its administrative centre in Orenburg (until 1925). This vast steppe territory eventually become the Kazakh SSR (in 1936) and the independent Republic of Kazakhstan (in 1991). M. V. Frunze’s Turkestan Army Group advanced 900 miles down the railway to Tashkent. The position was consolidated in 1920, notably by the incorporation into Soviet Russia of the pre-war protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara. In 1920, faced with active threats on the western and southern European periphery – the Poles and Vrangel’ – the Soviet government had been reluctant to commit troops to unnecessary fighting in distant eastern Siberia. After the Red Army took Irkutsk in March 1920, anti-Bolshevik forces under Ataman G. M. Semenov still controlled most of the railway line from Lake Baikal to the Pacific especially the ‘Chita cork’, about 400 miles east of Irkutsk. Moscow set up a buffer state in the form of a nominally independent ‘Far Eastern Republic’ (FER); this claimed be the government of independent non-Soviet eastern Siberia. The Japanese army pulled out of Transbaikal in the summer of 1920 after an agreement with the FER, and in October Semenov was forced to flee Chita; the city became the new capital of the FER. Most of Siberia, even the eastern region, was now effectively under Soviet control. In May 1921, however, a right-wing coup in Vladivostok restored a White government in that city. This endured under the protection of Tokyo until October 1922. In the following month the FER ceased to exist, and the final part of the former Russian Empire in the Far East was cleared of counter-revolutionary and foreign forces. In a formal sense the Russian Civil War was over.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

The Red home front: Building the early Soviet order, 1918–21 MURRAY FRAME, UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE

In his classic eyewitness account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, the American journalist John Reed recalled the rapid flurry of decrees issued by the Bolsheviks, as the new government ‘hammered at the scaffolding of the Socialist order’.1 Reed’s construction metaphor was particularly apposite because the Bolsheviks planned to build an entirely new kind of society founded on communist principles and led by the industrial working class (the proletariat). Their agenda reached far beyond the revolutionary slogans – Peace, Bread, Land, All Power to the Soviets – which had attracted growing support during autumn 1917 and had enabled Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades to oust the increasingly paralysed Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks conceptualized the revolution as a fundamental break with the past, the dawn of a new civilization, and they envisaged a revolutionary transformation in virtually every sphere of public and private life, from the state and the economy to the family and individual values.

THE CONTEXT The scale of transformational ambition was heralded by the Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People, a document which deliberately evoked its famous French revolutionary predecessor, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It was originally drafted by Lenin, proposed for adoption by the ill-fated Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and later incorporated as a preamble to the first Soviet constitution in July 1918. According to the declaration, the ‘fundamental task’ of the new regime was ‘the destruction of any exploitation of man by man, the complete abolition of the division of society into classes, the merciless suppression of the exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society and the victory of socialism in all countries’. Specific policies already adopted and now ratified by the declaration included: abolition of private land ownership; workers’

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supervision of industry and transport as a ‘first step’ towards their transfer to the republic (meaning their nationalization), nationalization of banks, universal labour duty, meaning the requirement of everyone to work, in order to destroy ‘the parasite classes of society and for the organization of economic life’; and formation of the Red Army to prevent the ‘exploiters’ returning to power. The declaration defined Russia as a republic of soviets of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies. There was no pretence of inclusivity. The ‘exploiting classes’ – broadly meaning the former tsarist establishment – were barred from participation in government: ‘Power must belong entirely and exclusively to the working masses and to their authorized form of representation  – Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies’.2 The declaration was not, therefore, a charter of individual rights as such, but a proclamation of state policy.3 The initial circumstances in which the Bolsheviks set out to construct a new order were hardly favourable. In addition to state breakdown, civil war and foreign intervention, they had to contend with a socio-economic catastrophe. The preeminent challenges were food scarcity and the collapse of industrial productivity. Food scarcity was inherited from the Tsarist and Provisional Governments but worsened under the Bolsheviks. The root causes lay in the shift to a war economy after the outbreak of the First World War. The prioritization of military materiel led to shortages of goods normally purchased by the peasantry, such as agricultural tools. This acted as a disincentive to the peasantry to sell grain on the open market. The loss of arable land in western Russia to the Central Powers also contributed to grain hoarding and rising food prices, problems compounded by widespread transport chaos as the railway network prioritized, but struggled to meet, the needs of the army. Both the Tsarist and Provisional Governments attempted to solve the crisis by means of a state grain monopoly but this simply exacerbated grain hoarding. Bread shortages, unsurprisingly, were instrumental in the downfall of both governments in 1917. For the Bolsheviks, these dilemmas were exacerbated by the Treaty of BrestLitovsk in March 1918. Although the treaty offered a ‘breathing space’ insofar as the Central Powers halted their military advance into Russia, it compounded the economic crisis. It handed great swathes of western Russia and Ukraine to the Central Powers, depriving the Bolshevik government of one-third of the country’s population, one-third of its agriculture, and more than half of its industry. The collapse of Germany and the Armistice in November 1918 effectively annulled the terms of Brest-Litovsk, but it was no simple matter for the Bolsheviks to reclaim the formerly occupied territories, which were contested by nationalist movements, White armies and peasant insurrectionists. Although the Reds still controlled the industrial heartlands of Russia, supplies of raw materials to run them, such as coal from the Donbas and cotton from Turkestan, were erratic.4 Freight traffic on the railways declined to approximately one-third of pre-war levels.5 By 1921 industrial productivity had plummeted to less than 20 per cent, and national income to less than 60 per cent, of their levels on the eve of the First World War.6 Serious disruption to food supplies and industrial productivity contributed to – and in the case of industrial productivity was partly caused by  – a steady exodus

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of people from Russia’s urban centres. Between 1917 and 1920, Petrograd, the revolution’s cradle, lost 1.8 million inhabitants, bringing its population down to only 700,000 people. During the same period, the population of Moscow, the capital city again from March 1918, fell by 50 per cent, from two million to one million people.7 Although most urban areas did not experience such sharp declines in population, the general pattern was still significant. In regions of the north, the rate of urban depopulation during 1917–20 was 24 per cent, and in the south and east it was 14 per cent.8 The main causes were twofold: Red Army conscription, and a return to villages, where the communal tradition and family connections offered city dwellers the prospect of sustenance. This demographic shift was reversed during the 1920s but it presented a short-term dilemma for the regime because it created a manpower shortage in industrial areas. It also presented an ideological conundrum: could a regime that regarded the urban working class as its social base and raison d’être survive when that very class seemed to be disappearing? Alongside these problems, the Bolshevik government had to contend with a sharp rise in public disorder, notably petty and violent crime, caused partly by the breakdown of police authority after the February Revolution. Writing in December 1917, Maxim Gorky described a society in which ‘Thievery is spreading, robberies are increasing’.9 According to data from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the volume of reported crimes – especially theft and robbery, as well as illegal distilling of alcohol and crimes of office  – rose steadily during the civil war period: from 108,638 in 1919, rising to 341,142 in 1920; peaking at 513,428 in 1921; and dropping to 264,861 in 1922.10 The actual crime rate was almost certainly higher, but these figures indicate that society was increasingly exposed to crime.11 As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has argued, this is an important factor for explaining the emergence of the Bolshevik authoritarian state, as the regime struggled to restore order.12 The scale of suffering during the civil war is almost beyond comprehension. Shortages of food resulted in widespread hunger and malnutrition, and shortages of fuel made the winters bitterly hard to bear. Epidemics of typhus and cholera were impossible to control in such circumstances. Between seven and ten million people are estimated to have died between 1917 and 1921, the vast majority from disease and starvation.13 Recent scholarship has also drawn attention to the mental and emotional impacts of the widespread turmoil.14 The Bolshevik worldview emphasized class divisions between ‘proletarians’ and ‘bourgeois’, between poor peasants and rich peasants, yet the extent of material deprivation and economic dislocation had a certain levelling effect on society. As the social and economic crisis deepened during 1918, the Bolsheviks also had to contend with escalating political opposition and attempts at counter-revolution. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended Russia’s war against the Central Powers, but in May 1918 the civil war intensified following the rebellion of Czech-Slovak soldiers en route to western Europe via the Trans-Siberian railway, a complex episode which handed control of Siberia to anti-Bolshevik forces. In early July 1918 the government was rocked by an attempted uprising initiated by the Left SRs. For the first six months of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks had governed in coalition with members of the leftist faction of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (the Left SRs). The latter,

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however, withdrew from the coalition in March 1918 in protest at Brest-Litovsk, which they regarded as a betrayal of the government’s duty to continue the fight against the Central Powers until revolution broke out in Germany. On 6 July, as the Fifth Congress of Soviets met in the Bolshoi Theatre, Left SR activists assassinated the German ambassador to Moscow, Wilhelm von Mirbach, in protest at BrestLitovsk and in hope of reigniting war with Germany. They were able to gain access to the ambassador’s quarters because party members had remained in a variety of lower-level posts in the Soviet administrative system after the end of the coalition. Almost simultaneously, local insurgencies against Bolshevik rule erupted in Iaroslavl, Rybinsk and Murom to the north and east of Moscow, coordinated by the former SR Boris Savinkov, ostensibly with the support of the Allies. The Bolsheviks easily subdued these protests, and the Left SRs were quickly purged from their lower-level posts, after which Soviet Russia was effectively a one-party state.15 But throughout summer 1918 the government remained besieged, as dramatically indicated on 30 August when the head of the Petrograd Cheka (the Bolshevik political police), Moisei Uritskii, was shot dead and Lenin was wounded by an assassin. All of this highlighted the fragility of the Bolshevik government and raised the prospect of escalating chaos. Faced with these challenges, the priority for Lenin’s regime on the Red home front  – Bolshevik-controlled territory of the former Russian Empire – was to retain power by any means. The remainder of this chapter will outline the main steps that the regime took to preserve, consolidate and extend its authority, focusing on political, economic and cultural measures between 1918 and 1921. The measures were a blend of improvised crisis management, coercion, experimentation and mobilization, all guided by revolutionary ideology but not constrained by it.

STATE AUTHORITY During 1917 state authority disintegrated and the political landscape was dominated by centrifugal tendencies as power shifted from the state towards popular representative organs, notably soviets, factory committees and workers’ militias. The Bolsheviks quickly moved to reassert central state authority. Party ideologues subscribed to the view, first expressed by Engels in the nineteenth century, that, as communist society developed, the state, as an expression of class division, would gradually ‘wither away’. But that was a distant prospect, and Lenin insisted that the state would continue to play a significant role during the period of transition to a new order. In The State and Revolution, written in 1917 (although not published until 1918), he set out his vision of a post-revolutionary transitional period characterized as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The task of the revolution was to destroy the bourgeois state – its bureaucracy, army, police – and to establish a proletarian state, which would coordinate the struggle against the revolution’s internal and external enemies. The theme of popular participation in state administration runs throughout The State and Revolution, but its dominant vision is of a centralized state ruling in the interests of the proletariat and poorest peasants. Other leading Bolsheviks, such as Nikolai Bukharin, also regarded the state as an instrument to advance the

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interests of the proletariat.16 Lenin put it bluntly in Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (April 1918): ‘It would be extremely stupid and absurdly utopian to assume that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without coercion and without dictatorship’.17 This conception of the revolutionary state was enshrined in the July 1918 constitution which set out the formal political organization of Soviet Russia, now officially called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).18 The constitution explicitly stated that its purpose was ‘to establish a dictatorship’ of workers and peasants for a transition period, the outcome of which would be the end of all exploitation, the establishment of socialism and the end of state authority. The constitution, however, was ambiguous about where power resided. It formally vested all authority in the working people of the republic, as represented by the soviets. Any citizen of the RSFSR aged eighteen or over could vote in soviet elections and stand for office. The small number of exceptions included: anyone who employed others for profit or lived on unearned income, merchants, clerics and former agents of the tsarist police. ‘Sovereign power’ was vested in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. When the congress was not in session,19 sovereign power resided in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (CEC). The CEC was elected by the congress, to which it was formally responsible, and was to consist of no more than 200 members. The constitution also described the CEC as the ‘supreme legislative, executive, and regulative organ’ of the RSFSR, tasked with directing the work of the government and soviets, as well as scrutinizing and ratifying decrees issued by Sovnarkom (the widely used acronym for the Council of People’s Commissars). But the constitution also described Sovnarkom as responsible for directing the affairs of the RSFSR. Sovnarkom was required to report to the CEC, which formally approved its membership and could veto its decisions, although Sovnarkom had ‘sole authority’ to enact ‘emergency measures’. Local soviets were expected to enforce the decrees and decisions of the government but had scope to decide ‘questions which have a purely local character’.20 These ambiguities of the constitution reflected a compromise between those who advocated centralism and those who advocated localism in the political system.21 In practice, executive authority was concentrated in Sovnarkom, chaired by Lenin, which oversaw the work of the commissariats (former ministries) and the day-today business of government. The influence of popular representative organs was gradually eclipsed as power was centralized and a conventional kind of state reestablished. This was illustrated, for example, by the fate of the Red Guards and workers’ militias which sprang up after the February Revolution to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the tsarist police system. These were voluntary, part-time and self-organizing groups formed to protect factories and maintain order in local areas.22 The Bolsheviks initially conceptualized such organizations as ‘the armed people’, governing and policing themselves at the grassroots of society and poised to guard against counter-revolution. By mid-1918, however, they were largely replaced by full-time professional organizations. The Red Guards were absorbed into the nascent Red Army as a professional standing army, and the militias were replaced by a professional police force known as the Worker-Peasant Militia.

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Despite retaining the term ‘militia’ (with its paramilitary connotations), it quickly became a conventional type of civilian police force under the central direction of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, with responsibilities for law enforcement and general public order very much like its tsarist and Provisional Government predecessors.23 As a centralized state re-emerged, real executive authority started to move from Sovnarkom to the Politburo (political bureau) of the Communist Party, as the Bolshevik Party had renamed itself in March 1918.24 This reflected a gradual shift in the locus of power from state organs to party organs, and the genesis of what became known as the ‘party-state’. The upper echelons of the party apparatus overlapped closely with the memberships of Sovnarkom and the CEC, so state and party became enmeshed at the top of the political pyramid. Established by the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, the Politburo initially consisted of five members – Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, N. V. Krestinskii and L. B. Kamenev – and began to meet from mid-April onwards. The purpose was to have a more agile and responsive body that could make decisions on urgent matters when the party central committee (not to be confused with the CEC) was not in session. The Politburo met irregularly to begin with but more frequently from late 1919, gradually acquiring greater authority vis-à-vis Sovnarkom. This has been attributed to the fact that leading party figures attended Sovnarkom meetings less frequently after 1919, which diminished its importance. This was for a number of reasons, including the fact that Sovnarkom agendas were often dominated by a large number of minor issues, detracting from focus on more urgent matters. Lenin was aware of this development but his distrust of parliamentary-style systems of representation that might constrain the party’s power made him disinclined to arrest it. His failure to appoint a new chair of Sovnarkom when he became ill contributed to its declining importance.25 Given that the party styled itself as the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ during the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ there was a certain theoretical logic to the growing authority of the Politburo and the party more generally. The party apparatus expanded and the notion of its ‘guiding role’ became more pronounced. In a way, this compensated for the diminishing size of the working class during the period. Party membership fluctuated but grew overall. In March 1919 it stood at 350,000 people, around 50,000 higher than the figure at the time of the October Revolution. By August 1919 the membership had been reduced to around 150,000 following a purge of members, but it had risen again to 600,000 by spring 1920.26 Yet the machinery of state expanded more dramatically, as the government centralized decision-making, adopted new responsibilities, absorbed the soviets into the state apparatus, and created new organs, such as the Cheka and the Supreme Council of the National Economy (see below). The state bureaucracy grew steadily and by the end of the civil war period the number of state employees had risen from 576,000 to 2.4 million.27 This process was accompanied by the erosion of the influence of local and regional soviets, which had initially formed the basis of the system’s formal legitimacy by giving a mandate to the Congress of Soviets, the CEC and Sovnarkom. It is therefore easy to see why critics described the new regime as a dictatorship of the Communist Party and state bureaucracy rather than

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the proletariat. Discontent with the Bolshevik mode of government soon surfaced within the party itself; in 1920 two groups  – the Democratic Centralists and the Workers’ Opposition – emerged to give expression to rank-and-file disquiet, calling (unsuccessfully) for the restoration of party democracy and more influence for ordinary workers. One aspect of the state apparatus that the Bolsheviks took a more experimental approach to  – rather than quickly recreating the pre-revolutionary structures in a new guise, as might be said of the commissariats, the army and the police – was the judicial system. The Bolsheviks, as Marxists, regarded legal systems as instruments of the ruling class rather than neutral frameworks for the regulation of society. As one of their legal theorists, Mechislav Kozlovsii, put it: ‘Law is born out of economic inequality, with the schism of the population into classes’.28 The expectation was that, as class divisions evaporated during the transition from capitalism to communism, law and crime would disappear too. As if to accelerate that process, the Bolsheviks quickly dismantled the old legal apparatus through a series of decrees in 1917 and 1918. They created a new dual structure: elected People’s Courts to hear civil and criminal cases, and Revolutionary Tribunals to deal with counter-revolutionary acts. Courts were initially instructed to be guided by the laws of imperial Russia and the Provisional Government, so long as they had not been rescinded by the Soviet government and did not contravene ‘revolutionary conscience’. In November 1918, however, courts were instructed to refer only to statutes issued by the new regime, and if no relevant statutes were available for a particular case, they should be guided by ‘socialist legal awareness’. This was a bold step because it nullified all pre-revolutionary law at a time when – apart from codes on the family and working conditions issued in 1918 – no Soviet law code existed. A new criminal code was not ratified until 1922. Until then judges had to improvise and follow ‘revolutionary conscience’ and ‘socialist legal awareness’. There was a necessary vagueness about what that meant. Broadly speaking it required courts to consider whether an offence was motivated by class interests, and the extent to which it threatened the revolutionary state. Members of the working class were expected to be treated more leniently by the courts than members of the bourgeoisie.29 As one scholar put it: ‘up to the creation of the law codes, the Soviet judge was directed by his instinct or intuition not toward law but with regard to justice as individually understood by him’.30 While the authorities did not expect the notion of legality to be ignored – official decrees and pronouncements, such as those relating to speculation and bribery, were to be observed – the absence of a full set of laws meant that court decisions were often arbitrary, a situation that has been described as ‘legalized lawlessness’.31 Yet the People’s Courts constituted an important interface between the new authorities and citizens. They were widely used and dealt with huge numbers of civil and criminal cases. During 1918 divorce petitions dominated the work of local courts as people rushed to take advantage of new regulations which made divorce far easier, although for the civil war period as a whole criminal cases dominated, theft being the main offence. This indicates that, despite its radical and improvised character, citizens entrusted their grievances to the Bolshevik judicial system, and one scholar has suggested that, in the process, they ‘legitimized the state by accepting socialist legal norms’.32

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The Revolutionary Tribunals were far more notorious than the People’s Courts for issuing arbitrary sentences. The tribunals were responsible for hearing cases of a more political nature, particularly manifestations of counter-revolution and other activity deemed anti-Soviet, including speculation, grain hoarding, desertion from the Red Army and peasant insurgency. In practice they also dealt with ordinary crime, although the distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘political’ offences was not always easy to make. However, the Revolutionary Tribunals were authorized to apply the death penalty after it was restored on 16 June 1918 – it had been abolished after the February Revolution – and so their decisions could be far more consequential. A recent study has concluded that it is not straightforward to generalize about Revolutionary Tribunals. They were not simply instruments of arbitrary violence, as they are often portrayed, but nor were they ordinary instruments of justice. They pronounced the death penalty in arbitrary ways, but they also showed mercy in many cases brought before them. Overall they ‘acted in conjunction with other state organs to extend and strengthen Bolshevik authority’.33 Like the People’s Courts, therefore, the Revolutionary Tribunals were one of the mechanisms that the new regime used to consolidate its power. The use of violence to defeat the regime’s enemies on the Red home front was the trademark of the Cheka, the Russian acronym for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Established on 7 December 1917 (OS) and led by the Polish revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka functioned as the regime’s political police, in contrast to its civilian force (the Worker-Peasant Militia). Although the Cheka had a wide remit – functioning as an unchecked and largely unaccountable ‘state within a state’ – its primary task was to suppress internal opposition to the Bolshevik government, which made no attempt to deny its use of terror. For Lenin, state violence was necessary to achieve victory for the proletariat,34 and Trotsky described repression as ‘the necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side’ in a revolution.35 As fighting in the civil war intensified, the proximity of internal opposition was signalled by the Left SR uprising, and then by the assassination of Uritskii and the attempt on Lenin’s life. In response, Sovnarkom hardened its approach and formally announced a campaign of Red Terror on 5 September 1918. The Sovnarkom resolution declared that ‘under the present circumstances it is necessary to safeguard the rear by means of terror. […] The Soviet Republic must be safeguarded from its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps, by shooting all persons associated with White Guard organizations, plots, and conspiracies, and by publishing the names of all those shot and the reasons for the shooting’.36 Terror was used to purge counter-revolutionaries through executions and internments. In order to deter others, the victims’ names were published in the Bolshevik press. Again, this was not a covert process but an open campaign of state violence against the regime’s opponents. Martyn Latsis, one of Dzerzhinsky’s chief deputies, claimed that ‘class enemies’ were the target of the Red Terror. In November 1918 he wrote: ‘We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not search for material and evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first question which you should

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ask him is what is his origin, upbringing, education or profession. These questions should determine the fate of the accused’.37 In other words, an individual’s class background could be used to determine their guilt or innocence. But there was more than an element of rhetoric in Latsis’s statement and, in fact, Cheka victims came from many different backgrounds. The Cheka contributed to the suppression of peasant-based insurrections, most notably the Makhno uprising (1919–21) and the Tambov revolt (1920–1). The most prominent victims of Cheka summary justice were the former Tsar Nicholas II and his family at Ekaterinburg in July 1918. George Leggett concluded that the Cheka ‘contributed signally to the consolidation of Soviet power, but at a terrible cost’.38 Calculating the number of victims is largely a guessing game. The execution statistics published by the Cheka  – 12,733 for 1918–20 – have always been treated with scepticism, and combined data from other sources, such as the reports of the Denikin Commission, indicate that the figure must have been much higher. Leggett’s estimate is 280,000 victims for 1917–22, including those who died at Cheka hands during the battles with peasant insurgents.39 Violence was widespread during the civil war years and was not only inflicted by the Cheka. Red partisans and food procurement brigades, for example, were responsible for appalling atrocities, as were many of the Bolsheviks’ opponents. Liudmila Novikova has also argued that ordinary people, especially near the frontlines of the civil war, sometimes used violence to settle scores and local rivalries; the political language of the revolution – ‘speculators’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ – might have been invoked in such cases but the motives were often otherwise.40

WAR COMMUNISM Centralism and coercion also characterized economic policy on the Red home front during 1918–21. Bolshevik economic management during this period is known as ‘war communism’, a term first used towards the end of the civil war to distinguish it from the New Economic Policy (NEP) announced in March 1921.41 As W. H. Chamberlin observed, the term encapsulated the blend of emergency measures and revolutionary idealism in early Bolshevik approaches to the economy.42 The fundamental aim of war communism was to establish a planned economy with central state coordination of production and distribution. As early as 1 December 1917 (O.S.) a new state body  – the Supreme Council of the National Economy, often referred to as VSNKh, its Russian acronym (pronounced ‘vesenkha’) – was established to coordinate the work of the various organizations responsible for economic affairs, such as the Commissariats for Trade & Industry, Finance and Food, but concerted efforts to centrally manage the economy only began in spring 1918. A key feature of war communism was the ‘food dictatorship’ decreed by Sovnarkom and the CEC on 9 May 1918 to supply food to urban areas and the Red Army. This reaffirmed the state’s grain monopoly, which fixed the price of grain purchased from the peasantry by the government. It required producers to relinquish all surplus grain after retaining what they needed for their own use (according to a basic standard determined by the authorities). The Food Commissariat was granted

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full powers to implement the decree, including use of armed force.43 The decree also tried to foment class war in the villages, calling on poor peasants to unite against their supposedly richer neighbours (kulaks) and to root out grain hoarders, a policy which merely antagonized the peasantry as a whole  – which did not see village society in simple class terms  – and was soon dropped. During the second half of 1918 the Food Commissariat implemented the prodrazverstka (food levy) system as a means of trying to extract grain from the peasantry. The main difference from the previous approach was that the state now determined grain quotas which the peasants were required to sell at fixed prices, keeping the remainder for themselves.44 However, hyperinflation – which meant that the money peasants received for grain had little value  – and a lack of goods that peasants wanted to purchase rendered prodrazverstka a system of forced requisition in all but name.45 Another key feature of war communism was state ownership of industry. On 28 June 1918 Sovnarkom decreed the nationalization of large-scale industry. Former owners were to continue running nationalized enterprises, but industry became state property.46 Workers’ supervision of industrial enterprises was replaced by the principle of one-man management, regarded by Lenin as more efficient. A corollary of nationalization was the abolition of private trade, formally decreed by Sovnarkom on 21 November 1918. According to the terms of the decree, the Food Commissariat would ‘provide the population with articles of personal and household use’ through a system of state and cooperative stores.47 Ration cards were introduced to control the distribution of food. War communism also involved efforts to coordinate the country’s workforce. According to the constitution, all able citizens were duty-bound to work. The working class, in theory, was in a privileged position under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The Labour Code of 1918, for instance, endeavoured to address poor working conditions and legislated for an eight-hour working day and social insurance for illness and unemployment. Yet for the most part these things remained ambitions rather than realities under war communism. Industrial productivity was significantly disrupted during the period, exacerbated by high rates of absenteeism, urban depopulation and an acute shortage of skilled workers. The Bolshevik hierarchy recognized that the communist future, which they envisioned as urban and industrial, could not be built in such circumstances. In an effort to replenish the workforce as a matter of urgency, Sovnarkom legalized compulsory labour on 29 January 1920. The decree covered ‘industry, agriculture, transport, and other branches of the national economy’. It called upon ‘the entire working population to perform, in addition to their normal occupations, various kinds of compulsory labour, of an occasional or regular nature, such as procurement of fuel, agricultural work […], construction work, road repair, snow clearing, hauling, and so forth’.48 Military methods of conscription, regimentation and discipline were to be applied to economic organization. Absenteeism was now regarded as the equivalent of desertion from the Red Army. Trotsky was the most high-ranking advocate of ‘labour militarization’. In January 1920 he transformed the Third Red Army into the First Revolutionary Army of Labour, tasked with rebuilding the Moscow-Kazan railway line. But disquiet at labour militarization contributed to

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growing friction between Trotsky, the trade unions, and the Communist Party during 1920.49 The policy was controversial and ultimately ineffective. Labour shortages persisted and, in fact, the total number of industrial workers fell even further during 1920–1, the period of ‘labour militarization’.50 The policy was gradually phased out with the onset of NEP and the temporary ‘retreat’ to a more liberal economy. Another striking feature of the RSFSR economy during the period of war communism was the decline of money as a means of exchange. The rouble had steadily lost value from the outbreak of the First World War, but inflation became rampant during the civil war. The Bolshevik government kept printing money to sustain economic activity but currency depreciation intensified to the point that the rouble was virtually worthless. Many local institutions and organizations responded by issuing their own currency, to establish a local means of exchange. It has been estimated that, across the territory of the former empire, ‘20,000 different types of money’ were in circulation during the period.51 By the end of the civil war it had become easier to provide certain services and commodities free of charge. For instance, train tickets, postal services and the water and electricity supplied to apartments no longer had to be paid for by money. It became increasingly common for workers to be paid in kind. Some peasants used paper currency as wallpaper, such was its lack of value.52 The ABC of Communism  – written in 1919 by Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhenskii as a popular commentary on the party programme and first published in 1920 – boldly declared that ‘Communist society will know nothing of money’.53 There was no pretence that communism had already been built in Russia; Communist Party ideologues conceptualized early Soviet Russia as a transitional society in which money would still be required as a means of exchange for commodities and services. Yet party idealists – including Aleksei Rykov, chairman of VSNKh, and the economist Iurii Larin – looked upon the headlong depreciation of the currency as an encouraging step in the direction of a new economic system based on barter exchange. Preobrazhenskii, in a pamphlet of 1920 which lauded the power of extreme inflation to erode capitalist practices, described the currency printing press as ‘the machine-gun of the Commissariat of Finance which poured its fire into the rear of the bourgeois order’.54 Lenin was more pragmatic and recognized that currency stabilization was essential to the government’s survival. To that end, he backed the reintroduction in 1922 of a gold-standard currency – the chervonets – which, in one estimation, is what ultimately ensured the regime’s survival.55 The sharp deterioration in productivity and widespread shortages of basic items, especially food, during 1918–21 led Chamberlin to conclude that: ‘war communism may fairly be considered one of the greatest and most overwhelming failures in history’.56 Economic coercion  – prodrazverstka, labour militarization  – had not solved the problems of supply and distribution that beset the RSFSR and caused so much turmoil and suffering. It is significant that the black market thrived under war communism, and it has been estimated that between 65 and 70 per cent of food was obtained by that route.57 Arguably war communism helped the Bolsheviks to prevail in the civil war, as a large share of available supplies went to the Red Army. But even there, insufficient rations were a common cause of desertion.58 If war communism

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did contribute to the Red victory, it nevertheless left the country shattered and fuelled popular opposition to the regime, the most potent symbol of which was the rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd in February-March 1921.59 For all the serious economic problems which characterized the period  – and which war communism failed to solve  – it is important to acknowledge that, in some areas of economic infrastructure, some progress was made. A case in point is the government’s electrification programme. The Bolsheviks firmly believed that technology would modernize the country. Lenin famously declared to the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920 that ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’.60 Modernization of the energy infrastructure was regarded as an essential precondition for post-war reconstruction and building a modern industrial economy. During the First World War, Russia’s electrical engineers had drawn up plans for mass electrification. The Bolsheviks aimed to realize that ambition, and some progress was made. The number of local electricity power stations doubled during the civil war years to 157.61 The coordination of local efforts was centralized in February 1920 with the creation of a State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) to oversee the development of a unified national grid. Outside of towns and cities, however, electrification remained patchy until the late 1920s.

A NEW REVOLUTIONARY LIFE An important aspect of Bolshevik efforts to consolidate and extend their authority was their policy on culture, here broadly conceived to encompass social structures, belief systems and their corresponding institutions. No sphere of life was considered to lie beyond the revolution’s legislative scope.62 This was because, for many revolutionaries, the construction of a new kind of society would require not only the acquisition of political and economic power but also a wide-ranging cultural transformation. One of the leading Russian thinkers in this area, Alexander Bogdanov, argued that ‘culture’ was not simply a passive mirror of reality; it was an active agent that influenced reality, because it helped people to understand the world around them, and therefore how they behaved. Art, for instance, wrote Bogdanov in 1918, should be regarded as an ‘educative tool […] a weapon for the social organisation of people’.63 The bourgeoisie had used culture as part of its apparatus of domination, and if the new order were to succeed, it would have to be founded upon a proletarian culture that reflected and transmitted its values. And this could be achieved only if the proletariat itself created the new culture, because only workers could properly express their values.64 Inspired by such thinking, some ‘cultural nihilists’ advocated a complete rejection of all past culture in favour of a new proletarian one. Lenin, however, insisted that the achievements of pre-revolutionary culture  – including ‘all the science, the technology, all the knowledge, the art’  – should be regarded as building blocks of the new order, adapted to circumstances rather than discarded.65 In practice, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, which was responsible for education and culture, supported efforts to create a new culture while endeavouring to resist outright nihilism. As a result, the cultural landscape

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of early Bolshevik Russia was relatively diverse and experimental: the revolution inspired many ambitious projects, albeit often tempered in their implementation by socio-economic chaos, the still fragile legitimacy of the regime, and the stubborn persistence of tradition.66 Bolshevik ideology was atheistic and its proponents considered religion to be a manifestation of popular superstition. They envisioned the future communist society as secular and rational, where phenomena would be explained and understood in material rather than supernatural terms. Party ideologues acknowledged that popular beliefs could not be transformed overnight. But they also regarded the institutional organization of religion as counter-revolutionary, especially the Orthodox Church – the largest religion in Russia – which had been close to the state in Tsarist Russia.67 The fact that the Orthodox clergy had generally welcomed the February Revolution and supported the Provisional Government made little difference to the new regime. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks announced the separation of church from state. This was confirmed by the constitution of July 1918. The church was deprived of any role in education, although ‘freedom of religious and anti-religious propaganda’ was officially recognized as the right of all citizens (article 13). The government gradually stripped the church of its assets and made the registration of births, deaths and marriages civil matters, rather than the responsibility of the church authorities. Churches still functioned in this hostile climate, and popular religious observance did not abate during the early years of the new regime. The removal of icons from schools and public buildings was often met with violent opposition. The government responded with brutal repression and execution of clerics, launching a full-scale assault on the church during 1921–2, putting clerics on trial, and doing nothing to halt the unofficial plundering of church property across the country. Throughout this ordeal, the new patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Tikhon (elected in November 1917), insisted that the church must remain apolitical. He refused to take sides in the civil war, but he did pronounce anathema on the Bolsheviks for their use of terror.68 The Bolsheviks subscribed to the view that the ‘bourgeois’ family was a kernel of patriarchal subjugation from which women and children had to be liberated. A  series of measures, culminating in the Family Code (October 1918), granted women and men equal rights in marriage, divorce and property. It seems that the intention was not to destroy marriage, or the family as a social unit, but to ensure it was no longer a repressive institution. The divorce rate was high during 1918–21, but so was the marriage rate. In fact, it has been suggested that, in the countryside, the devastation of the period reinforced traditional marriage as a means of survival, when so many women had become widowed by military conflict. In urban areas the nuclear family continued to develop in line with pre-revolutionary trends, gradually replacing larger extended families.69 It should be noted that, while the Bolsheviks supported women’s emancipation and introduced a number of related measures – in addition to the formal equalities established by the Family Code, for instance, abortion was legalized in 1920 – they generally considered class rather than gender difference to be the fundamental driver of exploitation and inequality. That is to say, it mattered more if you were ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ than if you were male

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or female. Women’s emancipation therefore tended to be folded into the question of proletarian class interests. The ABC of Communism stated: ‘It is obvious that the struggle of the proletariat must be greatly hindered by the lack of equality between the two halves of which it is composed’.70 Consequently, women’s emancipation was also viewed from the perspective of their role within the non-domestic workforce. This had grown substantially  – by 1920 women constituted 46 per cent of the industrial labour force, an increase from 25 per cent in 1913 – principally because men were conscripted during these years.71 There was no separate commissariat for women, but in 1919 a women’s section of the Communist Party – Zhenotdel – was established to mobilize women for the construction of communism.72 Much of the energy expended in the cultural sphere stemmed from the Bolsheviks’ awareness that most people in the RSFSR knew little about their programme. A more overt tactic to educate the population in communist principles and instil more support for the regime was the Bolsheviks’ use of propaganda as a method of mass persuasion. The Reds used propaganda – in the broadest sense of spreading their political message through a variety of channels – much more effectively than their opponents. In part, this stemmed from their experience of revolutionary agitation before 1917, but also from their domination of key resources at the centre of the RSFSR. For example, they deployed the transport infrastructure to great effect, sending ‘political agitation’ trains and ships to disseminate their message via lectures, distribution of pamphlets and newsreel screenings (known as agitki). Whatever citizens thought of the message, they must have noticed the colourful presence of propaganda in public spaces. Shop windows displayed posters and satiricalinformational drawings, organized by ROSTA, the Bolshevik telegraph agency, to which the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a prominent contributor. Huge open-air ‘mass spectacles’, witnessed by thousands of spectators, celebrated the revolution, such as Nikolai Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace, staged in Palace Square, Petrograd, in October 1920 for the third anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution (with a cast far bigger than the numbers involved in the original event!). Propaganda was accompanied by censorship. Lenin regarded the press in particular as a ‘weapon’ to which the Bolsheviks’ enemies should not have access. From mid-1918 – following the Left SR uprising and attempted assassination of Lenin – the non-Bolshevik press was finally closed down, following a process of gradual curtailment.73

CONCLUSION In retrospect, it seems astonishing that the Bolsheviks retained power in the face of the crises which confronted them on the Red home front (some of their own making), let alone the simultaneous challenges presented by civil war and foreign intervention (the military front). Few in fact had expected them to survive in government longer than a couple of months. Governing the RSFSR proved to be far more complex than centralizing authority and rooting out counter-revolutionaries (and that was no simple task anyway). The socio-economic devastation of the period

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from 1914 onwards ravaged the entire country and the challenge of reconstruction would have tested any regime. That the Bolsheviks managed to overcome their fragile political legitimacy to consolidate power and, in due course, build a system that lasted until 1991 was not only a matter of defeating their opponents by violently deploying the instruments of state coercion. It was also a matter of being perceived ultimately as the ‘lesser evil’, of having a programme which held out the promise of a better future for millions of shattered people. Even if the Bolshevik party soon squandered much of the support it had gained in 1917, many of its policies – such as the abolition of private land ownership and the new law on divorce  – were popular. Lenin was also a highly pragmatic tactician and knew when to compromise (Brest-Litovsk, NEP). If a new order was not quite in place on the Red home front by 1921, its foundations were laid through a combination of realpolitik and revolutionary idealism. Between 1918 and 1921 – and with mixed results – the Bolshevik regime established and experimented with the rudiments of a centralized party-state, economic planning and a vision of wide-ranging cultural transformation, all of which were developed further by the Soviet Union.

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CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

The White home front NIKOLAUS KATZER, GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE, MOSCOW

INTRODUCTION In his ground-breaking study of the year 1917 in Russia, Roger Pethybridge emphasized ‘the phenomenal speed’ with which, in the middle of wartime, the political and social, national and cultural revolution took hold of a relatively static society of over 170 million people, spreading out from the capital over an enormous territory to ‘kaleidoscopic’ effect. As the Provisional Government lost control over these developments, the Bolsheviks actively took the course of events into their own hands in the wake of the October revolution.1 Against this background, writing a history of the ‘White home front’ calls for reversing the lens: The periphery becomes the main theatre of the Revolution. Here there emerged ‘states’, which in their turn influenced the centre. They attempted to mobilize the human, natural and economic resources of their respective regions in their own interests. Among these competing projects, which triggered a series of civil wars that are not easily captured in a single overview, the White armies claimed the role of a force for order, seeking to combine the centrifugal forces in the name of the ‘unity of Russia’ so as to reconquer the centre together. Nominally the White home front lay beyond the military fronts. In reality the borders between them were fluid, the two sides not so clearly distinguished as the colours on the battlefield maps of the early 1920s suggest or as the Soviet and émigré military histories would have had us believe.2 For the ‘campaigns’ and ‘ice marches’, the ‘theatres’ and the ‘triumphs’ were spread over the whole territory of the old Russian Empire, but their ‘lines’ criss-crossed the old administrative boundaries. ‘Revolution’ and ‘counter-revolution’ each had many different faces according to time and place. Strictly speaking, then, we have to speak of White home fronts. Vladimir N.  Brovkin embeds them in a comprehensive history of the civil war ‘behind the lines’. Using the imagery of tides, he describes white, red and green floods washing over the land and then retreating. In the provinces strikes and uprisings destabilized the situation.3 Most recently, the chronological frame has been extended back into the war years, so as to expose the variety of conflicts and contexts at their point of origin.4

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The territories conquered and occupied by the Whites can be divided into three zones: First, there was the area closest to the front (tyl), in which commanders constantly had to reckon with surprise attacks by the enemy and panic reactions on the part of their own troops. This area was always ‘firmly tied to the fatherland’, in the words of an account from the last years of the Tsarist empire.5 The watchword here was: ‘the front is everywhere!’ As a rule, it was in this zone that the facilities were located that supported preparations for military operations and the direct provisioning of the combat troops. The whole of the economy and the everyday life of the population were oriented towards a ‘total war’.6 The second zone was the extended ‘hinterland’, which most resembled the ‘home front’ in a regular war. The quarters of the military authorities and the organs of ‘state’ were situated in these relatively consolidated areas. Medical units and military hospitals, provisioning centres and stores or cavalry stables usually had to be set up from scratch. Garrisons defended the rear areas against partisans or revolts of the local population. Railway lines and telegraph stations needed additional protection. The third and last zone was the extensive territory of the ‘deep provinces’ far from the metropolitan areas. Here, forces arriving from outside encountered particular geographical, ecological, economic and technological conditions on the one hand, and on the other, local peculiarities of social relations and culture. The reach of state agencies was limited on the ‘savage plain’ (dikoe pole) of the steppes or in the broad forests of Siberia.7 Here, it was less the force of arms than the ‘ideological baggage’ that was decisive in winning people’s ‘hearts and minds’, determining whether they would remain passive, cooperate willingly or have to be compelled, or whether they would openly resist. On the White home fronts as in Soviet Russia, the grave crisis unleashed by the war and intensified by the revolution had to be dealt with.8 On both sides, antagonistic forces competed for the establishment of ‘law’, ‘order’ and ‘security’. Alongside this internal struggle over power and resources there raged a civil war in which modern and archaic forms combined. Mounted armies operated alongside tank columns, mass battlefield engagements followed innumerable ‘duels’ and skirmishes, hunger and disease circulated along with propaganda for utopian schemes.

PERIPHERY – CENTRE – REGION Unlike the First World War, the Civil War encompassed almost the entire territory of the Russian Empire – from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the Caspian and Black Seas. From 1918 onwards this broad Eurasian territory between Berlin and Vladivostok, Budapest and Peking, Murmansk and Teheran was crisscrossed by innumerable military fronts and lines of ethno-national, cultural, social and political conflict. It was the scene of extremely brutal low-level warfare.9 White armies, red partisans, green (peasant) or black (anarchist) agrarian associations in arms, national militias and marauding irregulars fought for control in countless micro-spaces.10 Like modern versions of medieval mercenary armies, guerrillas terrorized whole regions, plundered and ravaged villages and towns. Local reigns of terror, led by actual or self-appointed Atamans, and peasant revolts de-stabilized the

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rear areas. In Siberia, in the Ukraine and in southern Russia warlords were preceded by their reputations as ‘dictators’ in miniature or simply ‘butchers’.11 In the light of all this, there was no Zero Hour for the first volunteer armies. Of course they were surrounded by an aura of unselfishness, courage and idealism in their desire to ‘rescue the country’.12 But everywhere the ‘founding fathers’ of the armed resistance came up against realities that blocked the renaissance of the empire. From that point of view it was a disadvantage to have to attack the centre from an insecure position on the margins. There was always the danger that units that had been incorporated into the home front with some effort would be lost again in the course of the military advance. The attempt to encircle Soviet Russia confronted the armies of the south under General Anton Denikin, the east under Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the northwest under General Nikolai Iudenich and the north under General Evgenii Miller with massive logistical problems.13 The organizational beginnings of the ‘White cause’ (Beloe delo) lie in the underground of the capital cities Moscow and Petrograd (St Petersburg) and of the Russian heartland which was permanently controlled by the Bolsheviks and Red Guards or the Red Army after the October Revolution. The formation of the military and political resistance was accelerated by the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Members of the toppled Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly, of non-Bolshevik parties and civil society associations and organizations like the Union of Landowners (Soiuz zemel’nych sobstvennikov), the Committee for Trade and Industry (Torgovo-promyshlennyi komitet) or the Council of Leading Personalities (Sovet obshchestvennykh deiatelei) attempted to keep their foothold in the centre in spite of persecution by the Secret Police (Cheka). Secret organizations like the military-social revolutionary Defence League for Homeland and Freedom (Soiuz zashchity rodiny i svobody), the cross-party League for the Regeneration of Russia (Soiuz vozrozhdeniia Rossii), the Right Centre (Pravyi tsentr), the conservative-liberal National Centre (Natsional’nyi tsentr) and the Tactical Centre (Takticheskii tsentr) formed networks to protect those subject to political persecution, or carried out acts of sabotage or retaliation for official terror measures. Not least, they worked to maintain communications between the different regions.14 The exodus to the periphery of officers of the old army and activists of the parties that had been banned set in at the turn of the year 1917–18. After that, the roles were reversed. A very mobile ‘Red’ underground, composed of ‘soviets’, party cells and partisans, destabilized the emerging White home fronts. By the summer of 1918 at the latest it was obvious that Soviet power would not just disappear. It turned its area of control into a ‘fortress’ and deployed offence as the best defence, using the underground as a vanguard even in distant regions.15 Politicians like the Monarchist Vasilii V. Shul’gin or the Liberal Petr. B. Struve, who had a well-developed instinct for power, attempted to persuade the White generals to adopt a similar strategy. They argued that the only way to reverse the post-revolutionary power relations was for the Whites to present themselves as a force for order on the periphery, even if this meant implementing ‘left wing policies with their right hands’.16 The regions were not automatically home fronts. There were no fixed fronts behind which a secure hinterland could be consolidated, and

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the Whites were nowhere the uncontested masters of their own house. The bitter struggles that took place along the broad intermediate zone that separated Soviet Russia from the Urals, Western Siberia, the central and lower Volga, southern Russia and the Ukraine made clear how fleeting victories won in local skirmishes could be. But the apodictic centralism of the military and political elites proved to be the Achilles heel of the White home fronts. Although the former imperial great power resembled a fragmented cosmos in 1918, the generals and their political advisers clung to the aim of a restoration within the 1914 borders. The formula of the ‘one, great and indivisible Russia’ (Edinaia, Velikaia i Nedelimaia Rossiia) summed up what the Whites had to offer as an alternative to the ‘double internationalism’: the one represented by Lenin’s ‘revolutionary civil war’ and the one deployed by the American president Wilson to justify ‘democratic intervention’.17 It was not the ‘selfdetermination’ granted by the Soviet government in the Declaration of the Rights of the Russian Peoples of 15 November 1917, but a return to the status quo ante that became the touchstone for success or failure. Denikin was convinced that the old Empire had to be restored in any event and in its full geographical extent – whether ‘voluntarily’ or ‘by violence’, through an economic war or a military offensive. No Russia, he argued, be it ‘red’, ‘pink’, ‘white’ or ‘black’, would be willing to ‘suffocate in the artificial borders’ left behind by the World War and the subsequent disorders.18 Looking back, Shul’gin too took this view; he was convinced that the Whites had forced the Reds ‘to serve the White cause with Red hands’.19 Under this maximalist programme, only Finland would be given the right to separate, subject to later confirmation by the Constituent Assembly. As far as Poland was concerned, given Poland’s extensive territorial ambitions in the east and southeast, an alliance was thereby nearly unthinkable. In spring 1920 Denikin’s successor General Petr Vrangel’ was hoping in vain for Piłsudski’s help in the war against Soviet Russia.20 The Whites’ nationalism was particularly potent in relation to the Ukraine, which was both politically and economically important. Here the German occupation had intensified internal antagonisms.21 Germanophile, westernizing, nationalist, Russophile and internationalist positions clashed irreconcilably. Advocates of independence came to be labelled indiscriminately and contemptuously as ‘Ukrainisers’ (ukrainstvuiushchie). All army leaders and counter-governments flatly denied the existence of a Ukrainian nation.22 This corresponded to the position taken by the Liberals (Kadets) as early as 1917.23 Even the secret services adopted the language of propaganda. A report from Kiev of 17 January 1919 read: ‘Russian democracy is groaning under the weight of Ukrainisation.’24 Almost every White home front was always both – exemplary and unique, typical and extraordinary. This was as true of the southern and eastern periphery as of the sub-regions. In many respects the Cossack army areas approximated a ‘Russian Vendée’.25 But they had already lost important privileges before the Revolution. Not only had the military-aristocratic tradition largely outlived itself in the Don, Kuban’ and Terek regions or in the southern Urals and Siberia, but the statesponsored influx of peasants had shaken the outdated social structure. In the Civil War, the policy of division and elimination (‘de-Cossackisation’) forced through

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by the Bolsheviks threatened what remained of independence. There could thus be no unified strategy. Some Cossack-mounted units provided critical support to both sides during the war of movement between the Red and White armies.26 Others looked to achieve their own independence with campaigns against neighbouring territories. A similar ambivalence also characterized the relationship between the Whites and regions with a large Muslim population like the northern Caucasus, the Crimea, the southern Urals, the central Volga region and Central Asia.27 This centralism made it impossible for the seat of any counter-government to be developed into a ‘citadel’, as the historian Nikolai Kakurin observed, or to become a regional ‘capital’. It was only towards the end of the Civil War, when he had nothing left at his back but the Black Sea, that Vrangel’ approached this kind of strategy with his vision of a ‘Crimean state’ as an ‘experimental farm’ (opytnaia ferma).28 The Whites’ Great Russian nationalism is sometimes cited as the reason for their ultimate failure.29 This makes sense inasmuch as their unitarism could not generate trust in the search for allies or the pacification of the home front, especially on the western and southern periphery, where the empires had once collided.30 ‘Whoever controls Moscow will control Russia’ – with this formula the chairman of the Liberals, the historian Pavel N. Miliukov, expressed the sentiments of many more people than the supporters of the Whites.31 Denikin’s directive of 3 July 1919, ordering the beginning of the ‘March on Moscow’, was thus very much an act of desperate anticipation.32 He could expect support at best from the Great-Russian part of the urban population and in the heavy industrial areas of the Ukraine. The campaign meant abandoning most of the rear area. All he could hope for was to restore the empire after returning as victor from the reconquest of the metropole.

STATE FORMATION The revolution triggered a race between ‘sovereignties’. The Whites had to compete not only against Soviet Russia and the separatist movements on the southern and western periphery, but also against the regional governments (kraevye pravitel’stva) and organs of pre-state regionalism (oblastnichestvo) in the Urals, Siberia, the Far East or the Far North.33 The longer the Civil War went on, the more important it became to concentrate power. Kolchak’s putsch in Omsk on 18 November 1918 was an unmistakable signal. On the one hand, it brought an end to the collegiate approach of the ‘directorate’ (All Russian Provincial Government) under the moderate Socialist Revolutionary Nikolai D. Avksentiev. On the other, it meant the de facto abandonment of the Constituent Assembly in the form in which it had been elected in 1917. The ‘The Ufa State Conference’ (Ufimskoe Gosudarstvennoe soveshchanie), for which a mixed bag of Old Revolutionaries, Liberals, officers and grandees travelled to the Bashkir capital Ufa between 8 and 23 September 1918, had already shown how swiftly the parallelogram of political forces was shifting. The option of a ‘third way’, a non-Bolshevik socialist republic that would defend the ‘socialist fatherland’ in the name of the Constituent Assembly, turned out to be an illusion as long as it had no backing from the military.34 The overwhelming strategic importance of this huge theatre of operations between Europe and Asia could hardly be overestimated.35

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Before the end of 1918, White military dictatorships emerged in rapid succession in the south, in Siberia, in the northwest and in the north. There was no historical model for them in Russia. It was only in the World War that officers had faced the complex task, not only of carrying out military orders but also of organizing civilian life behind the lines. The foundations for that were laid by the Decree on the Management of Combat Troops in the Field in Wartime of 20 July 1914.36 The commanders of the White troops regarded this ruling as legitimating their ‘sole personal power’ (edinolichnaia vlast’) under civil war conditions as well. They wanted to expressly distinguish their ‘national dictatorships’ from Bonapartism, which orthodox Marxists were inclined to see as the direction of travel of the Bolsheviks.37 Just how each ‘dictator’ interpreted his dual role as military and political master depended on the circumstances and on personal inclination. Kolchak, whose leadership all the others had accepted, to some extent under Allied pressure, appealed to Roman tradition. He argued that the ostensibly ‘softer’ title Supreme Ruler (Verkhovnyi pravitel’) was not a deliberate obfuscation, but was in keeping with the ancient ‘republican provision’ for crises of state. Like the Roman Senate, the Council of Ministers had summoned him to take up this office. The ‘public mood’ had called for a ‘strong hand’, to put an end to the constant changes of government.38 But even the marginalized monarchists saw this turn as an encouraging sign for a future restoration under Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich.39 In the south the founders of the volunteer army, Generals Mikhail Alekseev, Lavr Kornilov and Aleksei Kaledin, had agreed an administrative division of labour in December 1917. All three died in the course of 1918, and Denikin moved to take all powers into his own hands. In August 1918 Shul’gin drafted a ‘Decree on the Administration of the Territories Occupied by the Volunteer Army’. This became a kind of Constitution, which granted the commander the right to make laws. Civilians could exert influence only through a subordinate political organ, the ‘Special Conference’ (Osoboe soveshchanie), which drew on precedents from the late Tsarist and wartime periods. The borders of the occupied territories were fluid. The extent of real state power depended on the construction of functioning administrative machinery. In the Baltic provinces and Finland, this was barely possible.40 Kolchak had appointed General Iudenich supreme commander of the Russian forces on the northwest front on 10 June 1919. Only an ultimatum from the British Military Mission forced Iudenich to agree to a coalition government under the oil magnate Stepan G. Lianozov which included some independent and moderate Socialists. Iudenich joined only as War Minister. Its principal task was to ratify the independence of Estonia. Kolchak rejected both the ‘completely artificial’ government and its participation in the dismemberment ‘of the homeland’.41 With its seat in Reval (Tallinn) in Estonia, the ‘Russian Government’ controlled very few troops or resources in the region. If an offensive against Petrograd was ‘vital’ then, as Kolchak thought, Iudenich was taking a barely calculable risk.42 General Miller’s military dictatorship in the Northern Territory (Arkhangel’sk) also depended on improvisation. It replaced the Provisional Government under the

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Popular Socialist Nikolai V. Chaikovskii, which had pursued a moderate socialist policy focused on the region.43 ‘State-minded socialists’ (gosudarstvenniki-socialisty) remained in post, however, in spite of fundamental disagreements with the army leadership. In the end the new administration was something like a ‘semi-masked military dictatorship’, in which the generals dictated the rigid course while the ‘democratic circles’ willy-nilly shared the blame for it.44 It was the White movement in the narrow sense of the word that maintained the military governments. Officers, Liberals turned conservative and monarchists formed its core. All efforts to maintain a broad political platform while concentrating power thus failed.45 The ‘anti-Bolshevism’ which had originally inspired a broad phalanx of forces ‘to the right of the Bolsheviks’ turned into a narrow notion of struggle appealing to people’s instincts and passions.46 This powered the attempt to swim against the revolutionary current on the periphery. But the military dictators were not imaging their ideal commonwealth from the standpoint of margins, regions, social groups or nationalities, but from the centre, the whole and the (Great-Russian) ‘Nation’ (Velikorossiia). The highest priority was therefore assigned to the reconstitution of ‘stateminded-ness’ (gosudarstvennost’). It was envisioned as being ‘above party’ (nadpartiinyi, vnepartiinyi) and ‘beyond class’ (nadklassnyi).47 In a certain sense the generals were returning to their original self-image: They believed that they were ‘unpolitical’ and that for that very reason they would be able to bridge the divides which they thought had been opened up by the parties in 1917. They were no less obsessive in insisting on the ‘provisional’ character of their policies. There must be no appearance of ‘pre-emptive decision making’ (nepredreshenstvo), everything must await the decision of the Constituent Assembly  – the form the state would take, the rights of nationalities, property relations, the social order. The demonstrative desire to avoid fait accomplis and emphatic determination to recover sovereignty increased the power vacuum in the rear areas. But above all they hindered the construction of an effective justice system. With the Decree on the Courts of 5 December 1917 the Bolsheviks had dissolved the Governing Senate (Pravitel’stvuiushchii senat),48 which had been responsible for maintaining the rule of law and had itself protested against the ‘self-anointment’ (samostiinost’) of the Bolsheviks. Under the circumstances it would have been illusory to aim to restore it to its original functions, but some governments retained elements of its structure. After October, the legal order was everywhere in suspension. In 1918, even in the area controlled by the Bolsheviks, court judgements reflected neither a consistent application of old laws nor an acknowledgement of new ones.49 In many regions a number of legal systems operated in parallel; this was the case in the territories of the Ukrainian Central Council, the Crimean regional government, the Don army and not least Siberia. Courts, Departments of Justice and Justice Ministries often followed pre-revolutionary institutional models. In practice, legal reforms and new legislation introduced by the Provisional Government might be partially adopted or completely ignored.50 ‘Extraordinary justice’ became increasingly prevalent in the White territories. It was not possible to enforce the state monopoly of violence even in their own

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ranks. Behind the lines the population suffered from the indiscipline of military units and ‘hooliganism’ (khuliganstvo) on the streets. The impotence of the law enforcement agencies confirmed army leaders in their view that only their personal authority could solve the problem. For example, Vrangel’ announced that he would personally investigate every complaint.51 Kolchak, in his turn, pleaded ignorance.52 He claimed to have known nothing about Siberian villages burnt to the ground, executions without trial and torture in the prisons.53 Civil society institutions were indispensable for construction and stability on the home fronts. At their best, they could mediate between the local society and military and state authorities, take on important tasks in mobilizing and provisioning the population and maintain internal communication. Since the situation differed from region to region, and often even from district to district, the smooth running of everyday life in the provinces depended on their expertise. Their members knew the local conditions – natural, economic and social.54 Village and municipal governments, occupational associations, the Red Cross, the Union of Military Nurses, cooperatives, trade unions, educational and welfare organizations had proved their worth during the War.55 But Denikin put them in the same category as the soviets and committees of 1917. ‘Revolutionary (socialist) democracy’, he argued, was either ‘hostile’ to the army or at least ‘mistrustful’ and ‘unfriendly’.56 Accordingly, it was the organs of military and state power rather than what remained of local government that shaped the bureaucratic everyday. Excesses in the requisitioning of grain or the recruitment of soldiers, or after an area had been occupied, often occurred at a whim, or in ‘retaliation’.57 The institutional confusion was reflected in the multiplication of official titles. Governors Military and General, Supreme Captains (glavnonachal’stvuiushchie), Chiefs of the Rear Area (nachal’niki tyla), Commanders of Army Units, Settlements and Railway Stations competed with each other and with state security agencies (strazha, gosokhrana) and secret services (kontrrazvedka) for executive powers. Units like Azbuka (Alphabet), which carried on internal and external propaganda in the area under control of the southern Volunteer Army, tended to engage in arbitrary actions.58 Denikin claimed that these agents were responsible for ‘theft’ and ‘provocations’, and even for the organized White terror.59 Kolchak called them ‘the government’s worst enemies’.60 This undermined the authority of officialdom in the fight against ‘popular justice’ (narodnoe pravosudie), the violence against private and public property, shopkeepers and police regularly reported by the regional press.61 What was most often remembered was thus the courts martial and drumhead courts which provided summary justice.

RESOURCES At the peak of its power in October 1919 Denikin’s regime controlled a territory with an ethnically and socially heterogeneous population of about 42 million. With its flourishing agriculture, coal and iron mines and a diverse industrial sector, the region offered favourable conditions for provisioning the army and the home front. Roads and waterways made for orderly inland and external trade. If the Bolsheviks

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controlled Russia’s core territory with its dense infrastructure, a ‘South’ united against them, which stood ‘as one man’ behind the Whites, represented a serious threat.62 Scenarios of a similar kind could probably be traced, mutatis mutandis, for the Ural-Volga territory and Western Siberia. They could show just how much potential the Whites controlled, nominally at least. Although the war was in full swing, it was possible to draw on the experience of the Tsarist government, which had directed the economy using state contracts and tightly controlled it with trade restrictions, price controls and the introduction of a grain monopoly. There was a further lesson in the economic failure of the Provisional Government in 1917. Like these immediate precedents, the war communism of the Bolsheviks and the White economies were experimental crisis economies. They shared (cum grano salis) the same operating conditions, but were limited to regional contexts and had to find ways of compensating for the interruption of inter-regional exchange. This only worked in exceptional cases, because the fronts in the Civil War divided industries from energy producers and areas of food shortage from the grain surpluses.63 The relationship between how war communism was theoretically supposed to work and how it looked in practice has often been investigated.64 Still debated, however, is whether it was more strongly ideological in its motivation – a utopian experiment  – or whether it was an emergency regime, pragmatically adapting to the circumstances.65 There has yet to be a comparable debate about the White war economy. It has been neither objectively described in its entirety nor researched at regional and sectoral level drawing on the full range of empirical sources. Selective accounts circle around two hypotheses. According to one, the Whites not only looked to a restoration of pre-1914 property and production relations, but were actually preparing for it with the practical measures they took. The other acknowledges that there was a transition strategy, but sees its aim as maintaining production by any means necessary in order not to endanger military success. In this view, all their measures, contradictory as they were in detail, remained provisional and subject to later review by the Constituent Assembly. The gap in basic research cannot be filled by drawing conclusions about conditions in the regions outside the Soviet sphere of domination from macro-economic observations. Because as logical as it seems to see the transformation from the prewar economy (as of 1913), through the war economy and war communism, to the New Economic Policy as a coherent process, there is no place for the White economy in this logic.66 It has not been possible up to now to extrapolate its influence on economic change at the national level or how industry and agriculture developed on the periphery up to 1920 from the aggregate figures for 1921–2.67 Before we can develop a picture of events that covers all of the White home fronts, we need to await the insights which will be provided primarily by regional studies.68 These will tell us more about local sites of production and power plants, factories and workshops, agriculture and food supply. At the same time they will make clear how constraints on human, technological and natural resources were managed and how shortages were handled. Everything was subject to the needs of army and administration: grain, fodder and seeds, horses and livestock, fields and

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meadows, vineyards and forests, vehicles and machines, automobiles and railways. Time and again, facilities were made unusable and the contents of warehouses destroyed in advance of a forced withdrawal. Features of a crisis economy, like bagmen and speculation, the fight against inflation or measures to aid refugees were to be found on the ‘White’ periphery as well as in the ‘Red’ heartland.69 Agriculture and the 86 per cent of the population that lived on the land were already caught up in a process of profound cultural and technological change when the war broke out. Millions of young peasant soldiers fell and were lost to the labour force. Traumatized returnees, socialized by life on the front lines, brought violence and disorder to the villages.70 As different as the circumstances were in the widely scattered agrarian regions (with landed estates, communal farming and individual farms continuing to exist side-by-side), it could not be denied that the Revolution triggered a process of regressive levelling. In the wake of the Revolution, the peasants had taken advantage of the historical opportunity to appropriate private, church or state land.71 Wherever possible, they were farming it once again using their own preferred methods. It was extremely risky to try to reverse this, and that made agricultural policy highly conflictual. A liberal newspaper, for example, declared that the ‘anti-state’ element in the villages should be ‘transform[ed] from something revolutionary to something conservative’.72 On 13 April 1919 the Council of Ministers in Omsk approved with a mere one-vote majority an agrarian law which (as the Minister for Farming put it) was intended to reconcile the peasants with the idea that ‘the land does not belong to them’, until a Constituent Assembly was able to make a final decision. Until then, the state should manage and distribute it.73 Any sign of wanting to accept even partially the post-revolutionary reality in the countryside attracted suspicions of consorting with the Bolsheviks.74 It is true that unlike the Bolsheviks the generals were not waging war on the village. But it was difficult to convince the peasants of the value of voluntary cooperation. The reality of returning landlords or the rumour-fuelled fear of their return created an atmosphere of mutual mistrust. At a push, agricultural produce, horses and livestock had to be requisitioned by force. Violent seizures were a daily occurrence in spite of the state grain monopoly and provoked resistance from the peasants. In the memoirs of contemporaries these ‘dark pages’ (chernye stranitsy) occupy considerable space. The way the organs of government behaved, underpaying or paying with worthless vouchers or confiscating stores, is described in loving detail. By contrast, there are hardly any reports of a relatively orderly exchange of goods between city and country, peasants and army. And yet there were serious attempts to build on pre-war approaches by involving agrarian experts, raising technological standards, strengthening middle-sized farms at the expense of landed estates, developing programmes for settling impoverished agricultural labourers and rectifying the radical break that had been introduced in Soviet Russia.75 Quantitatively less significant, but not to be underestimated in strategic terms, was the relationship with the workers. On the one hand the generals knew that many workers were alienated from the soviets and rejected the politicization of everyday life.76 On the other hand they were still prejudiced against the workers. ‘Bolshevik tumult’ could be lurking behind every legitimate defence of workers’ interests.77 And

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more generally, the attitude of the White elites to the non-agricultural economic sectors and to the industrialists was ambivalent. Mining, industry and the railways, but also the urban commercial and manufacturing economy received less support than the agrarian interests.78 This was not only because of reports about closed-down factories and unscrupulous businessmen looking to get back at the Bolsheviks for the injustices inflicted on them elsewhere.79 Striking workers, too, whether their motivations were economic or social, were a constant reminder of the crisis which had for decades accompanied Russia’s path to industrialization. In the Civil War, heavy industry, which operated in enclaves scattered across the territory, suffered more than ever before from multiple problems. Sometimes it was the consequences of revolutionary destruction of property, sometimes fluctuations in orders and problems with resupply, or conversely labour shortages (bezliud’e) that made orderly production impossible. A new labour law drafted in early 1919 implied a strengthening of the rights of employees, but made no mention of the right to strike or of free trade unions.80 The impression thus arose that the regime in the South was trying to protect itself against the workers, rather than protecting them against the factory owners. Finally, a resource that is difficult to assess but was undoubtedly a determining structural factor on the White home fronts was the intervening powers. Without any doubt the presence of foreign troops, the extensive financial aid and the delivery of arms, equipment and materiel contributed significantly to the White armies’ resilience. There was little clarity, though, about the provision of modern high technology. Armoured trains and cars, tanks, airplanes and battleships were only rarely deployed. Information on domestic war production, for example in the railway workshops of the South (Ekaterinodar, Gorlovka, Sevastopol’, Rostov and Ekaterinoslav), in the Urals (Motovilikha, Cheliabinsk), and in Siberia (Novonikolaevsk, Irkutsk, Omsk), is still vague or speculative. There were somewhere between fifty and eighty armoured trains in use, including some that had been used by the Tsarist army during the First World War or captured from the troops of the Central Powers. Occasionally tanks of French or English origin are mentioned. Of an estimated over 130, the Red Army reportedly captured more than two thirds in the course of the Civil War. Statements about the White air force being equipped with aircraft (bombers, fighter and reconnaissance planes) produced in Russian, German, French, English and Italian plants are not very convincing.81 It is by no means obvious that foreign aid could have produced a White victory. We would need to know more about the shifts in strategy on the part of the respective powers as world war transitioned into civil war.82 Great Britain, France and the United States gave the impression of making decisions ad hoc, but they wanted to keep their options open for the future. They were thus by no means agreed that the Soviet regime had to be toppled by concerted action. The mood in their war-weary societies, which made any renewed mobilization very difficult, warned against such plans. And parts of their populations had some sympathy with the Revolution.83 Not least, state finances had to be consolidated after the long war. And many clung to the hope that the Bolshevik experiment would soon fail of its own accord. In the shadow of this debate, which fixated on European Russia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East, where Japan was engaging in expansionist intervention from April 1918 onwards, were forgotten.84 Up to November 1918 the Allied war aims agreed at the

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beginning of the War had not lost their relevance. Intervention could be justified on the basis that munitions depots and industrial plants had to be defended against attack from German or Red troops.85 But after that, the geostrategic cards in the game being played for the penetration and reordering of the wider European space were re-shuffled. Where would the Whites seek foreign partners if they won? In any case the walk-on part that Russia was assigned at the Versailles Peace Conference rekindled the conflict among Westernizers, Germanophiles and Nationalists.86

LOYALTIES In the Civil War, there were no disinterested parties and no safe hinterland. This ‘total war’ blurred the boundaries between front line and home front.87 It put people under constant pressure to take sides or justify their own position. They were recruited and mobilized, co-opted or despised, suppressed and intimidated. They submitted or identified, renounced or recanted. Under these circumstances, what was voluntary and what was forced could not always be distinguished. Anybody who wanted to survive, then, had to be able to switch identities or wear social masks. What did people in this situation mean when they claimed to be ‘patriots’? The view of the military was that a subject became a citizen by fulfilling his military duty. But the Civil War destabilized notions of ‘homeland’ (rodina) and ‘fatherland’ (otechestvo). Conflicts of loyalty were unavoidable.88 Moods shifted, feelings changed and attitudes came unmoored when people constantly had to adapt to changing circumstances.89 There was little place for nuance in the self-image of the White military and political elite. They made a sharp distinction between ‘us’ (my) and ‘them’ (oni), between ‘own’ and ‘other’ people.90 In everyday and official life this dichotomous perspective generated multiple occasions for committing ‘treachery’ or ‘treason’ (izmena, predatel’stvo) or identifying it in somebody else. Real or imagined opponents were declared to be ‘internal enemies’ and ‘spies’. Panic fear of subversion spread abroad. Even during the First World War this had led to deportations, expulsions and hostage-taking.91 Now the number of pogroms also increased.92 Leaflets were thrown from airplanes behind the lines; fake proclamations, decrees, newspapers and posters circulated. Almost every form of undesirable behaviour was grounds for suspicion. Commanders called on people to take up arms – against ‘Jewish commissars’, ‘Latvian mercenaries’ and ‘Chinese Chekists’, against ‘un-Russian’, ‘dishonourable’, ‘rootless’, ‘godless’, ‘dirty’, ‘bestial’ Bolsheviks.93 In the propaganda departments of Denikin and Vrangel’ ‘Russian’ Red Army soldiers were played off against ‘alien’ commissars, whose ‘yoke’ recalled the days of the Mongols.94 In this kind of atmosphere, soldiers strolling down the street in American, British or French uniforms could inspire distinctly ambivalent emotions. This created an opening for Red propaganda to decry the Whites as ‘mercenaries’ in the service of ‘imperial occupiers’.95 The views of Russian nationalists differed from this only in degree. They too sowed doubts about the trustworthiness of the Allies. Testimony to the permanent insecurity on the White home front is provided by private correspondence and autobiographical sources (diaries, personal notes, family chronicles) as well as by the secret situation and public opinion reports

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(svodki, obzory, spravki, doklady) of local and central, military and civilian security and propaganda services.96 Readers’ letters to regional newspapers, requests to the authorities, petitions and denunciations add colourful details to the picture.97 This material shows from the perspective of individual lives how state, legal and economic structures collapsed, social relationships developed over decades dissolved and traditional world views mixed with revolutionary ones. From the multiplicity of subjective observations there emerge characteristic patterns in the relationship to power and the social practices of ‘ordinary people’ (srednii chelovek, riadovoi grazhdanin, obyvatel’, prostye liudi, prostonarod’e).98 We can learn about the atmosphere on the home front not least from the rumours that dominated private communication at a time when official statements were unreliable.99 In spite of the wealth of material there are relatively few empirical studies of individual and collective behaviour in the societies of the White home fronts. This may seem not to be the case for the lower social strata. The older social histories give considerable attention to peasants and workers, as do some excellent recent studies. But the perspective of the non-Bolshevik periphery is rarely sustained.100 Innovative attempts to access the experience of ‘citizens’ connect these two approaches. They explore, for example, how peasants responded to complex situations and frames of reference such as ‘conscription’, ‘freedom’, ‘hunger’, ‘nation’ or ‘state’.101 In this approach, workers emerge not as the social base of the Bolsheviks but as wanderers between different realities.102 They thought in local urban contexts, just as the peasants did in rural ones. Higher purposes and grand objectives lay beyond their horizon. As a rule, they subscribed to them for tactical reasons rather than out of conviction.103 The same approach can be applied to those social groups that actively rejected cooperation with the Bolsheviks and fled to the White territories: aristocrats and members of the bourgeois elites and of the urban and rural middle classes, intellectuals and professionals (spetsy). They hung on in the hope that the Soviet regime would collapse sooner or later. Anybody who could, emigrated.104 Bread was the key to survival. Power was in the hands of whoever was distributing it.105 Bread had been rationed since 1917, while ‘war bread’ (golodnyi khleb) made from ersatz ingredients served to ease the bottle-necks. Month on month and year on year the food supply situation worsened, culminating in famine in 1921–2. White propaganda posters and leaflets promised flourishing landscapes, while misery reigned in the Bolshevik ‘empire of death’. One image shows ‘the thieving, bloody hand of the Bolshevik, which never sows but always reaps’ reaching out to grasp the ‘bread of Siberia’, produced in the White land of ‘work’, ‘law’ and ‘order’.106 On the front, too, the daily rations decided whether a soldier would stay true to the colours. One Red Army soldier noted on 13 June 1919: ‘White officers are deserting to us every day, because there’s no bread over there. The Whites only give 1 pound, but we get 2 pounds.’107 ‘Turncoats’ were a mass phenomenon in the Civil War.108 The heroic figure of the ‘volunteer’ (dobrovolets), fighting selflessly against ‘evil’ (zlo) in all its forms, was intended to counter the flow of deserters.109 But recruits avoided front duty so they could help with the harvest. Others fled into the forests to await the withdrawal of the mobilization force. Many joined ‘green’ combat units, which would attack the

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regular armies from ambush. They defended their home villages against marauding bands or punitive expeditions.110 The more fiercely they were suppressed, the more new fighters they attracted. Many commanders complained of up to 80 per cent casualties. In order to staunch the flow, they turned to draconian measures. The summary shooting of captured deserters was standard practice. But there were exceptions. If the situation of the army was desperate, prisoners of war or deserters from the Red Army might be ‘pardoned’. It was not always possible to prevent fanatical officers from having them indiscriminately shot, however. In January 1918 General Kornilov had issued the call to ‘take no prisoners’ in the fight against the Bolsheviks.111 In contrast to Denikin, who was also usually ruthless, Vrangel’ found himself forced to promise turncoats an amnesty. In a May 1920 appeal ‘To the Officers of the Red Army’ he promised ‘to forget the past’ and ‘make amends for sins’ through active cooperation.112

THE LEGACY As a space of collective experience, the ‘White home front’ contributed to shaping the history of Russia and the wider Eurasian space in the twentieth century. In a modern age characterized by turmoil, what happened between 1914 and 1922 was not simply a repetition of earlier wartime emergencies. The Civil War brought the former great power to the verge of total collapse. In the territories that were repeatedly occupied and then ‘liberated’ again, there raged a struggle between contending models of society, state forms and lifestyles.113 Its effects are still being felt, and can be seen in an ‘identity politics’ which is adapting the claims and narratives of those days and filling them with new content. The rhetoric of war was never demobilized, either in the Soviet Union or among the emigrés. Once the pre-revolutionary categories had gone, ‘nation’ and ‘class’ became the polar points of reference for identity construction.114 They also informed the (anti)colonial discourse that emerged with the collapse of the Tsarist Empire.115 In their respective hinterlands, Whites and Reds found themselves confronted with the age-old ‘national’ legacy of lawlessness, misappropriation of state property and bribery. Otherwise, typical signs of crisis like speculation, opportunism, fraud and evasion of responsibility reigned on both sides of the lines. But remarkably, Denikin complained of ‘class egotism’ taking hold of elites and masses alike – ‘master and servant’, ‘peasant and landlord’, ‘proletarian and bourgeois’. Everybody was appealing to the state, which defended their respective rights and interests, but nobody would acknowledge its successes or the ‘freedoms’ (of the press, the church, trade, education) it guaranteed. From that point of view, he argued, the Whites had had ‘barely a greater chance’ of victory than the Bolsheviks.116 The decisive factor was that the roof that the ideology and political practice of the Whites built over the home front was not broad enough to gather in all everybody who opposed the Reds. In the end, the many who ‘had lost everything’ – property, family, homeland  – were offered refuge in a ‘Russia’ of eternal values, a place of longing, in which superiority, honour and duty reigned supreme.117

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

The Bolsheviks and world revolution GEOFFREY SWAIN, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

For the Bolsheviks it was an article of faith that their revolution should be part of a broader European or even world revolution. They justified their decision to seize power in October 1917 on the grounds that a German revolution was imminent. They assumed that this German revolution would overthrow the Kaiser and bring about a general peace, saving them from the danger of having to sign a humiliating peace with German Imperialism; the collapse of the German Empire, they assumed, would usher in European-wide unrest and a possible European revolution. When the First World War ended in November 1918, the German Empire did indeed collapse, but the unrest which characterized the months following the fall of the Kaiser led to the triumph of the German Mensheviks over the German Bolsheviks in early 1919 when the Spartacist Uprising was crushed; Germany experienced a ‘bourgeois’ revolution but not a communist one. Although the post-war unrest continued throughout spring 1919, prompting short-lived Soviet governments in Hungary (21 March–1 August) and Bavaria (7 April–6 May), the course of the Russian Civil War meant that the Bolsheviks could bring little influence to bear. By early 1920, however, the Bolsheviks had triumphed over their counter-revolutionary opponents. That victory brought uncertainty to the borderlands both to Russia’s west and east, and that uncertainty offered the potential to export the Bolshevik Revolution. The war with Poland almost ended with the fall of Warsaw and the Red Army entering Germany; but exporting revolution at bayonet point proved far from simple. In the east, on the other hand, despite setbacks, the prospects proved more promising.

THE NECESSARY EUROPEAN REVOLUTION It was Trotsky who explained most clearly why Russian Marxists believed a European revolution was essential for the survival of a socialist revolution in Russia. In spring 1906, he reflected on what was for him the overwhelming lesson of Russia’s 1905 Revolution. His pamphlet Results and Prospects argued that, whatever classical Marxism might have taught about backward peasant Russia needing a ‘bourgeois’ revolution before there could be a ‘socialist’ one, 1905 had been led by the working

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class not by the liberal bourgeoisie: it had been the working class which had set the pace in 1905; their strike in October had forced the Tsar to make concessions; and the Soviet they formed had pushed the revolution forward. This lived experience of revolution, persuaded Trotsky that, when the Tsarist autocracy should next come under threat, it would be the workers who would again take the lead and form a revolutionary government. That revolutionary government, he suggested, would be able to consolidate its power initially by carrying out an immediate agrarian revolution; land would be expropriated from the nobility and transferred to the peasantry; and thus ‘the Russian peasantry in the first and most difficult period of the revolution will be interested in the maintenance of the proletarian regime’. However, what concerned Trotsky was the longer term: for how long would the peasants support the workers’ regime? As legislation was passed to protect the interests of the ‘agricultural proletariat’, he predicted, the richer peasants would protest, and soon the middle peasantry would vacillate. ‘The proletariat will find itself compelled to carry the class struggle into the villages and in this manner destroy the community of interest which is undoubtedly to be found among all peasants’. As a result, ‘the more definite and determined the policy of the proletariat in power becomes, the narrower and more shaky does the ground beneath its feet become’. Trotsky feared that ‘left to its own resources, the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it’. In Trotsky’s view, the solution to this dilemma was for the Russian working class ‘to link the fate of its political rule, and hence the fate of the whole Russian Revolution, with the fate of the socialist revolution in Europe’. And, Trotsky believed, a European revolution was an entirely realistic prospect once the Tsarist regime was overthrown. The Russian Revolution was bound to spread to Russian Poland, and this would in turn threaten the integrity of German Poland and Austrian Poland. The Hohenzollern and Habsburg rulers would send troops into revolutionary Russia to restore the monarchical order, and the result would be first a revolutionary war and then further revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary. These revolutions in advanced industrial countries would save revolutionary Russia from its own peasant-led counter-revolution.1 Lenin’s approach was rather different. He accepted the traditional Marxist view that there should be a ‘bourgeois’ revolution before a socialist one, but suggested that in Russia’s circumstances the gap between the two could be comparatively short, and he linked the length of that gap to the prospects for a European Revolution brought about by the social tensions inherent in the First World War. By summer 1915 he was beginning to suggest that the gap between a democratic revolution and a socialist one could be very short indeed: ‘The task of the proletariat in Russia is to carry the bourgeois democratic revolution through to its end in order to kindle the socialist revolution in Europe. This latter task now approximates very closely to the first [but] … for the first task the partner is the petty bourgeois peasantry of Russia; for the second, the proletariat of other countries.’2 Following through this logic, he argued in 1917 that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was already over by the time he returned to Petrograd in April. And, if that were so, the next prospect was socialist revolution, in partnership with the proletariat of Europe. The peasantry had

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played their part in the ‘bourgeois’ revolution and overthrown the autocracy. They were no longer a reliable ally, except for the very poor. In his April Theses Lenin wrote of the need for a soviet government representing workers and the rural poor, not the peasantry as a whole.3 His sixth thesis called for the ‘organization of separate Soviets of Deputies of Poor Peasants’, power needed to pass to the proletariat ‘and the poorest sections of peasants aligned with the proletariat’. Only some peasants would join the workers in moving towards a socialist revolution, which would still be a European affair. Lenin’s April Theses were clear, the February Revolution ‘was the beginning of the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war’ and in its second stage, when the working class came to power then ‘all the workers and toilers of all countries’ would rally around Russia and the socialist revolution would begin across Europe.4 As 1917’s October crisis approached, Lenin was optimistic about the prospects for world revolution. Writing on 29 September, he asserted that ‘the world working class revolution’ had begun, noting that the pro-war socialist parties had begun to split and were entering ‘the eve of revolution’. In particular, he latched on to the unrest that had taken place on 2 August 1917 [western calendar] on the German dreadnought Prinzregent Luitpold. Some 350 crewmen had staged a demonstration in the key naval port of Wilhelmshaven. For, Lenin this was a clear sign of what was to come, the mutinies were ‘indisputable symptoms that a great turning point is at hand, that we are on the eve of a world-wide revolution’.5 In early October he repeated that ‘the revolt in the German navy is indicative of a great crisis – the growth of world revolution’. Thus, for the Bolsheviks to delay seizing power in Russia would be to act as ‘traitors to the International’.6 A week later, at the crucial meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 16 October at which Lenin repeated his call for an immediate armed insurrection, he again cited the revolt in the German navy as indication ‘that in acting now we will have the whole European proletariat on our side’.7

AWAITING THE GERMAN REVOLUTION Once in power, the Bolsheviks immediately issued the Decree on Peace which they hoped would force the issue of world revolution. It made clear that ‘in proposing an immediate armistice, we appeal to the class-conscious workers of the countries that have done so much for the development of the proletarian movement … The workers’ movement will triumph and pave the way to peace and socialism’.8 The Soviet delegation to the first armistice talks on 20 November was comprised not of diplomats but class representatives, a peasant, a worker, a soldier and a sailor. The delegation insisted that the armistice had to be the precursor to a general peace, not a ceasefire on the Eastern Front alone. The Germans dismissed this outright, but agreed that the Soviet delegation should return to Petrograd to seek new instructions. Kamenev, who headed the delegation, reported loftily to the Soviet Executive on 24 November that the Germans had not taken ‘account of the fact that although Russia may be militarily weakened, she is capable of unleashing enough revolutionary energy to threaten German imperialism from within’.9 Unleashing

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revolutionary energy within Imperial Germany was no easy matter. It was Trotsky, not Kamenev, who returned to the negotiations and he accepted on 27 November that the demand for a general peace had to be dropped. In return for a German promise that no troops would be moved to the Western Front before 30 December, an immediate armistice would begin ‘in order to struggle for a general peace’; struggling for a general peace was not quite the same as negotiating one.10 The terms were agreed on 2 December. The peace talks at Brest Litovsk were due to start on 9 December. Trotsky addressed the Soviet Executive on the eve of his departure and raised the possibility that the demand for peace on the Eastern Front alone might not unleash sufficient revolutionary energy within Imperial Germany. We are becoming more and more convinced that peace talks will be a powerful weapon in the hands of other peoples in their struggle for peace. If we are mistaken, if Europe continues to be silent as the grave, and if this silence gives Wilhelm the chance to attack us and to dictate his terms to us, terms which would insult the revolutionary dignity of our country, then I am not sure whether our shattered economy and the general chaos (the result of the war and internal strife), we could fight. I think, however, that we could do so. For our lives, for our revolutionary honour, we would fight to the last drop of blood …11 This was not the first time the Bolsheviks had written about the possibility of a revolutionary war. The first of Lenin’s April Theses had suggested that a revolutionary war could be fought if the workers and poorest peasants had already taken power, and a complete break made ‘with all capitalist interests’.12 Thus, Lenin had no objection in principle, indeed, on 13 September, he had stated that, once in power, the Bolsheviks would sue for peace, but ‘if we do not secure an armistice, then we shall become “defencists”, … [and] save Petrograd’.13 However, by the end of December, Lenin was having serious concerns about the prospects for a revolutionary war. Given the need to secure the revolution at home – Lenin faced incipient counter-revolution in the Don region and the breakaway of nationalist Ukraine  – how much stress should be given to spreading the revolution abroad? Lenin decided: ‘first defeat the bourgeoisie in Russia, then fight the foreign, alien bourgeoisie’ and for this to happen, ‘gain time through a separate peace’.14 Trotsky spun out the talks as much as possible, and when presented with Germany’s first specific demands on 5 January 1918 asked for a ten-day adjournment. Returning to Petrograd, he found Lenin arguing openly that the German terms should be  accepted and a separate peace signed. His Theses on the Question of the Immediate Conclusion of a Separate and Annexationist Peace, published on 7 January, explained that the nascent civil war in Russia, the stubborn resistance of the bourgeoisie and the low cultural level of the peasantry were hampering socialist transformation and that ‘all these circumstances taken together are such as to make it perfectly clear that for the success of socialism in Russia a certain amount of time, several months at least, will be necessary, during which the hands of the socialist government must be absolutely free’. The socialist revolution in Europe ‘must come’, but it would be ‘a mistake to base the tactics of the Russian socialist government

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on attempts to determine whether the European, especially the German, socialist revolution will take place in the next six months’. On top of this it was clear ‘that our army is absolutely in no condition at the present moment’. Thus, ‘it would be absolutely impermissible tactics to stake the fate of the socialist revolution which has already begun in Russia merely on the chance that the German revolution may begin in the immediate future’.15 However, Lenin struggled to get the Party’s backing. An expanded Bolshevik Central Committee met on 8 January and rejected Lenin’s advice, supporting instead Trotsky’s proposal that the Soviet side should respond by issuing a declaration of ‘no peace, no war’ which would shame the European proletariat into action. This vote was considered advisory and the Central Committee met again on 11 January, but although Lenin dismissed ‘no peace, no war’ as ‘political showmanship’, the Central Committee still backed it.16 Nor had Trotsky completely abandoned the idea of revolutionary war. He declared to the Third Congress of Soviets on 13 January: ‘No peace with German Imperialists! Revolutionary war against world imperialism! … They cannot threaten us with an offensive, as they cannot be sure the German soldiers will take part in one’. If German Imperialism should ‘attempt to crucify us on the wheel of its military machine’, the Bolsheviks would ‘appeal to our elder brothers in the west and say – Do you hear? And the international proletariat will respond, we firmly believe this – we hear!’17 The congress agreed Russia would never sign an ‘imperialistic’ peace.18 On the eve of his return to the negotiations, however, Trotsky put flowery rhetoric aside and promised Lenin that he would sign the proposed peace if the Germans proved capable of resuming hostilities.19 Trotsky’s appeals did not go unheeded. At precisely this time in Germany, the recently formed Independent Social Democratic Party called a strike in favour of peace and this led to over a million German workers coming out in support. Their action followed hard on the heels of similar unrest in Vienna. The political agenda of the strikers was clear: the negotiations in Brest Litovsk should lead to a general peace.20 Unfortunately, the working-class unrest gradually faded away and Trotsky’s luck ran out on 28 January, when the Germans demanded an immediate decision from the Russian negotiators. Trotsky then issued his final statement, asserting that ‘in expectation of the approaching hour when the working classes of all countries seize power’, the Soviet side was withdrawing from the war but could not sign a peace treaty ‘which brings oppression, woe and misfortune to millions of human beings’. Less than a week later, he was back in Petrograd addressing the Petrograd Soviet on 16 February. (The change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar took place on 1/13 February 1918.) He was still, he said, 90 per cent certain that there would be no German offensive because it would ‘unquestionably mean provoking a mighty revolutionary protest by the German workers’.21 When German hostilities resumed on 18 February, he argued that the Party should not respond immediately: ‘the masses are only just beginning to digest what is happening’, he argued, and it was essential ‘to wait and see what impression all this makes on the German people’; later on the 18th, he called for a direct appeal to be made to civilian leaders in Berlin and Vienna. Only during the night of 18–19 February did Trotsky accept that the cause was lost, that there was no sign of an

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imminent German Revolution, and that the Bolshevik Central Committee should vote to resume peace talks. When the Bolsheviks learned on 21 February that the new German terms on offer were far worse than those Trotsky had previously refused to accept, even Lenin considered fighting on; but on 23 February, once Pskov had been captured by the German Army, Lenin dismissed Trotsky’s enthusiastic talk of organizing defence and insisted that ‘this is where the policy of revolutionary phrasemongering ends’. Trotsky reluctantly accepted and the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed on 3 March. Those opposed to the peace  – Left SRs, Anarchists and Left Communists – all argued that a revolutionary war was still feasible, and the Russian Army’s brief recapture of Pskov on 24–25 February argued in their favour.22

FIRST ATTEMPTS TO EXPORT REVOLUTION Against the background of the negotiations at Brest Litovsk, the first moves to export the October Revolution began. Finland came first. Kerensky had been unwilling to grant autonomy to Finland in spring 1917, lest it serve as a precedent for other nationalities. The Finnish Social Democrats, who had been the biggest party in the Finnish parliament since 1916, led the struggle for independence, and, overestimating the revolutionary nature of the July Days, took advantage of that crisis to win parliamentary backing for a unilateral declaration of independence. Kerensky responded at once and dissolved the Finnish parliament, with the support of Finland’s ‘bourgeois’ parties. This put Finnish liberals and Finnish socialists on a collision course. In early October, fresh parliamentary elections were held, which gave the ‘bourgeois’ parties a majority but the elections were denounced by the Social Democrats as unconstitutional and fraudulent. The new government sought to disband the Finnish Red Guards,23 and clashes soon began between the Red Guards and the newly formed ‘White Constabulary’.24 For much of November there was a general strike, with the Finnish Social Democrats actively discussing whether or not to seize power. On 6 December, to distance itself from the new Bolshevik Government in Petrograd, the ‘bourgeois’ government declared its independence from Russia.25 With Finland on the verge of civil war, Lenin held talks with Finnish Red Guard leaders at the turn of 1918. He provided them with arms, but ‘left the revolution in Finland to be achieved by the Finns themselves’.26 That revolution began with the formation of a Workers’ Government on 27–28 January 1918, but in the bloody fighting which followed, the Red Finns were out-gunned by the White Finns, who soon won the support of German imperial forces. Helsinki was captured by the Whites on 13 April after German troops had landed earlier in the month. By early May, the Whites had won and only a few thousand Red Guards managed to escape to Soviet Russia.27 In Romania, Lenin did provide troops to those wanting to carry out a revolution. As early as spring 1917, the Romanian Government had acted to prevent revolutionary unrest penetrating the country. Anti-war agitation led by the Social Democrats had resulted in arrests in April, and revolutionaries fled to Odessa, Christian Rakovsky among them. He became the effective leader of the Romanian Action Committee based there. As the October Revolution approached, the Romanian Government

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became increasingly concerned at the way Russian soldiers on the Romanian Front were undermining morale in the Romanian Army. A British report praised the way the Romanian Army ‘maintained excellent discipline’ but expressed concern at the disorganizing activity of Russian soldiers. When the Bolsheviks took power, the commander of Russian forces in Romania, General Dmitrii Shcherbachev, announced he did not accept Lenin’s authority and instead accepted an offer from the Rada administration in Kiev to become the independent commander of the Romanian Front. On 15 December, the Fourth Russian Army declared itself in favour of Soviet power and refused to obey Shcherbachev’s orders; he responded by using Rada troops to arrest those leading the agitation; a few days later, revolutionary soldiers tried to arrest Shcherbachev, and a few days after that a leading local Bolshevik was found dead in an alley way. From a Bolshevik perspective ‘the Romanian Government and its generals were shooting hundreds of revolutionaries’. In this situation, the Romanian Government decided, on the night of 21–22 December, to disarm those Russian units which recognized the Bolsheviks. Also on 21 December, the Romanian Government received a delegation from the newly established Moldovan Democratic Federative Republic, which wanted both to align Russia’s former Romanian-speaking province of Bessarabia with Romania and to ‘restore order’. The Romanian Government was cautious, but Shcherbachev favoured securing supply lines by deploying the Romanian Army in Bessarabia. On 28 December, Rakovsky’s Action Committee decided to act through their control of the Soviets of the Romanian Front, Black Sea Fleet and Odessa District (Rumcherod). A Romanian Military Revolutionary Committee was established, and three battalions prepared for action. On 3 January 1918, Rumcherod declared itself the supreme authority in both Bessarabia and on the Romanian Front and declared a revolutionary war against Romania. Initial success went to the revolutionary forces, but by the end of January they had been driven back by the Romanian Army. Then, in the middle of February, a new Red commander was appointed and by the end of February the Romanians had been forced to retreat from Bessarabia. The Treaty of Odessa, signed on 9 March, agreed that the Romanians would leave Bessarabia within two months, but there would be no revolutionary overthrow of the Romanian Government. The treaty was short-lived. Within days the German Army was taking control of Ukraine, under the terms of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, and on 7 May the Treaty of Bucharest was signed between Romania and Germany which recognized Bessarabia as part of Romania.28

THE DANGER OF PEASANT COUNTER-REVOLUTION From a Marxist perspective, the absence of a German revolution put revolutionary Russia into the situation envisaged by Trotsky in 1906. After the October seizure of power, the Bolsheviks had formed a coalition government with the Left SRs; that coalition government introduced a land reform in February 1918; but once they had the land, for how long would the peasants support the Bolsheviks? The Left SRs left the coalition government over the Treaty of Brest Litovsk and began to voice other peasant concerns as Lenin embarked on what he called socialist construction. In the

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second half of April, Lenin wrote The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government in which he stressed that ‘in a land in which the small proprietor population greatly predominates over the purely proletarian population, the difference between the proletarian revolutionary and the petty bourgeois revolutionary will inevitably make itself felt’. In other words, disagreements between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs were inevitable, and as Lenin believed one of the key immediate tasks was ‘to consolidate and improve the state monopoly in grain’ this soon became a major issue of contention.29 On 9 May a decree was issued stating that all grain, beyond a minimum for the current year’s sowing, had to be handed in to the state at a fixed price or the peasant concerned would be declared an ‘enemy of the people’ and liable to ten years imprisonment. The Left SRs, who favoured a free trade in grain, were fundamentally opposed to this policy. When peasants resisted, units of workers were empowered to go out to the countryside and collect grain, by force if necessary. Lenin’s final summary thesis was: ‘iron discipline and thorough exercise of proletarian dictatorship against petty bourgeois vacillation’.30 From 11 June, as promised in Lenin’s April Theses, Committees of the Poor began to be established throughout the countryside, to rally support for the policy of grain requisitioning. The results were twofold. First, the attempt by the Left SRs to seize power in July 1918 was followed by endemic Left SR inspired peasant unrest. In the second half of 1918 the Cheka recorded 100 peasant rebellions, while reports in the Menshevik press referred to peasant rebellions in Tver, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Vitebsk, Kazan, Tula Voronezh, Riazan, Kaluga, Smolensk and Tambov provinces at the end of 1918.31 Second, the SR Party staged an insurrection on the Volga and in much of Western Siberia. Although the SR People’s Army had to surrender the Volga in early October32, by early November it was back on the offensive.33 Yet no change of policy was envisaged. Addressing the Sixth Congress of Soviets in the first week of November, Lenin spoke of ‘the rural poor [being] in unity with their leaders, the city workers [and providing] a firm and stable foundation for real socialist construction in the countryside’. On 8 November, he spelled out what this meant when he told delegates from the Committees of the Poor that ‘socialized farming’ was to be Russia’s future.34 Was this the moment when Trotsky’s prediction in Results and Prospects came true? Were the Bolsheviks in danger of drowning in a wave of peasant-led counterrevolution? Relief came in the form of Allied victory on the Western Front and the concomitant revolutions which overthrew the imperial dynasties of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Armistice of 11 November marked the start of a sixmonth period when the prospects looked excellent for the European revolution which Russia’s Marxist had dreamed of for so long. And yet, the danger of a peasant counter-revolution was ever present.

SOVIET REVOLUTIONS IN 1919 The revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary seemed to open up the prospect of new soviet revolutions and to co-ordinate any such developments, the Bolsheviks decided to establish a new Communist International. On 21 January 1919, they

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issued by radio a ‘Letter of Invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International’. Although thirty-nine parties and groups had been listed in the invitation, only nine delegates from abroad were among the fifty-one delegates representing thirty-five organizations who attended. Due to open in mid-February, it was delayed because of the obvious travel difficulties in getting to Russia. When it finally opened on 2 March, the gathering adopted the more modest title of ‘an International Communist Conference’, but then, on 4 March, took the decision to restore the designation ‘congress’ with the authority to found a new international. One of the few foreign delegates, the German Hugo Eberlein, had been instructed to oppose founding a new international, but was overruled on the grounds that in February the Second (Socialist) International had been re-established and its activities needed to be countered. Little else was achieved by the time the congress closed on 6 March. It merely issued a Manifesto to the Proletariat of the Entire World, written by Trotsky, and elected an Executive Committee under the leadership of Zinoviev.35 While these congress preparations were underway, new soviet republics were indeed being established both on territory freed from German occupation and further afield. As the defeated German Army prepared to evacuate Ukraine at the end of 1918, the Bolsheviks briefly negotiated with the rump nationalist administration. However, by the middle of January 1919 border skirmishes had developed into full-blown war between nationalist Ukraine and Soviet Russia. Kiev was captured on 5 February, while much of the rest of the country saw sympathetic Left SR and Anarchist partisans overthrow the nationalist administration.36 The Third Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party was held during the first week of March, quickly followed by the All- Ukrainian Congress of Soviets on 6–10 March, which adopted a constitution for the new soviet state.37 Despite the help given by Left SRs and Anarchists in driving out the nationalists, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks insisted on ruling alone. Less than a fortnight later, a Soviet Republic was declared in Hungary on 21 March and two initiatives were taken to offer Ukrainian support. On 23 April, the Red Army commander in Ukraine called on Ataman Grigoriev, one of the partisan leaders who had supported the re-establishment of Soviet Ukraine, to advance into Bessarabia and from there to attack Romania, thus disrupting the advance of counterrevolutionary Romanian troops into Hungary.38 A more sober suggestion came from Lenin, who on 22 April, informed the Commander in Chief of the Red Army that Soviet forces should move westwards ‘for the purpose of establishing contact with Soviet Hungary’; in this regard ‘establishing firm contact by railway’ was essential.39 The Ukrainian Bolsheviks saw no need to abandon the agrarian policy of their Russian counterparts. The Third Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party resolved to begin ‘a transfer from individual to social farming’ and to do so with the help of Committees of the Poor.40 Even before the party congress, several decrees on the land had been issued: on 16 January, all land linked to sugar production was nationalized; and further decrees on 5 and 11 February established the principle that as much land as possible should be retained in large state land holdings. As a result of these policies, the Ukrainian Soviet Government established 1,685 state farms.41 The result was not hard to predict: the government reported ninety-three

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peasant uprisings during the month of April.42 Then, on 7 May, Ataman Grigoriev rebelled, depriving the Bolsheviks of control of much of south west Ukraine and ending one element of the planned support for the Hungarian Soviet.43 Peasant counter-revolution looked imminent. The danger posed by peasant counter-revolution was even greater in Latvia. On 3 January 1919, workers in Riga declared an insurrection, dissident soldiers mutinied and, later in the evening, units of the previously Russia-based Latvian Riflemen raced to the city; within days the Bolsheviks had control over almost all of the country, and the Russia-based Latvian Riflemen were approaching the German province of East Prussia.44 The manifesto of the Latvian Bolsheviks was clear about the ambition of the new regime: ‘behind us stands the communist revolution, which will certainly change not only Germany, but very soon also the rest of Europe into a Federation of European Socialist Soviet Republics of which we will then be a constituent part’.45 Just after the Latvian Bolsheviks came to power, the Spartacist Uprising began in Germany. German Bolsheviks, it seemed, were at last on the move. However, if when the uprising began on 5 January the prospects for the German Bolsheviks looked good, by 12 January their movement had collapsed; it was clear that Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades had mistaken the July Days for the October Revolution, since in Berlin in January 1919 few soldiers followed their workingclass comrades into action. Although labour unrest would continue in Germany for many months, the revolutionary moment had passed. The Latvian Bolshevik leader Peteris Stučka could not have appreciated this when, on 13 January he addressed the Latvian Congress of Soviets and predicted that the Latvians would not have to wait so long as the Russians for ‘a radical change in the front of the revolution’.46 Nor did the Latvian Riflemen threaten the border with East Prussia for long. Initially they had been opposed by regular units of the German Army, whose soldiers’ councils, formed during the overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty, were keen to avoid as much fighting as possible. The formation of Freikorps within the German armed forces meant that the Latvian Riflemen faced a more determined foe; by 18 March, the Freikorps had captured Jelgava, scarcely thirty miles from Riga.47 Yet Stučka’s optimism was not dulled. On 21 March, he informed the new Soviet Government in Hungary that ‘the revolution of the working class is advancing victoriously; nothing can now stop it becoming a world revolution’, all that was needed was for the Latvian Riflemen ‘to reach the Prussian frontier as quickly as possible’.48 Behind this revolutionary rhetoric stood a harsh reality. On an accelerated timescale, Soviet Latvia experienced the same agrarian crisis as Soviet Russia. Stučka’s new government nationalized all noble, state and church land and any private holding of more than 110 hectares; it established on that land 239 state farms. This did not mean that holdings smaller than 110 hectares were to remain in private hands; that land was brought under state control too, but could be rented from the state by the peasants on a yearly tenancy. At the same time, all farm equipment was nationalized and all livestock subject to compulsory purchase. In February, the process of transforming these state farms into ‘communes’ was begun.49 Growing rural unrest was the inevitable consequence. Stučka conceded that

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some Bolsheviks ‘got carried away with establishing agricultural communes’, while the architect of the land reform commented that the policy had degenerated into ‘burglar communism’. By the end of April, the Commissariat of Agriculture issued a ‘clarification’ which condemned those rural soviets which would not allow peasants to rent the land they had formerly owned.50 Yet it was too late. Soviet Latvia was suffering an acute food shortage with the population surviving on rations and soup kitchens; on 15 April nineteen people in Riga died of starvation.51 Riga fell to the Freikorps on 22 May. This was not peasant-led counter-revolution, but peasant unrest had opened the road to counter-revolution. The same reckless agrarian policy was being implemented in the Don region of Russia. By early March, the policy of forced ‘decossackisation’ – the ‘wholesale destruction of all upper elements of cossack society’ carried out through the confiscation of land and property – had led to at least 8,000 deaths and had prompted an insurrection which by the start of April covered 10,000 square kilometres. Early in May, General Anton Denikin was able to use British aeroplanes to drop supplies to the Don insurgents. By 8 June he had linked up with them and, on 30 June, he captured Tsaritsyn, beginning his march towards Moscow.52 There could be no more thought of world revolution until the Civil War was over.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR IN POLAND During the Civil War there were a series of border incidents and skirmishes with Poland. In 1919, Vilna (Vilnius) and Minsk were incorporated into Poland, and in January 1920 Poland occupied Dvinsk (Daugavpils), followed in March by Mozyr. With Denikin’s defeat in March 1920, the Bolsheviks decided to transfer the First Cavalry Army from the south to the Polish border.53 Lenin had already stated on 27 February that it was time to prepare for war with Poland, and on 11 March he informed Stalin that he thought such a war was ‘inevitable’.54 Whether Lenin had in mind initiating a war to retrieve lost territory, or a war to resist further Polish aggression is a matter of interpretation. However, before the deployment of the First Cavalry Army could be completed, the Poles launched a surprise attack on 25 April 1920. The advance of the Polish Army was dramatic and, by 6 May, Kiev had been captured; but thereafter the Polish plan backfired badly. Soviet Russia’s western frontier had been only lightly defended, and despite the speed of the Polish advance, the Red Army had not been surrounded or cut off. As it retreated it prepared a counter-offensive and this was launched on 30 May; by 12 June Kiev had been recaptured and by mid-July Minsk and Vilna brought back under Russian administration.55 At this point, the nature of the war began to change. The Red Army was approaching the Curzon Line, a boundary drawn up by the Allied Supreme Council which sought to designate the ethnographic divide between Poles on the one hand and Belorusians and Ukrainians on the other. On 11 July, the British Foreign Office sent a telegram to Moscow requesting that the Curzon Line be respected: Soviet Russia should halt its advance at the Curzon Line and negotiate, having recovered not only the territory Poland had acquired through earlier military operations but additional

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territory as well.56 To proceed beyond the Curzon Line would be to invade Poland. The Politburo debated the issue on 13 July: Trotsky called for negotiations, while Lenin called for a continued advance towards Warsaw in a revolutionary war.57 The respective roles of the two leaders in the Brest Litovsk crisis had been reversed. Lenin, not Trotsky, was the warmonger. Trotsky feared the Red Army would be seen as an occupying force, unless there had at least been a pretence at negotiation before the invasion began. The Central Committee backed Lenin on 17 July and on 23 July the order was given that the river Bug should be crossed.58 Crossing the Curzon Line coincided with the opening of the Second Congress of the Comintern on 19 July. This was a much better prepared assembly than the First Congress. There were over 200 delegates from thirty-seven different countries, and under Zinoviev’s guidance the rules and regulations of the international body were accepted, creating a highly centralized organization, firmly under Moscow’s control. Central to these were the so-called Twenty One Conditions for affiliation to the Comintern, which tied all communist parties to the Bolshevik concept of democratic centralism. Russian dominance of the Comintern Executive meant Moscow’s control of national communist parties. Organizational issues, however, were not at the front of delegates’ minds and only prompted limited debate during plenary sessions.59 The Polish communist leader Julian Marchlewski addressed the opening session and delegates regularly gathered around a map pinned to the wall to display the Red Army’s daily progress.60 World Revolution seemed a reality at last when the congress closed on 7 August. World Revolution was once again the Bolsheviks’ strategic north star.61 Preparations for the revolutionary, rather than the military aspects of the war began on 18 July, when Polish communists met in Moscow and asked for help from the Bolshevik Central Committee. Work began the next day and on 21 July the Polish Bureau of the Central Committee was established and allocated a generous budget of ten million roubles. Chaired by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik head of the Cheka, it then appointed, on 23 July, the membership of the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee (PPRC), chaired by Marchlewski, who, unlike most of the other members, had never joined the Bolshevik Party. Moscow’s tight control of the Polish operation reflected the ethos of the Twenty One Conditions. On 28  July, the Red Army captured the town of Białystok and the following day the PPRC announced its three immediate tasks: to issue a manifesto, to establish a network of local revolutionary committees and to proclaim the formation of the Polish Socialist Republic of Soviets. The PPRC moved to Białystok on 30 July and took up residence in a former palace.62 Workers were called on to form factory committees and farm labourers to form village committees, and these committees were urged to administer all privately owned land and property which was now brought under public ownership, with the exception of land owned by the peasants. Dzerzhinsky reported on 5 August that the mood among the town’s 19,000 strong workforce was ‘excellent’: a small group of local communists had established a revolutionary committee; and the Białystok branch of the Polish Socialist Party was in the hands of the Left and appeared sympathetic. The town also had a sizable Jewish population which at first was amenable to the new regime; the PPRC recognized Yiddish as

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an official language, however, its subsequent decision to dissolve the traditional Jewish commune was less popular.63 Dzerzhinsky was still optimistic about the level of working-class support on 15 August, as factories began to re-open: eight textile plants had been nationalized and were being run by the Industrial Department of the Białystok District Revolutionary Committee, he noted in a report. Hostile commentators complained of requisitioning, the seizure of bank accounts, the taking of hostages and executions. Some progress was made in establishing a soviet administration in nearby towns: revolutionary committees were established with various Polish Socialist Party leftists, Jewish socialists and anarchists coming forward.64 Maintaining a reliable food supply became the PPRC’s major problem. The Red Amy was requisitioning not only food but horses and carts as well, and the PPRC could only explain rather weakly that the Red Army would only take what was absolutely essential. On top of this was the PPRC’s own agrarian policy. Strict democratic centralism did not remove ideological disagreement. The manifesto of 30 July had explained that the landowners would be driven out, and that all estates administered by committees of farm labourers However, the new administration also ordered that inventories be taken of all new state farms in order to prevent ‘looting’ by the peasantry; in other words, there would be no breaking up of estates, and no redivision of the land among the peasantry. A member of the PPRC reported to Moscow on 15 August that ‘our fears about mistakes in the agrarian question are confirmed’, and it was Lenin who expressed those fears most cogently. When, on 16  August, reports came in of peasants beginning to seize land, Lenin urged that these moves be encouraged. Marchlewski insisted that no land be divided until a future congress of soviets had resolved the matter.65 The Battle of the Vistula raged from 14 to 17 August, with Lenin insisting that ‘at whatever cost Warsaw must be taken in 3–5 days’, and expressing great satisfaction that some units of the Red Army were approaching East Prussia.66 However, Warsaw was not taken, indeed the Red Army was able to salvage barely twelve of the twenty-two divisions deployed against Warsaw.67 By early September the Soviet side began serious peace talks, which culminated in an armistice on 12 October and then the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921.68 The advance on Warsaw was Lenin’s initiative and in the bitter debates which followed, when the Ninth Conference of the Bolshevik Party opened on 27 September, Trotsky suggested that the situation in July 1920 was similar to the situation during the July Days of 1917. Then Lenin had been right to call off the insurrection at the last possible moment; three years later he had mistakenly thrown caution to the wind. Lenin liked this analogy, for it suggested an honest disagreement about identifying the true revolutionary moment and he accepted that Trotsky was probably right.69

TURNING EAST When Lenin advised Marchlewski on 16 August that Polish peasants should be allowed to seize land, he was following the logic of ideas that he had first articulated in a Pravda article of 21 November 1918 entitled ‘The Valuable Admissions of

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Pitirim Sorokin’. Sorokin, an SR deputy to the Constituent Assembly, had just announced that he was leaving the SR Party, was resigning his mandate and would no longer struggle against Bolshevik power. Several developments had led him to take this decision. Soon after the SRs began their insurrection against the Bolsheviks in June 1918, they had faced the dilemma of accepting aid from the Allies. The SR Central Committee was opposed, but the powerful right-wing group which had supported Kerensky throughout 1917 was in favour. As the SR People’s Army came under increased pressure from the Red Army in September and October 1918, so the influence of these right-wingers grew, and co-operation with the British accelerated. Then, on 18 November, with the acquiescence of the British, Admiral Kolchak staged a coup in Omsk, declared himself dictator, and arrested as many SR politicians as he could find. The SR Central Committee promptly declared its neutrality in this new phase of the civil war, and a strong faction within the SR Party decided to co-operate with the Bolsheviks and the Red Army in resisting foreign intervention in Russia’s Civil War.70 Thinking through these events and Sorokin’s response to them, Lenin mused on the power of patriotism. ‘Patriotism is one of the most deeply ingrained sentiments’, he stated, and the revolution’s ‘extreme departure from patriotism’ at the time of the Brest Litovsk Treaty had been difficult, with only ‘the class-conscious proletariat’ able to understand why it had been essential. However, the events in Siberia and in particular the foreign intervention in Russia’s Civil War, were compelling the SRs ‘to turn in our direction’. This meant that, while the poor peasant was the only rural group on which the Bolsheviks could ‘safely rely’, the middle peasant ‘is not our enemy’; indeed ‘the task at the moment is to come to an agreement with the middle peasantry’. This was a dramatic change of policy, an abandonment of his conviction ever since his return to Russia in April 1917 that the Bolsheviks’ only ally in the countryside was the poor peasant. Shortly afterwards the Committees of the Poor were wound up. Unfortunately for Lenin, these radical ideas on a new peasant policy took time to become adopted by the Bolshevik Party at large.71 Although the Eighth Party Congress, 18–23 March 1919, endorsed his stance, on the ground, in Ukraine, in Latvia and on the Don assaults against the middle peasantry continued. Lenin’s rethink came too late to change the situation on the Denikin front.72 However, Lenin’s ideas on patriotism and its attraction for the middle peasantry proved to be extremely effective when applied behind the White front line, on the Black Sea coast and in Siberia. Initially these were the work of the SRs, but when the SRs tried to link their ambitions to those of the Allies, Bolshevik patriotism began to hold sway. Soon peasant insurgencies were being Bolshevik led and linked to the advancing Red Army.73 Bolshevik patriotism also offered a road to revolution for colonial peoples oppressed by foreign powers. Lenin’s mind was working in this direction as early as November 1919, when he addressed the Muslim ‘peoples of the East’ living within the former Russian Empire. Noting how foreign intervention had both strengthened the Soviet state and taught it how to develop a revolutionary war, he went on: ‘the socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie. No, it will be a struggle of all the colonies oppressed by imperialism’. The lesson was

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clear: ‘our Soviet Republic must now muster all the awakening peoples of the East and, together with them, wage a struggle against international imperialism’.74 Zinoviev took up the theme at the end of January 1920. Beyond the Caucasus, he said, ‘we shall see the flame of revolution spreading to India, Persia and a whole series of other countries … where they are waiting for the first Red Army regiment to appear in order to make their own revolution.’75 This prediction came true shortly afterwards, when the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic was declared in the mountainous north Persian province of Gilan. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, northern Persia had become a Russian zone of influence, while southern Persia was allocated to the British. After the February Revolution, Russian forces in the north ceased to operate and the British made tentative moves into the north. As early as 1914, a nationalist insurrection had been underway in this province, led by the Jangali (Forest) movement. This peasant protest, which involved the confiscation of landed estates and the occasional hostage of a landowner, was led by Mirza Kuchik and, when after the February Revolution Russian forces withdrew, the Jangali movement took control of most of Gilan and was able to set up an autonomous nationalist government, challenging the Tehran regime supported by the British.76 Kuchik gradually moved towards a pro-Soviet position, a stance adopted with greater enthusiasm by some of his supporters. One of his demands was that the British should withdraw the troops they had moved into Gilan and the opportunity presented itself in May 1920. With Denikin’s defeat, the Persian authorities had interned his White Navy in Anzali, under the protection of the British forces stationed there. Trotsky insisted that the Caspian Sea should be cleared of hostile ships, even if that meant violating Persian territorial integrity, and so, on 18 May, the Red Navy entered the Persian port of Anzali and the British forces protecting the port withdrew. Kuchik and his Jangalis then did as Zinoviev predicted would happen in January, they wrote to the Soviet commanders at Anzali, asking for assistance. On 4 June, just before the Red Navy withdrew, Kuchik agreed to establish a new Soviet state, supported by arms and ammunition from the Red Navy and later a division of the Red Army.77 The Gilan Soviet soon experienced tension between the cautious Kuchik, and more hard-line communists in his government. Kuchik refused to nationalize private wealth and property, and after bitter rows, he demonstratively returned to the forests on 9 July. In what amounted to a coup, the hard-liners declared martial law on 31 July and pushed ahead with a promise of land distribution, emergency taxes on landlords, the closure of bazaars and a policy of anti-religious propaganda. Kuchik then sought the intervention of Lenin, explaining that he was still loyal to the policies backed by Moscow, but not to the policies advised by the Georgian Bolshevik leader Budu Mdivani, who had helped organize the July coup.78 Problematically, the Second Comintern Congress had passed theses ‘On the National and Colonial Question’ which backed both Lenin’s view that a patriotic revolution should precede a socialist one, and the view of the Indian communist M.N. Roy who argued in favour of immediate soviet revolutions.79 This disagreement became a major undercurrent at the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in Baku from 1 to 8 September. Although Kuchik was not invited

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to Baku, and the situation in Gilan was not discussed on the floor of the congress, Kuchik’s letter to Lenin and his correspondence with Mdivani were widely circulated among delegates.80 As a result, one of the first acts of the Council of Action and Propaganda established by the Baku Congress was to debate Gilan. It decided to back Lenin and condemned Kuchik’s opponents for ‘the premature implementation of certain, ostensibly “communist” measures’ which amounted to ‘outright looting’ and ‘antagonized the Persian population’. The leaders of the Gilan Soviet were instructed to appoint a more moderate leadership, which could re-establish relations with Kuchik, and a new Soviet adviser was sent to Gilan to advocate moderate land reform; in October 1920, the Persian Communist Party obediently resolved that socialist actions were impossible in the immediate future.81 The Gilan Soviet never recovered from this difficult start, although the communist and Jangali movements formally reunited in May 1921. Kuchik was still arguing against plans to nationalize the land when his regime succumbed to the power of Tehran’s troops in September 1921.82 Only seven Chinese delegates attended the Congress of the Peoples of the East.83 However, it was the Chinese Communist Party which over the next two decades, through a tortuous process of trial and error, would successfully navigate the tricky waters of anti-imperial struggle, bourgeois revolution, socialist revolution, peasant insurgency and contradictory Soviet advice. Whatever Russian Marxists may have believed about the necessity for and inevitability of a revolution in Germany, the practice of fighting a civil war had shown that peasants and patriotism offered an alternative. The East would be Red.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Epilogue: The revolution in 1921 CHARLOTTE ALSTON, NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY

In the years that followed 1917 the Bolshevik government struggled to build a new revolutionary society and to hold on to and consolidate power in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Russia experienced three years of civil war, epidemics of cholera and typhus, a collapse in industrial production, crop failures and famine. These years of conflict and hardship had an inevitable impact on the early development of government and society in Soviet Russia. Although by the spring of 1921, Lenin’s government had dealt fairly conclusively with many of the principal sources of military opposition to the new regime, continuing conflicts on the new state’s borders left some degree of uncertainty. Peace was not formally concluded with Poland until March 1921, and there was ongoing conflict in Siberia and the Far East. At the same time, peasant rebellions in the countryside and discontent among workers in the cities were becoming more pronounced. Despite earlier signs of unrest across Europe, there was now clearly no imminent international revolution – perceived to be a necessity for the success of the revolution in Russia. And beyond that, there was still a substantial amount of work to do in building the revolution at home – activists could justifiably ask how much progress had been made towards a truly socialist state in the three years since 1917. When the tenth party congress met in March 1921, bringing together more than a thousand Bolshevik delegates, this was the backdrop against which their discussions and decision-making took place. At the conference Lenin announced both the introduction of the New Economic Policy – a strategic retreat in which some level of private enterprise was encouraged and grain requisitioning in the countryside was ended – and a ban on internal factions in the Bolshevik party. Explaining the decision to replace grain requisitioning with a tax in kind, Lenin told delegates that ‘so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia. And that is how it must be stated, frankly, at all meetings and in the entire press’.1 For all these reasons, 1921 was a pivotal year for the revolution. But pausing to look at the revolution in 1921 also gives us a chance to reflect on how it had impacted on and was understood in everyday life, in different social groups and across the empire – areas in which recent work, as evidenced in this volume, has

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substantially deepened and broadened our understanding. 1917 was punctuated by the two major revolutionary events in Russia’s capital cities, but it was a year of revolutionary change, in which the experience of revolution varied across cities and provinces, on the fronts in the war, and among different social, political and ethnic groups. In recent decades scholars have positioned the revolutionary year in broader timeframes, as part of a longer revolutionary process or ‘continuum of crisis’ encompassing the war and civil war, but more recently have also sought to recentralize the experience of revolution in 1917.2 In the case of either approach, it is clear that the civil war and subsequent events meant that the October Revolution could not be a clean break/the start of a clean sheet for building the revolution. In the midst of all these complications, efforts and obstacles, how did things stand in 1921?

CIVIL WAR AND DOMESTIC UNREST The last elements of General Vrangel’s forces were evacuated by sea from the Crimea in November 1920. According to Vrangel nearly 150,000 people left, though the French authorities in Constantinople gave a more conservative estimate of 116,000.3 In Siberia, anti-Bolshevik forces had been dispatched by the end of 1920 and in place instead was a Far Eastern Republic that was effectively controlled by Moscow. By 1921 then, military opposition to the new regime had been pushed to the extremities of the territory that the Soviet government contested. Evan Mawdsley outlines in his chapter for this volume the geographical factors at play in both the course and outcomes of the Russian Civil War.4 The Red Army’s ability to hold on to the heartland of Russia (including arsenals, communications, war industries, and people, and thirty provinces of the Russian Empire) was a decisive achievement – the conflict, meanwhile, was fought on the periphery, where White forces were dispersed, and also had far fewer material, industrial, intellectual and human resources to muster.5 The Bolsheviks had other strengths too – their agitprop campaigns (including agit-trains and agit-ships, art, and cinema) were well organized and benefitted from the cooperation of talented artists, but they also had a clear message with broad appeal. On the White side, disunity among the forces trying to fight together was compounded by issues of trust and appeal with their intended audiences. Even when White governments objectively knew that they needed to appeal to workers or peasants, Nikolaus Katzer’s chapter on the White home front demonstrates how difficult this was in practice. White regimes were always suspected of reactionary intentions, Katzer tells us, and they didn’t really trust the peasants or workers either. At the same time, there could be no disinterested parties: everyone was under pressure to take one side or another, to demonstrate loyalty.6 In line with the historiography of the revolution, studies of the civil war in recent years have emphasized the very diverse geographical, social and ideological dimensions of the conflict, and also their chronological fluidity.7 Some regions of Mawdsley’s ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ peripheries were successful in achieving independence following the revolution. Here, the situation was influenced not only by the progress of the revolution but also by the experience of wartime occupation. Still, by 1921, the new

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Soviet government was pretty much, if not completely, in control of the territory (considerably smaller than the territory of the former Russian Empire) that they would govern without further challenge or expansion for the next twenty years. The civil war years saw consistent levels of unrest even within the central areas that the Soviet government controlled, and by 1921 this was escalating. Rural discontent in response to conscription, tax collection, and grain requisition was a feature throughout the civil war. Geoff Swain notes the scale of peasant rebellions recorded in the latter half of 1918 – 100 according to the estimation of the Cheka, while Menshevik press reports noted unrest in Tver, Iaroslavl, Kostroma, Vladimir, Vitebsk, Kazan, Tula Voronezh, Riazan, Kaluga, Smolensk and Tambov provinces.8 In Tambov, one of the most important regions for grain procurement during the civil war and one of the few grain-rich areas that remained under Soviet control throughout the conflict, the relationship between the government and the local community rapidly deteriorated. Attempts to establish committees of the poor (progovernment structures designed to enlist poorer peasants in the procurement process) were a total failure, and instead state-organized requisitioning was supported by force where necessary.9 Local administrators and observers criticized this heavyhanded approach and called for better understanding of the culture of villages in the region  – the large-scale rebellion that was underway by the late summer of 1920 should perhaps then not have come as a total surprise. The Tambov rebellion (or Antonov rebellion, after its leader, Aleksandr Antonov) comprised a 20,000 strong army supported by a network of peasant unions which provided provisions, intelligence, and carried out acts of sabotage.10 They brought grain requisitioning in the province to a standstill, meaning that Soviet authorities in the regions cities were unable to carry out what was effectively their principal task in the region.11 Two different strategies brought the rebellion to an end – a reversal in the policy of grain requisitioning on the one hand, and the dispatch of much larger numbers of troops to the region. Lenin also personally wrote to Tambov peasants in a propaganda pamphlet blaming local authorities for the intolerable situation they faced, and urging them to escalate their concerns through the Soviet hierarchy to him.12 While the Soviet authorities routinely dismissed the Tambov rebels as bandits, Antonov’s supporters presented themselves as democrats and supporters of the Constituent Assembly. As Peter Fraunholtz points out in this volume, already before the revolution Russia’s peasants had become skilled at interacting with the agendas of their political superiors  – they were rational actors capable of articulating and defending their interests and were ‘ready to participate in the revolution on their own terms.’13 They were well prepared to do the same in the civil war context too. The Antonov movement also had a ‘relational’ dimension  – Erik Landis demonstrates that the Tambov rebels understood themselves as part of a larger ‘moment’ of opposition in which there was hope both for success and for outside help.14 Even if this was not forthcoming, the rebels may not have been wrong to think in this way. Russia’s urban working class were the Bolshevik party’s core support base, but urban unrest was nevertheless also a feature throughout the civil war years. Through the spring of 1919 there were strikes in major industrial centres across the Bolshevik-controlled heartland  – not only in the capital cities but also

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in Tver, Tula, Briansk and Sormovo – in response to food shortages and economic disruption but also the arrest of socialist opposition (Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik) leaders. As with peasant rebellions the Bolshevik leadership dismissed these by labelling them as counter-revolutionary conspiracies, or Menshevik provocations.15 The tenth party congress, when it opened in March 1921, took place against a backdrop of industrial unrest in Petrograd, Moscow and other industrial centres, but most importantly a rebellion among sailors at the Kronstadt naval base. The Kronstadt sailors had been loyal Bolsheviks and heroes of the revolution, but alarmingly for the Bolshevik leadership they were now calling for a true workers and peasants soviet republic, using slogans such as ‘for the Soviets without the Bolsheviks’. Their demands included freedom of speech and assembly, non-party meeting of representatives of workers and soldiers, and, interestingly, freedom also for peasants to do what they wanted with their land. The Kronstadt rebels were branded as counter-revolutionary puppets, and the rebellion was suppressed with force by an army of 45,000 along with several hundred volunteers who left the tenth party congress to help put down the rebellion.16 Both the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions were crucial however in the decisions taken at the party congress, including the introduction of the New Economic Policy.

NEW POLITICS AND NEW SOCIETY The civil war years were formative for Soviet society and government in all sorts of ways. They left behind a notable militarization of political language – brigades of workers in the 1920s and 1930s would engage in ‘campaigns’ or struggles on different ‘fronts’.17 Future tendencies towards violence, terror, suspicion of enemies and intolerance of dissent within party ranks could all be attributed to the experience of civil war as well as to longer-term tendencies and the ideology of the Bolshevik party leadership. The move towards a one-party state and away from cooperation, discussion and dissent did not follow a straightforward trajectory however. As Sally Boniece points out in her chapter in this volume, many Bolsheviks prior to October wanted a collaborative all-socialist government.18 For socialist parties other than the Bolsheviks, ‘all power to the Soviets’ as a slogan meant exactly what it said. And even in 1921, the resolution ‘On Party Unity’ that Lenin introduced at the tenth party congress, which outlawed factions within the party and made provision to expel anyone who was involved in such activity, was a response to the Workers’ Opposition and Democratic Centralists who were unhappy with the increasingly bureaucratic and centralist tendency that had developed since the revolution and civil war. Even at the heart of government, there was experimentation and improvisation. There was no blueprint for how the new Soviet government should work. Lara Douds demonstrates in this volume and elsewhere that collegiality and collective decision-making were initially preferred and regarded as more revolutionary than individual responsibility for particular portfolios. Douds illustrates the ways in which Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars, which drew its authority from the Soviets and included Left SRs as well as Bolsheviks) – actively governed

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in the early years of Soviet power. The civil war was an important driver here too: the Politburo (a governing body that stemmed from the Bolshevik party’s Central Committee) was set up in spring 1919 to deal with questions that needed swift resolution. Because the soviets themselves struggled during the civil war Sovnarkom did not have a strong sense of mandate, and the Politburo proved itself dynamic and responsive. Douds identifies 1921 as the year when the Politburo began to more systematically intervene in decision-making on economic affairs, schools, transport and government posts for example.19 These first years of the revolution were also years in which Soviet authorities sought to bring about the revolution in all sorts of spheres of life, and in which Soviet citizens grappled with what the revolution meant for them. Murray Frame’s chapter in this volume sets out some of the progress that took place between 1918 and 1921 in building a socialist society – or at least in improvising in a way that Frame says was ‘guided by revolutionary ideology but not constrained by it’.20 Pre-revolutionary laws were nullified in 1918 but no new criminal code was introduced until 1922, so judges and courts in the meantime were tasked with following ‘revolutionary conscience’ and being guided by ‘socialist legal awareness’ – which might include considering the role of class interests in a crime, and the extent to which a criminal act was a threat to the socialist state. A programme of electrification and the construction of power stations, considered a priority by Lenin if Russia were to effectively industrialize, was launched. New ‘labour schools’ were established in with practical skills, play, discussion and creativity were all encouraged, inspired by international debates about progressive education as well as the Bolshevik vision of a socialist society. There was also an expansion in access to higher education. These developments took place despite the extraordinarily unpropitious circumstances of the civil war, food shortages, epidemics and a collapse in productivity – Frame describes all of these developments as ‘ambitious projects, shaped by revolutionary ideology, but tempered in their implementation by socio-economic chaos, the still fragile legitimacy of the regime, and the stubborn persistence of tradition’.21 Elizabeth White’s chapter in this volume demonstrates the centrality of children to Bolshevik policy. Their rights were the subject of debate, legislation and activism. While some more extreme ideas about how children should be brought up (including removing them from families entirely and having them brought up in dedicated towns by experts) were not put into practice, the role of children as the Soviet citizens of the future was taken very seriously. The Komsomol (the Soviet youth organization) had nearly half a million members by 1920, and myths about the heroic role of children in the civil war gathered momentum in the early 1920s too.22 Genuine changes took place in the rights of women in the early Soviet state. Women had been central to the experience and activism of revolution in 1917, as Rochelle Ruthchild points out in her chapter in this volume: there were strong female leaders in the pre-1917 revolutionary movement; in February and March 1917 they led marches for their own rights and for others, they were granted the right to vote by the provisional government (a decision which probably influenced the British and American shift in attitudes towards granting the same), and they made up more than half the electorate in the Constituent Assembly elections.23 This

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didn’t mean they also got elected though – there were not many women in soviets, or in factory committees, and only 3 per cent of those elected to the Constituent Assembly were women.24 The Bolshevik government introduced sweeping reforms but also closed down independent feminist enterprises. As with crime and the justice system, Bolshevik thinkers suggested that the patriarchal family unit would ultimately wither away, and therefore legislating for equality would not ultimately be necessary. As early as December 1917 however Soviet decrees introduced civil marriage (and outlawed religious marriage), made no-fault divorce possible for both parties, and gave equal rights to children born outside marriage. In the mid-1920s further steps were taken to make divorce easier and to recognize de facto marriage, in the Family Code of 1926. On the other hand, women who had moved into industrial production during the war years were moved out into more traditionally gendered industries, resulting in unemployment among the female workforce. There were dramatic steps forward but these were nevertheless part of a broader shift in gender roles and attitudes, which also meant that some beliefs and practices (whether about roles at work or in the family) were more difficult to shift in society at large.25 Even in government, Siobhan Hearne points out the ways in which the Bolshevik leadership remained a boys club, and their representation of the proletariat and the building of a new society remained implicitly or explicitly gendered.26 While the early years of the Soviet regime were in many ways characterized by restrictions, control and centralization, in other ways they were a time of opportunity, possibility and experiment. Histories of the everyday experience of revolution can help us to understand both the hopes invested in the revolution and the practices, languages and ways of negotiating the regime that developed as a result. Some young activists in Russia’s cities who wanted to play their part in bringing socialism to life formed urban communes in which they pooled resources, shared domestic labour and worked out how to apply revolutionary practice in their individual and collective lives.27 In the countryside too, agricultural communities were spontaneously formed in which work and the fruits of labour were shared. These took names that were either specifically socialist or just generally utopian: Brotherhood or Red Lighthouse or Free World or Rosa Luxembourg.28 The revolution gave new impetus to older movements too: Christian anarchist Tolstoyan communities that had spread across the Russian Empire in the 1890s were revived and proliferated in new locations, for example.29 In all these instances, the everyday practice of revolution was not dictated by the state, but it didn’t operate completely independently from it either. As Felicitas Fischer von Weikersthal makes clear in his chapter in this volume on post-revolutionary culture, establishing revolutionary culture and practice involved a dialogue in which groups and individuals responded to and reinterpreted Bolshevik policy in line with their own norms, and informed this policymaking by return. And as Fischer von Weikersthal also makes clear, while the revolution had a substantial impact on the way everyday life looked, felt and was structured, through the renaming of streets, buildings, new holidays and a new alphabet, all of these things were mediated by the way people responded to them, took them on, or not, too.30 As regards the economy, and the countryside, Lenin’s Government nevertheless enacted a considerable strategic retreat. It wasn’t possible, by 1921, to impose the

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kind of reforms Lenin would have liked to have seen in the countryside. Although as Peter Fraunholtz tells us in his chapter in this volume peasants had begun in the spring of 1917 by utilizing available resources – that is, making sure that lands that had no ownership were sown/farmed one way or another  – through the summer and into autumn, in the absence of action from the Provisional Government, local initiatives were taken to reallocate land. The Bolsheviks sanctioned these seizures in October when they came to power, but they were sanctioning what had effectively already been carried out. Because noble estates in the countryside were thus appropriated and divided up by peasants, what emerged in central Russia in the years immediately after the revolution was a landscape of relatively small plots being farmed individually by families. This probably pretty much represented the desire of most peasant farmers for revolutionary change – a shift from noble ownership to owners farming their own land  – but it was very far from the Bolshevik ideal of collective ownership and production. Lenin was always aware of the need to maintain the delicate ‘smychka’ (union, or bond) between the ‘capitalist countryside’ and ‘socialist cities’, and knew he could not go all out for collectivization. His plan was to start with cooperatives, and to use them to demonstrate the potential of collective farming. The New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921 against the backdrop of the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions, nevertheless seemed to many Bolshevik activists to be a rather depressing retreat from the ambitions of the revolutionary and civil war years. NEP replaced grain requisitioning with a less punitive system of fixed quotas, effectively a tax in kind on grain. The government retained control of largescale industrial projects, but otherwise the nationalization of industry that had taken place under war communism was retracted, foreign investment was encouraged and private trade allowed to re-establish itself. The NEP offered concessions to all sectors of society except the working class. To counter the impression that NEP signified a political retreat, a loss of control or a relaxation of single party rule, it was accompanied by an even greater clampdown on opposition political parties. Mensheviks, SRs and Kadets were arrested, tried or deported. In the 1920s, Russia’s agricultural workers occupied a relatively privileged and unchallenged position which would last until 1928 when Stalin introduced the collectivization drive (implemented by Bolshevik party activists). Some first steps were put in place at this early stage towards further economic planning however: in the first year of NEP the state planning agency, Gosplan, was founded.31

REVOLUTION AT HOME AND ABROAD The Bolsheviks’ hopes for a world revolution had also peaked in 1918–19. World revolution was believed to be fundamental to the success of revolution in Russia, and as Geoff Swain makes clear both Trotsky and Lenin (while they had different takes on how this might happen) continued to look for signs and comment on the progress of possible revolution internationally even in 1917.32 In 1918, domestic unrest escalated rapidly, and war-weariness, strikes and protests across Europe contributed to the unwillingness of Allied governments to commit more resources

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to intervene against the world’s first socialist government. In Germany, mutinies and desertions from the army led to the formation of soldiers’ and workers’ councils on the soviet model. Even the rise to power of the fairly moderate Friedrich Ebert was seen as a promising sign, in that it paralleled the February Revolution, the first stage of the revolution in Russia. However, the far left Sparticist uprising in January 1919 resulted in the deaths of the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Hungary, a soviet republic was established in 1919 in the midst of disillusionment and discontent at the dismantling of the Hungarian part of the AustroHungarian empire. Bela Kun, the republic’s leader, had been in Russia in 1917, and put in place radical policies including the nationalization of land. His republic was crushed later that year by conservative Hungarian, Romanian and French forces. In 1919 and 1920, the first and second congresses of the Communist International, or Comintern, were upbeat in their ambition to coordinate the activities of communist parties worldwide. By the time that the third Comintern congress met between June and July 1921, the programme was less expansive and optimistic. As it became clear that the arrival of world revolution was not imminent, both the Comintern and the Soviet Government faced a reorientation of their priorities. On the other hand, communist parties abroad in this period were becoming serious (if small) entities inspired by the example set in Moscow and moving away from broader national and international labour movements. The Comintern’s relationship with these parties and the wider labour movement was characterized by a series of ‘zigzags’ between requiring close alignment to Bolshevik party ideals and practice, and broader, more inclusive popular front tactics (that might also win recruits).33 While in the 1920s there was some flexibility for communist parties internationally in the way that they responded to local situations, they were nevertheless expected to take direction from the Comintern’s central committee.34 Matthew Rendle points out in his chapter in this volume that many elites sought to negotiate and survive the new regime in Soviet Russia, despite the adverse practical and ideological circumstances they faced. Some retained roles in the government, civil service and military as specialists and bureaucrats.35 On the other hand, many members of the political opposition continued their campaigns against the Bolshevik government outside Russia. The political opposition was only the most vocal part of a larger exodus of soldiers and civilians in the years following 1917 – perhaps as many as a million Russians left and settled outside Russia in the wake of the revolution. Russian émigré communities developed in Manchuria, Bulgaria and Brazil, as well as across Europe, and while the average émigré was most likely to be, for example, engaged on a road-building project in Yugoslavia, the emigration also had a vigorous cultural and political life, centred in the capital cities of western Europe and the United States.36 As one-party government developed in Soviet Russia and opponents were targeted or sidelined, the political emigration came to encompass all the different non-Bolshevik political groups: liberals, conservatives and monarchists, socialist revolutionaries and Mensheviks, each with their own organizations and publications.37 While the years immediately following the revolution were characterized by vigorous campaigning on behalf of the white armies and against recognition of the Bolshevik government,

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by 1921 the focus switched to community building and looking to the future, though humanitarian work for refugee communities continued. Many émigrés were returning to sites of emigration that were familiar from the pre-revolutionary years, and it was common for individuals, families and groups (as prior to the revolution) to move around the major centres of emigration, in ways dictated by the groups/ enterprises they were involved with, but also larger-scale developments in politics and conflict in the twentieth century.38 The later careers of Alexander Kerensky and Viktor Chernov, whose roles in 1917 are explored in this book in the essays by Boris Kolonitskii and Hannu Immonen, can give us a snapshot of these experiences. Chernov was a member of the anti-Bolshevik government in Samara during the civil war, and then fled Russia  – he spent time in Paris, Berlin, Prague and New York where he died in 1952, and edited the journal Za Svobodu (For Liberty) from multiple locations.39 Kerensky, whose fate and image was so much tied up with revolution, appeared in London and Paris in 1918–19 campaigning for intervention against the Bolsheviks, and spent the rest of his long life in emigration (first in Paris, and then in New York) writing and rewriting his memoirs of the revolution.40 The range of political positions within the emigration expanded with new generations, though émigré numbers declined swiftly over the decades as refugees returned to Russia and the birth rate within the emigration remained low. The relationship between the emigration and the Soviet state would remain complicated in the decades that followed, characterized by attempts on either side to infiltrate the other, and philosophical debates (particularly in the context of another impending war) about whether to reconcile with the Soviet Union or work to defeat it.41

REVOLUTION ACROSS THE EMPIRE In recent years scholarship on the revolution has demonstrated how diverse the revolutionary experience was across the vast and varied territory of the Russian Empire, how important local economic and social conditions were in shaping the development of the revolution, and also the ways in which events were determined not just by politics in the centre but by the actions of ordinary people across the provinces of the Russian Empire.42 Michael Hickey’s chapter in this volume shows how the Smolensk region had a tradition of co-operation among its fragmented political parties, co-operation which continued well beyond the events of October.43 Sarah Badcock’s study of the Volga region emphasizes the impact of population churn caused by the war on life in the region, and demonstrates the outcomes that local action on food supply and land use could have in terms of dictating options available to central government in dealing with these issues.44 Gero Fedtke’s study of Turkestan demonstrates how the different structures of the revolution (soviets, civil committees and so on) were replicated across the empire, but also stresses that, rather than a system of ‘dual power’ there was a multiplicity of different actors and organizations in the region.45 As in some other places, there was already unrest (in this case due to food shortages) prior to the October Revolution. In the civil war period too, events across the theatres of conflict and the respective home fronts influenced its development – Nikolaus Katzer writes about how we might reverse

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the lens to study the White home front, thinking not only about how events in the centre influenced the periphery, but also how the periphery influenced the centre.46 In Russia’s border states, the revolution and the end of the war in Europe allowed for the emergence of independent governments in, among other places, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia and Ukraine. As Nataliya Kibita makes clear in her chapter on Ukraine, there were multiple revolutions at play in these nationally distinct regions – in Ukraine, the structures associated with the Russian revolution (firstly those created by the Provisional Government, and Soviets, and later Commissars) were paralleled by the structures of the Ukrainian revolution (the Radas and Central Rada).47 Emerging national movements had not been universally hostile to the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century  – in some regions there were opportunities in the imperial project for national groups who were otherwise subject to regional national elites (Baltic Germans, for example, in Estonia/Latvia, or Poles in Lithuania). Nevertheless, Russification policies, aimed at creating an efficient centralized bureaucracy, but also encouraged by Russian nationalists, most often strengthened hostility to Russian rule and encouraged aspirations for national autonomy.48 The German occupation of Russia’s western borderlands during the First World War complicated matters further. At the negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, both German and Soviet delegations defended the right to selfdetermination of non-Russian nationalities in Russia’s borderlands: for the Germans this self-determination had in some cases already been achieved (e.g. the Lithuanian declaration of independence under German protection) whereas for the Bolsheviks it would be achieved through participation of these populations in local soviets and therefore the revolution.49 In Finland, Finnish socialists advocated independence after February 1917, while liberals remained loyal to the Provisional Government, but after the October Revolution the positions were effectively reversed. Following Finland’s declaration of independence in December 1917 a bitter civil war was fought between the nationalists (who eventually won the war with German support) and socialists, including many workers and landless peasants.50 In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania emerging national movements fought against both Germans and Bolsheviks, but there were strong socialist movements in all three (in Latvia, particularly, there was strong popular support for the Bolsheviks). Soviet Russia recognized the independence of the three Baltic states in 1920, and in September 1921 they became members of the League of Nations (Finland had been admitted to the League in 1920). In Ukraine the situation was complicated by the ‘myriad of civil and military administrations’ that Kibita describes: during the years of revolution and civil war Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, Russian-anti-Bolsheviks, Germans  and Poles all fought on the territory of what would eventually (in 1922) become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.51 In the Caucasus, independent governments were established in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidzhan, at first with German support but later independently: the social democratic republic in Georgia, which had a flourishing independent cultural and political life, was the last to be invaded by Soviet Russia in the spring of 1921.52 Peace between the Soviet Government and Poland was also signed in March 1921, bringing the Polish-Soviet War to an end

EPILOGUE: THE REVOLUTION IN 1921

483

and finally establishing Poland’s interwar borders.53 Polish independence had been a foregone conclusion prior to the revolution since it was promised by the Germans during their occupation of the country and had also become a war aim of the Allied powers during the war. At Brest-Litovsk Bolshevik policy was to encourage self-determination as a way of overcoming mistrust and enlisting support for the revolution among non-Russian national groups. Both Lenin and Stalin agreed that the nationalist threat within Soviet borders was a serious one: rather than tackling it head on their strategy was to allow free expression of national sentiment in order for it to run its course and eventually be superseded by recognition of class interests. Passing through this phase of nationalism was necessary in order to achieve a spirit of internationalism. As a result significant effort and resource in the early 1920s went into the production of all kinds of cultural output from newspapers to theatre in local, national languages, as well as to promoting national elites into positions of party leadership.54 Soviet nationalities policy would also undergo lots of zigzags, becoming more nationalistic and chauvinistic in the 1930s under Stalin, but the policy of indigenization in the 1920s allowed for free cultural if not political expression for nationalities across the Soviet Union.

INTERPRETING THE REVOLUTION By 1921 the first attempts at writing the history of the revolution were also underway. Outside Russia, witnesses and émigré participants in the revolution published firsthand accounts of the events and of their experiences.55 In his spare time at the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky wrote History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, intended for foreign workers, which emphasized that the Bolshevik party had enjoyed broad popular support, and had done everything they could to cooperate with other socialist parties. The revolution was not an infringement of democratic principles but rather represented the will of the people.56 In 1920, this position altered when Lenin established Istpart, a Commission on the History of the Russian Communist Party and the October Revolution, an organization which was responsible for collecting, editing and disseminating materials on the Russian revolution. In Istpart’s materials, because of the imperative by that time to demonstrate to other international communist parties how a revolution might be created, the centralization and organization of the Bolshevik party were presented as central to the making of the revolution. If the key to October was successful Bolshevik organization, then by extension the February Revolution was leaderless and there was minimal Bolshevik involvement (a point undermined by Aleksandr Shliapnikov’s memoir account of Bolshevik activity at the time).57 From the outset then, Soviet histories of the revolution had a political purpose. It was also curiously the case that the principal takeaway from such histories – that the October Revolution was a well-organized coup d’etat – aligned with the perspective of historical accounts written in the decades that followed outside the Soviet Union. In 1922 Lenin would have his first stroke, and he became increasingly distant from politics in the years before his death in 1924. While Lenin deconstructed the strengths, weaknesses and

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personalities of his colleagues in his ‘Testament’ written in late 1922/early 1923, in the decade that followed both Stalin and Trotsky wrote their own histories of the revolution, in which each presented themselves as the only or the most loyal Leninist. Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution, and Stalin’s Short Course was enormously influential on writing about the revolution outside and inside Russia respectively.58 Murray Frame reminds us that the Bolsheviks imagined the revolution as ‘a fundamental break with the past and the dawn of a new civilisation’, and that they ‘envisaged a revolutionary transformation in practically every sphere of public and private life, from the state and the economy to the family and individual values.’59 Of course this could not completely the case – much recent research has pointed to the roots that new ideas implemented in the Soviet Union had in earlier Russian conceptions of modernity.60 Both Elizabeth White and Siobhan Hearne explore in their chapters in this volume the ways in which progressive ideas about gender or the status and education of children that the Bolsheviks put into practice had their roots in longer term transformations, and in the work of earlier Russian progressive thinkers in the nineteenth century.61 This is not to deny the ways in which the revolution was a watershed moment – it had a profound impact and influence both on Russia’s future development and on twentieth century history and politics. More than a hundred years on from the revolution, public commemoration of 1917 may be muted,62 but the range of perspectives and the international nature of scholarship on the revolution are increasingly broad. As evidenced by the chapters in this volume, there are many different lenses through which we can understand the revolutionary year of 1917. In 1921 the outcomes and full trajectory of the revolution may still not have been clear, but what is obvious from this collection of essays is the reach of the revolution, geographically, and in different sectors of society. Many different groups and individuals across the empire shaped the revolution’s progress, and few escaped its influence.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Sukhanov, N.N. The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record. Edited, abridged and translated by J. Carmichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 213. Sukhanov, like many contemporaries, continued to call the capital Petersburg, even after the name had been changed to Petrograd. 2 Philips Price, M. Dispatches from the Revolution: Russia 1916–18. Edited by Tania Rose (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 43. 3 Gorky, M. Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918 (New York: Paul. S. Eriksson Inc., 1968), p. 86. 4 Read, C. ‘Ten Months That No Longer Shake the World? The Centenary of the Russian Revolution and Beyond’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 1, p. 129.

Chapter 1 1 The only English-language biography of L’vov is by Thomas Earl Porter with Lawrence W. Lerner, Prince George E. Lvov. The Zemstvo, Civil Society and Liberalism in Late Imperial Russia (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017). Polner, T.I. Zhiznennyi put’ kniazia Georgiia Evgen’evicha L’vova. Lichnost’. Vzgliady. Usloviia deiatel’nosti (Paris: 1932; reprinted Moscow: Russkii putʹ: 2001) is a Russian account by an admirer. 2 Lyandres, S. ‘Conspiracy and Ambition in Russian Politics before the February Revolution of 1917: The Case of Prince Georgii Evgen’evich L’vov’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 8, 2015, pp. 99–133. 3 Diakin, V.S. Russkaia burzhuaziia i tsarizm v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny1914–1917 gg (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967) is an example of this less common approach. 4 For example, Hosking, G.A. The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma 1907–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), Pearson, R. The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism 1914–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977). 5 Airapetov, O.R. Uchastie Rossiiskoi imperii v Pervoi mirovoi voine, 4 vols (Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2014–15); Pervaia mirovaia voina v otsenke sovremmenikov: vlast’ i rossiiskoe obshchestvo.1914–1918, 4 vols (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014). 6 The final pre-war Duma session commencing in October 1913 had included 111 sittings, while the Third Duma that met between 1907 and 1912 had averaged more than 120 sittings each session.

486

NOTES

7

Shakhovskoi, V.N. Sic transit gloria mundi (Tak prokhodit mirskaia slava)1893–1917 gg (Paris: Impr. de Navarre, 1932), 135.

8

Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskii otchet. Chetvertyi sozyv, sessiia V (Petrograd: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1917), cols. 35–52.

9

Lyandres, S. ‘Progressive Bloc Politics on the Eve of the Revolution: Revisiting P.N. Miliukov’s “Stupidity or Treason” speech of November 1, 1916’, Russian History, 31, 4, 2004, pp. 447–64.

10 Gaida, F.A. Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’ v Rossii: dialog o puti politicheskogo razvitiia (1910–1917) (Moscow: Universitet Dmitriia Pozharskogo, 2016), pp. 386–7. 11 Gatrell, P. A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 211–15. 12 Waldron, P. ‘“A Sad and Heart-Rending Landscape”: Summer 1914 and the Politics of Russia’s Wounded’, Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 4, 2016, pp. 635–60. 13 Fuller, W.C. Jr. The Foe Within. Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 192–3. 14 Gaida, F.A. Liberal’naia oppositsiia na putiakh k vlasti (1914 – vesna 1917 g.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2013), p. 94. 15 Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Stenograficheskii otchet, Chetvertyi sozyv, sessiia IV, cols. 8–10. 16 Pervaia mirovaia voina i konets rossiiskoi imperii, t. 1, Politicheskaia istoriia (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2014), pp. 194–5. 17 Rodzianko, M.V. Krushenie imperii. Gosudarstvennaia Duma i fevral’skaia 1917 goda revoliutsii Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), p. 152. 18 Rodzianko, Krushenie imperii, 126. 19 Pervaia mirovaia voina i konets rossiiskoi imperii, t. 1, Politicheskaia istoriia, 198–9; 20 Krasnyi arkhiv, 1932, vol. 50–1, pp. 133–4. 21 Shul’gin, V.V. Dni (Leningrad: Priboi, 1925), p. 51. 22 Cherniavsky, M. (ed.) Prologue to Revolution. Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 166–7. 23 The Nicky-Sunny Letters: Correspondence of the Tsar and Tsaritsa, 1914–1917 (Hattiesburg, Mississippi: Academic International, 1970), p. 197. 24 Emmons, T. The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 353–9. 25 Ascher, A. The Revolution of 1905. Authority Restored (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 337–68. 26 Waldron, P. Between Two Revolutions. Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 147–77. 27 Galai, S. ‘The impact of the Vyborg Manifesto on the Fortunes of the Kadet party’, Revolutionary Russia, 20, 2, 2007, pp. 197–224.

NOTES

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28 Verner, A. The Crisis of Russian Autocracy. Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 260–5. 29 Istoricheskoe zasedanie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy 26-go iuliia 1914 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Tikhoretskii: Progress, 1914), pp. 3–38. 30 Sanitarnaia sluzhba russkoi armii v voine 1914–1917 gg. (Sbornik dokumentov) (Kuibyshev: Kuibyshevskaia voenno-meditsinskaia akademiia Krasnoi Armii, 1942), p. 48. 31 Manning, R.T. ‘The Zemstvo and Politics’, in Emmons, T. and Vucinch, W.S. (eds.), The Zemstvo in Russia. An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 138–40. 32 Tsuchiya Yoshifuru, T. ‘Unsuccessful National Unity: The Russian Home Front in 1904’, in Steinberg, J.W. et al. (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 336–7. Galai, S. The Liberation Movement in Russia 1900–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), esp. 109–76. 33 S˝ezd gorodskikh golov v Moskve 8–9 avgusta 1914 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1914), p. 2. 34 Waldron, ‘A Sad and Heart-Rending Landscape’, 651–4. 35 Moscow, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGVIA), f. 12593, d.1, l. 270. 36 ‘Osobyi zhurnal soveta ministrov, 25 noiabria 1914 goda’, in Osobye zhurnaly Soveta ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii. 1914 god (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), pp. 552–3. 37 Vserossiiskii zemskii soiuz pomoshchi bol´nym i ranenym voinam. Izvestiia glavnogo komiteta, 15 October 1914, 10. 38 Izvestiia, no. 12–13, 1–15 April 1915, 1. 39 Izvestiia, no. 6–7, 1–15 January 1915, 1. 40 Tumanova, A.S. Obshchestvennye organisatsii Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914–fevral´ 1917 g.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), pp. 112–13. 41 Polner, T.J. Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 201–38. 42 Promyshlennost’ i torgovliia, 15.9. 1914, p. 272. 43 Pares, B. Day by Day with the Russian Army (London: Constable, 1915), p. 224. 44 Robinson, P. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Supreme Commander of the Russian Army (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), p. 255. 45 Stone, N. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 144–9. 46 Korelin, A.P. and Gruzinova, A.S. (eds.) Zhurnaly osobogo soveshchaniia dlia obsuzhdeniia meropriiatii po oborone gosudarstva (osoboe soveshchanie po oborone gosudarstva), vol. 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2013), pp. 28–30. 47 Promyshlennost’ i torgovliia, 1.6. 1915, p. 543.

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48 Siegelbaum, L.H. The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–1917. A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 46–9. 49 Siegelbaum, Industrial Mobilization, 78–9. 50 Cherniavsky, Prologue to Revolution, 88–9. 51 Siegelbaum, Industrial Mobilization, 162–70. 52 Trudy vtorogo s”ezda predstavitelei voenno-promyshlennykh komitetov, 26–29 fevralia 1916 g (Petrograd: Tsentr. voenn.-prom. kom., 1916), p. 608. 53 Vserossiiskii soiuz gorodov. Zhurnal 3-ogo S”ezda predstavitelei Vserossiiskogo Soiuza gorodov (Moscow: Gorodskaia tipografiia, 1915), p. 7. 54 RGVIA, f. 12564, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 204–29. 55 RGVIA, f. 12564, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 2–5. 56 RGVIA, f. 12564, op. 1, d. 9, l. 236. 57 RGVIA, f. 12564, op. 1, d. 11, ll. 8–11. 58 Moscow, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 102, op, 246, d. 343 z.s, t. 1, ll. 2–10. 59 Arkhipov, I.I. Rossiiskaia politicheskaia ėlita v fevrale 1917: psikhologiia nadezhdy i otchaianiia (St Petersburg: Izd-vo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2000), pp. 58–63. 60 GARF, f. 102, op. 246, d. 343 z.s., t. 5, ll. 34–6. 61 Gavroeva, E. and Yates, J. ‘M. V. Rodzianko and Prince G. E. L’vov (Spring and Summer 1917)’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 1, 2017, pp. 35–54, deals with L’vov as prime minister.

Chapter 2 1

Orlovsky, D. ‘The Russian Revolution at 100’, in Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), p. 2.

2

Waldron, P. ‘Long-Term Causes of the Russian Revolution’, in Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 8.

3

Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 201–310; Leiberov, I.P. Na shturm samoderzhaviia: Petrogradskii proletariat v gody pervoi mirovoi voyny i Fevral’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1979), pp. 117–250.

4

Burdzhalov, E.N. Vtoraia russkaia revcoliutsiia: Vosstanie v Petrograde (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), pp. 119, 123, 155–6; Melancon, M. ‘Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency’, Carl Beck Papers, 1408, 2000, pp. 1–44; Wada, H. Roshia kakumei: Petorogurado, 1917nen 2gatsu (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2018), pp. 258–63, 286–92, 302–3, 329–37. The Mezhraiontsy or ‘Interdistrictites’ had preferred to establish informal linkages between district party organizations rather than relying on committees linked to the party leadership in emigration.

NOTES

489

5

Hasegawa, February Revolution, 121–3; Wada, Roshia kakumei, 224–58.

6

Hasegawa, T. ‘Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii in the February Revolution of 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 13, 2020, pp. 8, 41–3; Melancon, M. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), pp. 195, 235–7, 236, 262–3.

7

Kolonitskii, B.I. Simvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlasti (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2012), pp. 32–3.

8

Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 42–7.

9

Hasegawa, February Revolution, 269–72, 277–81. Also see Solzhenitsyn’s fictionalized accounts, Solzhenitsyn, A. March 1917: The Red Wheel. Node III (8 March-31 March) (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), Book 1–4, 2008, chapters 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 86, 87, 99.

10 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 277–85, 289–93. 11 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 147–58, 293–310. 12 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Tragicheskaia etotika’: obraz imperatorskoi sem”i v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Novoe literaurnoe obozrenie, 2010), pp. 342–3; Read, C. ‘Russia at War: War as Revolution, Revolution as War’, in Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 36; Stoff, L. ‘Military Revolution and War Experience’, in Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 151, 153; Sanborn, J. Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), pp. 168–70; Wildman, A.K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 34–6. 13 Quoted in Hasegawa, February Revolution, 154. 14 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 282, 292. 15 Hasegawa, ‘Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii’, 16–7. 16 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 427–32; Petrogradskii Sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v 1917 godu: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1, 27 fevralia–31 Marta 1917 goda. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), pp. 47–56, 55–6. 17 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 422–7. 18 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 422–33; Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Iz istorii prikaza No. 1 Petrografdskogo Sovet rabochikh i soldatskikhm deputatov’, in Gosudarstvo, obshchestvo, lichnost’ v istorii Rossii (XVII-XX vv): Sbornik nauchnykh trudov k 80-letiiu professora V. S. Izmozika (St. Petersburg: OOO Redtrak, 2018), pp. 99–106. 19 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 433–7, 443–4; Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Dvoevlastie v politicherskoi sisteme revoliutsionnoi Rossii (1917 g.)’, in Revoliutsiia 1917 goda v Rossii, sobyjtiia i kontseptsii, posledsvii i pamiat’ (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin), 2017, pp. 32–9.

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20 Stoff, ‘Military Revolution’, 154; Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky: The Revolution against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of the ‘Leader of the People’ (March-June 1917) (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2021), pp. 9, 240, 307–8; Sanborn, J. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 196–8. 21 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 348–81; Nikolaev, A.B. Dumskaia revolioutsiia, 27 fevralia–3 marta 1917 goda, 2 vols (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo RGPU im. A. I. Gertsena, 2017), vol. 1, pp. 176–235. 22 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 351–4; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 1, 178–9, 268–9. 23 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 366–70; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 1, 280–330. 24 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 324–9. 25 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 368–70, 390–9; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 1, 299–449. 26 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 334–5, 410–11; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 5–63. 27 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 295–6, 407–10; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 152–94. 28 Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 450–569. 29 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 401–6; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 1, 472–4, 481–97. 30 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 324–5, 443–4, 583–4, 631–8. 31 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 635–6. 32 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 437, 445–57, 576. 33 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 499–505. 34 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 370–4. 35 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 476–9. Solzhenitsyn’s fictionalized accounts of the negotiations among Rodzianko, the High Command and the Tsar leading to Nicholas’ abdication and Mikhail’s refusal to take the throne should be treated with utmost care, as the novelist narrates imaginary conversations and thoughts of actors not supported by documentary evidence. 36 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 479–86. 37 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 514–18. 38 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 529–31. 39 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 530–1. 40 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 491–3. 41 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 531–6. 42 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 531–6; Browder, R.P. and Kerensky, A.F. The Russian Provisional Government: Documents, 3 vols (Stanford: Stanford University

NOTES

491

Press, 1961), vol. 1, p. 91; Steinberg, M.D. and Khrustalev, V.M. The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 88–9. 43 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 536–40; Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, vol. 1, 92–93. 44 Basily, Nicolas de. The Abdication of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia (Princeton: The Kingston Press, 1981), p. 119. 45 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 540–3; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, vol. 1, 94–5. 46 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 543–8. 47 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 549–61; Steinberg and Khrustalev, Fall of Romanovs, 96–100. 48 Kerensky was supported by A.I. Konovalov, N.V. Nekrasov, M.I. Tereshchenko and Prince G.E.L’vov. Konovalov and Nekrasov were connected with Kerensky through the Masonic organization. Historians debate on the Masonic affiliation of Tereshchenko and L’vov. 49 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 595–6; 50 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 620–4; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 202–61. 51 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 596–8; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, vol. 1, 110–12. In this conversation, Rodzianko used the term, ‘Supreme Committee’, and only after Alekseev’s request for the clarification of the term, he explained that he meant the Duma Committee. 52 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 598–600; Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, vol. 1, 109–10; Steinberg and Khrustalev, Fall of the Romanovs, 103–5. Rodzianko said that the ‘Supreme Soviet’ and the Provisional Government should rule. Questioned by Ruzskii what he meant by ‘the Supreme Soviet’, Rodzianko corrected himself that he meant the State Duma under his chairmanship. 53 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 600–4. 54 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 606–16. 55 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 620–4. 56 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 624–8; Nikolaev, Dumskaia revoliutsiia, vol. 2, 202–61.

Chapter 3 1

For the unhelpful Tsarist heritage to the liberal rule of law project, see, for example, Williams, S.F. ‘Antidote to Revolution: Vasilii Maklakov’s Advocacy of the Rule of Law and Constitutionalism’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 4: Reintegration – The Struggle for the State (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 87–110; Williams, S.F. ‘Liberalism’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), pp. 137–47.

492

NOTES

2

Miliukov, P.N. The Russian Revolution: Vol. 2 Kornilov or Lenin? – Summer, 1917 (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1984).

3

For more on the voluntary nature of power in 1917 see Thatcher, I.D. ‘The Practice of Power in 1917’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 69–76.

4

For the primacy of violence and lawlessness that scuppered the liberal rule of law project see, for example, Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution. Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). This work proportions special blame to the Provisional Government for abolishing the Tsarist police and governors without having anything to put in their place.

5

See, for example, Thatcher, I.D. ‘The Russian Revolutionary Constitution and Pamphlet Literature in the 1917 Revolution’, Europe-Asia Studies, 68/10, 2016, pp. 1635–53.

6

Browder, R.P. and Kerensky, A.F. (eds.), The Russian Provisional Government 1917 vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 116.

7

Gaida, F.A. ‘Vremennoe pravitel’stvo: staroe i novoe v praktike gosudarstvennogo upravleniia’, in Petrov, Iu. A. (ed.), Velikaia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia 1917. 100 let izucheniia (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii RAN, 2017), p. 137.

8

Cited in Gaida, ‘Vremennoe pravitel’stvo’, 136.

9

Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Tret’emartovskaia politicheskaia sistema’, in Iu.A. Petrov (ed.), Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda: vlast’, obshchestvo, kul’tura 1 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2017), pp. 457–61.

10 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 2, 1043. 11 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 157–8. 12 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 3, 1250. 13 Two published volumes of its edicts and decrees that cover only the period of the first cabinet 27 February 5 May, and some of the legislation issued from 5 May to 24 July, run to over 1,000 pages. Subsequent volumes of this series were not issued. See Sbornik ukazov i postanovlenii vremennago pravitel’stva 1 27 fevralia – 5 maia 1917g. (Petrograd, 1917) & Sbornik ukazov i postanovlenii vremennago pravitel’stva 2(1) 5 maia – 24 Iiulia 1917g. (Petrograd, 1918). 14 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 165. 15 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 222–4. 16 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 193. 17 Cited in Gaida, ‘Vremennoe pravitel’stvo’, 137. 18 Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Reformy vremennogo pravitel’stva’, in Petrov, Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, 492. 19 Orlovsky, D. ‘What Was Power in 1917?’ in Read, Russia’s Home Front, 195. 20 Ruthchild, R.G. ‘Women and Gender in 1917’, Slavic Review, 76/3, 2017, p. 702.

NOTES

493

21 Thatcher, I.D. ‘Elections in Russian and Early Soviet History’, in Lentini, P. (ed.), Elections and Political Order in Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), pp. 22–5. 22 Pomeranz, W.E. ‘Law, Empire, and Revolution’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 310. 23 Pomeranz, W.E. ‘The Provisional Government and the Law Based State’, in Read Russia’s Home Front, 129, 135. 24 Ruthchild, R.G. ‘“Going to the Ballot Box Is a Moral Duty for Every Woman”: The Great War and Women’s Rights in Russia’, in Read, Russia’s Home Front, 166–7. 25 Tumanova, A.S. ‘Reformy v povestke dnia vremennogo pravitel’stva i organizovannoi obshchestvennosti vesnoi 1917g’, in Petrov, Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, 209–13. 26 Lohr, E. and Sanborn, J. ‘1917: Revolution as Demobilization and State Collapse’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, p. 706. 27 Thatcher, I.D. ‘Memoirs of the Russian Provisional Government 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 27, 1, 2014, pp. 7–8. 28 Cited in Badcock, S. ‘Loci of Political Power. The 1917 Russian Revolution from Regional Perspectives’, in Adamski, L. and Gajos, B. (eds.), Circles of the Russian Revolution. Internal and International Consequences of the Year 1917 in Russia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), p. 74. 29 Sanborn, J.A. Imperial Apocalypse. The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 209, 216–19. 30 Cited in Stone, D.R. The Russian Army in the Great War. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2015), p. 299. 31 Cited in Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse, 224. 32 Cited in Badcock, S. ‘1917 in the Provinces’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 266. 33 Figures cited from Getzler, I. ‘The Soviets’, in Harold Shukman (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 135. 34 Smirnov, N.N. ‘The Soviets’, in Acton, E. Cherniaev, V. Iu. and Rosenberg, W.G. (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 432. 35 Getzler, I. ‘Soviets as Agents of Democratization’, in Frankel, E.R., Frankel, J. and Knei-Paz, B. (eds.), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 17. 36 A.A. Bogdanov cited in Malysheva, E.P. and Bakhturina A.Iu. ‘Sovety i organy samoupravlenniia’, in Petrov (ed.), Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, 533. 37 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 2, 848–9. 38 Cited in Wildman, A.K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army. The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 231.

494

NOTES

39 Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 270–1. 40 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 3, 1241. 41 Smolin, A.V. ‘Narod i vlast (kronshtadtskii sovet v marte-iiune 1917g.)’, in Spiridonova, L.I. (ed.), Kronshtadtskii sovet v 1917 godu. Protokoly i postanovleniia 1 mart-iiun 1917g (St. Petersburg: Rosarkhiv, 2017), pp. 7–18. 42 Badcock, ‘Loci of Political Power’, 64. 43 Pethybridge, R. ‘The Significance of Communications in 1917’, Soviet Studies, 19, 1, 1967, p. 112. 44 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 322. 45 For good summary accounts of Finland in 1917 see Alenius, K. ‘“Finexit”: The Russian Revolution and Finnish Independence’, in Adamski and Gajos, Circles of the Russian Revolution, 122–36; Mainio, A. ‘The Nationality Question: Finnish Activism and the Russian Revolution, 1899–1919’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 211–19. 46 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 335. 47 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 345–7. 48 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 351–2. 49 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 370. 50 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 372. 51 For an excellent account of the different points of view among Ukrainian politicians about Ukrainian-Russian relations see Remy, J. ‘“It is Unknown where the Little Russians are heading to”: The Autonomy Dispute Between the Ukrainian Central Rada and the All-Russian Provisional Government in 1917’, Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 4, 2017, pp. 691–719. See also the contributions to this Handbook by Kibita and Orlovsky. 52 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1 376–7. 53 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 380. 54 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 383. 55 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 389–90. 56 Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government 1917, vol. 1, 390–2. 57 Mavor, J. The Russian Revolution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), p. 126; Pipes, R. The Russian Revolution 1899–1919 (London: Collins Harvill, 1990), p. 556. 58 Kerensky, A.F. ‘The Policy of the Provisional Government of 1917’, Slavonic and East European Review, 11, 31, 1932, pp. 1–19. 59 Smirnov, N.N. ‘The Constituent Assembly’, in Acton, Critical Companion, 332; Wade, R.A. ‘The October Revolution, the Constituent Assembly, and the End of the Russian Revolution’, in Thatcher, I.D. (ed.), Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia. Essays in Honour of James D. White (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 72–85.

NOTES

495

Chapter 4 1

See especially Gatrell, P. Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (London: Longman, 2005); and Harrison, M. and Markevich, A. ‘Russia’s Home front, 1914–22: The Economy’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 23–44.

2

Sidorov, A.L., Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), p. 3.

3

The classic account in English is Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).

4

Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 207–15; see also Volobuev, P.V. Ekonomicheskaia politika Vremennogo pravitel’stva (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962).

5

The specialist literature about Russian transport in 1917 is small. Useful starting points are: Pethybridge, R.W. ‘The Significance of Communications in 1917’, Soviet Studies 19, 1, 1967–8, pp. 109–14; Argenbright, R.T. ‘The Russian Railroad System and the Founding of the Communist State, 1917–1922’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1990); Senin, A.S. Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia v 1917 godu, 2nd edition (Moscow: Knizhnyi dom Librokom, 2009); Senin, A.S. Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii v epokhu voin i revoliutsii (1914–1922 gg.) (Moscow: GOU Uchebno-metodicheskii tsentr po obrazovaniiu na zheleznodorozhnom transporte, 2009); Augustine, W.R. ‘Russia’s Railwaymen, July–October 1917’, Slavic Review, 24, 4, 1965, pp. 666–79.

6

These brief biographical notes are based on the respective entries in Volobuev, P.V. et al. (eds.) Politicheskie deiateli Rossii 1917: Biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia, 1993) and Shelokhaev, V.V. et al (eds.) Politicheskie partii Rossii, Konets XIX–pervaia tret’ XX veka: Entsiklopediia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996).

7

For the creation of these committees see Siegelbaum, L.H. The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–17: A Study of the War-Industries Committees (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 40–68.

8

For a succinct introduction to the politics of wartime tsarist Russia see Waldron, P. ‘The End of Tsarism’, in Read Russia’s Home Front, 1–20. On the Kadets see, for example, Pearson, R. The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism1914–1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977) and Stockdale, M.K. Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 218–49.

9

For example: unsigned editorial comment articles, Rech’, 28 October 1915, 1–2 and 29 October 1915, 1; L. L’vov, ‘S.V. Rukhlov’, Rech’, 28 October 1915, 2: unsigned editorial comment article, Rech’, 16 March 1916, 1–2; Duma speeches by A. I. Shingarev and N. V. Nekrasov, Rech’, 22 March 1916, 4.

10 For example: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) f. 1276 (Sovet ministrov), op. 12, d. 263, ll. 1–2ob. (A. A. Polivanov (War Minister)

496

NOTES

to B. V. Shtiurmer (Chair of the Council of Ministers), 1 March 1916); ‘Zaiavlenie’, signed by 35 State Duma deputies, 26 February 1916 (RGIA f. 1278 (Gosudarstvennaia duma), op. 5, d. 1041, ll. 1–2). 11 For example: Merkulov, S.D. ‘Nedostatok prodovol’stvennykh produktov v Petrograde i zheleznodorozhnoe vedomstvo’, Novyi ekonomist, 41 (10 October 1915), pp. 6–8. 12 Rodzianko, M.V. ‘Gosudarstvennaia Duma i fevral’skaia 1917 goda revoliutsiia’, in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 6 (Berlin: Gessen, 1922), pp. 23–4, 45; Rodzianko, M.V., ‘Krushenie Imperii (Zapiski predsedatelia Russkoi Gosudarstvennoi Dumy)’, in Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 17 (Berlin: Gessen, 1926), pp. 100, 108–9, 157; Grinevetskii, V.I. Poslevoennye perspektivy russkoi promyshlennosti (Moscow, 1922), especially 108–37. 13 Vasil’ev, N. Transport Rossii v voine 1914–1918 (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1939); Sidorov, A. L. (ed.), Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune Velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii: Dokumenty i materialy, mart-oktiabr’ 1917 g., chast’ pervaia (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1957), pp. 565–634 (a slightly revised version of his 1948 article ‘Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii v pervoi mirovoi voine i obostrenie ekonomicheskogo krizisa v strane’, Istoricheskie zapiski, 26, 1948, pp. 3–64); Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii. 14 See Westwood, J. ‘The Railways’, in Davies, R.W. (ed.), From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). For a more recent and more extensive commentary, see Heywood, A.J. ‘Imperial Russia’s Railways at War, 1914–17: Challenges, Result, Costs, and Legacy’, in Read, Russia’s Home Front, pp. 65–92. 15 On the Russian case see Luntinen, P. French Information on the Russian War Plans, 1880–1914 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1984); Heywood, A.J. ‘“The most Catastrophic Question”: Railway Development and Military Strategy in Late Imperial Russia’, in Otte, T.G. and Neilson, K. (eds.), Railways and International Politics: Paths of Empire (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 45–67. 16 Mellor, R.E.H. German Railways: A Study in the Historical Geography of Transport (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 1976), pp. 18–19. 17 ‘Spravka k $58 smetu’, [spring 1914]; Response by Minister of Ways of Communication to Duma Budgetary commission, [spring 1914] (RGIA f.273, op.10, d.2642, ll.86, 63–6); Head of Directorate of Railways to Congress of Representatives of Stock Market Trade and Agriculture, [1915] (RGIA f.32, op.1, d.730, l.6). 18 This point is made explicitly in a December 1907 report to deputy minister V. A. Miasoedov-Ivanov by the Acting Head of Department for Monitoring the Repair of Rolling Stock after the Russo-Japanese War (RGIA f.229, op.4, d.414, ll.36–42). 19 Concerning the wartime waterways see Vasil’ev, Transport Rossii v voine, 22–7, 117–25. 20 30 let deiatel’nosti tovarishchestva neftianogo proizvodstva Brat’ev Nobel’, 1879–1909 (St Petersburg, 1910), pp. 139–248.

NOTES

497

21 The coal statistic is in: Draft report by Minister Trepov to the Tsar, circa November 1916 (RGIA f.229, op.4, d.414, l.178). Generally on the movement of goods by railway and waterway from and to Archangel see Heywood, A.J. ‘The Limits of Competence: Coping with Armageddon on the Archangel Railway, 1913–March 1917 (working paper)’. Cited 23 October 2021. Available online at: http://aura.abdn. ac.uk/handle/2164/8416. 22 Draft report by Minister Trepov to the Tsar, circa November 1916 (RGIA f.229, op.4, d.414, l.177ob.). 23 Heywood, A.J. ‘The Logistical Significance of the Turkish Straits, Russo–Ottoman War and Gallipoli Campaign in Imperial Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 1, 2017, pp. 16, 29–30 and note 43. 24 For example: Minutes of Temporary Administrative (rasporiaditel’nyi) Committee meeting 26, 18 February 1916 (RGIA f. 290, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 56–57). 25 See Heywood, A.J. ‘Spark of Revolution? Railway Disorganisation, Freight Traffic and tsarist Russia’s War Effort, July 1914–March 1917’, Europe–Asia Studies, 65, 4, 2013, pp. 753–72. 26 The pud-verst is the best available performance indicator for freight traffic, for it reveals actual work by including both the weight of the goods and the distance moved. One pud equated to 16.38 kg; one verst equated to 1.06 km. The modern metric and imperial/US equivalents are tonne-kilometres and ton-miles. 27 For a discussion of wartime winter weather that confirms and clarifies the exceptionality of the 1916/17 winter see Heywood, A.J. ‘Climate, Weather, and Tsarist Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917: The Wartime Winters’, in Heywood, A.J. et al (eds.), Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2022). 28 Data for planned and actual arrivals of such wagons in Petrograd between 16 December 1916 and 31 March 1917 are shown at Heywood, ‘The Logistical Significance of the Turkish Straits’, 8. 29 See Heywood, A.J. ‘War and Military Mobility in 1914: Russia’s General Mobilisation in Logistical Perspective’, unpublished working paper. 30 Hamilton, J.A.B. Britain’s Railways in World War I (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp. 37–42. 31 See Heywood, ‘The Logistical Significance of the Turkish Straits’, 8. 32 Examples from the Kadet-supporting newspaper Rech’ are: ‘Prodovol’stvovanie Petrograda’, 24 October 1914, 5 (about butter supply); ‘Neftianoi krizis’, 7 November 1914, 5; ‘Ugol’nyi krizis’, 5 March 1915, 4, and 14 March 1915, 6; ‘K ugol’nomu krizisu’, 15 March 1915, 5; ‘Obespechenie naseleniia khlebom’, 17 March, 4. Similar examples from the important government-supporting paper Novoe vremiia are: ‘Vzdorozhanie zhizni’, 23 November 1914, 7; ‘Chainyi golod’, 28 January 1915, 5; ‘Ugol’nyi krizis’, 28 February 1915, 4; ‘Ugol’nyi krizis v stolitse’, 5 March 1915, 3.

498

NOTES

33 See especially the minutes of the inter-ministry Administrative Committee (Rasporiaditel’nyi komitet) for freight traffic planning, mainly in RGIA f. 273, op. 10, dd. 2592 and 3041 (July 1914–July 1915) and f. 290, op. 1, dd. 1–4, 6 (December 1915–April 1917). A specific example from this committee is cited in note 39 below. 34 This document was known as MPS Circular 19077, and was widely reprinted, such as: Tsirkuliar U Zh D gg. nachal’nikam kazennykh, upravliaiushchim i direktoram chastnykh zheleznykh dorog, predsedateliam poraionnykh komitetov, kopii pravleniiam chastnykh zheleznodorozhnykh obshchestv, 27 iiulia 1915g, za No.19077/14754/215. O poriadke otpravleniia vneocherednykh gruzov i ob ustanovlenii novykh kategorii ocherednykh gruzov. Vypiska iz Sbornika tarifov rossiiskikh zheleznykh dorog No.2402 ot 13 avgusta 1915 goda (Petrograd, 1915). 35 Common tactics used by private shippers to evade restrictions included bribing railway staff to send a consignment by a very circuitous route, load a consignment for a restricted route without the necessary permit, or continue loading after getting notice to cease loading. For further detail see Heywood, ‘Imperial Russia’s railways at War’, 75 and note 28. 36 This issue is the focus of Heywood, ‘The Logistical Significance of the Turkish Straits’. 37 Murmansk port did not become available until the winter of 1916/17. 38 For instance, report No. 15 by MPS Chief Inspector, 12 May 1915, about his inspection of transport operations in the Caucasus (RGIA f. 269, op. 2, d. 89, l.65). 39 Minutes of Administrative Committee meeting No. 27, 21 January 1915 (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3041, l. 41ob.). 40 On this context see Bobroff, R.P. Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006). 41 Hughes, M. ‘From the February Revolution to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk’, in Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D. et al (eds.), Russian International Relations in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: Revolution and Civil War (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2021), pp. 6–9; Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, 252–7. 42 Heywood, A.J. ‘The Militarisation of Civilians in Tsarist Russia’s First World War: Railway Staff in the Army Front Zones’, in Stoff, L.S. et al. (eds.), Military Affairs in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 1: Military Experiences (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2019), pp. 354–5; Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 177–9. 43 Rossiiski gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv (RGVIA) f. 2004 (Upravlenie nachal’nika voennykh soobshchenii pri Verkhovnom glavnokomanduiushchem, 1914–1918 gg.), op. 3, d. 748, ll.34–ob., 76 (Chief of Staff Alekseev to Chair of the Council of Ministers Prince G.E. L’vov, 9 March 1917; L’vov to Alekseev, 12 March 1917). The Council of Ministers was formally renamed as the Provisional Government on 10 March. 44 ‘Zhurnal mezhduvedomstvennogo soveshchaniia v shtabe glavnokomanduiushchego’, 30 March 1917, uncorrected first draft (RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 748, ll. 309–23ob.).

NOTES

499

45 Heywood, A.J. Modernising Lenin’s Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 26–31. 46 ‘Obzor gruzovogo dvizheniia i perevozok za 16–30 aprelia 1917 g’. (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3716, l. 105ob.). 47 ‘Obzor gruzovogo dvizheniia i perevozok za 16–30 aprelia 1917 g’. (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3716, l. 106ob.). 48 This commission is the focus of Schneider, B.C. ‘Responding to the People: The Borisov Commission and the (Misnamed) Five-Year Railroad Construction Plan of 1916’, in Read Russia’s Home Front, pp. 93–106, with particular reference to the policy-making involvement of public organisations and associations. 49 Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 166–9. 50 Dodonov, B.F. et al. (eds.), Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo pravitel’stva, tom 1: Mart–aprel’ 1917 goda (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), pp. 214–15; Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia, 36–47. 51 Concerning the earlier wartime contracts for imports see Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia, 23–35; Heywood, A.J. ‘Russia’s Foreign Supply Policy in World War I: Imports of Railway Equipment’, The Journal of European Economic History, 32, 1, 2003, pp. 77–108, especially 87 for a summary list of the contracts by category. 52 Sidorov, Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii nakanune Velikoi oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii, 371–6. These documents appear not to have been included in Dodonov’s edition of the minutes of the Provisional Government’s sessions. 53 For example: Draft letter to the Minister of Ways of Communication from Council of Congress of Representatives of Industry and Trade, circa December 1913 (RGIA f.32, op.1, d.719, ll.99–101ob.; see especially ll.100–ob.); ‘Dokladnaia zapiska’, addressed to the ministers of ways of communication, finance, trade and industry, and agriculture, and also to the minister for state control, February 1915 (RGIA f.32, op.1, d.719, ll.107–10. 54 On wartime losses and destruction see Heywood, A.J. ‘War, Civil War and the “Restoration” of Russia’s Industrial Infrastructure, 1914–25: the Fate of the Railway Locomotive Stock’, Revolutionary Russia, 25, 1, 2012, pp. 31–59, and Heywood, A.J. ‘War Destruction and Remedial Work in the early Soviet Economy: Myth and Reality on the Railroads’, The Russian Review, 64, 3, 2005, pp. 456–79. 55 Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia, 33–7. 56 ‘Osobyi zhurnal Soveta ministrov’, 13 March 1915 (draft) (RGIA f. 268, op. 5, d. 311, ll. 5–8); Central War Industries Committee, Commission to investigate the wagon shortages, meeting no.3, 28 August 1915 (RGIA f. 268, op. 5, d. 312, ll. 113–16ob.); Report by MPS Directorate of Railways [to Council of Ministers?], 16 September 1915 (RGIA f. 273, op. 6, d. 3100, ll. 53–55ob.); MPS Directorate of Railways to Special Conference for Shipments, 6 July 1916 (RGIA f. 268 op. 5, d. 323, l. 417ob.); Council of Representatives of Locomotive-building Factories to MPS Deputy Minister Voinovskii-Kriger, 19 July 1916 (RGIA f. 31, op. 1, d. 64, l. 108).

500

NOTES

57 Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 172; ‘Zhurnal soveshchaniia’ (RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 748, ll. 322–ob.). 58 MPS Directorate of Railways Operations Department to Provisional Government, June 1917, chart 14 (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3677, l. 48). 59 Klemenchich, V. Itogi raboty zheleznykh dorog za tri goda 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow: Izdanie Tsekhtrana i Politupravleniia NKPS, 1920), p. 10. 60 See Heywood, Modernising Lenin’s Russia, 40–1; Foust, C., John Frank Stevens: Civil Engineer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp. 197–259. 61 Reichman, H. Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), especially 291–305; Heywood, ‘The Militarization of Civilians’, 337–9. 62 The first major attempt to provide systematic financial assistance, albeit initially only for personnel employed on state railways, became known as the Rules of 28 April 1915. For details see Heywood, ‘Militarization of Civilians’, 341–2. 63 The first one was in ‘Prikaz po M P S’, 5 March 1917 (cited from the copy at RGIA f. 229, op. 2, d. 1633, ll. 580–1). 64 Three files of papers pertaining to Plekhanov’s commission are preserved at RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, dd. 139–41. 65 Nekrasov to the Head of the MPS Directorate of Railways and all heads of railways, 7 March 1917 (RGIA f. 273, op. 1, d. 2985, l. 192). 66 On the emergence of Vikzhel see Augustine, ‘Russia’s Railwaymen’, 667–9. 67 Cited from the copy at RGIA f. 32, op. 1, d. 659, ll. 17–20. 68 Senin, Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, 63–6. 69 Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 195–8. 70 Zakrevskaia, G.P. and Gol’ianov, A.L. Rukovoditeli vedomstva putei soobshcheniia Rossii i SSSR (1797–1995): Katalog kollektsii khudozhestvennykh portretov, biograficheskie svedeniia (St Petersburg: MPS RF-Tsentral’nyi muzei zheleznodorozhnogo transporta Rossii, 1995), pp. 41–4; Senin, Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, 215–16 (extract from Liverovskii’s diary). 71 An early example is Nekrasov to I. K. Ivanovskii, 9 March 1917 (RGIA f. 229, op. 2, d. 1633, l. 29). Ivanovskii had been head of the Nicholas Railway and MPS Chief Inspector, and his resignation was demanded because of his ‘former activity’. 72 On the rise of the red specialists see Bailes, K.E. Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 73 Head of MPS Directorate of Railways to the Deputy Heads of Directorate, heads of departments and sections, 23 March 1917 (RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3678, l. 21). 74 Dodonov et al. (eds.) Zhurnaly, tom 1, 24. 75 Dodonov et al. (eds) Zhurnaly, tom 1, 26.

NOTES

501

76 The file at RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 183 is devoted to this process, which is described tellingly in the file name as a ‘reform’. 77 This policy is the subject of RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 188. 78 Senin, Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, 53. 79 Frolov’s report of 10 May 1916 is at RGIA f. 268, op. 5, d. 325, ll. 82–5; Minutes (extract) of the Administrative Committee meeting No. 135, 26 January 1917 (RGIA f. 290, op. 1, d. 6, ll. 1–5). 80 A telling exception is a caveat that was added to a 1916 report entitled ‘Dannye o gruzovoi rabote i utilizatsii podvizhnogo sostava za 1913 i 1915 gg’.: it warned about the reduced accuracy of railway statistics during the war. Cited from the copy at RGIA f. 269, op. 2, d. 98, ll. 25–49ob. (l. 25ob.). 81 Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 193, cited from Vestnik putei soobshcheniia, 5, 1918, 24–5 (the transport commissariat’s weekly official bulletin). 82 See Heywood, ‘Spark of Revolution?’, passim. 83 Data from Table 7 (coal) and Table 4.2 (main food products) at RGIA f. 273, op. 10, d. 3728, ll. 182, 183–ob. 84 ‘Spravka o ezhemesiachnom pritoke na fronty intendantskikh gruzov’, [circa December 1917] (RGVIA f. 2004, op. 3, d. 357, ll. 54ob.–55). 85 Senin, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport, 180.

Chapter 5 1

The Mensheviks led the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets and congresses, while the SRs led the peasants’ soviets and congresses. The Interdistrictite group was composed of left-wing members of the Social Democratic (SD) parent party who did not affiliate with either the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks.

2

Melancon, M. ‘From the Head of Zeus: The Petrograd Soviet’s Rise and First Days, 27 February-2 March 1917’, in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2004 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2009), pp. 37–8, 44–5.

3

Lih, L.T. ‘“All Power to the Soviets!” Part 1: Biography of a Slogan’, 23 March 1917’, in Riddell, J. (ed.), Marxist Essays and Commentaries, https://johnriddell. com/2017/03/23/all-power-to-the-soviets-part-1-biography-of-a-slogan.

4

Lih ‘“All Power to the Soviets!”’ Five moderate socialists – two Mensheviks, two Trudoviks/Popular Socialists and one SR – were appointed to serve in the first liberal-socialist coalition cabinet along with ten liberal leaders and Aleksander Kerensky, a former Trudovik Duma deputy of liberal inclination who had joined the Provisional Government in February. The Trudoviks (Labor Group) and the Popular Socialists, two small parties to the right of the SRs, merged into a single party in June 1917.

5

Rabinowitch A. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 136–7, 148–9,

502

NOTES

174–5; ‘Proklamatsiia Orgkomiteta i Fraktsii VTSIK sotsialistov-revoliutsionerovinternatsionalistov’, in Partiia levykh sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov: Dokumenty i materialy, t. 1, Iiul’ 1917 g.-mai 1918 g. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), pp. 49–51. 6

Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 195–7; Haimson, L. H. ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, in Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905–17 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 58–9; Galili, Z. The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 331–3.

7

Minority resolution at the 7th SR party council on 10 August, Delo naroda, no. 124, 11.8.1917.

8

Rosenberg, W.G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–21 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 226–8, 235–7; Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 138–9; Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution, 383–4; Volubuev, O.V. ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917: Decisions and Consequences’, in Brovkin, V.N. (ed.), The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 46, 48. The second coalition cabinet consisted of eight liberals and six moderate socialists: two SRs, two Mensheviks and two Popular Socialists.

9

Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 177–8, 182; Volubuev, ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917’, 50; 17 Sept. session of the Democratic Conference, Znamia truda, no. 22, 19.9.1917.

10 Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 243–4; Radkey, O. H. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 410, 417–19; Volubuev, ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917’, 51–2; Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution, 386–9; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 183–6; Swain, G. The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 37. The third coalition cabinet consisted of eleven liberals, three of them Kadets and five moderate socialists: four Mensheviks and one SR. 11 Znamia truda, nos. 19–21, 14-17.9. 1917. 12 ‘The Immediate Convocation of an All-Russian Congress of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Soviets!’ in Znamia truda, no. 26, 23.9. 1917; Abraham, R. Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 295; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 188, 212. 13 Radkey, The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism, 440–2; Volubuev, ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917’, 47, 49; Sukhanov, N.N. The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, trans. and ed. Carmichael, J. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 524; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 152–3, 159–62; Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution, 380–1. 14 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 178–81, 189, 196, 201–2; Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 538–40; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 75.

NOTES

503

15 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 540, 542, 562; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 202; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 75–6. 16 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 179, 182, 191, 193–4, 202–3; Gill, G.J. Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 141–4; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 81–3; Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 305. 17 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 205–6, 224–5; Wade, R.A. The Russian Revolution, 1917, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 222–3. 18 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 305–7; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 228; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 225–8, 231–4; White, J. D. ‘Lenin, Trotsky and the Arts of Insurrection: The Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, 11–13 October 1917’, in Wade, R.A. (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 199–201, 204–5. 19 Volubuev, ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917’, 55–6; Radkey, O.H. The Sickle under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 8, 70; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 226–7. 20 Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 581–5; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 228–9; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 240–4. 21 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 314–16; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 232; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 248–9. 22 Volubuev, ‘The Mensheviks in the Fall of 1917’, 57; Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 315–17; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 79–80; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 255–9; Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 605–12. 23 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 250–5, 261–75; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 233–7; Melancon, M. ‘The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Uprising’, in Brovkin, V.N. The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 70; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 97–8. 24 Rabinowitch A. The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 9–10; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 96–7; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 260–1, 264–6, 291–2; ‘Session of the Menshevik Faction of the Second Soviet Congress’, 24–25 October 1917 in Vtoroi Vserossiiskii s”ezd Sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov (25–26 oktiabria 1917 g.): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Moscow: Arkheograficheskii tsentr, 1997), p. 24. 25 Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 98–100; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 239–40; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 409, n. 6; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 291–4, 356, n. 45. The numbers of

504

NOTES

delegates are taken from a preliminary report by the credentials committee of the Soviet Congress; other reports vary. 26 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 295–6; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 240; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 101–2; Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 639–40, 644–6. The SD Internationalists were a recently formed group of unaffiliated SDs, see Häfner’s contribution to this handbook. 27 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 303–4; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 18–19; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 240–2; Melancon, M. ‘The Hammer and the Sickle: Lenin, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Soviet Russia’s First Land Laws, October 1917–February 1918’, in Melancon, M. and Raleigh, D. J. (eds.), Russia’s Century of Revolutions: Parties, People, Places; Studies Presented in Honor of Alexander Rabinowitch (Bloomington: Slavica, 2012), pp. 62–4, 84–5. 28 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 17, 19–21; Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 242–3; ‘Otchet Rabochei gazety’, in Vtoroi Vserossiiskii s”ezd Sovetov rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov, 80–2. 29 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 21, 26; ‘Otchet Rabochei gazety’, 81–2; Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, 54–7; Melancon, ‘The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Uprising’, 72–3. 30 Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 244–6; Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 317; Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 14, 17–40, 44–5, 65–8; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 23–5, 27–9; Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, 54–60; Brovkin, V. N. The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 19–20, 22–3. 31 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 19, 26–7; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 106–7. 32 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 30–2, 35–40; Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, 59, 64–8; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, 23–6. 33 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 23, 41, 46–7; Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, 64, 67–8; Melancon, ‘The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Uprising’, 74; Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October, 32–3. 34 Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 104, 203–12, 220–1, 226–46; Keep, J. L. H. The Russian Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), pp. 320–1, 438–43; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 50. 35 Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 144–8, 220; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 51–2; Razgon, A.I. ‘Pravitel’stvennyi blok bol’shevikov i levykh eserov (oktiabr’ 1917 g.-ianvar’ 1918 g.)’ Istoricheskie zapiski 117, 1989, pp. 117–24. 36 Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 148–9; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 83–4; Razgon, ‘Pravitel’stvennyi blok bol’shevikov i levykh eserov’, 126–32. 37 On the pro-coalition groups, see Melancon, ‘The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Uprising’, 72–4; Haimson, ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 107; and Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 26–31.

NOTES

505

38 Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 71–2. 39 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power, 13, 33, 35, 53.

Chapter 6 1

Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 79.

2

Cook, L. ‘Collegiality in the People’s Commissariats, 1917–1920’, Revolutionary Russia, 26, 1, pp. 1–31.

3

Orlovsky, D. ‘State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle Strata’, in Koenker, D. et al. (eds.), Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 180–209; Rees, E.A. The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–34 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1987).

4

Shakhtman, M. The Struggle for the New Course, published in one volume with his translation of Leon Trotsky’s The New Course (New York: New International Publishing Company, 1943), p. 54.

5

Friedrich, C. and Brzezinski, Z. Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); Fainsod, M. How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).

6

Schapiro, L. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917–1922 (London: LSE, 1955); Schapiro, L. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 2nd edition (New York: University Paperbacks, 1960); Daniels, R.V. The Conscience of the Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Ulam, A. Lenin and the Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965); Pipes, R. The Formation of the Soviet Union, Communism and Nationalism, 1917–23 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954); Pipes, R., The Russian Revolution (London, 1990); and Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (London: Collins Harvill, 1994)

7

Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 39, 243.

8

Iroshnikov, M.P. Sozdanie sovetskogo tsentral´nogo gosudarstvennogo apparata: Sovet narodnykh komissarov i narodnye komissariaty oktiabr´ 1917 g. ianvar´ 1918 g. (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1966); Genkina, E.B. Gosudarstvennaia deiatel´nost´ V. I. Lenina 1921–23 (Moscow: Nauka, 1969); Genkina, E.B. Leninpredsedatel´ sovnarkoma i STO: Iz istorii gosudarstvennoi deiatel´nosti V. I. Lenina v 1921–22 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1960); Gorodetskii, E.N. Rozhdenie sovetskogo gosudarstva 1917–18 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1965).

9

Tucker, R.C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974); Cohen, S. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A Political Biography 1888–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

10 Lewin, M. The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985); Fitzpatrick, S. ‘The Civil War as a Formative Experience’,

506

NOTES

in Gleason, A., Kenez, P. and Stites, R. (eds.), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 11 Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968) and The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Smith, S.A. Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1983). 12 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power. 13 Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 14 Anweiler, O. The Soviets. The Russian Workers, Peasants and Solders Councils, 1905–21 (New York: Pantheon, 1974), p. 218. 15 Anweiler, The Soviets, 193. 16 Rigby T.H. Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 17 Douds, L. Inside Lenin’s Government. Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 18 Sukhanov, N. The Russian Revolution of 1917: A Personal Record, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 640. 19 1918 Constitution, articles 37 and 38, translated in Unger, A. Constitutional Development in the USSR (New York: Pica Press, 1982), p. 31. 20 Douds, L. ‘“The dictatorship of the democracy’? The Council of People’s Commissars as Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary coalition government, December 1917–March 1918”’, Historical Research, Special Issue: The Centenary of the Russian Revolution: New Directions in Research, 90, 247, February 2017, pp. 32–56. 21 Douds, ‘The dictatorship of the democracy’?, 36. 22 Douds, ‘The dictatorship of the democracy’?, 39–53 23 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 31. 24 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 46–8. 25 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 49–50. 26 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 50–1 27 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 51–2 28 Vos´moi s˝ezd RKP(b), mart 1919 goda. Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1959), pp. 193, 222. 29 Cook, L. ‘Collegiality in the People’s Commissariats, 1917–20’, Revolutionary Russia, 26, 1, 2013, pp. 1–31. 30 Vos´moi s˝ezd RKP(b), 193, 222. 31 Vos´moi s˝ezd, 166, 168. 32 Vos´moi s˝ezd 429.

NOTES

507

33 Vos´moi s˝ezd, 5. 34 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 127. 35 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 128. 36 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 156. 37 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 131. 38 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 133, 39 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 136. 40 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 137–40. 41 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 140. 42 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 137. 43 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 135. 44 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 134–43. 45 Cook, ‘Collegiality’, 1–31. 46 Siegelbaum, L. Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 23. 47 Service, R. The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23. A Study in Organizational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 100–4. 48 Service, Bolshevik Party, 85–111. 49 Service, Bolshevik Party, 109, 96. 50 Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) f. 50, opis 1, d. 3, l. 20. 51 RGASPI f. 50, op.1, d. 3, ll. 117–19. 52 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 142. 53 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 142–3. 54 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 143–5. 55 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 144–5. 56 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 144. 57 Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government, 145.

Chapter 7 1

A brief list of Kerensky’s books: Delo Kornilova (Moscow: Zadruga, 1918); Gatchina (Iz vospominanii) (Moscow: Knigopechatnik, 1922); Izdaleka: Sbornik statei (1920–1921 g.) (Paris: Povolotskii, 1922); The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution (New York: Appleton, 1927); La Révolution russe (1917) (Paris: Payot, 1928); The Crucifixion of Liberty (London: Barker, 1934); Russia and History’s Turning Point (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1965).

2

Startsev, V. Krakh kerenshchiny (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982); Sobolev, G. (ed.) Aleksandr Kerenskii: liubov’ i nenavist’ revoliutsii: dnevniki, stat’i, ocherki,

508

NOTES

vospominaniia sovremennikov. (Cheboksary: Chuvashskii universitet, 1993); Ioffe, G. Semnadtsatyi god: Lenin, Kerenskii, Kornilov (Moscow: Nauka, 1995); Basmanov, M. Gerasimenko, G. and Gusev, K. Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii (Saratov: Saratovskaia gosudarsvennaia ekonomicheskaia akademiia, 1996); Fediuk, V. Kerenskii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2009); Tiutiukin, S. Aleksandr Kerenskii: Stranitsy politicheskoi biografii (1905–1917 gg.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012); Rabinowitch, A ‘A. F. Kerenskii i V.I. Lenin kak politicheskie lidery perioda krizisa’, in Politicheskaia istoriia Rossii XX veka. K 80-letiiu professora Vitaliia Ivanovicha Startseva: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov (St Petersburg: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi universitet imeni A. I. Gertsena, 2011), pp. 209–16. Andrei Nikolaev published an article about a 1917 interview in which Kerensky described the February Revolution: Nikolaev, A. ‘A. F. Kerenskii o Fevral’skoi revoliutsii’. Klio, 3, 2004, pp. 108–16. The most recent publication of this source is in Lyandres, S. (ed.) The Fall of Tsarism: Untold Stories of the February 1917 Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Also see the collection on Kerensky: Nikolaev, A. (ed.) A.F. Kerenskii: pro et contra, antologiia (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkoi Khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2016). 3

Abraham, R. Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987).

4

On the different images of Kerensky see Golikov, A. ‘Fenomen Kerenskogo’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 5, 1992, pp. 60–73; Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky: The Revolution against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of the Leader of the People’ (March–June 1917). Translated by Arch Tait (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).

5

Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 125–45; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 43–54.

6

Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 53–124; Tiutiukin, Aleksandr Kerenskii, 38–106; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 27–42.

7

Smith, N. ‘Political Freemasonry in Russia, 1906–1918: A Discussion of the Sources’, Russian Review, 44, 2, 1985, p. 158.

8

See Startsev, V. Tainy russkikh masonov (St Petersburg: D.A.R.K., 2004).

9

Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 54–66.

10 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 53–124; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 27–54. 11 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 76–102; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 27–54. 12 See Radkey, O. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October, 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Kolonitskii, B. ‘Obrazy A.F. Kerenskogo v gazete “Delo naroda” (mart – oktiabr’ 1917 goda)’, in Morozov, K. (ed.), Sud’by demokraticheskogo sotializma v Rossii: sbornik materialov konferentsii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo imeni Sabashnikovykh, 2014), pp. 202–21. 13 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 98–114, 203–11. 14 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 190–203.

NOTES

509

15 Hereafter ‘leader’ will be capitalized to indicate when this sense of a unique vozhd’ is meant. 16 Kolonitskii, B. ‘A.F. Kerenskii kak Lui Blan: Obraz ‘revoliutsionnogo ministra’ v propagande bol’shevikov (mart – aprel’ 1917 goda)’, in Con amore: istorikofilologicheskii sbornik v chest’ Liubovi Nikolaevny Kiselevoi (Moscow: OGI, 2010), pp. 231–42. 17 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 146–68; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 78–91. 18 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 192–226; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 146–90. 19 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 210–25; Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 179–203. 20 See Wildman, A.K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Vol. 2: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 231–80. 21 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 280–309. 22 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 280–94. 23 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 249–80. 24 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 190–203. 25 See Znamenskii, O. Iiul’skii krizis 1917 goda (Moscow and Leningrad: Nauka, 1964); Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution. Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); Tarasov, K. Soldatskii bol’shevizm. Voennaia organizatsiia bol’shevikov i levoradikal’noe dvizhenie v Petrogradskom garnizone (fevral’ 1917-mart 1918 g.) (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2017). 26 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 226–30. 27 Tiutiukin, Aleksandr Kerenskii, 202–33. 28 Some of the contemporaries wrote in the diaries about the possibility of a civil war caused by the conflict between the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the Soviets: Naryshkina, E. Moi vospominaniia. Pod vlast’iu trekh tsarei (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014), p. 446; Ustrialov, N. Byloe – revoliutsiia 1917 g. (1890-e – 1919 gg.): Vospominaniia i dnevnikovye zapisi (Moscow: ANKIL, 2000), pp. 139, 141. 29 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 244. 30 Such a characterization of Kerensky could be found in diaries as early as June: Amfiteatrov-Kadashev, V. ‘Stranitsy iz dnevnika’ (ed. S.V. Shumikhin) Minuvshee. Vol. 20. (Moscow and St Petersburg: Atheneum – Feniks, 1996), p. 479. It is encountered in July again: Knox, A.W.F. With the Russian Army: 1914–1917, 2 vols (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1921), vol. 2, p. 671. Film director Sergei Eizenshtein intended to play up the theme of ‘Alexander IV’ in his famous film October: Eizenshtein, S. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 6 vols (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971), vol. 6, p. 73. 31 Abraham, Alexander Kerensky, 105–7, 244, 266–7; Kolonitskii, B. ‘A.F. Kerenskii i Merezhkovskie’, Literaturnoe obozrenie, 3, 1991, pp. 98–106.

510

NOTES

32 Rumours about Kerensky using morphine reached Odessa as early as the start of June. Lakier, E. ‘Otryvki iz dnevnika, 1917–1920’, in Demidova, O. (ed.), ‘Preterpevshii do kontsa spasen budet’: Zhenskie ispovedal’nye teksty o revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2013), pp. 142–3. These rumours were more widely spread later. Other contemporaries claimed that Kerensky became addicted to cocaine: Amfiteatrov-Kadashev, ‘Stranitsy iz dnevnika’, 494. 33 On the Moscow State Conference see Nikolaev, A. ‘Bor’ba sil revoliutsii i kontrrevoliutsii v sviazi s sozyvom Gosudarstvennogo soveshchaniia (aprel’ – avgust 1917 g.)’: Diss. Cand. Sc. (Hist.) extended abstract. Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSSR, Institut istorii SSSR, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1990. 34 On the premonitions of a civil war after the Moscow State Conference see Kolonitskii, B. and Godunov, K. ‘Tema grazhdanskoi voiny v tekstakh “pravykh” sotsialistov vo vremia “kornilovshchiny”’, in Morozova, A. and Suslov, A. (eds.), Zhit’ istoriei i dumat’ o budushchem: Sbornik statei i materialov k 60-letiiu doktora istoricheskikh nauk K.N. Morozova (Moscow: n.p., 2021), pp. 351–64. On the plans of Kornilov and his milieu to include right-wing socialist leaders in the governments see Sevost’ianov, G. (ed.) Delo generala L.G. Kornilova. Materialy Chrezvychainoi komissii po rassledovaniiu dela o byvshem Verkhovnom glavnokomanduiushchem generale L.G. Kornilove i ego souchastnikakh: Avgust 1917 – iiun’ 1918 g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, 2 vols (Moscow: MFD; Materik, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 152, 177, 188. 35 During the Kornilov’s rising, the SR Party newspaper wrote about ‘savages’ among the native troops sent against the revolutionary capital. Delo Naroda 29&30.8. 1917. 36 Ganin, A. ‘“Ia uznal, chto naznachen nachal’nikom levoi kolonny otriada, atakuiushchego Zimnii dvorets”: Neizvestnye vospominaniia i pis’mo polkovnika G.P. Apreleva o sobytiiakh 1917 g.’, in Nikolaev, A. (ed.), Revoliutsiia 1917 goda v Rossii: Novye podkhody i vzgliady. Sbornik nauchnykh statei (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RGPU im. A.I. Gertsena, 2020), pp. 225–6. 37 Fedor Stepun had written marvellously about the cultural clash between Russia’s intelligentsia and officer corps, which was embodied by Kerensky and Kornilov: Stepun, F. Byvshee i nesbyvsheesia. (Moscow: Progress-Litera; St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1995), pp. 410–14. 38 See Katkov, G. Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Breakup of the Russian Army (London: Longman Press, 1980). 39 Sevost’ianov, Delo generala L.G. Kornilov vol. 1, pp. 39, 144–5, vol. 2, p. 501; Denikin, A. Ocherki russkoi smuty. Krushenie vlasti i armii. Fevral’ – sentiabr’ 1917 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), p. 470. 40 Kolonitskii and Godunov, ‘Tema grazhdanskoi voiny’, 351–64. 41 Abrosimova, T. et al. (eds.) Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP(b) v 1917 godu: Protokoly i materialy zasedanii (St Petersburg: Bel’veder, 2003), pp. 413–14.

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42 For a rare instance of using the word ‘kerentsy’ in a contemporary diary: ‘“Beshenyi shkval snosit vse, chem my zhili…”: Iz dnevnika Rashel’ Mironovny KhinGol’dovskoi’, in Surzhikova, N. (ed.), Rossiia 1917 goda v ego-dokumentakh: Dnevniki (Moscow: Politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2017), p. 322. 43 The first occasion of the use of the word ‘kornilovshchina’ that we know of was recorded as early as 28 August in the main SR newspaper, Delo naroda. 44 Articles by the SR leader Viktor Chernov were particular important politically, see Chernov, V. ‘Kornilov i kornilovshchina’ Delo naroda. 3.9.1917. On relations between Kerensky and SR leadership, see Kolonitskii, ‘Obrazy A.F. Kerenskogo’, 202–21. 45 See Lenin, V.I. ‘Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks’ and ‘Letter to the Petrograd City Conference’, in Collected Works, 45 vols (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961–1973), vol. 26, pp. 45, 146–47. 46 The first occasion that the word ‘kerenshchina’ was used in personal correspondence is dated 26 October. A cavalry officer described an unproductive meeting of the regiment’s committee: ‘In a word, utter kerenshchina’, see Stolypin, A. ‘Zapiski dragunskogo ofitsera, 1917–1920 gg’, Russkoe proshloe, 3, 1992, p. 43. However, this word was used as early as the end of September in the Bolshevik press, see Zvezda (Revel’) 29.9.1917, quoted in Petrov, M. Bol’shevizatsiia iuzhnykh baz Baltiiskogo flota v 1917 godu (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1981), p. 112. 47 Kolonitskii, B. ‘Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii kak “zhertva evreev” i “evrei”’ Jews and Slavs. Vol. 17: The Russian Word in the Land of Israel, the Jewish Word in Russia (Jerusalem, 2006), pp. 241–53. 48 Concurrences in the far-left and the far-right press were mentioned both in moderate socialist newspapers, and in press reviews prepared by government agencies. On one of the most successful right-wing gutter publications that promoted this theme, see Kolonitskii, B. ‘Images of A.F. Kerensky and the Political Struggle in 1917 (based on the newspapers of A.A. Suvorin)’, Historia Provinciae: The Journal of Regional History, 4, 3, 2020, pp. 834–83. 49 See Kolonitskii, B. ‘Kerensky as “Traitor”: Symbolic Politics, Rumor and the Political Deployment of Rumours in the Revolutionary Period’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 1, 2021, pp. 1–18. 50 Saul, N.E. Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1978), p. 174; Kolonitskii, B. ‘Britanskie missii i A.F. Kerenskii (mart – oktiabr’ 1917 goda)’, in Fursenko, A. (ed.), Rossiia v XIX-XX vv.: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu Rafaila Sholomovicha Ganelina (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1998), pp. 67–76. 51 See Lenin, ‘The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power’, Collected Works, 26, p. 21. 52 Bilyi, V. ‘Koroten’ky pisni (“chastushki”) rokiv 1917–1925’. Etnohrafichnyi visnyk Book 1 (Kiev, 1925), p. 30.

512

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53 The Central Committee of the Baltic Fleet mentioned in its appeals the alliance between Kerensky and Kornilov, Kaledin and even the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. See Tsentral’nyi komitet Baltiiskogo flota. Protokoly i postanovleniia Tsentral’nogo komiteta Baltiiskogo flota (1917–1918) (Moscow, Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1963), p. 256; Baltiiskie moriaki v podgotovke i provedenii Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi sotialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Moscow, Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1957), pp. 308–9. 54 The would-be Partriarch Alexius I of Moscow and All-Russia wrote in late October: ‘But if truth be told, does it at all matter – Lenin or Kerensky? The former openly declares himself an usurper and the enemy to all things good, but the latter is the same kind of adventurer but under the external form of a statesman’. ‘Aleksei (Simanskii) to Arsenii (Stadnitskii) 28 October 1917’, in Pis’ma patriarkha Alekseiia svoemu dukhovniku (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sretenskogo monastyria, 2000), p. 81. A well-known priest said nearly the same thing in a 26 November sermon: ‘I warn you that, as a man of the church, I have no contact with either the old or the newest government (neither the Lenins, nor the Kerenskys), because there is not the slightest difference between them in essence and in moral importance…’ Vostorgov, Io. O sovesti. Besedy pastyria, 1917–1918 (Moscow: Moskva, 2018), p. 233. 55 A conservative Petrograd official dreamt of seeing Kerensky hanged in early November 1917, when the former Provisional Government head was still trying to organize armed struggle against the Bolsheviks: Diushen, I. Dnevnik petrogradskogo chinovnika, 1917–1918 (Moscow: Voevoda, 2020), p. 62. 56 Groza (Petrograd) 8.11.1917. 57 Kolonitskii, ‘Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii’, 241–53. 58 Kolonitskii, B. ‘Kul’turnaia gegemoniia sotsialistov v Rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 6, 2017, pp. 72–87. 59 Bogdanov, A. ‘Chto zhe my svergli?’ Novaia zhizn’ 17.5.1917. 60 The rejection of the Kerensky regime was crucial for the first stage of the White movement. Denikin, A. Ocherki russkoi smuty. Bor’ba generala Kornilova, avgust 1917 g. – aprel’ 1918 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), pp. 81–2.

Chapter 8 1

Melancon, M. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), pp. 22–8.

2

Immonen, H. Mechty o Novoi Rossii. Viktor Chernov 1873–1952 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo Universiteta, 2015), pp. 172–3.

3

Morozov, K.N. Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov v 1907–1914 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), p. 4.

4

Chernov, V. The Great Russian Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), p. 120.

NOTES

513

5

Erofeev, N.D. Partiia sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov. Dokumenty i materialy. Tom 3 chast’ 1. Fevral’-oktiabr’ 1917 g. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), pp. 599–600.

6

Erofeev, Partiia, 331.

7

Mints, I.I. Istoriia Velikogo Oktiabria v trekh tomakh. Tom 2: Sverzhenie veremnnogo pravitel’stva. Ustanovlenie diktatury proletariata (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 906–7.

8

Immonen, Mechty, 186.

9

Kolonitskii, B. ’Tovarishch Kerenskii’: Antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kul’ta ’vozhdia naroda’. Mart – iiun’ 1917 goda (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2017) p. 77.

10 Immonen, Mechty, 183–4. 11 Abraham, R. Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 190. 12 Kostrikin, V.I. Zemel’nye komitety v 1917 godu (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), pp. 103–4. 13 Immonen, H. The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1988), pp. 117–29. 14 Immonen, Mechty, 193–4. 15 Immonen, Mechty, 195–8. 16 Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks Come to Power. The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1976), pp. 11, 17–38. 17 Mints, Istoriia 2, 614–15. 18 Tchernoff, O. New Horizons. Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution. Translated from the French by Crystal Herbert (London: Hutchinson, 1936; Hyperion Reprint Edition, 1975), p. 44. 19 Volia naroda 23 July 1917, p. 4. 20 Immonen, H. ‘Viktor Chernov in 1917. A Reappraisal’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 1, 2017, pp. 62–3. 21 Immonen, Mechty, 222–3. 22 Immonen, Mechty, 221–4. 23 Rosenberg, W.G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 144–5. 24 Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks, 174–5. 25 Immonen, Mechty, 230–2. 26 Immonen, Mechty, 236–7. 27 Immonen, Mechty, 236–7. 28 Swain, G. ‘A Soviet Government’? in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), pp. 331–3. 29 Bykhovskii, N.Ia. Vserossiiskii Sovet Krest’ianskikh Deputatov 1917 s predisloviem S.M. Dubrovskogo. (Moscow, 1929), pp. 288–2.

514

NOTES

30 Häfner, L. Die Partei der linken Sozialrevolutionäre in der russischen Revolution von 1917/18. Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas. 18. (Köln-Weimar-Wien: Böhlau, 1994), p. 286. 31 Radkey, O.H. Russia Goes to the Polls: The Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 23. 32 Bykhovskii, Vserossiiskii, 314. 33 Bykhovski, Vserossiiskii, 316. 34 Immonen, Mechty, 245. 35 Chernov, V.M. ‘Bor’ba za Uchreditel’noe Sobranie i ego Razgon’, Kentavr, 3, 1993, p. 119. 36 Bykhovskii, Vserossiiskii, 326–7. 37 Chernov, V.M. ‘Protokoly zasedanii Tsk partii eserov (iiun’ 1917 – mart 1918 g.) s kommentariami V.M.Chernova’, Voprosy Istorii, 9, 2000, pp. 8–9. 38 Chernov, Great Russian Revolution, 396,402. 39 Häfner, Die Partei, 263. 40 Swain, ‘Soviet Government’, 333–4. 41 Pokrovski, M.N. and Iakvovlev, Ia.A. (eds). Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudartsvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930), pp. 9, 25. 42 Pokrovski and Iakovlev, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 64. 43 Lenin, V.I. Pol’noe Sobranie Sochinenii, 5th edition, vol. 35 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), pp. 227–8. 44 Pokrovski and Iakovlev, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 106, 100, 217. 45 Chernov, V.M. Pered burei. Vospominaniia (New York: Izd. im. Chekhova, 1953), p. 364. 46 Pokrovski and Iakovlev, Uchreditel’noe Sobranie, 106, 110. 47 Vishniak, M.V. Vserossiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie (Paris: Sovremennie zapiski, 1932), p. 79. 48 Immonen, Mechty, 258–9. 49 Erofeev, Partiia, 295–304. 50 Lenin, PPS, 35, 23–7. 51 Immonen, Mechty, 257.

Chapter 9 1

Though this narrative focuses on the Bolsheviks from the February to the October Revolutions in 1917, Denis Mel’nik has called for a different timeline in ‘Revolutionary Economic Reasoning in the Context of Revolution: The Origins and Fate of Bolshevik Economics’ Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, pp. 722–31. Because Leftists at the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference held in 1915 provided ‘the nucleus’ for a

NOTES

515

post-war international communist movement that would be ‘a major political asset of Bolshevism’, Mel’nik proposes centring the Bolsheviks and Lenin in a revolutionary narrative extending from 1915 to 1921. By 1921, world revolution clearly was not imminent, which defied Lenin’s expectations. (726–7) 2

Badcock, S. ‘The Russian Revolution: Broadening Understandings of 1917’, History Compass, 6, 1, 2008, pp. 243–62; Kolonitskii, B. and Cohen, Yi E. ‘Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution: New Challenges to Old Paradigms?’ History and Memory, 21, 2, 2009, pp. 34–59; Lyandres, S. and Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Contemporary Russian Scholarship on the February Revolution in Petrograd; Some Centenary Observations’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 2, 2017, pp. 158–81; Novikova, L. ‘The Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, 4, 2015, pp. 769–85; Smith, S.A. ‘The Historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years On’, Kritika, 16, 4, 2015, pp. 733–49; Wade, R.A. ‘The Revolution at One Hundred: Issues and Trends in the English Language Historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 9, 1, 2016, pp. 9–38.

3

Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); and The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). A Soviet historian, Khana M. Astrakhan, came to some of the same conclusions as did Rabinowitch around the same time, according to Kolonitskii and Cohen in ‘Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution’, 39.

4

Wood, E.A. ‘February 23 and March 8: Two Holidays That Upstaged the February Revolution’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, p. 732.

5

Engel, B.A. Women in Russia, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 131.

6

Wood, E.A. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 14.

7

Clements, B.E. Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 102.

8

White, J.D. Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 355.

9

The Mezhraiontsy or ‘Interdistrictites’, members of the Mezhraionka, had preferred to establish informal linkages between district party organizations rather than relying on committees linked to the party leadership in emigration. Melancon, M. ‘Who Wrote What and When: Proclamations of the February Revolution in Petrograd, 23 February–1 March 1917’, Soviet Studies 40, 3, 1988, pp. 479–500; Melancon, M. ‘From the Head of Zeus: The Petrograd Soviet’s Rise and First Days, 27 February–2 March 1917’, in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2009).

10 Thatcher, I.D. ‘The St. Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913–1917: The Rise and Fall of a Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Unity Faction’, Slavonic and East European Revie, 87, 2, 2009, pp. 284, 319.

516

NOTES

11 Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution – Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 644. 12 Hasegawa, The February Revolution, 644. 13 Wade, R.A. The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 34–5; Burdzhalov, E.N. Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 86, 180; Shliapnikov, A. Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2 (Moscow: Politizdat, [1925] 1992), pp. 62–5, 91–5; Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 278–96. 14 Hasegawa, February Revolution, 334–42, 356–7; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 26–132; Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), f. 70, op. 4, d. 387, l. 132; Wade, Russian Revolution, 1917, 91, 94. 15 Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 65–6, 163–5; Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 33–5; and Longley, D.A. ‘The Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917’, Soviet Studies, 24, 1, 1972, p. 67; Suny, R.G. Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 595–6. 16 Hasegawa, The February Revolution, 649. 17 Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 445–8. 18 Suny, Stalin, 597. 19 Lih, L.T. ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), p. 321. 20 Suny, Stalin, 595. 21 Suny, Stalin, 599–601. 22 Lih, L.T. ‘Letter from Afar, Corrections from Up Close: The Bolshevik Consensus of March 1917’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, 4, 2015, pp. 799–806, 814. 23 Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky: The Revolution against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of ‘The Leader of the People’ (March – June 1917) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), p. 128. 24 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 110; Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 35–6. 25 Engel, Women in Russia, 138. 26 Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 31, 38. 27 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 108–9. 28 Clement, Bolshevik Feminist, 111. 29 Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 36. 30 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 112. 31 Engel, Women in Russia, 138. 32 Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 35, 38.

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33 Engel, Women in Russia, 139. 34 Longley, ‘The Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917’, 66, 72; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 439, 452; Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 36. 35 Suny, Stalin, 604–6. 36 Lih, L.T. ‘Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917’, The NEP Era: Soviet Russia, 1921–1928, 8 (2014), 55. 37 Lih, ‘Fully Armed’ 56–7. 38 Novikova, ‘The Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective’, 771–2. 39 Lih, ‘Fully Armed’, 62. 40 Blanc, E. Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics across the Russian Empire (1882–1917) (Leiden: Brill, 2021), p. 281. 41 Kolonitskii and Cohen, ‘Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution’, 39–40. 42 Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy, 238. 43 Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy, 276. 44 Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy, 280. 45 Thatcher, ‘The St. Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka’, 300–3, 316. 46 Thatcher, ‘The St. Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka’, 305, 318. 47 Suny, Stalin, 607. 48 Service, R. Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 2, Worlds in Collision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 145–6; Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 36–45. 49 Lih, L.T. ‘The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April 1917 in Context’, Russian History, 38, 2, 2011, pp. 199, 201. 50 Lih, ‘The Ironic Triumph’, 206, 210–11. 51 Lih, ‘The Ironic Triumph’, 220–4. 52 Lih, ‘The Ironic Triumph’, 230–1. 53 Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 43. 54 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 254–5. 55 Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy, 382. 56 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 256. 57 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 249. 58 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 253. 59 White, Red Hamlet, 363–4, 366–7. 60 White, Red Hamlet, 349, 351, 353, 357. 61 Suny, Stalin, 610. 62 Suny, Stalin, 618. 63 Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 46.

518

NOTES

64 Lih, ‘The Ironic Triumph’, 234. 65 Lih, ‘The Ironic Triumph’, 239–40. 66 Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in May 1917’, 320. 67 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 167. 68 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 258. 69 Koenker, D.P. and Rosenberg, W.G. Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 103–4, 115, 205. 70 Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 132; Wade, R.A. Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), pp. 43–4. 71 Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias, 61; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 389–91. 72 Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 2, 392–3; Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias, 97; Georgievsky, R.P. Ocherki po istorii krasnoi gvardii (Moscow: Fakel, 1919), pp. 66–7. 73 Anonymous, ‘Editorial’ Rabochaia gazeta, 43, 1917; Shliapnikov. A. (pseud. Belenin, A.), ‘O “krasnoi gvardii”’ Pravda, no. 49, 1917, p. 5. 74 Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, 2:132; Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias, 43–4. 75 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 5469, op. 1, d. 2, l. 4; Bulkin, F. Soiuz metallistov, 1906–1918 gg.: kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1926), pp. 180, 190. 76 GARF, f. 5469, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 2–5; Shkliarevsky, G. Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 26–9. 77 Shkliarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolution, xi–xiv. 78 Shkliarevsky, Labor in the Russian Revolution, 71; Smith, Red Petrograd, 110–12. 79 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 113. 80 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘“Workers’ Control and the Workers’ Constitution” the Fabzavkoms and the Trade Unions in 1917’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 115–16. See also Mikhailov’s contribution to this volume. 81 Wade, Russian Revolution, 1917, 172–80. 82 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 266–7. 83 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 112–13. 84 Steinberg, M.D. (ed.) Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 153. 85 Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, 135–214, and The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 32–4; Wade, Russian Revolution, 1917, 181–4; Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 3 (Moscow: Politizdat, [1927] 1992), 621.

NOTES

519

86

Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 114–15.

87

Lyandres, S. ‘The Bolsheviks’ “German Gold” Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations’, in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), pp. 1, 94–5.

88

Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, 320, 325.

89

Suny, Stalin, 612, 637, 641, 647–9.

90

Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, 325.

91

Suny, Stalin, 659.

92

Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 117–18.

93

Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 37.

94

Thatcher, ‘The St. Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka’, 284.

95

Thatcher, ‘The St. Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka’, 319.

96

Takiguchi, Ju. ‘Spreading the Revolution, Assembling Information, and Making Revolutionaries: The Bolshevik Party Congress, 1917–22’, in Read, C. et al (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 4: The Struggle for the State (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 427–8.

97

Suny, Stalin, 663.

98

Suny, Stalin, 667.

99

Shliapnikov, Kanun semnadtsatogo goda; Semnadtsatyi god, vol. 3, 620, 650–6, 669.

100 Flenley, P. ‘Industrial Relations and the Economic Crisis of 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 4, 2, 1991, pp. 184–209; Shliapnikov, ‘Nash tarif’, Metallist, 1–2, 191), pp. 4–5. 101 Smith, Red Petrograd, 125–6; Anonymous, ‘Iz zhizni soiuza’ Metallist, 1–2, 1917, p. 21. 102 Koenker and Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917, 236. 103 Wade, Russian Revolution, 1917, 194–205. 104 Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917, 166. 105 White, J.D. ‘Lenin, Trotsky and the Arts of Insurrection: The Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region, 11–13 October 1917’, in Wade, R.A. (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 189. 106 Smele, J.D. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years that Shook the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 26, 30. Smele disagrees with Geoffrey Swain and Evan Mawdsley who date the beginning of the Civil War to October 1917 and Rex Wade who places it in January 1918 with the closure of the Constituent Assembly (29, 32, 34). 107 Stites, R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 43.

520

NOTES

108 Anderson, K.B. ‘The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in World Politics’, in Budgen, S. et al. (eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 129. 109 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 43. 110 Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, 322. 111 Ryan, J. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 72. 112 Lohr, E. and Sanborn, J. ‘1917: Revolution as Demobilization and State Collapse’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, pp. 707–8. 113 Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy, 383. 114 Kolonitskii, B. ‘Political Tradition, Revolutionary Symbols, and the Language of the 1917 Revolution’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, 184. 115 Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, 319–20. 116 Novikova, ‘The Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective’, 773. 117 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 189; Suny Stalin, 675. 118 White, ‘Lenin, Trotskii, and the Arts of Insurrection’, 189–90. 119 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 187, 193–6, 201–6. 120 Lih, ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917’, 327–8. 121 White, ‘Lenin, Trotskii and the Arts of Insurrection’, 190–1, 194. 122 Shliapnikov, Alexander ‘K oktiabriu’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 10 (1922), 11–12. 123 Koenker and Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917, 297. 124 Koenker and Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917, 329. 125 White, ‘Lenin, Trotsky and the Arts of Insurrection’, 196–9. 126 White, ‘Lenin, Trotsky and the Arts of Insurrection’, 206. 127 Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 218–21, 234–48; Suny, Stalin, 677, 680–1. 128 Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks Come to Power, 222–310. 129 White, Red Hamlet, 373–8. 130 Smith, ‘The Historiography of the Russian Revolution 100 Years On’, 737; Buldakov, V.P. ‘Dynamics of Violence, 1914–1917’, in Orlovsky, Companion to the Russian Revolution, 90. Kolonitskii and Cohen, ‘Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution,” 4’, discuss Buldakov’s book Krasnaia smuta: priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (1997). See also Hasegawa, T. “C‘ime, Police, and Mob Justice in Petrograd during the Russian Revolutions of 1917”, i’ Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches, pp. 46–71. 131 Markwick, R.D. ‘Violence to Velvet: Revolutions – 1917–2017’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, p. 603. 132 Shliapnikov, ‘K oktiabriu’, 13–14.

NOTES

521

133 Shliapniko, ‘K oktiabriu’, 21–2; RGASPI, f. 70, op. 4, d. 387, l. 134; Shkliarevsky, Labour in the Russian Revolution, 96–7. 134 Clements, Bolshevik Feminist, 119–20. 135 Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 231.

Chapter 10 1

Häfner, L. ‘Zwischen “Vaterlandsverteidigung” und “Defätismus”. Die Partei der Sozialrevolutionäre und die ‚dritte Kraft “als Weg aus dem Krieg”’, in Jacob, F. and Altieri, R. (eds), Krieg und Frieden im Spiegel des Sozialismus 1914–1918 (Berlin: Metropol, 2018), p. 367; Häfner, L. ‘Revolutionary Defencism as a cul-de-sac? Socialist Parties and the Question of War and Peace in the Russian Revolution of 1917–18’, Revue des études slaves, 90, 1–2, 2019, pp. 48–9.

2

Albert, G. Das Charisma der Weltrevolution. Revolutionärer Internationalismus in der frühen Sowjetgesellschaft, 1917–1927 (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2017), p. 24.

3

Zemlia i volia, 5 May 1917, p. 2; and 21 May 1917, p. 1.

4

Zemlia i volia, 21 May 1917, p. 1.

5

Rakhmetov, V.N. (ed.), Pervyi Vserossiiskii s“ezd Sovetov R. i S. D., t. 1. (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1930), p. 307.

6

Delo Naroda, 25 May 1917: 1; see Häfner, L.‘“In Struggle You Will Find Your Rights”: The Socialist Revolutionaries’ Central Organ Delo Naroda and the Peace Question in Spring 1917’, in Schedewie, F. and Dierks, B. (eds), Imagining the Future in Russia’s February Revolution (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

7

Getzler, I. Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 52; Thatcher, I.D. ‘The St Petersburg/Petrograd Mezhraionka, 1913–1917: The Rise and Fall of a Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party Unity Faction’, Slavonic and East European Review, 87, 2, 2009, pp. 284–7. The Mezhraiontsy or ‘Inter-districtites’ had preferred to establish informal linkages between district party organizations rather than relying on committees linked to the party leadership in emigration.

8

See Douds, L. ‘“The dictatorship of the democracy?” The Council of People’s Commissars as Bolshevik-Left Socialist Revolutionary Coalition Government, December 1917–March 1918’, Historical Research, 90, 247, 2017, pp. 32–56; Häfner, L. ‘“Nur im Kampf wirst Du Dein Recht erlangen!” SozialistenRevolutionäre (Maximalisten) und Linke Sozialisten-Revolutionäre in der Russischen Revolution 1917–18: Ideologische Grundlagen, Organisation und Handeln’, in Kellermann, Ph. (ed.), Anarchismus und Russische Revolution (Berlin: Dietz, 2017), pp. 100–27; Iur’ev, A.I. Ėsery na istoricheskom perelome (1917–1918) (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011); Leont’ev, Ia.V. ‘Levoėserovskoe dvizhenie: organizatsionnye formy i mekhanizmy funktsionirovaniia’, Doctoral dissertation, Moscow State University, 2009.

522

9

NOTES

See Getzler, I. ‘Iulii Martov, the Leader Who Lost His Party in 1917’, Slavonic and East European Review, 72, 3, 1994, pp. 424–40 and his Sukhanov; Depretto, J.P. ‘Un menchevik face à la défaite: Martov et la révolution d’Octobre’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 50, 2, 2003, pp. 112–30; Aunoble, É. ‘Questioning the Use of Marxism. Yuli Martov’s Analysis of 1917’, Socialist History, 52, 2017, pp. 17–24.

10 See Sapon, V.P. Ternovyi venets svobody. Libertarizm v ideologii i revoliutsionnoi praktike rossiiskikh levykh radikalov (1917–1918 gg.) (Nizhnii Novgorod: Izd. Nizhegorod. un-ta, 2008) and his ‘Rossiiskie levye ėsery i maksimalisty v avangarde libertarnogo dvizheniia v 1917 g.’, Izvestiia vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii. Povolzhskii region. Gumanitarnye nauki, 3, 2007, pp. 17–23. 11 See Thatcher, ‘Mezhraionka’. 12 See King, F. ‘Between Bolshevism and Menshevism: The Social-Democratic Internationalists in the Russian Revolution’, Revolutionary Russia, 9, 1, 1996, pp. 1–18; Korostelëv, S.G. ‘Zhurnal «Letopis’» (1915–1917) i gazeta «Novaia zhizn’» (1917–1918) v istoriko-kul’turnom kontekste’, Dissertation, Moscow State University, 2014. 13 Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: the End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 106, 190; Savel’ev, P.Iu. ‘Rossiiskie sotsial-demokraty’, in Petrov, Iu.A. (ed.), Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda: vlast’, obshchestvo, kul’tura, vol. 1 (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2017), p. 688. 14 Melancon, M. ‘Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency?’, in Sevost’ianov, G.N. (ed.), Politicheskie partii v rossiiskikh revoliutsiiakh v nachale XX veka (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2005), pp. 252, 256, 263; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 644. 15 Iurenev, I. ‘Mezhraionka (1911–1917 gg.)’ Proletarskaia Revoliutsiia, 2, 25, 1924, p. 123; Leont’eva, L. ‘V riadakh mezhraionki’ Krasnaia Letopis’, 2, 11, 1924, p. 135; Institut Marksizm-Leninizm pri TsK KPSS Shestoi s”ezd RSDRP (bolshevikov). Avgust 1917 g.: Protokoly (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1958), p. 49; Mandel, D. The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution (Revised and expanded edition Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018), p. 63. 16 Shestoi s”ezd, 50; Rozental’, I.S. ‘Mezhraiontsy’, in Sorokin, A.K. (ed.), Rossiia v 1917 godu. Ėntsiklopediia (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2017), p. 551. 17 Ermanskii, O.A. Iz perezhitogo (1887–1921 gg.) (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), p. 121; Hasegawa, February Revolution, 105–6. 18 Novaia zhizn’, 13 September 1917, p. 4. 19 Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), f. 444, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 1–1ob, 3–4. 20 RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 11, ll. 33–33ob; and op. 1, d. 1, l. 18ob; Novaia zhizn’, 20 October 1917, p. 3; and 21 October 1917, p. 2. 21 RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 2–3; d. 11, ll. 1–24; d. 18, ll. 1–25.

NOTES

523

22 Shelokhaev, V.V. (ed.), Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov. Dokumenty, publitsistika 1906–1924 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 2002), p. 114. 23 Zemlia i volia, 19 May 1917, p. 4; Sapon, Ternovyi venets, 96; Getzler, I. Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 37–8. 24 Sapon, ‘Levye ėsery’, p. 17. 25 Bekhterev, S.L. Ėsero-maksimalistkoe dvizhenie v Udmurtii (Izhevsk: Udmurtskii institut istorii, iazyka i literatury UrO RAN, 1997), p. 45; Sapon, ‘Levye ėsery’, 20. 26 Shelokhaev, Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov, 7, 126. 27 Bekhterev, Ėsero-maksimalistkoe dvizhenie, 28–30. 28 Partiinyia izvestiia, 19 October 1917, pp. 21–24. 29 RGASPI, f. 274, op. 1, d. 19, l. 123; and d. 26, ll. 161ob–163; Melancon, M. ‘The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Uprising’, in Brovkin, V.N. (ed.), The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 64; Radkey, O.H. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism. Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 152–3, 267. 30 International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam (IISH), f. 840, 25 August 1917, p. 1. 31 Häfner, L. Die Partei der Linken Sozialrevolutionäre in der Russischen Revolution 1917–18 (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 84, 160. 32 Zemlia i volia, 27 May 1917, p. 1; Protokoly pervago S”ezda Partii Levykh Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov (Internatsionalistov) (Petrograd: Revoliutsionnyi Sotsializm, 1918), p. 33. 33 Häfner, Die Partei der Linken Sozialrevolutionäre, 449–52. 34 Smith, S.B. Captives of Revolution: the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), p. 17. 35 Iur’ev, Ėsery, 240, 247. 36 Häfner, Die Partei der Linken Sozialrevolutionäre, 5, 500–01. 37 Shelokhaev, Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov, 131–3. 38 Trudovaia respublika, 25 June 1917, p. 3; K rabochim 1917, p. 13; Zverin, A.A. Kak organizovat’ sovetskuiu vlast’ na mestakh (Samara: L. L. Shefer, 1918), pp. 2, 9–10, 45; Shelokhaev, Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov, 8. 39 Trudovaia respublika, 9 July 1917, p. 3; and 23 July 1917, p. 4. 40 Trudovaia respublika, 30 July 1917, p 3. 41 Shelokhaev, Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov, 113; Trudovaia respublika, 12 April 1918, p. 2; and 3 May 1918, pp. 2–3; Getzler, Kronstadt, 135, 138. 42 Zverin, Kak organizovat’, 10, 13; Nestroev, G.A. Maksimalizm i bol’shevizm, ch. 1-ia (Moscow: Maksimalist, 1919), p. 65; Volia truda, 1 September 1917, p. 4; Golos maksimalista, 25 April 1918, p. 5; Shelokhaev, Soiuz ėserov-maksimalistov, 129.

524

NOTES

43 Volia truda, 12 September 1917, p. 2. 44 Sotsialist-Revoliutsioner (Gel’singfors), 9 July 1917, p. 1; Za zemliu i voliu (Kronshtadt), 21 May 1917, p. 2. 45 Tretii s“ezd Partii Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov (Petrograd, 1917), pp. 214–19. 46 Internatsionalist, 20 July 1917, pp. 1–2. 47 Zemlia i volia (Odessa) 29 October 1917, p. 1. 48 Kamkov, B.D. Dve taktiki (Moscow: Revoliutsionnyi sotsializm, 1918), pp. 3, 14, 20; Protokoly, 103, 112; Trutovskii, V.E. Perekhodnyi period. (Mezhdu kapitalizmom i sotsializmom) (Petrograd: Revoliutsionnyi Sotsializm, 1918), p. 78. 49 RGASPI f. 444, op. 1, d. 22, l. 3ob. 50 Delo Naroda, 6 April 1917, 1; Trutovskii, Perekhodnyi period, 12, 14. 51 Trutovskii, Perekhodnyi period, 18–20. 52 Zemlia i volia, 17 May 1917, p. 1. 53 Eisenstadt, Sh.N. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 129, 1, 2000, pp. 1–29. 54 Rabochaia gazeta, 6 May 1917, p. 4. 55 Novaia zhizn’, 10 May 1917, p. 4; Galili, Z., Nenarokov, A. and Kheimson, L. (eds.) Men’sheviki v 1917 godu v 3-kh tt., t. 1: Ot ianvaria do iiul’skikh dnei (Moscow: Progress-Akademiia/ROSSPĖN, 1994), p. 308; Zemlia i volia, 27 May 1917, p. 2. 56 Delo naroda, 13 April 1917, p. 1; Zemlia i volia, 5 May 1917, p. 2; SotsialistRevoliutsioner (Kazan’) 14 May 1917, p. 2; Leont’ev, ‘Levoėserovskoe dvizhenie’, 49–51. 57 Depretto, ‘Un menchevik’, 114. 58 Galili, Ot ianvaria, 147. 59 E.g. Vpered, 8 April 1917, 1. 60 Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo, 174. 61 Thatcher, ‘Mezhraionka’, 300. 62 Novaia Zhizn’, 5 May 1917, p. 1; see the issue for 18 April 1917, p. 1. 63 Trudovaia respublika, 25 June 1917, p. 2; ibid. 9 July, pp. 3–4; see Häfner, L. and Immonen, H. ‘Russian Political Parties in the Russian Revolution of 1917–18’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 2020), p. 100. 64 Novaia Zhizn’, 20 September 1917, p. 1. 65 Protokoly, 39–45; Za zemliu i voliu (Kazan’), 1 November 1917, p. 1; SotsialistRevoliutsioner (Moscow) 10 November 1917, p. 2; Novaia zhizn’, 28 October 1917, p. 2. 66 Galili, Ot ianvaria, 591, 603–5; Mandel, Petrograd Workers, 7. 67 Novaia zhizn’, 18 April 1917, p. 1; RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 22, l. 5.

NOTES

525

68 RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 11, l. 2ob; Novaia zhizn’, 21 January 1918, p. 14; Swain, G. ‘A Soviet Government?’ in Orlovsky, Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 331–3. 69 RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 22, l. 5. 70 RGASPI, f. 444, op.1, d. 26, l. 5; King, ‘Between Bolshevism and Menshevism’, p. 8. 71 Delo Naroda, 6 April 1917, p. 1. 72 Zemlia i volia, 14 April 1917, p. 3; and 28 April 1917, pp. 1–2. 73 Galili, Ot ianvaria, 539; Sukhanov, N.N. Zapiski o revoliutsii. V 3-kh tomakh, book 3-4 (Moscow: Izd. pol. lit., 1991), pp. 266–8; Rakhmetov, Pervyi Vserossiiskii I, 336–9; Rakhmetov, V.N. and Miamlin, N.P. (eds.) Pervyi Vserossiiskii S“ezd Sovetov R. i S. D., t, 2 (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1931), pp. 90–1. 74 Rakhmetov, Pervyi Vserossiiski I, 307–15. 75 The table below is compiled according to Golostenov, M. ‘“Periodicheskaia pechat” politicheskikh partii Rossii v 1917 godu’, in Shelokhaev, V.V. (ed.), Politicheskie partii Rossii. Konets XIX – pervaia tret’ XX veka. Ėntsiklopediia (Moscow: ROSSPĖN, 1996), pp. 780–800; http://feb-web.ru/feb/periodic/default.asp; Galili, Z., Nenarokov, A. and Kheimson, L. (eds.) Men’sheviki v 1917 godu v 3-kh tt., t. 3: Ot kornilovskogo miatezha do kontsa dekabria, pt. 1 (Moscow.: Progress-Akademiia/ ROSSPĖN, 1996), p. 401; Getzler, Sukhanov, 70; Leont’ev, Levoėserovskoe dvizhenie, 32; Radkey, Agrarian Foes, 267; Rozental, ‘Mezhraiontsy’, 551; Shestoi s”ezd 1958, 50; Il’inskii, L.K. (ed.), Spisok povremennykh izdanii za 1917 g., ch. 1: Alfavitnyi spisok povremennykh izdanii (Petrograd.: Voennaia tipografiia, 1919), p. 96 et passim; Zhdanova, I.A. ‘Periodicheskaia pechat’, in Sorokin, A.K. (ed.), Rossiia v 1917 godu. Ėntsiklopediia (Moscow.: ROSSPĖN, 2017), p. 720; Zemlia i volia, 18 July 1917, p. 2. 76 Zhdanova, ‘Periodicheskaia pechat’, 719; Golostenov, ‘Periodicheskaia pechat’, 800. 77 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. R9591, op. 1, d. 46, ll. 1, 6ob; Häfner, Die Partei der Linken Sozialrevolutionäre, 153–7. 78 Galili, Ot ianvaria, 590. 79 Ermanskii, Iz perezhitogo, 156–7. 80 Shestoi s”ezd, p. 50. 81 Zemlia i volia, 9 May 1917, p. 1; and 19 May 1917, pp. 1, 4. 82 Document Centre for the Recent History of Saratov Region (TsDNISO), f. 151, op. 1, d. 4, l. 79ob. 83 Golos truda, 29 August 1917, p. 1. 84 Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, books 1–2, p. 91. 85 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘The Press and the Revolution’, in Acton, E.V., Cherniaev, V.Iu. and Rosenberg, W.G. (eds.) Critical Companion to the Revolution 1914–1921 (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 383. 86 Zemlia i volia, 19 May 1917, p. 3; and 21 May 1917, pp. 3–4.

526

NOTES

87

Zemlia i volia, 21 May 1917, p. 2; see Leont’ev, Ia.V. ‘Partiia sotsialistovrevoliutsionerov na putiakh raskola v 1917 godu’, in Airapetov, O.R. et al.(eds.), Russkii Sbornik. 1917 god (Moscow: Modest Kolerov, 2017), pp. 126–7.

88

Novaia zhizn’, 9 September 1917, p. 1.

89

Zemlia i volia (Odessa), 4 November 1917, p. 1.

90

Zemlia i volia, 10 May 1917, p. 1; and 21 May 1917, p. 1; see Fastovskij, V. Terrorismus und das moderne Selbst. Religiöse Semantiken revolutionärer Gewalt im späten Zarenreich (1860–1917) (Göttingen: V&R, 2018), p. 282.

91

Kamkov, B.D. ‘Bor’ba “tsennostei”’, Nash Put’. Organ Revoliutsionnago Sotsializma, 2, 1917, p. 11.

92

Tretii s”ezd, pp. 119, 141, 150, 153; Galili, Ot ianvaria, 589.

93

Izvestiia Gel’singforsskago Soveta, 3 October 1917, p. 2.

94

Bor’ba, 5 December 1917, p. 1.

95

Novaia Zhizn’, 20 September 1917, p. 1.

96

Novaia zhizn‘, 18 August 1917, p. 1; Kamkov, ‘Bor’ba “tsennostei” ’, 7, 11.

97

Volia truda, 15 October 1917, p. 3.

98

Sotsialist-Revoliutsioner (Gel’singfors), 18 July 1917, p. 1.

99

Bor’ba, 5 December 1917, p. 1.

100 Revoliutsionnaia rabotnitsa, April 1918, p. 1. 101 Zemlia i volia, 29 June 1917, p. 1. 102 Kamkov, ‘Bor’ba “tsennostei” ’, p. 9; Bor’ba, 8 December 1917, p. 2. 103 Narodnaia Niva, 20 June 1917, pp. 1–2; and 22 June 1917, pp. 1–2. 104 Kamkov, Dve taktiki, p. 29. 105 GARF, f. R5847, op. 1, d. 67, l. 41. 106 Zemlia i volia (Odessa), 4 November 1917, p. 1; Novaia zhizn‘, 21 January 1918, p. 14; and 31 January 1918, p. 1; Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, 11 February 1918, p. 8; RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 22, l. 3ob. 107 Novyi Luch, 3 December 1917, p. 4; Iskra, 20 November 1917, p. 1; Galili, Z., Nenarokov, A. and Kheimson, L. (eds.) Men’sheviki v 1917 godu v 3-kh tt., t. 3: Ot kornilovskogo miatezha do kontsa dekabria, pt. 2 (1997) (Moscow: ProgressAkademiia/ROSSPĖN, 1997), p. 586. 108 Galili, Ot kornilovskogo miatezha pt. 2, 583–4; Getzler, ‘Iulii Martov’, 424–5. 109 Brovkin, V.N. The Mensheviks After October (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 301–2. 110 Kamkov, Dve taktiki, 4. 111 Novaia zhizn‘, 21 January 1918, p.13. 112 Golos Sotsial-Demokrata, 11 February 1918, p. 4. 113 Häfner, ‘Revolutionary Defencism’, 61.

NOTES

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114 RGASPI, f. 444, op. 1, d. 26, l. 3. 115 Golos maksimalista, 25 April 1918, p. 4. 116 Martov, Iu.O. Mirovoi bol’shevizm (Berlin: Iskra, 1923), p. 38. 117 Novaia zhizn’, 3 April 1918, p. 1. 118 Zemlia i volia, 25 May 1917, p. 1; Rakhmetov, Pervyi Vserossiiskii s“ezd II, 13; Galili, Ot ianvaria, 539.

Chapter 11 1

‘Marsh anarkhistov’ (‘Anarchist March’), first published in 1908, with versions from Siberia and Ukraine. http://a-pesni.org/starrev/marchanarh.htm (accessed 28 May 2021).

2

Rublev, D. Rossiiskii anarkhizm v XX veke (Moscow: Rodina, 2019).

3

Eikhenbaum, B. ‘Mig soznaniia’, in Formal’nyi metod. Antologiia russkogo modernizma, vol. 2, pp. 488–93 (Moscow and Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi), p. 488.

4

Mosolov, A. Pri dvore imperatora (Riga: Filin, 1938), p. 81; Voeikov, V. S tsarem i bez tsaria: Vospominaniia poslednego dvortsovogo komendanta gosudaria imperatora Nikolaia II (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1995), pp. 286–7. One Kexholm Regiment soldier serving in that barracks at the time, Iakov Triapitsyn, later gained notoriety as a ruthless anarchist guerrilla commander in the Far East who ordered the town of Nikolaevsk-na-Amure to be blown up and burned in 1920: Kriven’kii, V. et al. ‘Iakov Triapitsyn bez legend: Novye dannye o sud’be partizanskogo komandira’, Acta Eroditorum, 26, 2018, p. 127.

5

Kryzhitskii, G. Mamont Dal’skii (Leningrad and Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965), pp. 179–86.

6

On Dal’skii discussing Proudhon’s theories of warfare in 1914: Utro Rossii, 10 January 1917; Birzhevye Vedomosti (morning edition), 8 and 15 March 1917.

7

Kryzhitskii, Mamont Dal’skii, 79, 176–8.

8

Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917. The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), pp. 237, 240; Avrich, P. The Russian Anarchists (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2005), p. 124. Avrich, originally published in 1967, remains the best survey of the Russian anarchist movement, but no archives could then be used and the focus is mostly social.

9

Morshanskaia, M. Iustin Zhuk: chelovek, politik, revoliutsioner (Moscow and St Petersburg: Samoopredelenie, 2018), p. 34.

10

Kolonitskii, B. Simvoly Vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’: k izucheniiu politicheskoi kul’tury Rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2012), p. 153; Simanovich, V. ‘Iz Shlissel’burgskoi kreposti na voliu (Vospominaniia ob osvobozhdenii)’, in Na voliu! Padeniie samoderzhaviia. Osvobozhdenie iz tsarskikh tiurem i katorgi (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), pp. 11–13.

528

NOTES

11 Bergman, J. The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) p. 147. 12 The full scope of Bleikhman’s speechmaking is apparent now that the protocols of Petrograd and Kronstadt Soviets have been published, as have the full protocols of the 6th Petrograd Factory Committee Conference. These books also rescued from obscurity many other rank-and-file revolutionaries, who had strong opinions which they could express with confidence and aplomb but were not good on paper. Petrogradskii Sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v 1917 godu. Tom 1 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), p. 198; Kronshtadtskii Sovet v 1917 godu. Protokoly i posatnovleniia. Tom 1 (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2017), p. 262; Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov. Part’ 4 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 2002), p. 168. 13 Ivanov, D. ‘“Weapons and Literature”: Petrograd Anarchist-Communists’ Publishing Efforts and the Kommuna Journal (March–July 1917)’, in Schedewie, F. and Dierks, D. (eds.), Imagining the Future in Russia’s February Revolution (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 14 Klich, no. 1, 1917. 15 Shtyrbul, A. Anarkhistskoe dvizhenie v Sibiri v pervoi chetverti XX veka. Antigosudarstvennyi bunt i negosudarstvennaia samoorganizatsiia trudiashchikhsia: teoriia i praktika. Part 1 (1900–1918) (Omsk: Izdatel’stvo Omskogo pedinstituta, 1996), p. 139. 16 Kriven’kii, V. Anarkhistskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XX veka: teoriia, organizatsiia, praktika (Moscow: Rosspen, 2018), p. 233. Some of the references in this volume are not reliable. 17 Ivanov, ‘Weapons and Literature’. 18 Rublev, D. Chernaia gvardiia: Moskovskaia Federatsiia Anarkhistskikh grupp v 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Common Place, 2020), pp. 56–8. Retribution against ‘provocateurs’ continued after the October coup – anarchist-communist Aleksandr Ge had a man he identified as a police agent arrested by the Soviets in late 1917, though not after much soul-searching. See Gorev, B. Anarkhizm v Rossii (ot Bakunina do Makhno) (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1930), p. 113. 19 On the role of mob justice in undermining state authority: Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution. Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017). 20 Rublev, Chernaia gvardiia, 102–25. 21 The Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists was a small far-left populist group – see Häfner’s contribution to this Handbook. As Menshevik historian Boris Gorev noted, ‘shared tactics (non-stop militancy, economic terror and principled vindication of expropriatorship)’ made anarchists and Maximalists often indistinguishable, and they were frequently closely aligned: Gorev, B. Anarkhisty, maksimalisty i makhaevtsy. Anarkhicheskie techeniia v pervoi russkoi revoliutsii (Petrograd: Kniga, 1918), p. 5. Radicals including Bolsheviks were often lumped

NOTES

529

together – writing in 1917, Gorev mentioned the ‘anarcho-maximalist sermon of the Leninites’ as a major threat to the revolution, see p. 3. 22 The episode is discussed in Ivanov, D. ‘“The Dying Criminal”: The Image of the Anarchist Shlioma Asnin and the Political Struggle in Petrograd, June 1917’, Historia Provinciae – The Journal of Provincial History, 4, 3, 2020, pp. 884–928. 23 Vladimir and Abba Gordins were prolific writers who contributed to anarchist publications in the heady revolutionary era. The Gordin brothers’ activities were later seen as having served the communist dictatorship by most of their comrades, but today they are considered as part of the artistic avant-garde. Their mystical fantasies of the world of Pananarchy begotten by the Union of the Five Oppressed by the combined forces of capital, state, men’s domination, ethnic discrimination and scientific education, in preclusion of intersectional theories, are actually interesting if bizarre literature when decoupled from the ideological context. See Brat’ia Gordiny. Anarkhiia v mechte (Moscow: Gileiia, 2019 and Strana Anarkhiia (utopii) (Moscow: Common Place, 2019). Their work is also placed in the context of Yiddish-language anarchist movement in Goncharok, M. Pepel nashikh kostrov. Ocherki istorii evreiskogo anarkhistskogo dvizheniia (idish-anarkhizm) (Moscow: Common Place, 2017). 24 Note of Nikiforov’a interrogation by an unidentified investigator, State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) 124.68.48.375. 25 There are several recent biographies of Nikiforova. Cotlenko, M. Maria Nikiforova: The Revolution without Delay. The Odyssey of an Anarchist throughout Ukraine (1885–1919) (Amsterdam: Roofdruk Editions, 2018) offers contemporary ‘insurrectionary’ anarchist views on history, and is based on an earlier publication, a scrupulous survey of published sources in Archibald, M. Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova – the Anarchist Joan of Arc (Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2007). In Russian, Leont’ev, Ia. ‘“Mariia Nikiforova. Chernaia ten” revoliutsii i anarkhii’, in Krasnye (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2018) is a good if slightly sensationalist summary of available sources which shows the many gaps in Nikiforova’s biography. 26 Nikitin, B. Rokovye gody. Novye pokazaniia uchastnika (Moscow: Airis Press, 2007), pp. 120, 123. 27 Memoirs of N.I. Pechnikov (1956), Central State Archive of Political-Historical Documents, St. Petersburg (TsGAIPD SPb) R-4000.5.1245.3-4. 28 Zhelezniakov, A. ‘Pamiatnaia tetrad’, in Matros Zhelezniak (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960), p. 35. 29 The classic account is still Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution. Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. For more on the insurgent soldiers and anarchist influence, see Tarasov, K. Soldatskii bol’shevizm. Voennaia organizatsiia bol’shevikov i levoradikal’noe dvizhenie v Petrogradskom garnizone (fevral’ 1917-mart 1918 g.) (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2017). 30 Uriadov, A. Mirovaia voina i vest’ o revoliutsii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politkatorzhan, 1931), pp. 27–9.

530

NOTES

31 Sledstvennoe delo bol’shevikov: Materialy Predvaritsel’nogo sledstviia o vooruzhennom vystuplenii 3-5 iiulia 1917 g. v g. Petrograde protiv gosudarstvennoi vlasti. Iiul’-oktiabr’ 1917 g. Book 2, Part 2. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2012), p. 502. Kolobushkin was the only prominent anarchist arrested in the aftermath of the July Days; he was released on bail in early September 1917. 32 Russkaia Volia (morning edition), 22 June 1917. 33 Petrogradskii Soviet, vol. 3, 321. 34 Stulov, P.M. ‘Pervyi Pulemetnyi polk v iiul’skie dni 1917 g’, Krasnaia Letopis’, 9 3, 1930, p. 93. 35 Immonen, H. Mechty o novoi Rossii. Viktor Chernov (1873–1952) (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo Universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2015), pp. 209–10; Zhenevskii, A. ‘Arest V. Chernova v iiul’skie dni 1917 g’, Krasnaia Letopis’ 6, 1926, pp. 68–75. 36 Kronshtadtskii Sovet, 409–10, 447; Nikitin, Rokovye gody, 368. 37 Ivanov, ‘Weapons and Literature’. 38 Sandomirskii, G. Torzhestvo antimilitarizma (k istorii anarkhistskogo dvizheniia) (Moscow: Tipografiia MGSNKh, 1920), p. 3. 39 Kropotkin, P. Pis’ma o tekushchikh sobytiiakh (Moscow: Zadruga, 1918), pp. 100, 110, 112. 40 A memoirist recalled his meetings with Kropotkin in England in the early 1900s: ‘I was astounded that Kropotkin attached more importance to the Russian liberal opposition than to the revolutionary workers’ movement.’ Posse, V. Vospominaniia V.A. Posse (1905–1917 gg.) (Petrograd: Mysl’, 1923), p. 95. On Kropotkin’s extensive contacts with English liberals: Pitt, S. ‘Evolution and Revolution: Kropotkin’s revolutionary ideas and his British Liberal connections.’ Unpublished paper given at the Study Group on the Russian Revolution Webinar, April 15, 2021. 41 See Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) 42 Swain, G. The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1996), p. 105. 43 Russkaia Volia (evening edition), 31 May 1917. 44 Ivanov, ‘Weapons and Literature’; Sandomirskii, Torzhestvo, 51. 45 Goldman, E. The Truth about the Boylsheviki (New York: Mother Earth, 1918), p. 4. 46 Sandomirskii, Torzhestvo, 7; Rublev, Rossiiskii anarkhizm, 246–7; Lebedev, N. P.A. Kropotkin (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925), p. 72; Avrich, Russian Anarchists, 136; Udartsev, S. Kropotkin (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literature, 1989), p. 18. The English typescript of Goldman’s obituary, dated 16 February 1921 and published in Byloe 17, 1922, is in the Russian State History Archive (RGIA) 1093.1.56, quote on l. 5. Kropotkin’s undated note to Kerenskii discussing a meeting is in GARF 1807.1.449.1. 47 Morshanskaia, Iustin Zhuk, 38–40; Ivanov, D. ‘“Bit” po golovam burzhuev’: voenizirovannoe nasilie v Shlissel’burge, 1917–1919 gg’, Ab Imperio, 2, 2019, pp. 202–6.

NOTES

531

48 Makhno, N. Vospominaniia (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), p. 45. 49 Al’tshul’, L. ‘Pobeg iz tiur’my’, in Matros Zhelezniak (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1960), pp. 79–84. 50 Izmailov, N. ‘Na revoliutsionnoi Baltike’, in Matros Zhelezniak, pp. 88–90. 51 Khovrin, N. ‘My podruzhilis’ v boiakh’, in Matros Zhelezniak, p. 91. 52 In 1912, Mokrousov fled from his ship in the Baltic Fleet after strangling a suspected informer with his bare hands, and lived in Scandinavia, Argentina and Australia before returning in 1917. Mokrousov, ‘V noch’ na 25-e oktiabria’, 464–74; Polikarpov, V. Buriam navstrechu (Simferopol’: Krymizdat, 1961), pp. 15–16, 33–40; Khovrin, N. Baltiitsy idut na shturm (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1966), p. 9. 53 I.S. Bleikhman for the Federation of Anarchist-Communists, G.M. Bogatskii for the Union of Independent Anarchists and V.S. Shatov for the Union of AnarchoSyndicalist Propaganda, appointed on 28–29 October 1917. Fraiman, A. Forpost sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii. Petrograd v pervye mesiatsy Sovetskoi vlasti (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969), pp. 38–9. Other anarchists joined the committee later but remained a small minority. 54 Khovrin, ‘My podruzhilis’ v boiakh’, 92–4; Izmailov, N. and Pukhov, A. Tsentrobalt. Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Kaliningrad: Kaliningradskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1960), p. 215. On Berg’s outstanding qualities as a rally orator: Khovrin, Baltiitsy, 84. 55 Baltiiskie moriaki v bor’be za vlast’ Sovetov (noiabr’ 1917-dekabr’ 1918) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968), p. 72; on his later participation in the Baku Commune in whose forces he was the chief signals officer before becoming martyred in September 1918 as one of the ‘26 Baku commissars’, see Burdzhalov, E. Dvadtsat’ shest’ bakinskikh komissarov (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1938), pp. 65, 72, 106. 56 Baltiiskie moriaki, 50, 60, 316; Khovrin, ‘My podruzhilis’ v boiakh’, 94–6; Izmailov and Pukhov, Tsentrobalt, 235–41. 57 Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe sobranie: Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014), p. 136; Khovrin, ‘My podruzhilis’ v boiakh’, 96; Baltiiskie moriaki, 68–9. 58 Tretii Vserossiiskii s’’ezd Sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh i krest’ianskikh deputatov (Petrograd: Priboi, 1918), p. 15; Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe sobranie, 136. 59 Gor’kii, M. Nesvoevremennye mysli: Zametki o revoliutsii i kul’ture (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), p. 155. 60 Fraiman, Forpost, 210–11; Ioffe, G. ‘“Doloi Vremennoe pravitel’stvo!” (Sud’by “vremennykh” posle padeniia Zimnego)’, Otechestvennaia Istoriia, 5, 2006, pp. 115–16; Musaev, V. ‘Ubiistvo deputatov Gosudarstvennoi Dumy A.I. Shingareva i F.F. Kokoshkina – politicheskoe ili ugolovnoe prestuplenie?ct’, in Tavricheskie chteniia 2009. Aktual’nye problemy istorii parlamentarizma v Rossii (1906–1917 gg.) (St Petersburg: Tsentr istorii parlamentarizma, 2010), pp. 345–52. 61 Hufvudstadsbladet, 16 August 1919. The sailor, who was probably Kreis, served on Okean, a training ship from which Zhelezniakov deserted in 1916. 62 Musaev, ‘Ubiistvo deputatov’, 350.

532

NOTES

63 Bonch-Bruevich, V. Vospominaniia o Lenine (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), pp. 171–98; Lenin, V.I. ‘Predpisanie V.D. Bonch-Bruevichu’, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition, vol. 50 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1970), p. 27. 64 Quoted in Kolonitskii, Simvoly Vlasti, 122–3. 65 Chudnov, M. Pod chernym znamenem (zapiski anarkhista) (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1930), pp. 43, 157. 66 Burevestnik, 10, 19 and 23 January 1918. 67 Rublev, Chernaia gvardiia, 281–2, 439–41. 68 Politicheskie deiateli Rossii. 1917. Biograficheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Bol’shaia Rossiiskaia entsiklopediia, 1993), p. 77. 69 Velidov, A. K istorii VChK-OGPU. Bez vymyslov i kupiur (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 2011), pp. 432–40. 70 Bezvlastie, no. 1, March 1918, 14–15. 71 Rublev, Rossiiskii anarkhizm, 302–5 72 Kalandarishvili was already married when he met Mkervali, and she posed as his sister. Kozhevin, V. Legendarnyi partizan Sibiri (Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1987), pp. 14, 59–60, 87–8; Tsereteli, M. Narodnyi geroi Nestor Kalandarishvili. Vospominaniia soratnika (Tbilisi: Literatura da khelovneba, 1965), pp. 36–8. 73 Quoted in Shtyrbul, Anarkhistskoe dvizhenie, 167. 74 Kozhevin, Legendarnyi partizan, 24–35; Kozhevin, V. Boevye soratniki Kalanarishvili (Ulan-Ude: Buriatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1975), pp. 6–18. Kalandarishvili joined the Communist Party shortly before he was killed in 1922, which made him acceptable for Soviet historians. His comrade Ivan Strod wrote some memoirs, Civil War in the Taiga. A Story of Guerrilla Warfare in the Forests of Eastern Siberia (Moscow and Leningrad: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1933). 75 Tsereteli, Narodnyi geroi, 25–6. 76 Shtyrbul, Anarkhistskoe dvizhenie, 168. 77 Tsereteli, Narodnyi geroi, 44. 78 Reds sometimes executed captured White officers by driving nails into epaulets on their shoulders. 79 Iaroslavskii, A. Krov’ i radost’ (Irkutsk: Izdanie Kul’turno-prosvetitel’skogo otdela pri otriade Kalandarishvili, 1919), pp. 8–9. The original partly rhymes. 80 Quoted in Gorev, Anarkhizm v Rossii, 100. 81 Ravich-Cherkasskii, M. Anarkhisty (Khar’kov: Proletarii, 1930), p. 56. 82 Khudaikulov, M. Iz istorii bor’by bol’shevistskoi partii s anarkhizmom (Tashkent: Uzbekistan, 1984), p. 51. 83 Fraiman, Forpost, 190–3.

NOTES

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84 von Hagen, M. ‘The First World War’, in Suny, R. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. III: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 110–11. 85 Sadoul, J. Zapiski o bol’shevitskoi revoliutsii. 1917–1919 (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), pp. 233–4; Rublev, Rossiiskii anarkhizm, 317–18. 86 The operation in Moscow, its reasons, conduct and aftermath is exhaustively discussed in Swain, G. ‘The Bolshevik Anti-Anarchist Action of Spring 1918’, Revolutionary Russia, 33, 2, 2020, pp. 221–45; and with many new sources in Rublev, Chernaia gvardiia. 87 Khudaikulov, Iz istorii bor’by, 86, 93–4. 88 Starikov, S. Levye sotsialisty v Velikoi Rossiiskoi revoliutsii. Mart 1917-iiul’ 1918 gg. (Na materialakh Povolzh’ia) (Ioshkar-Ola: Mariiskii Gosudarstennyi universitet, 2004), pp. 375–479. 89 Firsenkov, I. Maksimalist. Dnevnik uchastnika grazhdanskoi voiny 1918–1921 gg. (St Petersburg: Morskaia Entsiklopediia, 2017). 90 Furmanov, D. Put’ k bol’shevizmu. 1917–1918 (Ivanovo-Voznesensk) (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927). 91 Rublev, D. ‘Anarkhisty i Krasnaia Armiia’, in 100 let Krasnoi armii (Moscow: AIROXXI, 2018), p. 180. A compendium of what is known about anarchists’ role in the civil war is in Ermakov, V. Anarkhisty na frontakh Grazhdanskoi voiny 1917–1922 gg. (St Petersburg: SPbGIK, 2018). 92 Ioffe, G. Krakh rossiiskoi monarkhicheskoi kontrrevoliutsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), p. 163. On the same day, 13 June, Nicholas’s brother Mikhail Romanov was killed by a group of maverick Perm’ Bolsheviks led by Gavriil Miasnikov: Avrich, P. ‘Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G.T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group’, Russian Review, 43, 1, 1984, pp. 4–5. 93 Kovalevich, K. Sviatye ogon’ki revoliutsii (Moscow: Common Place, 2018). A collection of his writings with glimpses into the lesser-known parts of the anarchist movement. Valuable material on underground anarchists and related matters is in Na vnutrennem fronte Grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2019), pp. 129–270. 94 Smith, S.A. ‘The Revolutions of 1917–1918’, in Suny The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. III, p. 139. 95 Lotman, J. Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London: Tauris, 1990), p. 69. 96 Thatcher, I. ‘Scripting the Russian Revolution’, in Baker, K.M. and Edelstein, D. (eds.), Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 223–4. 97 Lotman, J. Culture, Memory and History. Essays in Cultural Semiotics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 227–8.

534

NOTES

Chapter 12 1

Berdiaev, N.A. Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), p. 119.

2

Mironov, B.N. ‘“Rabochie v revoloutsii 1917 g.: sub”ekt istorii ili pushechnoe miaso’, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2, 394, 2017, pp. 24–35. Also available as Mironov, B.N. ‘Cannon Fodder for the Revolution. The Russian Proletarian in 1917’, Kritika, 18, 2, 2017, pp. 351–70.

3

See the same Kritika volume.

4

Bekhterev, S.L. and Bekhterev, L.N. ‘Mestnoe samoupravlenie v retrospektive imperskogo i rannesovetskogo perioda (na materialakh Izhevska)’, Vestnik Udmurtskogo universiteta: Seriia Istoriia i Filologiia, 27, 4, 2017, pp. 535–43. au Bekhterev L.N. ‘Zavodskii poselok Urala kak proobraz industrial’nogo goroda i istoriko-kul’turnyi fenomen’, in Kolonitskii, B.I. et al (eds.), Kul’tura gorodov Rossiisskoi imperii na rubezhe XIX-XX vv. (Materialy mezhdunarodnogo kollokviuma, St. Petersburg, 14–17 iunia 2004 g.) (St. Peterburg: Evropeiskii Dom, 2009), pp. 193–205.

5

See Borodkin, L, Valetov, T., Smirnova, Iu. and Shil’kina, I. ‘Ne rublem edinym’: Trudovye stimuly rabochikh-tekstilshchikov dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010); Vodarskii, Ia.E. Issledovaniia po istorii russkogo goroda (fakty, obobshcheniia, aspekty) (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2006), pp. 96–149.

6

Rashin, A.F. Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii. Istoriko-ekonomicheskie ocherki (Moscow: Politizdat, 1958), p. 208.

7

Gaponenko, L.S. (ed.) Istoriia sovetskogo rabochego klassa. V dvukh tomakh. Tom 1. Rabochii klass v Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i na zashchite ee zavoevanii, 1917–20 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), p. 337; Istoriia rabochikh Leningrada. V dvukh tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), pp. 10–11.

8

For example, Babushkin, I.V. Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925); Kanatchikov, S.I. Iz istorii moego bytiia (Moscow, 1932); Moiseenko, P.A. Zapiski starogo revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966); Shapalov, A.S. V bor’be za sotsializm (Moscow, 1934); and Shotman, A. Zapiski starogo bol’shevika (Leningrad, 1963). For Kanatchikov, see also Zelnik, R. (ed.) A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

9

Mikhailov, N.V. ‘Rabochie i rossiiskoe obshchestvo v kontse XIX – nachale XX v.: istoki rossiiskogo radikalizma’, in Revoliutsionnyi protsess i obshchestvennoe soznanie: Sbornik statei (St. Peterburg: Liki Rossii, 2009), pp. 19–20, table 1 pp. 22–3.

10 Ivanov, L.M. ‘Preemstvennost’, in fabrichno-zavodskogo truda i formirovanie proletariata v Rossii’ in Rabochii klass i rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii, 1861–1917 (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), p. 140. 11 Drobizhev, V.Z., Sokolov, A.K. and Ustinov, V.A. Rabochii klass Sovetskoi Rossii v pervyi god proletarskoi diktatury (Opyt strukturnogo analiza po materialam professional’noi perepisi 1918 g.) Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta, Moscow State University Publishers, 1974), p. 86 (table 3).

NOTES

535

12 Postnikov, S.P. and Fel’dman, M.A. Sotsiokul’turnyi oblik promyshlennykh rabochikh Rossii v 1900–1941 gg. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), pp. 179–81; Rashin, Formirovanie, 122. 13 Drobizhev, Sokolov and Ustinov Rabochii klass 222 (appendix 4). 14 Korelin, A. P. (ed.) Rossiia. 1913 god: Statistiko-dokumental’nyi spravochnik (St. Petersburg: Blits, 1995), p. 223 (table 6); Laverychev, V Ia. (ed.) Rabochii klass Rossii, 1907 – fevral’ 1917 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), pp. 246–8, especially 246 table 10; Sidorov, A.L. Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), p. 412. 15 See Kirianov, Iu.I. Zhiznennyi uroven’ rabochikh Rossii (konets XIX – nachalo XX v) (Moscow: Nauka, 1979); Mironov, B.N. Blagosostoianie naseleniia i revoliutsii v imperskoi Rossii, XVII – nachala XX v.) Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2012). 16 Ryndziunskii, P.G. Kres’tiane i gorod v kapitalisticheskoi Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX v. (Vzaimootnoshenie goroda i derevni v sotsial’no-ekonomicheskom stroe Rossii) (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), p. 39. 17 Shishkin, V.F. Tak skladyvalas’ revoliutsionnaia moral’ (Istoricheskii ocherk) (Moscow: Mysl, 1967), pp. 17–42. 18 Iakhshiian, O.Iu. ‘Sobstvennost’ v mentalitete russkikh krest’ian’, in Mentalitet i agrarnoe razvitie Rossii (XIX-XXvv.). Materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996), p. 100; Gordon, A.V. ‘ Tip khoziaistvovaniia – obraz zhizni – lichnost’’, in Krest’ianstvo i industrial’naia tsivilizatsiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), p. 137. 19 Danilova, L.V. and Danilov, V.P. ‘Krest’ianskaia mental’nost’ i obshchina’, in Mentalitet i agrarnoe razvitiie, p. 24. 20 Brooks, J. When Russia Learned to Read. Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 355. 21 Gvozdev, S. Zapiski fabrichnogo inspektora (1894–1908) (Moscow: Dorovatorskii i Charushnikov, 1911), p. 189. 22 See Grabko, M.E. Deiatel’nost’ Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v rabochei srede Moskovskoi gubernii v kontse XIX – nachale XX v. (Moscow: PGTPUB, 2017); Zelnik, R. ‘“Neprivychnomu glazu”: vera i bezverie u peterburgskikh rabochikh v 1870-e gg’, in Lichnost’. Protest. Istoriia: Sbornik statei (St. Petersburg: Nestoristoriia, 2007), pp. 145–77; Kirianov, Iu.I. ‘Mentalitet rabochikh Rossii na rubezhe XIX-XX vv’, in Potolov, S.I. (ed.), Rabochie i intelligentsia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii, 1861–fevral’ 1917 (St. Petersburg: Blits, 1997), pp. 55–76; Korobkov, Iu.D. ‘“Otnoshenie ural’skikh rabochikh k vlasti v kontse XIX – nachale XX v.”’ in Ural v kontekste rossiiskoi modernizatsii (Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias, 2005), pp. 368–87; Mikhailov, N.V. ‘abochie i rossiiskoe obshchestvo’,36–9; Postikov and Fel’dman, Sotsiokul’turnyi oblik, 292–3; Rogoznyi, P.G. Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ i Russkaia revoliutsiia: Ocherki istorii (Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2018); Herrlinger, P. Working Souls. Russian Orthodox and Factory Labor in St. Petersburg, 1881–1917 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2007); Firsov, S.V. ‘“Workers and the Orthodox Church

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NOTES

in Early Twentieth Century Russia”’, in Melancon, M. and Pate, A.K. (eds.), New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1848–1918 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2002), pp. 95–122. 23 See Pomper, P. The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia (Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc, 1970); Zelnik, R.E. (ed.) Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflctions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 24 Kanatchikov, S.I. Iz istorii moego bytiia (Moscow: Staryi Bol’shevik, 1932), p. 154. 25 ‘Bor’ba’, Rabochaia mysl’’, no. 2, December 1897 (no author). 26 ‘Kto bedit’, Rabochaia mysl’’, no. 2, December 1897 (no author). 27 Ermakov, P.P. Vospominaniia gornorabochego (Sverdlovsk: Sverdlgiz, 1947), pp. 126–7. 28 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘The Collective Psychology of Russian Workers and Workplace: Self-Organization in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Melancon and Pate, New Labor History, pp. 77–94. 29 Baldin, K.E. Rabochee kooperativnoe dvizhenie v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX – nachale XX v. (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2006), pp. 118–32, 238–9, 304–5 (appendix 3). 30 Mironov, K. Iz vospominanii rabochego (Moscow, 1906), pp. 4–5. 31 Pushkareva, I.M. (ed) Trudovye konflikty i rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii na rubezhe XIX-XX vv. (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), p. 131. 32 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘Vozhaki fabrichno-zavodskikh rabochikh Peterburga 1905–07 gg’, in Rabochie i rossiiskoe obshchestvo. Vtoraia polovina XIX – nachale XX v.: Sbornik statei i materialov, posviashchennyi pamiati O. N. Znamenskii (St. Petersburg: Glagol, 1994), p. 56. 33 Postnikov and Fel’dman, Sotsiokul’turnyi oblik, 179–81; Rashin, Formirovanie, 579, 601. 34 The number of complaints by workers concerning ‘nasty forms of address and beatings’ rose from 1,275 in 1904 to 6,855 in 1905, and from 1,031 in 1911 to 12,595 in 1912. See Svod otchetov fabrichnykh inspektorov za 1904 (St. Petersburg, 1907), p. ix; and the relevant volumes published in 1908 (xiv), 1911(lvii) and 1913 (lviii). 35 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘Industrial’nyi trud i rabochii protest v Rossii, 1917–29’, in Obychnyi chelovek v neobychnoe vremia: k 6 – letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia S. V. Iarov. Sbornik Statei (St. Petersburg: European University at St. Petersburg, 2021), pp. 38–58. 36 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘Workers’ Control and the “Workers’ Constitution”: The Fabzavkoms and the Trade Unions in 1917’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), pp. 105–23. 37 Balabanov, M. Ot 1905 k 1917 g. Massovoe rabochee dvizhenie (Moscow & Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1927), pp. 35–7, 207–8. 38 Balabanov, Ot 1905 k 1917 g., 237. 39 Pankratova, A.M. Fabzavkomy Rossii v bor’be za sotsialisticheskuiu fabriku (Moscow: Krasnaia Nov’, 1923), p. 118.

NOTES

537

40 See Nikolaev, A.B. Revoliutsiia i vlast’: IV Gosudarstvennaia duma 27 fevralia – 3 marta 1917 g. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RGPU, 2005); Ganelin, R.Sh. (ed.) Pervaia mirovaia voina i konets Rossiiskoi imperii. Tom 3: Fevra’lskaia revoliutsiia (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2014). 41 See Burdzhalov, E.N. Vtoraia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia: Vosstanie v Petrograde (Moscow: Nauka, 1967) and the companion volume Vtoraia rossiiskoi revoliutsiia: Moskva, front, periferiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1971); Leiberov, I.P. Na shturm samoderzhaviia: Petrogradskii propletariat v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny i Fevral’skoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1979); Ferro, M. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 42 Petrogradskii sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v 1917 g.: Dokumenty i materialy. Tom 1, 27 fevralia – 31 marta 1917 g. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), pp. 136, 188, 190. 43 Galili, Z. Lidery menshevikov v russkoi revoliutsii. Sotsial’nye realii i politicheskaia strategiia (Moscow: Respublika, 1993), p. 74. 44 Sobolev, G.L. Proletarskii avangard v 1917 g.: Revoliutsionnaia bor’ba I revoliutsionnoe soznanie rabochikh Petrograda (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SanktPeterburgskogo universiteta, 1993), pp. 64–6. 45 Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP(b) v 1917 godu: Protokoly i materialy zasedanii (St. Petersburg: Bel’veder, 2003), p. 78. 46 Sobolev, G.L. Revoliutsionnoe soznanie rabochikh i soldat Petrograda v 1917 g.: Period dvoevlastie (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), pp. 63–4; Blinov, A.S. Tsentral’nyi sovet fabzavkomov Petrograda, 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Profizdat, 1982), p. 33. 47 See Buldakov, V. Krasnaia smuta. Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo nasiliia (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997). 48 See Churakov, D.O. Fabzavkomy v bor’be za proizvodstvennuiu demokratiiu. Rabochee samoupravlenie v Rossii, 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Promotei, 2005). 49 Lenin, V.I. ‘Pis’ma iz daleka. Pis’mo 5, 26 marta 1917’, in Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (PPS) vol. 31 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), p. 56; also his ‘O zadachakh proletariata v dannoi revoliutsii, 4/5 aprelia 1917 g’. in the same volume, p. 8. 50 Lenin, ‘Petrogradskaia obshchegorodskaia konferentsiia RSDRP(b). Zakliuchitel’noe slovo po dokladu o tekushchem momente. 14 (27) aprelia’, PPS, 31, p. 247. 51 Lenin ‘VII (Aprel’skaia) vserossiiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP(b), 24–29 aprelia 1917 g. Nabroski k tezisam resoliutsii o Sovetakh, 25–26 aprelia 1917 g.’, PPS, 31, p. 385. 52 Lenin ‘Voina i revoliutsiia. Lektsiia 14 (27) maia 1917 g.’, PPS, 32 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969, p. 95. 53 Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP(b), 219. 54 Peterburgskii komitet RSDRP(b), 240. 55 Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), p. 59.

538

NOTES

56 See Blinov, Tsetral’nyi sovet; Itkin, M.L. Rabochii kontrol’ nakanune Velikogo Oktiabria (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1984)’ Znamenskii, O.N. Piterskie rabochie i Velikii Okt’iabr (Leningrad: Nauka, 1987); Sobolev Revoliutsionnoe soznanie; Stepanov, Z.V. Fabzavkomy Petrograda v 1917 g. (Leningrad: Naukoa, 1985); Cherniaev, B.Iu. ‘Rabochii kontrol’ i al’ternativy ego razvitiia v 1917 g’, in Rabochie i rossiiskoe obshchestvo. Vtoraia polovina XIX – nachalo XX v. Sbornik statei i materialov, posviashchennyi pamiati O. N. Zenamenskogo (St. Petersburg: Glagol, 1994), pp. 164–77; Mandel, D. The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime; from the February Revolution to the July Days (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Melancon, M. ‘Into the Hands of the Factory Committees’: The Factory Committee Movement and Discourses, February to June 1917’, in Melancon and Pate, New Labor History; Smith, S.A. Red Petrograd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 57 Protokoly zasedanii fabkoma Bol’shoi Ivanovo-Voznesenskoi manufaktury (Kuvaevskoi) ot 2 iiunia, i 1, 10 avgusta 1917 g. in Ivanovo State Archives (GAIO) f. R-793, op. 1, d. 1, l. 21; d. 1a, l. 3, 7ob. 58 Kopiia protokola Konferentsii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov g. Tveri, 12–14 oktiabria 1917 g. in Tver’ Centre for Documentation of Recent History (TTsDNI) f. 114, op. 1, d. 83, ll. 4-5. 59 Itkin, Rabochii kontrol’ 115. 60 Cited in Sobolev, Revoliutsionnoe soznanie, 65. 61 Churakov, D.O. Russkaia revoliutsiia i rabochee samoupravlenie, 1917 (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1998), pp. 121, 129. 62 Reili, D. Dzh. Politicheskie sud’by rossiiskoi gubernii: 1917 v Saratove (Saratov: Slovo, 1995), p. 98. (See also Raleigh, D.J. Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.) 63 See Blinov, Tsetral’nyi sovet and Itkin, Rabochii kontrol’, 35–9. 64 Rabochii kontrol’ v promyshlennykh predpriiatiiakh Petrograda v 1917–1918 gg.:Sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1947), p. 101. 65 Cherniaev, V.Iu. ‘Rabochii kontrol’ i al’ternativy ego razvitiia’, in Rabochie i rossiisskoe obshchestvo, 166–7. 66 Fabrichno-zavodskie komitety Petrograda v 1917 g.: Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), pp. 29, 31. 67 ‘Protokol zasedaniia zavodskogo komiteta zavoda ‘Arsenal Petra Velikogo’ ot 10 maia 1917 g’, in Fabrichno-zavodskie komitety Petrograda v 1917 g.: Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), pp. 81–2. 68 ‘Protokol sovmestnogo zasedaniia zavodskogo komiteta i administratsii Patronnogo zavoda ot 19 aprelia 1917 g’, in Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), 207. 69 Rabochii kontrol‘, 102–3. 70 Sobolev, Revoliutsionnoe soznanie, 79–81. 71 Sobolev, Revoliutsionnoe soznanie, 72–3.

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72 Protokoly zasedanii rabochego zavodskogo komiteta Galernogo ostrovka ot 20 iiunia i 20 sentiabria 1917 g. in Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), pp. 73, 92. 73 Protokol ob”edinennogo zasedaniia zavodskogo komiteta Putilovskogo zavoda i predstavitelei raiionnogo soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov ot 13 sentiabria 1917 g. in Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), pp. 478–9. 74 Protokol sovmestnogo zasedania zavodskogo komiteta Arsenala Petra Velikogo s predstaviteliami mestnykh komitetov. Ne pozdnee 13 avgusta 1917 g. in Protokoly (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982) p. 120. 75 As note 74, p. 235. 76 Nosach, V.I. Profsoiuzy Sankt-Peterburga-Petrograda-Leningrada. V dvukh knigakh. Kniga 1: 1905–1930 gg. (St. Petersburg: Nestor, 2009), pp. 107–8, 116–18. 77 Nosach, Profsoiuzy, 107, 127. 78 Shabalin, B.I. Fabrika na Obvodnom: Kniga 1, 1860–1917 (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1949), pp. 292–5. See also the journal Trudorezina nos. 1, 22 April; 3, 6 May; 6, 27 May; 7, 3 June, 8, 10 June, 14, 22 July; 15, 29 July, 17, 12 August and 18, 2 September. 79 Mikhailov, N.V. ‘Pechatnyi Dvor’ na sluzhbe knige i Otechestva: 1827–2005 (St. Petersburg: Pechatnyi Dvor, 2005), pp. 148–53. 80 Churakov, Fabzavkomy, 119. 81 Pankratova, A.M. Fabzavkomy i profsoiuzy v revoliutsii 1917 g. (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), pp. 3–8. 82 Pankratova, A.M. Politicheskaia bor’ba v rossiiskom profdvizhenii 1917–1918 gg. (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo gubprofsoveta, 1927), pp. 31–2, 34, 93. 83 Nosach, Profsoiuzy Sankt-Peterburga, 126–7. 84 Petrogradskii sovet profsoiuzov v 1917 g.: Protokoly i materialy (St. Petersburg: Tret’ia Rossiia, 1997), pp. 36–7, 39–40. 85 Protokoly i materialy, 30–4, 47–8, 50–4, 55–6. 86 ‘Rabochee dvizhenie v 1917 g’, in Pokrovskii, M.N. and Iakovleva, Ia.A. (eds.), 1917 god v dokumentakh i materialakh (Moscow, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926), pp. 105–7. 87 Badcock, S. ‘Politics, Parties, and Power: Sormovo Workers in 1917’, in Filtzer, D. et al (eds.), A Dream Deferred: New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History (Bern: Peter Lang A. G., 2008), p. 90. 88 Volobuev, P.V. Proletariat i burzhuaziia v Rossii v 1917 g. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1964), p. 234–46; Gaponenko, L.S. Istoriia sovetskogo rabochego klassa. V 6 tomakh. Tom 1: Rabochii klass v Oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i na zashchite ee zavoevanii, 1917–20 (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), pp. 94–5, 447–9; Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Friedgut, T.H. Politics and Revolution in Russia’s Donbass: Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 291–301; Hickey, M.C. ‘ Big Strike in a Small City: the Smolensk Metalworkers’ Strike and the Dynamic of Labor Conflict in 1917’, in Melancon and Pate, New Labor History, pp. 207–32; Koenker, D. and Rosenberg, W. Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

540

NOTES

89

Churakov, Fabzavkomy, 114–15.

90

Blinov, Tsentral’nyi sovet, 165–8, 192.

91

Krupskaia, N.K. ‘Vospominania o Lenine’, in Vospominaniia o Vladimire Il’iche Lenine: v desiati tomakh, tom 2 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989–90), p. 275.

92

‘Polozhenie o rabochem kontrole, 14 noiabria 1917 g’, in Rabochii kontrol’ v promyshlennykh predpriatiiakh Petrograda, 1917–1918 gg. (Leningrad, 1947), pp. 233–5.

93

Borisova, L.V. Trudovye otnosheniia v Sovetskoi Rossii (1918–1924) (Moscow: Sobrania, 2006), pp. 20–1.

94

Lenin, V.I. Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1970), p. 361.

95

Blinov, Tsentral’nyi sovet, 165–8, 192.

96

Lobok, D.B. Profsoiuzy i Sovetskoe gosudarstvo, 1917–1934 (St. Petersburg: SPbGUP, 2007), pp. 33–4.

97

Lenin, PPS, vol. 36 (Moscow: Politizdat 1969), 74.

98

Blinov, Tsentral’nyi sovet, 202, 206–7, 218.

99

Mikhailov, ‘Industrial’nyi trud’, 38–58.

100 Borisova, Trudovye otnosheniia; Ul’ianova, S.B. ‘To na skaku, to na boku’: Massovye khoziaistvenno-politicheskie kampanii v petrogradskoi/leningradskoi promyshlennosti v 1921–1928 gg. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Politekhnicheskogo universiteta, 2006); Ul’ianova, S.B. and Ofitserova, N.V. Zavodskoe soobshchestvo i vlast’ v Sovetskoi Rossii 1920-kh gg. (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Politekhnicheskogo universiteta, 2017); Churakov, D. Revoliutsiia, gosudarstvo, rabochii protest: formy, dinamika i priroda massovykh vystuplenii rabochikh v Sovetskoi Rossii, 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004); Churakov, D. Buntuiushchie proletarii: rabochii protest v Sovetskoi Rossii (1917–1930-e gg.) (Moscow: Veche, 2007). 101 Koenker, D.P. Republic of Labor. Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 307–8. 102 Gaponenko (ed.) Rabochii klass, 337.

Chapter 13 1

Gaudin, C. ‘Rural Echoes of World War I: War Talk in the Russian Village’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 56, 3, 2008, p. 392.

2

See for example Frierson, C. Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3

Badcock, S. ‘1917 in the Provinces’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 463. The earliest Western example is Raleigh, D. Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); see also Novikova, L. ‘The Russian Revolution from a Provincial Perspective’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16, 4, 2015, pp. 769–85.

NOTES

541

4

The space provided here does not permit a full examination of the 1917 revolution across all of rural Russia. This chapter focuses primarily on tensions among peasants of European (specifically central and middle Volga) Russia in the context of decades of political and economic change, war, and regime change in 1917.

5

Finkel, E., Gelbach, S. and Kofanov, D. ‘(Good) Land and Freedom (for Former Serfs): Determinants of Peasant Unrest in European Russia, March-October 1917’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, pp. 719–20.

6

Nafzinger, S. ‘Communal Property Rights and Land Redistributions in Late Tsarist Russia’, Economic History Review, 69, 3, 2016, p. 783.

7

Pallot, J. Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 81.

8

Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 406.

9

Verner, A. ‘Discursive Strategies in the 1905 Revolution: Peasant Petitions from Vladimir Province’, The Russian Review, 54, 1, 1995, p. 78.

10 Pallot, Land Reform, 81; For a more detailed discussion of the agricultural elite’s view of the peasantry’s maladjustments see Kotsonis, Y. Making Peasants Backwards: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999). 11 Nafzinger, ‘Communal Property Rights’, 780. 12 Macey, D. ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation in Rural Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Stolypin Agrarian Reforms’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 31, 3 & 4, 2004, p. 411. 13 Nafzinger, ‘Communal Property Rights’, 784. 14 Retish, A. ‘Peasant Dreams and Aspirations in the Russian Revolution’, in Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution, p. 237. 15 Macey, ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation’, 413. 16 Johnson, R. ‘Family Life Cycles and Economic Stratification: Case Study in Rural Russia’, Journal of Social History, 30, 3, 1997, p. 724. 17 Moon, D, ‘Russia’s Rural Economy, 1800–1930’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1, 4, 2000, p. 688. 18 Baker, M. ‘Rampaging Soldatki, Cowering Police, Bazaar Riots’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35, 2–3, 2001, p. 141. 19 Macey, ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation’, 414. 20 Nafzinger, ‘Communal Property Rights’, 785. 21 Retish, A. ‘Peasant Dreams’, 231. 22 Hafner, L.K. ‘Engines of Social Change? Peasant Migration and the Transgression of Spatial, Legal, and Cultural Divides in Late Imperial Russia’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 34, 4, pp. 557–8. 23 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 405. 24 Steinberg, M. The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 180.

542

NOTES

25 Engel, B.A., Between Fields and the City, Women Work and Family in Russia 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 41–53. 26 Frierson, C. ‘The Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided’, The Russian Review, 46, 1, 1987, p. 49. 27 Hafner, ‘Engines of Social Change?’, 556. 28 Frierson, ‘The Razdel,” 49; Hafner, “Engines of Social Change?”, 556. 29 Johnson, ‘Family Life Cycles’, 723. 30 Frierson, ‘The Razdel’, 43–4. 31 Pearson, T. Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 196. Gaudin, C. Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 32 Popkins, G. ‘Code versus Custom? Norms and Tactics in Peasant Volost Court Appeals, 1889–1917’, The Russian Review, 59, 3, 2000, p. 408. 33 Pallot, Land Reform, 92. 34 Popkins, ‘Code versus custom’, 409. 35 Heinzen, J. Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p. 15. 36 Smith, S.A. ‘“Moral Economy” and the Peasant Revolution in Russia: 1861–1918’, Revolutionary Russia, 24, 2, 2011, p. 148. Many other peasants choose to resettle in Siberia during this time period. See Siegelbaum, L. ‘Paradise or Just a Little bit Better? Siberian Settlement “Fever” in Late Imperial Russia’, The Russian Review, 76, 1, 2017, pp. 22–37. 37 Macey, ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation’, 407. 38 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 405; See also Macey, ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation’, 409. 39 Pallot, Land Reform, 165–6. 40 Moore, C. ‘Land for Service: Russian Peasant Views of a Postwar Land Settlement during World War I’, in C. Read et al. (eds.), Russia’s Homefront in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Book 3. National Disintegration and Reintegration (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 312–3. 41 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 149. 42 Macey, ‘Reflections on Peasant Adaptation’, 416. 43 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 233. 44 Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, 19. 45 Retish, A. Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 46. 46 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 138.

NOTES

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47 Retish, Russia’s Peasants, 46. 48 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 192–3. 49 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 143. 50 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 192–3. 51 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 141. 52 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 410–11. 53 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 193. 54 Retish, Russian Peasants, 47–8. 55 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 143–4. See also Moore ‘Land for Service’, 312. 56 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 406. 57 For the extent of food riots across Russia during the war see Buldakov, V.P. ‘Dynamics of Violence’ in Orlovsky (ed.) Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 158–77. 58 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 141. 59 Retish, Russian Peasants, 58. 60 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 397. 61 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 149. 62 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 399. 63 Retish, Russian Peasants, 27. 64 Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 139. 65 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 400. 66 Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 200. 67 Retish, Russian Peasants, 80. 68 Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 414. 69 Holquist, P. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–21 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 50. 70 Retish, Russian Peasants, 57. 71 Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 267. 72 Hickey, M. ‘“Who Controls These Woods?” Forests and Mnogovlastie in Smolensk in 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 32, 2, 2019, p. 197. 73 Figes, O. ‘The Russian Revolution of 1917 and Its Language in the Village’, The Russian Review, 56, 3, 1997, p. 336. 74 Retish, Russian Peasants, 76. 75 Figes, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 332. 76 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 194. 77 Figes, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 335–6.

544

NOTES

78

Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 235.

79

Badcock, S. ‘Structures and Practices of Power: 1917 in Nizhegorod and Kazan’ Provinces’, in her Russia’s Homefront in War and Revolution, 1914–1922. Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015), p. 369.

80

Retish, Russian Peasants, 49.

81

Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 199.

82

Figes, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 337.

83

Figes, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 336–7.

84

Johnson, ‘Family Life Cycles’, 724.

85

Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 187.

86

Figes, O. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 56–8.

87

Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 199.

88

Rendle, M. ‘The Problem of the “Local” in Revolutionary Russia: Moscow Province, 1914–1922’, in Badcock, Russia’s Homefront, p. 10.

89

Figes, Peasant Russia, 35; Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 199.

90

Retish, Russian Peasants, 84–91.

91

Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 269.

92

Hickey, ‘Who Controls These Woods?’, 203–4; Figes, Peasant Russia, 40–4.

93

Gaudin, ‘Rural Echoes’, 406.

94

Verner, ‘Discursive Strategies’, 81.

95

Moore, ‘Land for Service’, 302. Anti-German violence was not confined to rural areas during the First World War. See V.P. Buldakov ‘Dynamics of Violence’.

96

Moore, ‘Land for Service’, 305.

97

Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 143.

98

Steinberg, The Russian Revolution,186.

99

Baker, ‘Rampaging Soldatki’, 143.

100 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 199. 101 Steinberg, The Russian Revolutionr,186. 102 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 154. 103 Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 272. 104 Channon, J. ‘The Peasantry in the Revolutions of 1917’, in Frankel, E., Frankel, J. and Knei-Paz, B. (eds.), Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 107; Figes, Peasant Russia, 48. 105 Finkel et al., ‘(Good) Land and Freedom’, 710. These authors identify five types of peasant unrest that reflect the proximity of landed resources: seizure of estates; seizure of meadows, forests, harvest; forced rental of land; obstruction of timber

NOTES

545

harvesting; and forced removal of hired labor or POW and refuges from agricultural activities. Finkel et al., ‘(Good) Land and Freedom’, 720. Sarah Badcock takes a critical look at what terms like ‘unrest’ and ‘anarchy’ in the countryside mean and for whom. Badcock, ‘Structures and Practices of Power’, 371. 106 Channon, ‘The Peasantry’, 107–8. 107 Finkel et al., ‘(Good) Land and Freedom’, 719–20. 108 Verner, ‘Discursive Strategies’, 83. 109 Izvestiia Penzenskogo Sovieta Soldatskykh, Rabochykh, i Krest’ianskykh Deputatov no. 16, 1917. Hereafter IZVP. 110 Figes, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 328. 111 Lih, L. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 93–4. Gill, G. Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 57. 112 Hickey, ‘Who Controls These Woods?’, 203–4. 113 Lih, Bread and Authority, 92–3. 114 Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 269. 115 Narodnoe Prodovol’stvie: Gazeta Penzenskogo Prodovol’stvenago Komiteta, 9, 1917. 116 IZVP, no. 20 1917 117 Gill, Peasants and Government, 80. 118 Badcock, Politics and the People, 206. 119 Matsuzato, K. ‘Interregional Conflicts and the Collapse of Tsarism: The Real Reason for the Food Crisis in Russia after the Autumn of 1916’, in Conroy, M.S. (ed.), Emerging Democracy in late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local SelfGovernment (The Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government and the State Council before and during World War (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1998), pp. 281–92; On popular self-protection see Lih, Bread and Authority, 66–72. 120 Retish, Russian Peasants, 53. 121 Holquist, Making War, 50 122 Badcock, ‘Structures and Practices of Power’, 372. 123 Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, 40–8. 124 Badcock, ‘1917 in the Provinces’, 279. 125 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 240. 126 Dry weather also impacted Samara, Saratov, and Simbirsk provinces. Figes, Peasant Russia, 85. 127 IZVP, no. 80, July 27, 1917. 128 Gill, Government and Peasants, 83. 129 Narodnoe Prodovol’stie no. 9, 1917. 130 Narodnoe Prodovol’stvie no. 12, 1917.

546

NOTES

131 Badcock, Politics and the People, 206. 132 State Archive of Penza Oblast’(GAPO) f. r-9, op. 1, ll. 105–9. 133 IZVP, no 92, August 11, 1917. 134 Badcock, ‘Structures and Practices of Power’, 375. 135 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 197. 136 Badcock, ‘Structures and Practice of Power’, 376. 137 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 240. 138 IZVP no. 91, August 9, 1917. 139 Vestnik Penzenskago Gubernskago Ispolnitel’nago Komiteta i Komissariata (Hereafter VSTP), September 7, 1917. 140 Badcock, ‘Structures and Practices of Power’, 379. 141 Zaitsev, K.I. and Dolinskii, N.V. ‘Organization and Policy’, in Struve, P. (ed.), Food Supply in Russia during the War (New Haven, 1930), p. 107. 142 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 237. 143 Verner, ‘Discursive Strategies’, 81. 144 Figes, Peasant Russia, 56–8. 145 Finkel et al. ‘(Good) Land and Freedom’, 719–20. 146 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 155. 147 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 237. 148 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 197. 149 Heinzen, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, 23. 150 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 155. 151 Retish, ‘Peasant Dreams’, 238. 152 Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 198. 153 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 155. 154 Holquist, Making War, 49. 155 Smith, ‘Moral Economy’, 155. 156 Verner, ‘Discursive Strategies’, 81. 157 Pallot, Land Reform, 165–6.

Chapter 14 1

Efimov, V.P. (ed.) (1925), Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 1914–1918 goda (v tsifrakh) (Moscow: Tipografia M.K.Kh. im. F. Ya. Lavrova, 1935), pp. 17–18.

2

Gavrilov, L.M. and V.V. Kutuzov ‘Istoshcheniye lyudskikh rezervov v Russkoy armii v 1917 g.’, in Sidorov, A.L. (ed.), Pervaia mirovaia voina (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 148, 157.

NOTES

547

3

Golovin, N.N. Voennye usiliia rossii v mirovoi voine, vol. 1–2 (Paris: Tovarishchestvo ob“edinennykh izdatelei, 1939), vol. 1, p. 150.

4

Golovin, Voennye usiliia, 172–3.

5

Tarasov, K.A. ‘Vooruzhennyi narod ili nation in arms? Petrogradskii garnizon k seredine tret’ego goda voiny’, in Miller, A.I. and Soloviev, K.A. (eds.), Rossiiskaia imperiia mezhdu reformami i revoliutsiiami, 1906–1916 (Moscow: Kvadriga, 2021), pp. 372–3.

6

Tarasov, ‘Vooruzhennyi narod’, 373–4.

7

Tarasov, ‘Vooruzhennyi narod’, 376–7.

8

Wildman, A.K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldier’s Revolt (March-April 1917), vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 34–5.

9

Astashov, A.B. ‘Voennye sudy v Petrogradskom garnizone nakanune Fevral’skoi revoliutsii’, Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federalnogo universiteta. Seriia: Gumanitarnie i sotsialnye nauki, 6, 2017, p. 7.

10 Astashov, A.B. Russkii front v 1914–nachale 1917 goda: Voennyi opyt i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2014), p. 479. 11 Astashov, A.B. ‘The “Other War” on the Eastern Front during the First World War: Fraternization and Making Peace with the Enemy’, in Heywood, A.J. et al (eds.), Military Affairs in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 1: Military Experiences (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019), pp. 372, 379–81. 12 Astashov, Russkii front, 679–-94. 13 Tarasov, ‘Vooruzhennyi narod’, 384–7. 14 Astashov, A.B. ‘The Russian Peasant at the Front during the First World War’, Russian Studies in History, 56, 2, 2017, pp. 107–10. 15 Astashov, Russkii front, 669–70. 16 Porshneva, O.S. Krest’iane, rabochie i soldaty Rossii nakanune i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), p. 212 17 Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 270–1. 18 Hasegawa, The February Revolution, 277–81. 19 Boyd, J.R. ‘The Origins of Order No. 1’, Soviet Studies, 19, 3, 1968, pp. 359–72. 20 Miller, V.I. Soldatskie komitety russkoi armii v 1917 g.: Vozniknovenie i nachal’nyi period deiatel’nosti (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), p. 55. 21 Mawdsley, E. The Russian Revolution and the Baltic fleet: War and Politics, February 1917 – April 1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 4, 14–15, 18. 22 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 55–6. 23 Wade, R. The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 99.

548

NOTES

24 Solntseva, S.A. Bez tsaria v golove. Sotsial’naia modernizatsiia russkoi armii v period voiny i revoliutsii (fevral’ – noiabr’ 1917 g.): monografiia (Moscow: Izdatel’skii dom «Rossiiskoe voienno-istoricheskoe obshchestvo»; Piatyi Rim, 2020), p. 26. 25 Kolonitskii, B.I. Simvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’: k izucheniiu politicheskoi kul’tury rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda. (Saint Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2012), pp. 157–9, 197. 26 Frenkin, M.S. Russkaia armiia i revolutsiia 1917–1918 (Munich: Logos.Frenkin, 1978), p. 71; Solntseva, Bez tsaria v golove, 59–60. 27 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 22, 24. 28 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 73. 29 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 248–84. 30 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 10. 31 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 286; Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 248. 32 Miller, Soldatskie komitety, 377–8. 33 Frenkin, Russkaia armiia i revolutsiia, 86; Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 377. 34 Tarasov, K.A. Soldatskii bol’shevizm. Voennaia organizatsiia bol’shevikov i levoradikal’noe dvizhenie v Petrogradskom garnizone (fevral’ 1917 – mart 1918 g.) (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2017), pp. 119–21. 35 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 249. 36 Golub, P.A. Partiia, armiia i revoliutsiia: Otvoevanie partiei bol’shevikov armii na storonu revoliutsii. Mart 1917 – fevral’ 1918 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1967), p. 54. 37 Efimov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 26. 38 Golovin, Voennye usilia rossii, vol. 2, 191; vol. 1, 208. 39 Astashov, ‘The “Other War” on the Eastern Front’, 374. 40 Senin, A.S. Russkaia Armiia v 1917 godu: Iz istorii Voennogo ministerstva Vremennogo pravitel’stva (Moscow: Veche, 2017), p. 295. 41 Solntseva, Bez tsaria v golove, 98. 42 Senin, Russkaia Armiia, 292. 43 Stoff, L.S. They fought for the Motherland: Russia’s women soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 87. 44 Stoff, They fought, 53. 45 Solntseva, Bez tsaria v golove, 115. 46 Solntseva, Bez tsaria v golove, 121. 47 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 193. 48 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Understanding the Kerenskii Offensive: Russian Revolutionary Military Propaganda and the Soldiers’ Motivation to Fight, April–June 1917’, in Heywood et al. (eds.), Military Affairs, 532.

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49 Golub, Partiia, armiia i revoliutsiia, 78, 113. 50 Kakurin, N.E. (ed.) Razlozhenie armii v 1917 godu (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, 1925), p. 180. 51 Nelipovich, S.G. ‘«… Front sploshnykh mitingov». Obobshchonnye arkhivnye dannye ob iiun’skom nastuplenii 1917 goda voisk Iugo-Zapadnogo fronta’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 2, 1999, pp. 34–47. 52 Kolonitskii, ‘Understanding the Kerenskii Offensive’,521. 53 Nelipovich, ‘«… Front sploshnykh mitingov»’, 44. 54 Golub, Partiia, armiia i revoliutsiia, 125. 55 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 295. 56 Solntseva, Bez tsaria v golove, 72. 57 Andreev, A.M. Soldatskie massy garnizonov russkoi armii v Oktiabr’skiy revoliutsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1975), p. 123. 58 Andreev, Soldatskie massy, 125. 59 Ferro, M. ‘The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary’, Slavic Review, 30, 3, 1971, p. 493. 60 Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 153–6; Sapon, V.P. ‘Vosstanie soldat Nizhegorodskogo garnizona v iiule 1917 goda. Po materialam mestnoi periodicheskoi pechati i vospominaniiam uchchastngikvo’, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, 10, 2010, pp. 3–8. 61 Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 135–40, 206–8. 62 Efimov, Rossiia v mirovoi voine, 20. 63 Frenkin, M.S. Zakhvat vlasti bol’shevikami v Rossii i rol’ tylovykh garnizonov armii (Jerusalem: Stav, 1982), p. 14. Apparently not all of them reached the front. The delay in the dispatch of reserve regiments due to the riots could be from two to six weeks. Many regiments assigned to the front in July got there only in mid-September (Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 232). 64 Andreev, Soldatskie massy, 21. 65 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 1, 371. 66 Frenkin, Russkaia armiia i revoliutsiia 1917–1918, 200. 67 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 230. 68 Tarasov, Soldatskii bol’shevizm, 136–9. 69 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 38. 70 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 38. 71 Zaionchkovskii, A.M. Strategicheskii ocherk voiny 1914–1918 gg., vol. 7 (Moscow: Vysshii voennyi redaktsionnyi sovet, 1923), p. 157.

550

NOTES

72 Zaionchkovskii, Strategicheskii ocherk, 151–88. 73 Grebenkin, I.N. Dolg i vybor: Russkii ofitser v gody mirovoi voiny i revoliutsii, 1914–1918 gg. (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2015), pp. 302–3; Rendle, M. Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 120–4, 137–52. 74 Grebenkin, Dolg i vybor, 290. 75 Grebenkin, Dolg i vybor, 368. 76 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 403. 77 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 228. 78 Frenkin, Russkaia armiia i revolutsiia 1917–1918, 512–18. 79 Andreev, Soldatskie massy, 234. 80 Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 208. 81 Tarasov, Soldatskii bol’shevizm, 246–50. 82 Golub Partiia, armiia i revoliutsiia 237, 239, 246. 83 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 314–17, 320–8. 84 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2., 337–49. 85 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 350–65. 86 Spirin, L.M. Klassy i partii v grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii. (1917–1920 gg.) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1968), pp. 424–5. 87 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, vol. 2, 381. 88 Bazanov, S.N. Velikaia voina: kak pogibala Russkiya armiia (Moscow: Veche, 2014), p. 249. 89 Bazanov, Velikaia voina, 253. 90 Bazanov Velikaia voine, 254. 91 Bazanov, Velikaia voina, 282. 92 Tarasov, K.A. ‘Elected Power in the Petrograd Garrison in 1917–1918’, Russian Studies in History, 56, 4, 2017, p. 284. 93 Bazanov,Velikaia voina, 309. 94 Bazanov,Velikaia voina, 302. 95 Golub, Partiia, armiia i revoliutsiia, 292. 96 Tarasov, Soldatskii bol’shevizm, 333.

Chapter 15 1

Vos’moi s”ezd RKP (b) mart 1919 goda: Protokoly (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959), p. 199.

2

Orlovsky, D.T. ‘State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle Strata’, in Koenker, D., Rosenberg, W. and Suny, R. (eds.), Party, State and Society

NOTES

551

in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Orlovsky ‘The Lower Middle Strata in Revolutionary Russia’, in Clowes, E., Kassow, S. and West, J. (eds.), Civil Society in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); ‘The Lower Middle Strata in the Russian Revolution’, in Acton, E. and Rosenberg, W.G. (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (London: Arnold, 1997). See also, Buldakov, V.P. et al. (eds.) Bor’ba za massy v trekh revoliutsiakh v Rossii: Proletariat i srednye gorodskye sloi (Moscow: Mysl’, 1983), pp. 164–266. 3

Orlovsky, D.T. ‘Professionalism in the Ministerial Bureaucracy on the Eve of the February Revolution of 1917’, in Balzer, H. (ed.), Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 267–92. On the European Experience, see Orlovsky, D.T. ‘The Petty Bourgeoisie in Europe’, in Stearns, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social History (New York: Scribner’s, 2000); Kocka, J. Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte 1850–1980: Vom Privatbeamten zum angestellten Arbeitnehmer (Göttingen: Sammlung Vandenhoeck, 1981).

4

See statistics in Orlovsky, ‘State Building’, 189, 198–203.

5

Wright, E.O. Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).

6

Lenin, V.I. Pol’noe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1958–65), vol. 34, pp. 38–41.

7

Startsev, V.I. Vnutrenniaia politika Vremmenogo pravitel’stva (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980).

8

Von Hagen, M. ‘Part I: War and the “Russian” Revolutions’ and “Part II: Revolution as War: The Western Borderlands Post October”’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020); Suny, R.G. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

9

Khrystiuk, P. Zamitki i materiialy do istorii ukraiinskoi revoliutsii 1917–1920 gg., 4 vols (New York: Vydavnytstvo Chartoryĭs’kykh, 1921). See also Reshetar, J.S. Jr. The Ukrainian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). What follows is largely taken from the very valuable memoirs of Pavlo Khrystiuk. Reshetar is one of very few historians to have made good use of this source.

10 Haimson, L.H. Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905–1917: Two Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), especially ‘Lenin, Martov and the Issue of Power’, 1–107. Also Galili, Z, Nenarokov, A. and Kheimson, L. (eds.) Mensheviki v 1917 godu tom 3, ot Kornilovskogo matezha do kontsa dekabria; chast’ pervaia; ot Kornilovskogo matezha do Vremennnogo Demokraticheskogo Soveta Rossiiskoi Respubiki; (avgusta- pervaia dekada oktiabria) (Moscow: Rosspen, 1996), pp. 343–406; and chast’ vtoraia: Ot Vremennogo Demokratisheskogo Soveta Rossiskoi Respubliki do kontsa dekabria (pervaia dekada oktiabria- konets dekabria) (Moscow: Rosspen, 1997), pp. 122–90. Israel Getzler, in his classic study of Martov, gets the democratic alternative, but not the social content. According to Getzler, Martov took a clear anti-coalition stand as early as July and could have created

552

NOTES

his own party or won over Dan and others, but failed to accomplish either, see Getzler, I. Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 11 Mensheviki v 1917, vol. 3, part 1, 381–4. 12 Izvestiia for 12 October 1917 is reproduced in Mensheviki v 1917 godu, vol. 3, part 2, 201–3. 13 Tokarev, Iu.S. Petrogradskii sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov v marte- aprele 1917 g. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976) Startsev, V.I. Revoliutsiia i vlast’: Petrogradskii sovet i Vremennoe pravitel’stvo v marte- aprele 1917 goda (Moscow: Mysl’, 1978). 14 The election results on 25 September were: Bolshevik- 230; SR- 102; Menshevik54; Menshevik Internationalist- !0. The latter did not gain enough support for even one seat on the new Executive Committee. The Executive Committee chose a new Presidium with Trotsky as Chair. This was the same day as the press announcement of the new Provisional Government cabinet and the beginning of a strike on the railways. 15 This is clear from the published protocols, see Petrogradskiĭ sovet rabochikh i ⁀ut ⁀sii, soldatskikh deputatov v 1917 godu: protokoly, stenogrammy i otchety, rezoli ⁀a obshchikh sobraniĭ, sobraniĭ sekts postanovlenii ⁀iĭ, zasedaniĭ Ispolnitelʹnogo komiteta ⁀a-25 okt⁀ i frakt ⁀siĭ 27 fevrali iabr⁀ ia 1917 goda, v p⁀ iati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1993–2005). 16 Petrogradskii sovet, vol. 4, p. 388 et seq. 17 These issues are discussed by Lars Lih in his essay ‘The Bolsheviks and Their Message’, for Orlovsky (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 319–30. 18 Petrogradskii Sovet, vol. 4, p. 410 et seq. 19 Rudneva, S.E. Predparlament Oktiabr’ 1917 goda: opyt’ istoricheskoi rekonstruktsii (Moscow: Nauka, 2006), p. 212. 20 Dan, F. ‘Poslednie dni Vremennago Pravitel’stva’, in Letopis’ Revoliutsii, vol. 11 (Berlin, 1923), pp. 163–75. 21 Dan ‘Poslednie dni’, p. 166. 22 Orlovsky, D.T. ‘The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s’, in Siegelbaum, L. and Suny, R.G. (eds.), Making Workers Soviet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and his ‘White-Collar Workers in the Second Revolution and Post-War Reconstruction’, in Rowney, D.K. and Huskey, E. (eds.), Russian Bureaucracy and the State: Officialdom from Alexander III to Vladimir Putin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Chapter 16 1

Nashe slovo, No. 280, 12 March 1917.

2

See, for example, Arendt, H. On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 18; Goldstone, J. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University

NOTES

553

Press, 2014), pp. 15–25; and Lawson, G. Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 79–80. 3

For example, landowners mentioned as part of rural unrest, officers for their role in the Kornilov Revolt, and the White armies and nobles as victims of Bolshevism: Smith, S.A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 126–7, 236–8; and Engelstein, L. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 161–5, 364–6.

4

See especially Steinberg, M. The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

5

One multi-authored survey of pre-1917 left out the major and moderately conservative party, the Octobrists, as they seemingly fell between chapters on conservatives (far right) and liberals (Kadets); Petrov, Iu.A. (ed.) Rossiia i gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny: ekonomicheskoe polozhenie, sotsial’nye protsessy, politicheskii krizis (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), pp. 519–99. The authors rectified this in their survey of 1917 by creating a category of ‘liberal conservatives’ in the liberal chapter; Petrov, Iu.A. (ed.) Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda: vlast’, obshchestvo, kul’tura, 2 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2017), I, pp. 599–631, esp. 609–13.

6

See, for example, Patriarch Kirill discussing the centenary in March 2017, at http://www.interfax.ru/russia/555912 (accessed 1 May 2021); and Eremin, I.A. ‘Gosudarstvennyi perevorot v fevrale 1917 g. kak rezul’tat predatel’stva praviashchei elity: uroki istorii’, in 1917 god v istorii Rossii (Barnaul: AZBUKA, 2017), pp. 40–55.

7

See, for example, the entire volume devoted to ‘conservatives’, in Pervaia mirovaia voina v otsenke sovremennikov: vlast’ i rossiiskoe obshchestvo 1914–1918, 4 vol (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), II.

8

Lieven, D. ‘The Elites’, in The Cambridge History of Russia. Volume II: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 227–44.

9

Luk’ianov, M.N. Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma, 1907–1914 (Stuttgart: IbedemVerlag, 2006); and Gilbert, G. The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia (London: Routledge, 2015).

10 For more details, see Rendle, M. Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 12–18. 11 Chermenskii, E.D. IV Gosudarstvennaia duma i sverzhenie tsarizma v Rossii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1976), 112; Borodin, A.P. Gosudarstvennyi sovet Rossii (1906–1917) (Kirov: Viatka, 1999), pp. 142, 235. 12 Bureaucratic dissent comes across in memoirs, albeit written in hindsight; Loukianov, M. ‘“Renovated Russia” in Bureaucrats’ Memoirs: New Publications’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 1, 2021. 13 See, most recently, Gaida, F.A. Vlast’ i obshchestvennost’ v Rossii: dialog o puti politicheskogo razvitiia (1910–1917) (Moscow: Universitet Dmitriia Pozharskogo, 2016); and Korros, A. ‘The Progressive Bloc and the State Council, 1915–17’, in

554

NOTES

Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 4: Reintegration – The Struggle for the State (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), 61–84. 14 The debates can be sampled in Pervaia mirovaia voina, II. Otherwise, see the work of Loukianov, Mikhail ‘The First World War and the Polarization of the Russian Right, July 1914–February 1917’, Slavic Review, 75, 4, 2016, pp. 872–95; ‘The First World War and the Russian Conservatives’, in Read et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front, pp. 23–59; and ‘Support for the Regime and Right-Wing Reform Plans, Late 1916–Early 1917’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), pp. 43–50. 15 See, for example, Grebenkin, I.N. Dolg i vybor: Russkii ofitser v gody mirovoi voiny i revoliutsii, 1914–1918 (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2015); Kulikov, S.V. Biurokraticheskaia elita Rossiiskoi imperii nakanune padeniia starogo poriadka (1914–1917) (Riazan’: P. A. Tribunskii, 2004); Rogoznyi, P.G. ‘The Russian Orthodox Church during the First World War and Revolutionary Turmoil, 1914–1921’, in Frame, M. et al. (eds.), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1. Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014), 350–2; and Petrova, E.E. and Bitiukov, K.O. Velikokniazheskaia oppozitsiia v Rossii 1915–1917 gg. (St Petersburg: Asterion, 2009). 16 Rendle, Defenders, 21–9. 17 He was also dismissed in part for his role in an ‘ecclesiastical crisis’ in September 1915, investigating an illegal canonization conducted by a Rasputin-supporting bishop who was then supported by the Tsar. This reflected the growing alienation and fracturing of the church as well; see Freeze, G. ‘Religion and Revolution: The Russian Orthodox Church Transformed’, in Companion, 278. 18 Kulikov, S.V. ‘“Revolutions Invariably Come from Above”: The Fall of Tsarism through the Prism of the Elite Circulation Paradigm’, Russian Studies in History, 47, 4, 2009, pp. 8–39. 19 Lyandres, S. ‘Conspiracy and Ambition in Russian Politics before the February Revolution of 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 8, 1, 2015, pp. 99–133. 20 As well as Grebenkin, Dolg i vybor, see his ‘From War to Revolution: Political Aspects of the Mood of Russian Officers between 1914 and 1917’, Russian Studies in History, 56, 3, 2017, pp. 145–58. 21 Loukianov, ‘First World War’, 889. 22 On the Bloc during this period, see Solov’ev, K.A. ‘Progressivnyi blok v ianvarefevrale 1917 g’, in Petrov, Iu.A. (ed.), Velikaia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, 1917: sto let izucheniia (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2017), 124–8. 23 Nikolaev, A.B. Dumskaia revoliutsiia, 27 fevralia-3 marta 1917 goda, 2 vols (St Petersburg: RGPU imeni A. I. Gertsena, 2017); and Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution. Petrograd, 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2017). For concise summaries of their arguments, see Nikolaev, ‘The Duma Revolution’, and Hasegawa, ‘The Duma Committee, the Provisional Government, and the Birth of “Triple Power” in the February Revolution’, in Companion, 53–67, 77–84.

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24 Garkush, I.O. (ed.) Stavka i revoliutsiia. Shtab verkhovnogo glavnokomanduiushego i revoliutsionnye sobytiia 1917 – nachala 1918 goda po dokumentam Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo voenno-istoricheskogo arkhiva: V 2 t. Tom I: 18 fevralia – 18 iiunia 1917 g. (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2019). See also Ganin, A.V. ‘Genshtabisty i fevral’skaia’, in Kalashnikov, V.V. (ed.), Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda (St Petersburg: SPBGETU ‘LETI’, 2017), pp. 208–64. 25 Rendle, Defenders, 46–52. Letters of support were sent by industrialists, landowners and officers; Gavroeva, E. S. ‘“Pis’ma vo vlast” (VKGD i Vremennoe pravitel’stvo) v marte – aprele 1917 goda kak istochnik po istorii russkoi revoliutsii’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 13, 1, 2020, pp. 164–5, 175–9; and the clergy; Babkin, M.A. (ed.) Rossiiskoe dukhovenstvo i sverzhenie monarkhii v 1917 godu (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), pp. 53–101. Even monarchists were supportive initially (possibly feeling they had little choice); Ivanov, A.A. ‘‘Chernaia sotnia sginula v podpol’e’: russkie pravye i revoliutsiia 1917’, Rossiiskaia istoriia, 2, 2017, pp. 42–59; and Stogov, D.I. ‘Pravye v period s marta 1917 g. do okonchaniia Grazhdanskaia voiny (istoriograficheskii ocherk)’, in Kalashnikov (ed.), Epokha Revoliutsii i Grazhdanskoi voiny v Rossii., pp. 165–74. Hopes for the future differed within groups, though; for officers, see Suriaev, V.N. ‘Fevral’skaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda v vospriiatii russkogo ofitserstva’, in Petrov (ed.), Velikaia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 480–7. 26 For more on everyday life, see Rendle, Defenders; Smith, D. Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy (London: Macmillan, 2012); and, more recently, Barinova, E.P. ‘Rossiiskaia elita v 1917 godu: vybor puti v ekstremal’nykh usloviiakh’, in Velikaia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia: obshchestvo, chelovek, kul’tura, povsednevnost’, 2 vols (Moscow: Knigodel, 2017), I, pp. 144–53. 27 The first government was also favourably composed. As well as liberal Kadets, it included conservative Octobrists and Progressists. Attempts were also made to form new republican parties to bridge liberal and conservative interests and operate more effectively within revolutionary politics; Shelokhaev, V.V. ‘Liberal’nye partii’, in Petrov (ed.), Rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, I, 609–13; and Khailova, N.B. ‘Liberalytsentralisty v 1917 g.: real’nye politiki ili utopisty’, in Petrov (ed.), Velikaia rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, 219–26. 28 Orlovsky, D. ‘Corporatism or Democracy: The Russian Provisional Government of 1917’, in Weiner, A. (ed.), Landscaping the Human Garden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 67–90. 29 Kulikov, S.V. ‘Vremennoe pravitel’stvo i vysshaia tsarskaia biurokratiia’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 24, 1–2, 1997, pp. 78; Izmozik, V.S. and Tikhonova, N.S. ‘Vremennoe pravitel’stvo: sotsial’no-politicheskaia kharakteristika’, Iz glubiny vremen, 8, 1997, p. 8; Rogoznyi, P.G. Tserkovnaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2008), pp. 139, 143. 30 For a case study, see Rendle, M. ‘The Problem of the “Local” in Revolutionary Russia: Moscow Province, 1914–22’, in Badcock, S. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution. Book 1: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015), pp. 28–30.

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31 For more on the support for all unions, as well as Rendle, Defenders, see Rendle, M. ‘Tsarist Elites in Revolutionary Russia’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution. Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 252–3. 32 Buldakov, V.P. and Leont’eva, T.G. 1917 god. Elity i tolpy: kul’turnye landshafty russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow: IstLit, 2017), p. 239. 33 On the All-Russian Military Union, a union bridging elites and non-elites, see Rendle, M. ‘Forging a Revolutionary Army: The All-Russian Military Union in 1917’, War in History, 19, 1, 2012, pp. 49–71. 34 Rosenberg, W.G. ‘The Russian Municipal Duma Elections of 1917: A Preliminary Computation of Returns’, Soviet Studies, 21, 2, 1969–70, pp. 142, 146, 154–5, 157, 160–1. 35 Wade, R.A. The Russian Revolution, 1917, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 60. 36 For more specific examples, see Rendle, ‘Tsarist Elites’, 249–51. 37 On the Centre and a similar body, the Military League, see Rendle, Defenders, 144–7, 162–4. 38 For more on these meetings, see Rendle, Defenders, 173–80. 39 Senin, A.S. ‘Soveshchaniia obshchestvennykh deiatelei v 1917 godu o sotsial’noekonomicheskom krizise’, in Novikov, A.V. (ed.), 1917 god: ot Imperii Romanovykh k Sovetskoi imperii (Kostroma: KGU, 2017), pp. 134–41. 40 For recollections, see Krivosheeva, N.A. (ed.) Delo velikogo stroitel’stva tserkovnogo. Vospominaniia chlenov Sviashchennogo Sobora Pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi Tserkvi 1917–1918 godov (Moscow: PSTGU, 2009), pp. 70, 97–8, 312–13, 504–5; and for an assessment, see Kenworthy, S. ‘Rethinking the Russian Orthodox Church and the Bolshevik Revolution’, Revolutionary Russia, 31, 1, 2018, pp. 6–7. 41 Protasov, L. ‘The All-Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative’, in Wade, R.A. (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 258. 42 Johnston, R. New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920–1945 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), p. 11. 43 There has been much work in Russian on the civil war recently. For a study that addresses social backgrounds, see Gagkuev, R.G. Beloe dvizhenie na Iuge Rossii. Voennoe stroitel’stvo, istochniki komplektovaniia, sotsial’nyi sostav. 1917–1920 gg. (Moscow: Posev, 2012). There have also been studies of other resistance; most recently, see Tarasov, K.A. ‘“Vse, kto protiv bol’shevikov, – s nami”: deiatel’nost’ organizatsii Shul’gina-Filonenko v Petrograde (ianvar’-mart 1918 g.)’, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 9, 3, 2019, pp. 580–94. 44 For a recent survey of the burgeoning literature on ‘former people’, not all of whom were elites, see Smirnova, T.M. ‘“Byvshie liudi” poslerevoliutsionnoi Rossii: osnovnye itogi, problemy i perspektivy izucheniia’, in Petrov (ed.), Velikaia

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rossiiskaia revoliutsiia, pp. 502–8. On nobles, see Tchouikina, S. Les gens d’autrefois: La noblesse russe dans la société soviétique (Paris: Belin, 2017) and Rendle, M. ‘The Problems of “Becoming Soviet”: Former Nobles in Soviet Society, 1917–1941’, European History Quarterly, 38, 1, 2008, pp. 7–33. 45 Chase, W. Workers, Society, and the Soviet State (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 122; Heinzen, J. Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p. 255. Earlier, in late 1918, almost 98 per cent of the Commissariat of Finance had been post before October and there were figures of 60–80 per cent in other commissariats; Gimpel’son, E.G. Sovetskie upravlentsy 1917–1920gg. (Moscow: IRI RAN, 1998), p. 116. 46 Kavtaradze, A.G. Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe respubliki sovetov 1917–1920gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 176–7; and Grebenkin, I.N. ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution: The Officers’ Image’, Russian Studies in History, 56, 3, 2017, pp. 212–22. 47 For information on the activities of tribunals, see Rendle, M. The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 48 On Eiler’s service in 1917, see Rendle, ‘Local’, 29–33; on his fate, see Rendle, ‘Tsarist Elites’, 261. 49 For overviews, see Freeze, ‘Religion and Revolution’, 280–3; and Shkarovskiy, M. ‘Soviet State and Soviet Church’, in Schönpflug, D. and Schultze-Wessel, M. (eds.), Redefining the Sacred: Religion in the French and Russian Revolutions (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 181–95.

Chapter 17 1

https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm (accessed 1 May 2021).

2

Recent reviews of the state of the field in regards to women and gender in 1917 include Lindenmeyr, A. ‘Writing Women into the Russian Revolution of 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 13, 2020, pp. 214–31; Engel, B.A. ‘A Gendered Revolution?’ Revolutionary Russia, 30, 2, 2017, pp. 196–207, and Pushkareva, N. ‘Soviet and Post-Soviet Scholarship of Women’s Participation in Russia’s Socio-Political Life from 1900 to 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 2, 2017, pp. 208–27. Recent discussions of the revolution which involve an almost all-male cast and no mention of women’s activism include ‘Round Table on the February Revolution of 1917 in Russian History’, Russian Studies in History, 56, 1, 2017, pp. 6–50. For a summary of historians’ debates about the February Revolution and advocacy of the primary role of male revolutionary activists, see, among others, Melancon, M. ‘Rethinking Russia’s February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency?’ in The Carl Beck Papers on Russian & East European Studies, Number 1408 (Pittsburgh: The Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2000). Views emphasizing women’s agency are not new. See Edmondson, L. Feminism

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in Russia, 1900–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984); Stites, R. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, 1991); McDermid, J. and Hillyar, A. Midwives of the Revolution: Female Bolsheviks and Women Workers in 1917 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), and Chatterjee, C. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), and Iukina, I. Russkii feminizm kak vyzov sovremennosti (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2004) and Ruthchild, R.G. Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Notably Mark Steinberg’s works have attempted to integrate more acknowledgement of women as historical actors in 1917. See The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 28–32; and Chapter 6, ‘Women and the Revolution in the Village’, pp. 170–222. For coverage of soldiers’ wives, primarily in the countryside, see Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 145–80. One earlier historian of peasant women who did mention the support by some peasant women for women’s political rights is Barbara Engel. See her ‘Women, Men and the Languages of Peasant Resistance, 1870–1907’, in Frank, S.P. and Steinberg, M.D. (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 34–53, especially pp. 50–1. Engel’s survey does not extend to 1917. For Western scholarship on women peasants, resistance and economic power, see especially Kingston-Mann, E. Women, Land Rights and Rural Development: How Much Land Does a Woman Need? (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2018). The scholars who have pioneered women’s history of this period in Russia include Natalia Pushkareva, Irina Iukina, Zoia Grishina, Olga Khasbulatova, Natalia Gafisova, Valentina Uspenskaia, Natalia Novikova and Olga Shnyrova. 3

Pokrovskaia, M.I. ‘Gosudarstvennyi Soviet i iuristki’, Zhenskii vestnik, February 1913, p. 45.

4

Pokrovskaia, M.I. ‘O zhenskoi prestupnosti’, Zhenskii vestnik, October 1905, pp. 293–4.

5

Ruthchild, Equality and Revolution, 226–9. For video of the march, from newsreel film taken at the time, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLOQASmngrE (accessed 1 May 2021).

6

For data and statistics about the elections, see Radkey, O. Russia Goes to the Polls: The Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

7

Zetkin as quoted in Alexandra Kollontai, International Women’s Day, trans. Alix Holt (Highland Park, Michigan: International Socialist Publishing, 1974), https:// www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/womens-day.htm (accessed 1 May 2021), p. 2.

8

Mikhailova (Kollontai), A. ‘Zhenshchina-rabotnitsa na pervom feministicheskom kongresse v Rossii’, Golos sotsial-demokrata (March 1909), pp. 6–7.

NOTES

9

559

Trotsky, L.D. Istoriia russkoi revoliutsii, 2 vols, vol. 1. Fevralskaia revoliutsiia (Berlin: Izd. Granit, 1931), p. 126; Kaiurov, V.N. ‘Shest’ dnei fevral’skoi revoliutsii’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1, 1923, p. 158.

10 The leaflet is in Longley, D.A. ‘The Mezhraionka, the Bolsheviks, and International Women’s Day: In Response to Michael Melancon’ Appendix F (“Pechatnyi listok Peterburgskogo Mezhduraionnogo Komiteta posviashchennyi Mezhdunarodnomu dniu rabotnits─23 fevralia 1917g.) Soviet Studies, 41, 4, 1989, pp. 625–45. 11 See Wood, E.A. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Chatterjee, Celebrating Women, 37–58; Iukina, Russkii feminizm. 12 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘“Democracy” in the Political Consciousness of the February Revolution’, in Wade, R.A. (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 75–90, 77. Kolonitskii discusses many understandings of democracy at the time but does not mention women as part of the discourse or activism about democracy and democratic rights. 13 McDermid and Hillyar, Midwives, 17. 14 Kollontai (A. Kalantai), ‘Rabotnitsy i uchreditel’noe sobranie’, Pravda, 21 March 1917, p. 1. 15 Browder R. and Kerensky, A. (eds.) The Russian Provisional Government, 1917, vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 173. 16 The march as it progressed from the City Hall down Nevskii Prospekt was captured on newsreel. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLOQASmngrE (accessed 1 May 2021). 17 The newsreel footage cited above shows Figner holding a flower, alongside Shishkina-Iavein. 18 Chekhova, M.A. ‘Bor’ba za pravo, kak nravstvennaia obiazannost’ zhenshchiny’, Soiuz zhenshchin 3, October 1907, pp. 4–5. 19 For Zakuta’s account, see Ruthchild, editor and translator, Olga Zakuta, ‘Kak v revoliutsionnoe vremia Vserossiiskaia Liga Ravnopraviia Zhenshchin dobilas’, izbiratel’nykh prav dlia russkikh zhenshchin’ Aspasia, 6, 2012, pp. 117–24. For the text of the electoral law see Browder and Kerensky, The Russian Provisional Government, 454–61. The clause including women as eligible voters is on p. 455. 20 The great majority of African-American women (and men) in the southern United States did not get the vote until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, partially gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. Native Americans were finally authorized to vote by the Snyder Act of 1924. But because the Constitution left it up to the states to determine voting eligibility, it was only in 1962 that New Mexico became the last state to enfranchise native Americans. 21 Rodzianko had experienced the wrath of the Tsar on the issue of universal suffrage. The autocrat remained opposed to full suffrage and further democratic reforms even at a time of utmost peril to his rule. Immediately after the start of the February Revolution, Rodzianko met with the Tsar on 3 March 1917, presenting him with a

560

NOTES

proposal for elections to a Constituent Assembly. The Tsar rejected it out of hand, writing in his diary: ‘God knows who thought up such nonsense!’ See Shatskillo, K.F. (ed.) Dnevniki Imperatora Nikolaia II (Moscow: Orbita, 1991), p. 625. 22 Stoff, L.S. They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), pp. 74–6. 23 For a comprehensive study of the Women’s Battalion in the context of the Russian military in World War One, see Stockdale, M. ‘“My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness”: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917’, American Historical Review, 109, 1, 2004, pp. 78–116. 24 Edmondson, L. ‘Women’s Rights, Gender and Citizenship in Tsarist Russia, 1860–1920: The Question of Difference’, in Grimshaw, P. et al. (eds.), Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 153–67, 160. 25 ‘Lloyd George Won to Women’s Cause’, New York Times, 29 March 1917, pp. 1–2. 26 Flexner, E. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 292–297; ‘Lloyd George’, 1–2. 27 Vishniak, M. Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie (Paris: Izd. Sovremennyia zapiski, 1932), p. 83. 28 For the Constituent Assembly election participation figures, see Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, pp. 44–5. 29 Protasov, L.G. ‘Zhenshchina v Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel’noe Sobranie’, in Shcherbinin, P.P. (ed.), Ot muzhskikh i zhenskikh k gendernym issledovaniiam: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii 20 aprelia 2001 goda (Tambov: Tambov State University Press, 2001), pp. 46–54, 47. 30 Sypchenko A.V. and Morozov, K.N. (eds.) Trudovaia narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partiia: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), pp. 269, 287. 31 ‘Eshche odna nespravedlivost’, Zhenskoe delo, 20, 1 November 1917), p. 1. 32 For the list, see Jus Suffragii, 1 March 1918, p. 94; Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, p. 301, and Pietrow-Ennker, B Russlands ‚neue Menschen’: Die Enwicklung der Frauenbewegung von den Anfängen bis zur Oktoberrevolution (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), p. 351. For feminist vote totals, see Radkey, Russia goes to the polls, pp. 154, 156. 33 Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, pp. 44, 45. 34 On the schoolteacher, see Radkey, Russia goes to the polls, 45; on women voting Bolshevik, see p. 62. 35 Ferro, M. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 356. 36 Crosley, P.S. Intimate Letters from Petrograd (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1920), p. 221. 37 Kulik, V.N. ‘Tveritianki v 1917 godu’, in Uspenskaia, V.I. (ed.), Zhenshchiny. Istoriia. Obshchestvo. Sbornik nauchnykh trudov. Vypusk I (Tver’: Tverskoi Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1999), pp. 138–48, 143. The Russian original is: ‘Ne khodite vyi, devchonki, S demokratami guliat’: Demokraty vas nauchat, Proklamatsii chitat’’.

NOTES

561

38 Protasov, L.G. Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie: Istoriiarozhdeniia i gibeli (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), p. 70. 39 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 49. 40 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 49. 41 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 50. 42 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 51, for the quote. 43 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 49. 44 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 50. 45 On the voting percentages, see Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 50. 46 Wolbrecht, C. and Corder, J.K. ‘Turning Rights into Ballots: The Uneven Integration of Women into Electoral Politics after Suffrage’, Politics Symposium, political science & politics, 01.07.2020, 53, 3, p. 480. 47 On the feminist vote, see Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 48; Spirin, L.M. Rossiia 1917 god: Iz istorii bor’by politicheskikh partii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1987), pp. 299, 305; and Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, xii, 154, 156. 48 Tyrkova claimed that the Bolsheviks stole the election and then destroyed the vote tallies. L.G. Protasov, utilizing the most complete archival research to date, disputes her claims. See Protasov, L.G. Liudi Uchreditel’nogo sobranniia: portret v inter’ere epokhi (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), pp. 8, 44, 46. 49 The fate of the female Constituent Assembly delegates was largely tragic. Kollontai and Rozmirovich were the only ones to survive and gain prominence in the Soviet Union. Rozmirovich served the Soviet state in various capacities, although after 1935 she did not hold any prominent party positions. Kollontai won fame as the first female ambassador in the world, but her foreign postings saved her from the purges. Vera Figner was marginalized after the Bolsheviks seized power. Of the others, Breshko-Breshkovskaia emigrated, and Spiridonova, Iakovleva, Sletova, Perveeva and Matveevskaia perished in Stalin’s gulag. Bosh committed suicide. See Protasov, ‘Zhenshchiny’, 53. 50 On Tyrkova, see Norman, A. ‘Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, November 26, 1869–January 12, 1962’, Russian Review, 21, 3, 1962, p. 278 on her loss to Trotsky. On Sletova, see Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 44. On all the women elected, see Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 52–3. For a description of the first session of the Constituent Assembly, see especially Vishniak, Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie, 98–116. See also Vaksberg, A. Val’kyriia revoliutsii (Smolensk: Rusich, 1997). 51 Ramirez, F.O., Shanahan, S. and Soysal, Ia. ‘The Changing Logic of Poltiical Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990’, American Sociological Review, 62, 5, 1997, pp. 735–45, 735. 52 Wolbrecht and Corder, ‘Turning Rights into Ballots’, 479–83, 480. 53 Protasov, ‘Zhenshchina’, 46–54, 47. 54 Gisela Bock argues that while women’s suffrage did not result in dramatic changes, its long-term benefits for women are real. See Bock, G. Women in European History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 252.

562

NOTES

55 See Gurevich, L. Pochemu nuzhno dat’ zhenshchinam takiia zhe prava, kak muzhchinam (Petrograd: 1917); Edmondson Feminism, 165–9, and Stites Women’s Liberation, 291–5. Vishniak in Vserossiiskoe uchreditel’noe sobranie contends that the Provisional Government’s electoral law was the model for other eastern and central European countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and Germany, and also for Republican Spain (85). 56 Protasov, L.G. ‘The All-Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative: Two Views of the Problem’, in Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia, 243–66. I personally witnessed several instances, in my Leningrad dorm, and on a Moscow-bound train, where Soviet citizens were canvassed to make sure they had voted. 57 Enderlein, E. ‘“Hier Était Demain”: Réflexions Sur Le Premier Congrès Feminine Pan-Russe de 1908’, in Leduc, G. (ed.), Nouvelles sources et nouvelles methodologies de recherché dans les etudes sur les femmes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), p. 139. Évelyne Enderlein was told by Arkadii Vaksberg that the list of feminist organizations and publications to be closed was compiled by Kollontai and is at GARF. I have not been able personally to consult these documents. Personal conversation, 22 March 2008.

Chapter 18 1

Sanborn, J.A. Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), p. 161.

2

Engel, B.A. ‘Peasant Morality and Pre-Marital Relations in Late 19th Century Russia’, Journal of Social History, 23, 4, 1990, p. 698.

3

Engel, B.A. Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work, and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 11–12.

4

Worobec, C.D. ‘Masculinity in Late-Imperial Russian Peasant Society’, in Clements, B.E. et al. (eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 78.

5

Collective responsibility was abolished in 1903, but it remained common practice in rural communities, see Kotsonis, Ya. ‘“Face-to-Face”: The State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation, 1863–1917’, Slavic Review, 63, 2, 2004, pp. 221, 239.

6

Chernukha, V.G. Pasport v Rossii, 1719–1917 gg (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2007), pp. 167–80; Schenk, F.B. ‘“The New Means of Transportation Will Make Unstable People Even More Unstable”: Railways and Geographical Mobility in Tsarist Russia’, in Randolph, J. and Avrutin, E.M. (eds.), Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility Since 1850 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 218–34.

7

Burds, J. Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labour Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), pp. 22–3.

8

Engel, ‘Peasant Morality’, 703–4.

NOTES

9

563

Frank, S.P. ‘“Simple Folk, Savage Customs?” Youth, Sociability, and the Dynamics of Culture in Rural Russia, 1856–1914’, Journal of Social History, 25, 4, 1992, pp. 717–18.

10 Baker, H. ‘Monarchy Discredited? Reactions to the Khodynka Coronation Catastrophe of 1896’, Revolutionary Russia, 16, 1, 2003, pp. 19–22. 11 Mathew, T. Greetings from the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia (London: Four Corners Books, 2018), pp. 85–97; Daly, J.W. ‘Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906–1917’, Journal of the Historical Society, 9, 1, 2009, p. 28. 12 Mathew, Greetings from the Barricades, 214, 227, 246–7, 268, 271, 314, 332; Minin, O., ‘Art and Politics in the Russian Satirical Press, 1905–1908’, PhD dissertation (University of Southern California, 2008), pp. 87–8, 92–3. 13 Steinberg, M.D. and Frank, S.P. ‘Introduction’, in Frank and Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 14 Engel, Between the Fields and the City, 144–5, 207. 15 Valetov, T. ‘Migration and the Household: Urban Living Arrangements in Late 19th to Early 20th-Century Russia’, History of the Family, 13, 2, 2008, pp. 163–77. 16 Smith, S.A. ‘Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St Petersburg’, in Clements Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 99. 17 Smith, ‘Masculinity in Transition’, 101. 18 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 6. 19 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 133–7. 20 Steinberg, M.D. Petersburg Fin-de-Siecle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 120–2. 21 Gilbert, G. ‘Cultivating the “Aristocracy of the Spirit”: The Sokol Movement in Late Imperial Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 3, 2017, pp. 504–28. 22 Windhausen, J.D. and Tsypkina, I.V. ‘National Identity and the Emergence of the Sport Movement in Late Imperial Russia’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 12, 2, 1995, pp. 167–86; McReynolds, L. Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 112. 23 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 131–43. 24 Brooks, J. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 59–108. 25 McReynolds, L. The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 293–9. 26 Kelly, C. ‘The Education of the Will: Advice Literature, Zakal, and Manliness in Twentieth-Century Russia’, in Clements Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 133–5. 27 Kelly, ‘The Education of the Will’, 145.

564

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28 McReynolds, L. ‘Visualizing Masculinity: The Male Sex That Was Not in Finde-Siecle Russia’, in Kivelson, V.A. and Neuberger, J. (eds.), Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 133. 29 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 253–6. 30 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 280–7. 31 Brüggemann, K. ‘Imperial Careers and National Recollection: Baltic Wrestlers and the Organisation of National Sports in the Late Tsarist Empire (using the example of Estonia)’, in Katzer, N. et al. (eds.), Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in Soviet Culture and Society (Frankfurt: Campus, 2010), p. 143. 32 Hearne, S. ‘An Erotic Revolution? Pornography in the Russian Empire, 1905–1914’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 30, 2, 2021, p. 213. 33 Hilton, M.L. Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), p. 11. 34 Starks, T. Smoking under the Tsars: A History of Tobacco in Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 144. 35 Ruane, C. ‘Clothes Shopping in Imperial Russia: The Development of a Consumer Culture’, Journal of Social History, 28, 4, 1995, pp. 765–82. 36 Smith, ‘Masculinity in Transition’, 107. 37 Brooks, J. The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 159–60. 38 Stolarski, C. ‘Another Way of Telling the News: The Rise of Photojournalism in Russia, 1900–1914’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 12, 3, 2011, pp. 561–90. 39 McReynolds, ‘Visualising Masculinity’, 136. 40 Stockdale, M.K. Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 106–39. 41 Sanborn, J.A. ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 77, 2, 2005, pp. 290–324. 42 Gatrell, P. Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 22–3. 43 Gatrell, P. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 3. 44 Levsen, S. ‘Masculinities’, in Daniel, U. et al. (eds.), 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopaedia of the First World War, 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online. net/article/masculinities (accessed 16 April 2020). 45 Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation, 136. 46 Petrone, K. ‘Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian War Posters of the First World War’, in Melman, B. (ed.), Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace 1870–1930 (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 104–10. 47 Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation, 164–5.

NOTES

565

48 Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation, 141–5; Pyle, E.E. ‘Peasant Strategies for Obtaining State Aid: A Study of Petitions during World War I’, Russian History, 24, 1–2, 1997, pp. 44–8. 49 Badcock, S. ‘Women, Protest, and Revolution: Soldiers’ Wives in Russia during 1917’, International Review of Social History, 49, 1, 2004, p. 62. 50 Stockdale, M.K. ‘“My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness”: Women, Patriotism, and Soldering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917’, American Historical Review, 109, 1, 2004, p. 85. 51 Rachamimov, I. ‘The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920’, American Historical Review, 111, 2, 2006, pp. 362–82. 52 Astashov, A.B. ‘Seksual’nyi opyt russkogo soldata na pervoi mirovoi i ego posledstviia dliia voiny i mira’, Voenno-istoricheskaia antorpologiia: Ezhegodnik (2005–6), pp. 367–82. 53 Hearne, S. ‘Sex on the Front: Prostitution and Venereal Diseases in Russia’s First World War’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 1, 2017, pp. 108–14. 54 Healey, D. ‘Love and Death: Transforming Sexualities in Russia, 1914–1922’, in Frame, M. et al. (eds.), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2. Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities and Memory (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014), pp. 162–6. 55 Sumpf, A. ‘War Disabled on Screen: Remembering and Forgetting the Great War in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1914–1940’, First World War Studies, 6, 1, 2015, p. 57; Kattsina, T.A. and Mezit, L.E. ‘The Development of Government and Public Assistance for Disabled Veterans in 1914–1921 (Evidence from Yenisseyskaya Province in Russia’, Terra Sebus. Acta Musei Sabesiensis, 11 (2019), p. 449. 56 McCallum, C. ‘Scorched by the Fire of War: Masculinity, War Wounds and Disability in Soviet Visual Culture, 1941–65’, Slavonic and East European Review, 93, 2, 2015, p. 256. 57 Petrone, P. The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 90. 58 Sumpf, ‘War Disabled on Screen’, 66–8; ‘Obshchestvo “voina, pomoshch’ i trud’”’ Vechernee vremiia, 19 October 1915. 59 Phillips, L.L. ‘Gendered Dis/ability: Perspectives from the Treatment of Psychiatric Casualties in Russia’s Early Twentieth-Century Wars’, Social History of Medicine, 70, 2, 2007, p. 334. 60 Phillips, ‘Gendered Dis/ability’, 343. 61 Milne, L. ‘“Novyi Satirikon”, 1914–1918: The Patriotic Laugher of the Russian Liberal Intelligentsia during the First World War and the Revolution’, Slavonic and East European Review, 84, 4, 2006, p. 643. 62 Figes, O. and Kolonitskii, B.I. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 11–16.

566

NOTES

63 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘“Politicheskia pornografiia” i desakralizatsiia vlasti v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (slukhi i massovaia kul’tura)’, in Tiutiukin, V. (ed.), 1917 god v sud’bakh Rossii i mira: Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia: Ot novykh istochnikov k novomu osmysleniiu (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, 1998), pp. 67–81. 64 Sylvester, R.P. ‘Scandal of the Severnaia: or Sex and the “New Man” in Late Imperial Odessa’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 20, 2, 2011, pp. 225–42. 65 Engelstein, L. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, and Civil War, 1914–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 120. 66 Wildman, A.K. The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April 1917) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 34–5. 67 Petrone, ‘Family, Masculinity, and Heroism’, 95–120; Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 115–20. 68 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 142–7. 69 Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 192–6, 234–5; Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 32–3, 52–4. 70 Retish, A.B. ‘Creating Peasant Citizens: Rituals of Power, Rituals of Citizenship in Viatka Province, 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 16, 1, 2003, pp. 47–67. 71 Ruthchild, R.G. Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press 2011), pp. 223–9. 72 Badcock, ‘Women, Protest, and Revolution’, 55–6. 73 Koenker, D.P. and Rosenberg, W.G. Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 314–16. 74 Steinberg, M.D. The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 201. 75 On Sofia Panina, see Lindenmeyr, A. Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). 76 Lindenmeyr, A. ‘“The First Woman in Russia”: Countess Sofia Panina and Women’s Political Participation in the Revolutions of 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 9, 1, 2016, p. 160. 77 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘“Comrade Kerensky”: The Antimonarchy Revolution and Images of the “Leader of the People”’, Anthropology and Archaeology of Eurasia, 38, 2, 1999, p. 29. 78 Kolonitskii, B.I. Comrade Kerensky: The Revolution against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of ‘The Leader of the People’ (March-June 1917) (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), pp. 114–21. 79 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 208. 80 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 138. 81 McReynolds, Russia at Play, 113–43; Brooks, The Firebird and the Fox, 147–66. 82 Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 104.

NOTES

567

83

Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 103.

84

Kolonitskii, ‘The Antimonarchy Revolution’, 35.

85

Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 92–3.

86

Bochkareva, M. Yashka: My Life as Peasant, Exile, and Soldier (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1919), p. 156.

87

Stockdale, ‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’, 102–4.

88

von Hagen, M. Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 14.

89

Steinberg, M.D. Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 228.

90

Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 227.

91

Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 179–89.

92

Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky, 12.

93

Sumpf, ‘War Disabled on Screen’, 73.

94

Sumpf, A. ‘Une société amputée. Les retours des invalides russes de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1929’, Cahiers du monde russe, 51, 1, 2010, p. 47.

95

Otchet o trudakh 1ogo Vserossiiskogo s’ezda delegatov uvechnykh voinov (15-27 iiuniia 1917) (Petrograd: Vserossiiskii soiuza uvechnykh voinov, 1917), pp. 5–6.

96

Otchet o trudakh, 5–6.

97

Shcherbinin, P. ‘Osobennosti sotsial’noi zashchity veteranov voennoi sluzhby v Rossiiskoi imperii v XVIII-nachale XX v.’, Journal of Power Institutions in PostSoviet Societies, 6, 7, 2007, https://journals.openedition.org/pipss/973; Sumpf, ‘Une société amputée’, 46.

98

Tsentral’nyi komitet vserossiiskogo soiuza uvechnikh voinov, ‘Ko vsem uvechnym voinam tovarishchi!’, 19 September 1917, available via Natsional’naia elektronnaia biblioteka https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000200_000018_RU_NLR_ BIBL_A_011175979/ (accessed 22 April 2021).

99

Shcherbinin, ‘Osobennosti sotsial’noi zashchity veteranov’.

100 This changed in the mid-1920s, see Phillips, S.D. ‘“There Are No Invalids in the USSR!”: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History’, Disability Studies, 29, 3, 2009. 101 For an overview of the political crises of summer 1917, see Wade, R.A. The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 170–204. 102 Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 26. 103 Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 11; Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 146. 104 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Obrazy A. F. Kerenskogo i politcheskaia bor’ba v 1917 godu (na primere gazet A. A. Suvorina’, Historia Provinciae – Zhurnal regional’noi istorii, 4, 4, 2020, pp. 869–70, 872–3. 105 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Feminizatsiia obraza A. F. Kerenskogo i politicheskaia izoliatsiia vremennogo pravitel’stva osen’iu 1917 goda’, Problemy istorii i istorigrafii. Sbornik

568

NOTES

dokladov mezhvuzovskoi konferentsii, 1 (2013), pp. 93–103; Kolonitskii, ‘Obrazy A. F. Kerenskogo’, 846–7. 106 Kolonitskii, ‘Feminizatsiia obraza A. F. Kerenskogo’, 99–100. 107 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Kerensky as “Traitor”: Symbolic Politics, Rumour, and the Political Deployment of Rumours in the Revolutionary Period’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 1, 2021, p. 6. 108 Lipatova, N.V. ‘On the Verge of the Collapse of Empire: Images of Alexander Kerensky and Mikhail Gorbachev’, Europe-Asia Studies, 65, 2, 2013, p. 273. 109 Fraser, E.L. ‘Soviet Masculinities and Revolution’, in Baker, C. (ed.), Gender in 20th-Century Eastern Europe and the USSR (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 129. 110 Fraser, ‘Soviet Masculinities’, 134. 111 Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-“Burzhui” Consciousness in 1917’, Russian Review, 53, 2, 1994, pp. 190–1. 112 O’Donnell, A. ‘A Noah’s Ark: Material Life and the Foundations of Soviet Governance, 1916–1922’, PhD dissertation (Princeton University, 2014), pp. 105–6. 113 Carey, M. ‘“A Man of Throbbing Vitality”: Leon Trotsky and the “Leatherites”’, British Library European Studies blog, https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2017/06/leontrotsky-and-the-leatherites.html (accessed 17 May 2021). 114 Kaminsky, L. ‘“No Rituals and Formalities!” Free Love, Unregistered Marriage, and Alimony in Early Soviet Law and Family Life’, Gender & History, 29, 3, 2017, pp. 718. 115 Fraser, ‘Soviet Masculinities’, 133. 116 Wood, E.A. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 13–48. 117 Borenstein, E. Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 4. 118 Friedman, R. and Healey, D. ‘Conclusions’, in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, 232.

Chapter 19 1

Decree on the Unified Labour School of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. 16 October 1918. http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/raising-socialistyouth/raising-socialist-youth-texts/unified-labor-school/

2

Eklof, B. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 103.

3

Kirschenbaum, L. Small Comrades. Revolutionising Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge Falmer, 2001), p. 13.

NOTES

569

4

See Nikolai Dobroliubov, The Importance of Authority in Education, 1857 at https:// www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/children/ref/excerpt/authority.html

5

Alston, P.L. Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 173.

6

Dobrenko, E. ‘“The Entire Real World of Children”: The School Tale and Our Happy Childhood’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 49, 2, 2005, p. 228.

7

Alston, Education and the State, 167.

8

Alston Education and the State, 176.

9

Russkaia Shkola March 1905, in Alston, Education and the State, 177.

10 See Andreev, A.L. ‘On the Modernization of Education in Russia. A Historical Sociological Analysis’, Russia Social Science Review, 54, 5, 2013, pp. 4–21. 11 Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 90. 12 Hans, N. The Russian Tradition in Education (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 149. 13 Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 293. 14 Gorshkov, B. Russia’s Factory Children. State, Society and Law, 1800–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), p. 165. 15 Engels, F. The Principles of Communism. Written in 1847, the draft was first published in 1914. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm. 16 See Bukharin, N.I. and Preobrazhenskii, E. The ABC of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). First published in 1920, chapter 10 is ‘Communism and Education’ and Part 79 ‘Preparation for School Life’, see also https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/10.htm. Preobrazhenskii wrote the section on education. Written in 1919 at the height of the Civil War, it was conceived of as both an elaboration of the new Party Programme, adopted at the Eight Party Congress in March, and a statement of aspirations. 17 See Banfield, G. ‘Marx and Education: Working with the Revolutionary Educator’, Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies, 31, 1, 2015. 18 Nadezhda Krupskaia was Lenin’s wife and a leading Bolshevik Party member, who had been involved in adult education before the revolution. She was a key figure in educational policies in the early Soviet period and later canonized as an international educational theorist, with the Soviet government sponsoring a UNESCO literary prize in her name between 1970 and 1992. For a sympathetic view of Krupskaia’s commitment to a broader emancipatory humanistic education than that eventually associated with Soviet education, see Read, C. ‘Krupskaia, Proletkult and the Origins of Soviet Cultural Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 12, 3, 2006, pp. 245–55. 19 For the decree in English: http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/raising-socialist-youth/ raising-socialist-youth-texts/unified-labor-school/ 20 See Mchitarjan, I. ‘John Dewey and the Development of Education in Russia before 1930: A Forgotten Reception’, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 19, 1–2, 2000, pp. 109–31.

570

NOTES

21 Wagner, W. ‘Family Law, the Rule of Law, and Liberalism in Late Imperial Russia’, Jahrbűcher fűr die Geschichte Osteuropas, 43, 4, 1995, p. 528. 22 Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 19–23. 23 Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 21 24 Liebel, M. ‘The Moscow Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1918)’, International Journal of Children’s Rights, 24, 1, 2016, p. 10. 25 http://www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm 26 The Constituent Assembly was the elected All-Russian parliamentary body that met for one day in January 1918 before being closed down by the Bolsheviks. 27 Butler, W. Russian Family Law (London: Wildy, Simmonds and Hill Publishing, 2015), p. 70. 28 Liebel, ‘The Moscow Declaration on the Rights of the Child’, 5. 29 Geiger, H.K. The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 39. 30 Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/. 31 Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, 72. 32 The legal category of illegitimacy was reintroduced in 1944 to encourage the birth rate, as the state guaranteed to care for all illegitimate children and free fathers from responsibility for them. See White, E. A Modern History of Russian Childhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), chapter 3. 33 Ginsborg, P. Family Politics. Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 40. 34 For the decree see: http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/the-new-woman/the-newwoman-texts/code-of-laws-concerning-the-civil-registration-of-deaths-births-andmarriages/ 35 This account of the early development of the Komsomol is taken from Neumann, M. The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 20–31. 36 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 23–31. 37 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 31. 38 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 36. 39 Lenin, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/02.htm 40 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 47. 41 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 46–7. 42 White, E. The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party in Emigration (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 34. 43 For Gaidar and the identity formation role of Soviet children’s literature, see White, A Modern History of Russian Childhood, 87, 93.

NOTES

571

44 Guillory, S. ‘The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War Memoirs’, Slavic Review, 71, 3, 2012, pp. 546–56. 45 For refugee children’s autobiographical writings, see Petrushevskaia, L. (ed.) Deti russkoi emigratsii. Kniga, kotoruiu mechtali no ne mogli izdat izgnanniki (Moscow: Terra, 1997). 46 Ransel, D. Village Mothers. Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 265. 47 Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 27. 48 Alston, Education and the State, 170. 49 Goldman, W. Women, the State and Revolution. Soviet Family Policy and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2010, p. 65. 50 Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades, 12. 51 Oushakine, S. ‘The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity’, Cultural Anthropology, 19, 3, 2004, p. 410. 52 Frierson, C.A. and Vilensky, S.S. Children of the Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 46. 53 See Mahood, L. and Satzewich, V. ‘The Save the Children Fund and the Russian Famine of 1921–23: Claims and Counter Claims about Feeding “Bolshevik Children”’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 22, 1, 2009, pp. 55–83. 54 The classic account remains Ball, A. And Now My Soul Is Hardened. Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 55 See Byford, A. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 154–64 for detail on state approaches and conceptualizations of this group of children. 56 Partlett, W. ‘Breaching Cultural Worlds with the Village School. Educational Visions, Local Initiative and Rural Experience and S.T. Shatskii’s Kaluga School System, 1919–1932’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 82, 4, 2004, p. 879. 57 Pujal, S. ‘Fathers and Sons: The Politics and Culture of Generational Class War in Russia, 1918–1929’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 32, 1, 2005, p. 210. 58 At certain times higher secondary education cost a fee. 59 Harwin, J. Children of the Russian State, 1917–1995 (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p. 10. 60 Neumann, The Communist Youth League, 7.

Chapter 20 1

David-Fox, M. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

2

An exception is Richard Stites, who included as early as the late 1980s aspects of preserving cultural heritage in his analysis on the Russian Revolution. Stites, R.

572

NOTES

Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3

I follow a definition that was already formulated by contemporaries. Nikolai Bukharin, for example, called in 1925 for a cultural revolution which he understood as a ‘fundamental change in the virtues of people, in their habits, in their feelings and desires, in the way they lived their daily life, in their byt (everyday life)’ (Bukharin: ‘Ob uperiadochenii byta molodezha’ Komsomol’skaia Pravda, 24 May 1925, p. 2). Cited in English after Neumann, M. The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1931 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 7. For such a broad definition see also Burke, P. Cultural Hybridity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), p. 5 and his What Is Cultural History? (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 3rd ed.

4

One of the first historians to argue that there existed a cultural revolution well before the great turning point of 1928–31 was Stefan Plaggenborg, see his Revolutionskultur: Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrussland zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996). See also David-Fox, M. ‘What Is Cultural Revolution?’ The Russian Review, 58, 2, 1999, pp. 181–201.

5

In view of the plethora of existing literature, one may forgive the author if not all publications of the last three decades receive equal attention. In addition, the portrayal is forced to be strongly centre-focused. A broad inclusion of the peripheries and the pre- and post-revolutionary cultures beyond the dominant Russian Orthodox is not feasible within the scope of this article.

6

Neumann, The Communist Youth League; Dahlke, S. ‘Kampagnen für Gottlosigkeit: Zum Zusammenhang zwischen Legitimation, Mobilisierung und Partizipation in der Sowjetunion der zwanziger Jahre’, Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas, 50, 2, 2002, pp. 172–85.

7

von Geldern, J. Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Brovkin, V.N. Russia after Lenin. Politics, Culture and Society. 1921–1929 (London: Routledge, 1998); Rolf, M. Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); Husband, W.B. ‘Mythical Communities and the New Soviet Woman: Bolshevik Anti-religious Chastushki, 1917–32’, The Russian Review, 63, 1, 2004, pp. 89–106.

8

Both the high and the landed nobility, officers of the tsarist army, members of the tsarist police and gendarmerie, merchants, clergy and factory owners were considered to be ‘former people’ (byvshie). Smith, D. Former People. The Last Days of Russian Autocracy (New York: Macmillan, 2012); Rendle, M. Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2010), p. 202. For intellectuals, see Finkel, S. On the Ideological Front: the Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

9

Smirnova, T.M. ‘Byvshie liudu’ sovetskoi Rossii. Strategii vyzhivaniia i puti integratsii 1917–1936 gg (Moscow: Mir istorii, 2003); Tchouikina, S. Les gens d’autrefois. La noblesse russe dans la societé soviétique (Paris: Belin, 2017); Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland.

NOTES

573

10 Clark, K. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Philipps, L.L. Bolsheviks and the Bottle. Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). A strong proponent of a general extension of the period studied beyond 1917 is Peter Holquist, see his ‘The Russian Revolution as Continuum and Context and Yes, – as Revolution’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 58, 1–2, 2017, pp. 79–94. See also Neumann, M. and Willimott, A. (eds.) Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide (London: Routledge, 2018). 11 Clark, K. ‘The “Quiet Revolution” in Soviet Intellectual Life’, in Fitzpatrick, S. et al. (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 210–29; David-Fox, M. ‘Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922–28’, Soviet Studies, 44, 6, 1992, pp. 1045–68; Read, C. Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For more recent scholarship that assists this argument, see Finkel, On the Ideological Front; Kachurin, P. Making Modernism Soviet. The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 12 Suggested forcefully in Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur. 13 James von Geldern has recently argued that Russian-Soviet culture was ‘fundamentally different after fifty years of social and institutional change’, see his ‘Culture, 1900–1945’, in Suny, R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 549–78. 14 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 61–78. 15 Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution; Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and “Anti-Burzhui” Consciousness in 1917’, The Russian Review, 53, 2, pp. 183–96. 16 Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 169. Because of this deeprooted antagonism and ‘antibourgeois’ sentiments Kolonitskii doubts that civil war would have been avoided by a more stable Provisional Government anyway, see his ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda’. 17 Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 61–9; Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 30–70; McMeekin, S. History’s Greatest Heist. The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 18 Semyonova, N. and Iljine, N.V. (eds), Selling Russia’s Treasures. The Soviet Trade in Nationalized Art 1917–1938 (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2013), p. 14. 19 Examples of this visual propaganda are the posters Kto protiv sovetov (Who is against the soviets), 1919, from D.S. Moor and Deninkinskaja banda (Denikins gang), 1918, from V.N. Deni. For more posters see Bonnell, V.E. Iconography of Power. Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 20 Besides the ‘Decree on Land’ the following decrees among many implied degradation and exclusion of the former elites: ‘Decree on the abolition of estates and ranks’, reproduced in Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii, Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (eds.), Dekrety

574

NOTES

Sovetskoi Vlasti, vol. 1, 25 oktobria 1917 – 16 marta 1918 (Moscow: Gos. izd. pol. lit., 1957), pp. 71–2; and the ‘Constitution (Special Law) of the Russian Socialist Federative Socialist Republic’, published in Izvestiia, 19. 7. 1918. On the looting of estate houses see Priscilla Roosevelt, P. ‘The Fate of Russia’s Estate Houses and Their Contents, 1917–1930’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, 43, 3–4, 2009, pp. 45–71. Roosevelt (46) compares the damage done to the cultural artefacts of Russia’s estate houses with the Chinese national cultural loss during Mao’s cultural revolution. 21 McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, 45–6. 22 Smith, S.A. ‘Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Struggle against Relics 1918–1930’, Past and Present, 204, 2009, pp. 155–94. 23 Finkel, S. ‘Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia’, The Russian Review 62, 4, 2003, pp. 589–613; Finkel On the Ideological Front; on the expulsion of intellectuals see also Shentalinskii, V. ‘Oskolki serebriannogo veka’, Novyi mir, 5, 1998, https://magazines.gorky.media/novyi_mi/1998/5/ oskolki-serebryanogo-veka.html. Richard Stites has described this anti-intellectual policy as Makhaevism and as part of pre-revolutionary anti-intellectualism (Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 72–6). 24 On the discussion on a ‘soft-line’ in NEP and the refutation of such arguments see footnote 12 in Finkel, ‘Purging the Intellectual’, 592. 25 For example: ‘Decree banning the export of the Botticelli paintings (tondo) abroad), 30 May 1918’, in Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti, vol. II (Moscow: Gos. izd. pol. lit., 1959), pp. 604–5; ‘Decree of the Sovnarkom prohibiting the export and sale of objects of special artistic and historical value abroad, 19 September 1918’, in Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti o Petrograde (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986), pp. 221–2. See also Semyonova and Iljine, Selling Russia’s Treasures, 17. 26 However, the material success of these campaigns is questioned, Semyonova and Iljine, Selling Russia’s Treasures; McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist. For sales in the second half of the 1920s, see Gariffulin, R. ‘Sales of Work of Art from the Leningrad Palace Museums, 1926–1934’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, 43, 3–4, pp. 161–94. 27 Kelly, K. Socialist Churches. Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016); Semyonova and Iljine, Selling Russia’s Treasures, 23; McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist; Solomakha, E ‘The Destruction of the Hermitage’, in Semyonova and Iljine Selling Russia’s Treasures, 128–41. 28 Jahn, H.F. ‘The Housing Revolution in Petrograd 1917–1920’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 38, 2, 1990, pp. 212–27; Pott, P Moskauer Kommunalwohnungen 1917 bis 1997. Materielle Kultur, Erfahrung, Erinnerung, Basler Studien zur Kulturgeschichte Osteuropas 17 (Zürich: Pano, 2009). 29 Smith, Former People, 134–5; Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland, 212–13. 30 ‘Novyi god, novaia bor’ba, novoe shchast’e’, Pravda, 1, 1, 1919, English translation after Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 186.

NOTES

575

31 Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur, 23. 32 Time off from work, excessive eating and drinking – something diametrically opposed to the values of the revolutionary underground – remained ‘an integral part of the very concept of celebration’, see Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 39; Husband, W. ‘Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 1917–1932’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 1, 1998, pp. 74–107. On the – not very fruitful – attempt to implement a new funeral rite see Sokolova, O. ‘Soviet Funeral Services: From Moral Economy to Social Welfare and Back’, Revolutionary Russia, 32, 2, 2019, pp. 251–71. 33 Pott, Moskauer Kommunalwohnungen, 101–17. 34 Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur. The communication gap is noticed in many areas, as for example Soviet mass festivals or radio. Von Geldern, J. ‘Putting the Masses in Mass Culture: Bolshevik Festivals, 1918–1920’, Journal of Popular Culture, 31, 4, 1998, pp. 123–44; Lovell, S. ‘Broadcasting Bolshevik: The Radio Voice of Soviet Culture, 1920s–1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48, 1, 2013, pp. 78–97. 35 Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur, 343. 36 Khestanov, R. ‘The Role of Culture in Early Soviet Models of Governance’, Studies in East European Thought, 66, 1–2, 2014, pp. 123–38. 37 On Bolshevik revolutionary virtues see Clements, B.E. Bolshevik Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 38 Lenin, V.I. The Great Initiative, Including the Story of ‘Communist Saturdays’ (Detroit: Marxian Educational Society, 1919). 39 Brooks, J. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Clark, C.E. Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (London: Associated University Presses, 2000). 40 Grant, S. Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society. Propaganda, Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s (London: Routledge, 2013); Riordan, J. Sport in Soviet Society. Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 41 The extent to which post-revolutionary culture was masculine has not yet been sufficiently examined. Studies of Bolshevik mentality, working-class culture and youth culture suggest that masculinity played an important role in the self-image and cultural formation of these groups. Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle; Neumann, The Communist Youth League; Clements, Bolshevik Women. See also Hearne’s contribution to this Handbook. 42 Mende, W. Musik und Kunst in der sowjetischen Revolutionskultur (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 72–8; Mally, Culture for the Future. 43 Glisic, I. The Futurist Files. Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), pp. 68–71. 44 Mende, Musik und Kunst, 75–6; Murray, N. The Unsung Hero of the Russian AvantGarde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 113–14.

576

NOTES

45 Redepenning, D. ‘Der Sound der Oktoberrevolution 1917 bis 1927’, in Fischer von Weikersthal, F. and Penter, T. (eds.), Oktoberrevolution 1917. Ereignis, Rezeption, künstlerische Deutung (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2020), pp. 251–65. 46 It has often been argued that Lenin and other Bolsheviks were rather conservative in their taste. On the lack of understanding of futuristic decorative art, see Murray, N. Art for the Workers. Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd, 1917–1920 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 140–2, 187. 47 One of the few who heard it was Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 78. See also his ‘Iconoclastic Currents in the Russia Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past’, in Gleason, A. et al. (eds.), Bolshevik Culture. Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 4. 48 See the following decrees of the Sovnarkom: ‘On the transfer of relics to the Ukrainian people, 26 November 1917’ and ‘On the protection of objects of antiquity and art belonging to the Polish people, 25 January 1918’, both in Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti, vol. I, pp. 168–70 and 343–5. 49 Similarly, Kelly Socialist Churches, 5. 50 Lunacharsky in Iskusstvo kommuny 5, 5.1.1919, cited in English after Murray The Unsung Hero, 113; O’Connor, T.E. The Politics of Soviet Culture. Anatolii Lunacharsky (Ann Arbor: Umi Research Press, 1983), p. 68; Roosevelt, ‘The Fate of Russia’s Estate Houses’, 47. 51 The artist and graphic designer Nikolai Kupreianov, for example, designed several posters, among them in 1919 ‘Citizens, preserve cultural treasures’. The poster shows articles that Narkompros obviously felt worthy of protection: a scroll, books, a painting, a vase, a palace and – very prominently – part of the sculpture The Horse Tamers, designed in the nineteenth century by the Russian sculptor Baron Peter Klodt von Jurgensberg decorating the Anichkov bridge in Petrograd. Also in 1919, Kupreianov designed yet another poster calling for the preservation of libraries, ‘Books are the source of knowledge. Citizens, protect libraries’. Both posters were published by the Narkompros Department for the Arts and the Protection of Monuments of Art and Antiquities. 52 This poster was not issued by Narkompros itself but by the Society for the Study, Popularization and Artistic Protection of old St Petersburg and its Environs. Nevertheless, it expressed the ideas of parts of the upper leadership of the new state. 53 During a speech at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, Lenin referred to the importance of ‘capitalistic culture’ for the building of socialism in order to justify the integration of ‘bourgeois’ specialists (Khestanov, ‘Role of Culture’, 126–7). Even a decree ordering the destruction of tsarist monuments excluded those of artistic or historical value: ‘Decree on the monuments of the Republic, 12 April 1918’, in Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti, vol. II, 95–6. See also Gorshanina, S. and Tolz, V. ‘Constructing Heritage in Early Soviet Central Asia: The Politics of Memory in a Revolutionary Context’, Ab imperio, 4, 2016, pp. 77–115. 54 On pre-revolutionary and post-February preservationists, see Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 76.

NOTES

577

55 Even radical avant-garde artists accepted the survival of pre-revolutionary art within the confines of museums, see Glisic, The Futurist Files, 59. 56 Nobles in particular were able to profit from such a policy of incorporating prerevolutionary museum experts and others involved in the protection of cultural property. Smith Former People, 258–61; Smith, S. ‘The Accidental Museum: Expropriating and Appropriating the Past’, The Russian Review, 67, 3, 2008, pp. 438–53. 57 At least until his arrest in 1925. 58 Johnson, E.D. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 79–81. 59 Blinov, A.M. ‘Obshchetsvo “Staryi Peterburg – novyi Leningrad”’, Pamiatniki Obshchestva, 2, 1987, pp. 45–51; Roosevelt, ‘Fate of Russia’s Estate Houses’; Semenova, N. ‘A Soviet Museum Experiment’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, 43, 3–4, pp. 81–102. On the Commission for Storage and Registration, see McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, 56–62. 60 Kelly, Socialist Churches, 6. 61 Kruglikova, G.A. ‘Okhrana istoriko-kul’turnogo naslediia v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (na materialakh Urala)’, in Dokument. Arkhiv. Istoriia. Sovremennost’: Sbornik nauchnykh trudov, 18 (Ekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Uralskogo Universiteta, 2018), p. 112. For the Central Asian case, see Gorshenina and Tolz, ‘Constructing Heritage’. 62 Thus in Central Asia, mosques and Muslim cultural heritage could survive, see Gorshenina and Tolz, ‘Constructing Heritage’. For many places of worship, the Stalin years were to be much more devastating, see. Kruglikova, G.A. ‘Gosudarstvenno-pravovaia okhrana istoriko-kul’turnogo naslediia v pervye gody sovetskoi vlast’, in Kul’tura Urala v XVI-XXI vv: istoricheskii opyt i sovremennost’. Kniga vtoraia: Materialy dokladov i soobshchenii Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 75-letiiu professora V.G. Chufarova (Ekaterinburg: Bank kul’turnoi informatsii, 2008), pp. 373–8; Kelly, Socialist Churches. 63 With regard to the problem of preserving objects, artworks and architecture despite their pre-revolutionary form and content, see Glisic, The Futurist Files, 138–43. 64 This refutes Olga Sobolev’s thesis that a vindication of the past and re-establishment of the concept of cultural heritage took place only in 1925 when the Bolsheviks retreated to the idea of revolution in one country. Sobolev, O. ‘The Symbol of the Symbolists: Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Literary Canon’, in Hodgson, K. et al. (eds.), Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), pp. 130–1, https://doi.org/19.11647/OBP.0076.05. 65 Swift, M. Picturing the Page. Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 66 Husband, ‘Mythical Communities’. 67 von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals; Murray, Art for the Workers.

578

NOTES

68 The dialogue with tradition, thus, should not be reduced to NEP conciliatory politics. 69 Rolf, M. ‘Feiern in Zeiten der Kulturrevolution. Das Massenfest in der Sowjetunion (1917–1932)’, Historische Anthropologie. Kultur – Gesellschaft – Alltag, 13, 2, 2005, pp. 165–6. 70 Kruglikova, ‘Okhran istoriko-kul’turnogo naslediia’, 113. 71 Murray, The Unsung Hero, 120–30.

Chapter 21 1

This is best exemplified by the notion of ‘visuality’, see Duttenhöfer, B. Das Geschlecht der Öffentlichkeit. Deutsche und russische Frauenzeitschriften und ihr Publikum im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Saarbrücken: universaar/Saarland University Press, 2013), p. 338.

2

Couldry, N. and Hepp, A. (eds.) The Mediated Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).

3

Couldy and Hepp (eds.) The Mediated Construction, p. 17. For a distinction in journalistic theory, e.g., between the three interdependent elements of the ‘subject of administration’, meaning government organs, publishers, editors and journalists, the journalistic products as such, and the ‘object of administration’, signifying the readerships / audiences, see Akhmadulin, E.V. ‘Nekotorye osobennosti retrospektivnogo izucheniia sistemy regional’noi periodicheskoi pechati’, Izvestiia Iuzhnogo Federal’nogo Universiteta. Filol. Nauki, 4, 2013, pp. 130–7.

4

On the First World War and media societies see Leonhard, J. ‘Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War – A Commentary from a Comparative Perspective’, in Böhler, J. et al. (eds.), Legacies of Violence. Eastern Europe’s First World War (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2014), p. 325.

5

See Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘The Press and the Revolution’, in Acton, E, Cherniaev, V. Iu. and Rosenberg, W.G. (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 381–90. Pointing to the absence of the radio as mass medium in 1917, Kolonitskii compares the press with railways and cars, thus hints at the transport and infrastructure aspects vital for the unfolding of the revolution. On pamphlets see Thatcher, I.D. ‘The Russian Revolutionary Constitution and Pamphlet Literature in the 1917 Revolution’, Europe-Asia Studies, 68, 10, 2016, pp. 1635–53.

6

Daly, J.W. ‘Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906–1917’, The Journal of the Historical Society, 9, 1, 2009, pp. 24–5.

7

Daly, ‘Government, Press, and Subversion’, p. 25.

8

Preventive censorship and administrative measures against the press were abolished one week after the October Manifesto in 1905.

9

Ferenczi, C. ‘Funktion und Bedeutung der Presse in Russland vor 1914’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 30, 3, 1982, p. 363.

NOTES

579

10 Ferenczi, ‘Funktion’, 362. On analyses of the press, the rise of civil society and political public opinion, see also Ferenczi, C. Aussenpolitik und Öffentlichkeit in Russland 1906–1912 (Husum: Matthiesen, 1982); Fedyashin, A. Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866–1904 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), focused on the ‘thick journals’, especially Vestnik Evropy; Hagen, M. Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit in Russland 1906–1914 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982); McReynolds, L. The News under Russia´s Old Regime. The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Zhirkov, G.V. Zhurnalistika Rossii: ot zolotogo veka do tragedii. 1900–1918 gg. (Izhevsk: Izhevskii institut komp’iuternykh issledovanii, 2014). 11 See Bönker, K. Jenseits der Metropolen. Öffentlichkeit und Lokalpolitik im Gouvernement Saratov (1890–1914) (Cologne – Weimar – Vienna: Böhlau, 2010). In her analysis of three towns in the province of Saratov on the Lower Volga, Bönker offers a comprehensive chapter on ‘the provincial press between civil society as a mission and loyalty to the autocracy’, pp. 397–442, p. 397. Other authors (looking at other regions) point out the ‘socially defensive’ character of censorship and press politics, especially after 1907: The new legislation on the press of 1905/6 did not extend to the province, and while the government cooperated to some degree with the moderate public, censorship hit hardest the workers´ newspapers and especially those in Poland, see Ferenczi, ‘Funktion’, 367, 371–2. After 1907, full-time censors were based in St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw and Tiflis. In the provinces, supervision was exercised by officials with the rank of vice-governors and their secretaries. But then secretaries were also ‘not to be burdened with excessive formalities’, which led to the conclusion that the government itself did not pay great attention anymore, Hagen, Entfaltung, 105–6, referring here to Rigberg, B. ‘The Efficacy of Tsarist Censorship Operations, 1894–1917’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 14, 3, 1966, pp. 327–46. For a recent assessment of provincial periodicals experiencing increased pressures from central and local authorities, as well as shortages of material and personnel, see Suslin, E.V. and Zhuravlev, V.A. ‘K probleme zakonodatel’nogo regulirovaniia pechatnogo dela v period stanovleniia novoi politicheski sistemy Rossii (Mart – Oktjabr’ 1917 g.) Vestnik SanktPeterburgskoi iuridicheskoi akademii 49, 4, 2020, p. 12. 12 Ferenczi, ‘Funktion’, 364. 13 Ferenczi, ‘Funktion’, 364. 14 International exchange had an impact on visualization in journals (through photographs) after the 1880s, and the politicization of socially and culturally heterogenous readerships, see Duttenhöfer, Das Geschlecht der Öffentlichkeit, 17, for the Russian context, and for the increased numbers of illegal papers published abroad, see Kruglikova, O. and Alexeev, K. ‘The Russian Revolution and the Establishment of Authoritarian Media Systems’, in Arnold, K., Preston. P. and Kinnebrock, S. (eds.), The Handbook of European Communication History (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2020), p. 153.

580

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15 See Daly, ‘Government, Press and Subversion’, 56, 65, and Jahn, H.F. Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 16 Daly, ‘Government, Press and Subversion’, 26, 65. 17 See for example Duttenhöfer, Das Geschlecht der Öffentlichkeit, 301, for the previously politically committed women’s journal Zhenskoe delo. 18 See Bönker, Jenseits der Metropolen, 422. 19 This point has been raised especially in comparison with Britain, see Pethybridge, R. The Spread of the Russian Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1972), pp.111–12. 20 Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia. A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 123. 21 Bönker, Jenseits der Metropolen, 408 (‘Provinzkritik’). For the provincial small towns in Saratov province, Bönker indicates quite high percentages of 57.9–64.4 of literate population before 1917, also p. 408. 22 Badcock, S. ‘Structures and Practices of Power: 1917 in Nizhegorod and Kazan’ Provinces’, in Badcock, S. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 1: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015), pp. 357, 377. 23 On Tercümān, see Bennigsen, A. and Lemercier-Quelquejay, C. La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Paris: Mouton, 1964), pp. 37–42, 138–41; Kırımlı, H. National Movements and National Identity among the Crimean Tatars (1905–1916) (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 32–55, and Tuna, M. Imperial Russia’s Muslims (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 117–22. 24 Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse, 51–5, 104–5. 25 See note. 10. – As possible exceptions, the following two studies were not accessible to the authors of this article: Akhmadulin, E.V. Istoriia rossiiskoi zhurnalistiki nachala XX veka (Rostov-na-Donu: Kniga, 2008); Zhirkov, G.V. Zhurnalistika dvukh Rossii: 1917–1920 (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 1999), neither were the following dissertations: Antonov-Ovseenko, A. A. ‘Rol’ periodicheskoi pechati v formirovaniia obshchestvennogo soznaniia v Rossii v 1917 g’. Tver’ 2013 – (Avtoreferat https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/197477028. pdf (accessed 9 July 2021); Morozov, E.M. ‘Regional’naia periodicheskaia pechat’ politicheskikh partii Rossii v 1917 godu (po materialam Vladimirskoi, Kostromskoi i Iaroslavskoi gubernii)’ Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2010; Zhdanova, I.A. ‘Sotsial’no-politicheskie predstavleniia o demokratii v Rossiiskoi periodicheskoi pechati marta-oktiabria 1917 g’. Moscow, 2003. 26 Davis Jr., R.H. ‘The Russian and Soviet Newspaper as a Research Resource: Recent Developments in Bibliographic Access’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 34, 3, 1990, p. 365. Davis addresses the ‘very nature of the newspaper as a communications medium – currency, regionality, and diversity’ that was ‘antithetical to Soviet preglasnost’ attitudes’ and therefore impeded the preparation of detailed bibliographic research resources. Still, for Western scholars, the press was more easily accessible

NOTES

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as a source, especially before the opening of provincial archives to foreigners in the 1990s. Of course, perspective must always be recognized; newspapers should not serve as mere ‘stone pits’ for the reconstruction of events, see Ferenczi, ‘Funktion’, p. 365. 27 For cases in the provinces see Rosenberg, W.G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution. The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), on strikes against and assaults on Kadet newspapers in Bakhmut, Kiev, Vladikavkaz, Barnaul and other places, 55, 164, 200. 28 For studies that rely on the press, but pursue their own research questions see Altrichter, H. Russland 1917. Ein Land auf der Suche nach sich selbst (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997). Altrichter offers a general account of the revolution, covering also Finland, the Baltic, Poland, Ukraine, Caucasus and Transcaucasus, Crimea and Central Asia, on the basis of published sources including in large part the press. 29 For new source editions see Hickey, M.C. (ed.) Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011); Zil’bershtein, I.S. (ed.) Gor’kii i russkaia zhurnalistika nachala XX veka: neizdannaia perepiska (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1988). 30 Badcock, S. ‘The 1917 Revolutions in 2017: 100 Years on’, in The Historian (2017), pp. 20–5. 31 Manfred Hagen provides a table as overview of the major Russian daily newspapers for the years 1906–14, with place and first year of publication, political tendency and estimate of transregional dissemination. According to this overview, the most widespread newspapers were Russkoe slovo (Moscow, 1895; 160–300,000, 1916: 740.000 copies), Gazeta kopeika (Moscow, 1908, ‘tabloid’, up to 300,000), Novoe vremia (St Petersburg, 1865, 60–200,000), Birzheviia vedomosti (St Petersburg, 1880, central and provincial edition, 1911: 14,000); listed as less wide-spread: Russkiia vedomosti (Moscow, 1863, 100,000), Rech’ (Petrograd, 1906, 40–70,000), Pravda (St Petersburg, 1912, 20–40,000). Other (smaller) newspapers listed without estimates of dissemination (in that order): Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik (governmentofficial), Rossiia (St Petersburg, 1906, semi-official), Grazhdanin (St Petersburg, 1872), Moskovskiia vedomosti (Moscow, 1756), Russkoe znamiia (St Petersburg / Moscow, 1905), Zemshchina (St Petersburg, 1905), Svet (St Petersburg), Kievlianin (Kiev, 1906), St. Petersburger Zeitung (St Petersburg, 1727), St-Peterburgskiia vedomosti (St Petersburg), Golos Moskvy (Moscow, 1907), Slovo (1903/4–1909, St Petersburg / Moscow), Utro Rossii (Moscow, 1907/9), Kievskaia mysl’ (Kiev), Rus’ (St Petersburg, 1904–1908), Tovarishch (1906), Luch (1912, St Petersburg), Vpered (Warsaw / Vilna / Moscow, 1906), Hagen Entfaltung, pp. 98–9. 32 See Akhmadulin ‘Nekotorye osobennosti’, 130. Also, for example Shmagun, O.V. ”Malaia” gazeta ‘Petrogradskii Listok’ v period mezhdu dvumia revoliutsiiami 1917 goda (diss., Moskva, 2016). On the Russian Orthodox Church, see for example Netuzhilov K. E. Tserkovnaia periodicheskaia pechat’ v Rossii XIX stoletiia (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo S.-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, 2008). Like other works, this one stops before the revolution, although it has a bibliography of

582

NOTES

church publications between 1821 and 1917. On the diversity of problems and interests voiced in provincial church periodicals in 1917, see a forthcoming article by Margarete Zimmermann. On the satirical press, see Milne, L. ‘Novyi Satirikon, 1914–1918: The Patriotic Laughter of the Russian Liberal Intelligentsia during the First World War and Revolution’, Slavonic and East European Review, 84, 4, 2006, pp. 639–65. 33 See for example Haid, E. Im Blickfeld zweier Imperien. Galizien in der österreichischen und russischen Presseberichterstattung während des Ersten Weltkriegs (1914–1917) (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2019); Velychenko, S. Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine. Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Cartoons, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). This book also gives information on numbers and locations of paper mills and presses, people involved and transportation conditions, pp. 23–45. 34 See Figes, O. and Kolonitskii, B. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), especially pp. 71–5. See also Badcock ‘Structures and Practices of Power’: Badcock notes that the dual power model valid for the capital did not hold for the provinces (p. 379); that conflicts between old and new authorities were reflected in local newspapers (p. 366) offering rare sources for the activities of local leaders; and that (p. 359) political elites often referred to deviant actions of the population as ‘disorders’, hoping to control the process of democratization (p. 369). 35 Raleigh, D.J. ‘The Revolution of 1917 and the Establishment of Soviet Power in Saratov’, in Wade, R.A. and Seregny, S.J. (eds.), Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov, 1590–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1989), p. 277. 36 See Baker, K.M. and Edelstein, D. (eds.) Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 37 This observation is taken from the forthcoming edited volume the authors of this article are currently preparing for Brill (Leiden) under the title Imagining the Future in Russia’s February Revolution. Instant Voices in the Press across the Empire. 38 Many thanks for this insight to Semion Lyandres, author of The Fall of Tsarism. Untold Stories of the February 1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 39 Saratovkaia zemskaia nedelia is mentioned, for example, by Max Weber, in his ‘Russlands Űbergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus’, in Mommsen, W.J. and Dahlmann, D. (eds.), Max Weber: Zur Russischen Revolution von 1905. Schriften und Reden 1905–1912 (Tűbingen: J. C. B. Morh (Paul Siebeck), 1989), p. 597. Edited by N. N. L’vov, this zemstvo newspaper was issued weekly between 1898 and 1905, and then monthly (758), 40 See E[Katerina] P[assek] ‘Ot soiuza svobody i ravenstva zhenshchin v g. Ostrogozhsk’, Ostrogozhskii listok, 11 (30 March 1917), pp. 3–4, et al. 41 As part of the Great Reforms following peasant emancipation in 1861, the zemstvos were established at provincial and district levels in 1864 as institutions of rural selfgovernment.

NOTES

583

42 Printed zemstvo assembly records (Zhurnaly Zemskago sobraniia) stop for Ostrogozhsk in 1915. There is no record, therefore of whether the same can be said of this institution as it was for the Duma: that participants were bolder and more explicit outside than inside the assemblies. 43 The issue of Ostrogozhskii listok which printed Ekaterina Passek’s articles, for example, also carried two small ads in which citizens urged possible finders to return their lost sugar coupons, Ostrogozhskii listok, 30 March 1917, p. 4. 44 The bibliography Gazety SSSR counts eighty-seven languages altogether. Unfortunately, newspapers pertaining to 1917 cannot easily be singled out in this five-volume work, Gazety SSSR 1917–1960. Bibliograficheskii spravochnik 5 vols. (Moscow: Kniga, 1970–1984) (see also below, note 69). 45 For the concept of ‘travelling concepts’, see Bal, M. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 46 One such approach is presented by the forthcoming edited volume referred to in note 37. 47 See for the following Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’. 48 Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’, 381–2. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa describes how the ‘speed with which it took measures to control the means of communication and transport’ provided another ‘indication of how the Duma Committee acted as a bona fide revolutionary power’, in Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution. Petrograd, 1917. The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), p. 393. The efficiency of taking of control over the telegraph and the cooperation between other key bodies are pointed to as a crucial factor in the debate among historians about the leadership role of the Duma Committee in February, see Lyandres, S. and Nikolaev, A.B. ‘Contemporary Russian Scholarship on the February Revolution in Petrograd: Some Centenary Observations’, Revolutionary Russia, 30, 2, 2017, p. 169. See also Browder, R.P. and Kerensky, A.F. (eds.) The Russian Provisional Government 1917. Documents, 3 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 67, for a description of how the Executive Committee of the State Duma got hold of the central telegraph agency on 1 March, expressly with the aim of placing the Executive Committee in control of information issued to the provinces. According to this cited report from Izvestiia revoliutsionnoi nedeli, telegrams with accounts of events of the previous three days were to be sent to all large towns (Khar’kov, Odessa, Kiev, Saratov). News was to go only to the provinces; Petrograd and Moscow were to be served by their own correspondents. 49 Apparently, in Petrograd of the established newspapers only Russkii Invalid appeared between 25 February and 5 March, and Russkoe Slovo in Moscow, Akhmadulin, E. V. ‘Zhurnalistika Rossii v usloviiakh burzhuazno-demokraticheskogo gosudarstva (fevral’-oktiabr’ 1917 g.) Izvestiia Iuzhnogo federal’nogo universiteta. Filologicheskie nauki (2007) No. 1–2, pp. 269-70; Periodicheskaia pechat‘ v Rossii v 1917 godu. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, 3 vols. (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka imeni M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, 1987), vol. I, p. 16, vol. II, pp. 109, 111.

584

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50 Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, 40. 51 For additional information on legal measures and newspaper print runs see Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’, 382–3. 52 Raleigh, ‘Saratov’, 278. For similar events in Novocherkassk, Holquist, P. Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s continuum of crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 51. 53 ‘The dissemination outside Petrograd of the news of the Revolution’, quoted in translation from publication 1930 in Krasnyi Arkhiv, in Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, pp. 147–8. 54 Russkoe Znamiia, Zemshchina and other papers were forbidden on 5 March, but reappeared as a matter of principle five days later, Akhmadulin, ‘Zhurnalistika`, 270. 55 Kruglikova, ‘The Russian Revolution’,157. 56 The history of this newspaper goes back to 1839. See Akhmadulin, E.V. and Dgtyareva, T.S. ‘The Typology of Ethno-Estate in Cossack Publications in Russia in the 19th – Beginning of the 20th Centuries’, World Applied Sciences Journal, 25, 9, 2013, p. 1272, also for more selected evidence on the often vibrant press scene developing in provincial and peripheral centres from the nineteenth century on. 57 Daly, ‘Government, Press and Subversion’, 63. 58 Raleigh, ‘Saratov’, 282–3. 59 Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, 230–4; also Dodonov B. F. (ed.) Arkhiv noveishei istorii Rossii. Seriia ‘Publikatsii’, vol. VII: Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo Pravitel’stva: Mart – oktiabr’ 1917 goda, 4 vols., vol. 1: Mart – aprel’ 1917 goda (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Politicheskaia Entsiklopediia, 2001), p. 358. The materials of this Bibliographic Chamber, including its annual reports, in which also failures to meet the requirements were noted, provided an important basis for subsequent bibliographical research, see Varnakova, G.S. ‘Nekotorye aspekty sistemnogo izucheniia otechestvennoi pressy 1917–1918 gg. (S chego nachat‘ issledovanie)’ Istoriia otechestvennykh SIM. Ezhegodnik 2013 (Moscow: Fakultet zhurnalistiki MGU, 2014), pp. 24–6. 60 Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’, 385. See also Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government, 977, 1436. Akhmadulin lists Kronshtadt, Helsingfors, Ekaterinodar, Tsaritsyn, Voronezh and Riga as places where Bol’shevik papers were prohibited. Akhmadulin ‘Nekotorye osobennosti’, p. 281. 61 Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’, p. 387. 62 The idea of the advertising monopoly was developed by Lenin as early as the ‘traumatic events’ of July and August, which led to changes in Lenin´s ‘tactics […] in general and his attitude to the press in particular’, Kenez, P. ‘Lenin and the Freedom of the Press’, in Gleason, A., Kenez, P. and Stites, R. (eds.), Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 136. 63 Plaggenborg, S. Revolutionskultur. Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrussland zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus (Cologne – Weimar – Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), pp. 112–17. See also Brooks, J. ‘The Breakdown in

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Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–1927’, in Gleason et al. (eds.), Bolshevik Culture, pp. 151–74. 64 According to Kruglikova, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 158, by August 1918, all of the previously most popular papers with social and political content were gone. 65 Browder and Kerensky, Provisional Government (see note 40). Repeatedly, according to these documents, the government warned against ‘infringements of the press’ (233), and motivated the reimposition of military censorship with appeals ‘to the patriotism of the citizens of the entire nation’ (977). 66 Kolonitskii, ‘The Press’, p. 385. Also Kolonitskii, B.I. ‘Sovety i kontrol’ nad pechat’iu (mart-oktiabr’ 1917 goda)’, in Polotov, S.I. (ed.), Rabochie i rossiiskoe obshchestvo: Vtoraia polovina XIX-nachalo XX veka (Sbornik statei i materialov, posviashchennykh pamiati O. N. Znamenskogo) (St. Petersburg: Glagol, 1994), pp. 151–63. 67 Kolonitski, ‘The Press’, 384. On the issue of a perceived lack of pro-government papers and government measures against the rivalry of oppositional and foreign publications at the frontline, see also Suslin and Zhuravlyov, ‘K probleme’, 14–15. 68 Kolonitski, ‘The Press’, 387. See also above note 17. 69 Varnakova, ‘Nekotorye aspekti’, 18–26. 70 Kruglikova, ‘The Russian Revolution’, 157. 71 Varnakova, ‘Nekotorye aspekti’, 19–21. 72 Periodicheskaia pechat‘ v Rossii v 1917 godu. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, 3 vols. (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka imeni M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, 1987). Beyond Russia’s borders, war periodicals issued in war-stricken territories were included, see pp. 7–8. Some areas and provinces were evidently omitted. 73 Gazety SSSR 1917–1960. Bibliograficheskii spravochnik 5 vols. (Moscow: Kniga, 1970–84). 74 Regional units and names were adopted partly (for the European territories) from Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk. Institut Rossiiskoi istorii Rossiia 1913 god. Statistikodokumental’nyi spravochnik (St. Petersburg: Blits, 1995), pp. 88–90. 75 Periodicheskiaia pechat’, vol. 3, pp. 5–79. 76 Periodicheskiaia pechat’, pp. 273–4, 295–8, 308–13. 77 Periodicheskiaia pechat’, vol. 2, p. 68. 78 Periodicheskiaia pechat’, p. 116: Saratovskaia zemskaia nedelia, izd. Sarat. Gub. Zemstvo. Saratov (30 September–19 December), continued. Editor: No. 1 (30 Sep.) – 7 (5 Dec.) S. V. Anikin. 79 Again, more empirical evidence and background information are needed here for verification. For democratization as the ‘attempts of local and central government bodies to draw ordinary people, who had previously had little or no popular representation, into local government’, see Badcock, ‘Structures’, 358. 80 Raleigh, D.J. Experiencing Russia’s Civil War. Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 49.

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81 Raleigh, Experiencing. 82 Periodichaskaia pechat’, vol. 1, p. 306. The newspaper was issued as a ‘societal, political and literary newspaper’ by the local district zemstvo between September and December 1917. 83 See the forthcoming volume referred to in notes 37 and 46. 84 Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse, 104–33. 85 For Ahmet Ağaoğlu’s biography, see Shissler, A.H. Between Two Empires. Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003); for Ali bey Hüseyinzade, see Akpınar, Ya. ‘Turan, Ali’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi (The Turkish Endowment for Religious Affair’s Encyclopaedia of Islam), vol. 40 (Istanbul, 2012), pp. 408–10. 86 Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse; Periodicheskiaia pechat’, 31–2, 228–37. 87 For his connections to Ahmet Ağaoğlu (Agaev), see Meyer, J.H. Turks across Empires. Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 47. 88 Benningsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse, 283. 89 Benningsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse, 179–82.

Chapter 22 1

Hickey, M. ‘Paper, Memory, and a Good Story: How Smolensk Got Its October’, Revolutionary Russia, 13, 2, 2000, pp. 1–19.

2

Useful Soviet-era materials include Budaev, D.I. (ed.) Bol’sheviki Smolenshchiny do oktiabria 1917 g.: sbornik dokumentov (Smolensk: Smolenskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1956); Gorodskoi, N.M. (ed.) Ustanovlenie i uprochenie sovetskoi vlasti v Smolenskoi gubernii, sbornik documentov (Smolensk: Smolenskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1957); and Galitskaia, N.P. (ed.) Vospominaniia uchastnikov bor’by za vlast’ sovetov v Smolenskoi gubernii (Smolensk: Smolenskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1957). For history in the heroic mold, see Budaev, D.I. Rozhdennyi v borb’e soiuz (Smolensk: Moskovskii rabochii, 1984).

3

Sikorskii, E.A. God 1917-i: Oktaibr’skii perevorot v Smolenske (Smolensk: Smolenskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1997) and Bolsheviki v bor’be za vlast’: teroriia i praktika (1917–1920 gg) (Smolensk: Smolenskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1997). More detailed discussions of 1917 include Il’iukov, A. Revoliutsiia 1917 g. v Smolenskoi gubernii (Smolensk: Madzhenta, 2007); Kail, M. Pravoslavnaia tserkov i veruiushchie Smolenskoi eparkhii v god revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voinny (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ippolitova, 2010).

4

See Manning, R.T. ‘Bolshevik Without the Party’, in Raleigh, D.J. (ed.), Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), pp. 36–58, and the following by Hickey, M.C. ‘Big Strike

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in a Small City: The Smolensk Metalworkers’ Strike and Dynamics of Labor Conflict in 1917’, in Melancon, M. and Pate, A. (eds.), New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840–1918 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2002), pp. 207–32; ‘Demographic Aspects of Jewish Population in Smolensk Province, 1870s-1914’, Acta Slavica Iaponica, 19, 2002, pp. 84–116; ‘Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Smolensk, Spring 1917’, Russian Review, 55, 4, 1996, pp. 613–37; ‘Local Government and State Authority in the Provinces: Smolensk, February–June 1917’, Slavic Review, 55, 4, 1996, pp. 863–81; ‘Moderate Socialists and the Politics of Crime in Revolutionary Smolensk’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35, 2–3, 2001, pp. 189–218; ‘Peasant Autonomy, Soviet Power, and Land Distribution in Smolensk Province, November 1917–May 1918’, Revolutionary Russia, 9, 1, 1996, pp. 19–32; ‘People with Pure Souls: Jewish Youth Radicalism in Smolensk, 1900–1914’, Revolutionary Russia, 20, 1, 2007, pp. 51–73; ‘The Provisional Government and Local Administration in Smolensk in 1917’, Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 9, 1, 2016, pp. 253–76; ‘Revolution on the Jewish Street: Smolensk, 1917’, Journal of Social History, 31, 4, 1998, pp. 823–50; ‘Revolutionary Smolensk: The Establishment of Soviet Power in Smolensk Province, 1917–1918’, PhD dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1993; ‘The Rise and Fall of Smolensk’s Moderate Socialists: The Politics of Class and thee Rhetoric of Crisis in 1917’, in Raleigh, Provincial Landscapes, 14–35; ‘Smolensk’s Jews in War, Revolution, and Civil War’, in Badcock, S. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, Book 1, Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015), pp. 175–214; ‘Urban Zemliachestva and Rural Revolution: Petrograd and the Smolensk Countryside in 1917’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 23, 2, 1996, pp. 143–69; and ‘“Who Controls These Woods?’” Forests and Mnogovlastie in Smolensk in 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 32, 2, 2019, pp. 197–225. 5

This essay draws on State Archives of Smolensk Oblast (GASO) files from the provincial commissar’s administration, provincial and county zemstvos, the Smolensk city duma, police and court institutions, Minsk military district staff units, trade unions and factory committees, refugee relief agencies and local soviets. It also draws on memoirs and political party files at the State Archive for the Recent History of Smolensk Oblast (GANISO). For archival references, see publications by Hickey, Iliukhov, Manning and Sikorskii cited above. Endnotes to this essay are limited primarily to sources for quotations.

6

On provincial studies of 1917, see ‘Introduction: A Kaleidoscope of Revolutions’, in Badcock, S. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front, pp. 1–15.

7

Smolensk was divided administratively into twelve counties and 239 rural districts.

8

Belyi and Porech’e counties made up the province’s northwestern subregion; Dorogobuzh, Dukhovshchina, Krasnyi and Smolensk its central subregion; and El’nia, Gzhatsk, Iukhnov, Roslavl, Sychevka and Viaz’ma the eastern subregion.

9

By 1914, such farms accounted for 16 per cent of all land in the province.

588

NOTES

10 On SRs, see Igor Kiprov Sozdanie i deliatel’nost’ Smolenskoi organizatsiii partii sotsialistov-revoliutsionerov (1901–1907): liudi, sobyti, dokumenty: monografiia (Smolensk: Smolenskaia gorodskaia tipografiia, 2010). 11 Riabkov, G.T. (ed.) Revoliutsionnoe dvizhenie v Smolenskoi gubernii v1905–1907 gg.: sbornik dokumentov (Smolensk: Smolenskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo. 1957). 12 Kuznetsov, I. (ed.) ‘Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Smolenskoi gubernii v 1905–1906 gg’, Krasnyi Arkhiv, 74, 1936, pp. 109–10. 13 Shorin, Iu. and Stepchenkov, L. (eds.) Smolenskaia guberniia v Pervoi mirovoi voine (Smolensk: Krai Smolenskii, 2016). 14 ‘Soveshchenie gubernatorov v 1916 godu’, Krasnyi arkhiv, 33, 1929, pp. 161–2. 15 Smolenskii vestnik, 16 March 1917, 3; Hickey, M. Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011), pp. 152–3. 16 Smolenskii vestnik, 11 April 1917, 3. 17 Smolenskii vestnik, 12 April 1917, 2. 18 Smolenskii vestnik, 13 May 1917, 3. 19 Smolenskii vestnik, 6 April 1917, 3. 20 Smolenskii vestnik, 13 May 1917, 2–3; 14 May 1917, 3–4. 21 Hickey, Fighting Words, 290. 22 Smolenskii vestnik, 27 July 1917, 3. 23 Smolenskii vestnik, 13 June 1917, 2. 24 GASO f. 1994, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 58–9. 25 Smolenskii vestnik, 4 July 1917, 4. 26 Pershin, P.N. Agrarnaia revoliutsiia v Rossii, T. 1, Ot reformy k revoliutsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), p. 370. 27 Smolenskii vestnik, 25 June 1917, 4; 29 June 1917, 3. 28 Izvestiia Petrogradskago soveta, 27 July 1917, 10. 29 ‘Soiuz zemel’nykh sobstvennikov v 1917 g’’ Krasnyi arkhiv 21, 1927, pp. 106–7. 30 Rech, 22 July 1917, 5–6. 31 In fall, the Bolshevik central committee secretariat had six rural Smolensk contacts; in January 1918, it had eighteen. Anikeev, V.V. (compiler) ‘Zhurnal iskhodiashchikh dokumentov TsK RSDRP (b) za 1917 g’. in Chugaev, D.A. (ed.), Istochnikovedenie istorii Sovetskogo obshchestva pt. 2 (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), 92, 100–1001, 111; ‘Adresa mestnykh orgnaizatsii RSDRP (1917–1918 gg’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1, 1956, pp. 31–45. 32 Delo Naroda, 1 August 1917, 4; Narodnoe slovo, 6 August 1917, 3. 33 Smolenskii gubernskii vedemosti, 3 August 1917, 1. 34 On 27 July, Efimov ordered ‘pacification’ of a peasant disturbance in Belyi county. GASO f. 799, op. 1, d. 20, l. 53.

NOTES

589

35 Ivanov, S.V. ‘Krest’ianstvo i “oktiabr”’, Krasnaia letopis, 6, 1923, p. 286. 36 Perepiska sekretariata Ts. K. RSDRP (b) c mestnymi partiinymi organizatsiiami: sbornik dokumentov, vol. 1, Mart-oktiabr’ 1917 g. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturym 1957) 1, pp. 261, 295–6; ‘Pis’ma Tsentral’nogo Komiteta RSDRP (b) mestnym bol’shevistskim organizatsiia (sentiabr’-oktiabr. 1917 g’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, 5, 1955, p. 14. 37 Shestakov, A. ‘Oktiabr v derevne’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 69, 10, 1927, p. 94. 38 Gorodskoi, Ustanovlenie i uprochenie, 108–9; Smolenskii gubernskii vedemosti, 2 November 1917, 1. 39 Kotelnikov, K.G. and Meller, V.L. (eds.) Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v 1917 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1927), p. 307. 40 Smolenskii vestnik, 10 October 1917, 3; 11 October 1917, 2; 12 October 1917, 2–3. 41 Smolenskii gubernskii vedemosti, 26 October 1917, 1. 42 Revoliutsionnie dvizhenie v Rossii nakanune Oktiabr’skogo vooruzhennogo vosstaniia (1-24 oktriabria 1917 g.), dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Akadamiia Nauka SSSR, 1962), pp. 450–2. 43 Smolenskii vestnik, 1 September 1917, 2–3. 44 Smolenskii vestnik, 6 September 1917, 2–3; 7 September 1917, 2. 45 Hickey, Competing Voices, 294–302. 46 Gorodskoi, Ustanovlenie i uprochenie, 140. 47 Smolenskii vestink, 3 September 1917, 3. 48 GASO f. 1994, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 21–21 ob. 49 Smolenskii vestink, 6 October 1917, 2. 50 GASO f. 146, op. 1, d. 1, l. 192. 51 Smolenskii vestink, 6 October 1917, 2; GASO f. 1994, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 33–4. 52 Smolenskii vestnik, 19 October 1917, 3. 53 Smolenskii vestnik, 25 October 1917, 2. 54 Smolenskii vestnik, 5 November 1917, 2. 55 Smolenskii vestnik, 10 November 1917, 1 56 There was no separate Left SR electoral list. 57 The total vote was Bolsheviks, 18,437; Kadets, 9,217; Mensheviks and SRS (combined), 8,560. Smolenskii vestnik, 15 November 1917, 3. 58 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 25 November 1917, 4. 59 Smolenskii vestnik, 5 December 1917, 2. 60 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 29 December 1917, 1. 61 Biulleten Moskovskago gorodskago prodovol’stvennago komiteta, 12 January 1918, 2; 13 January 1918, 2; 25 January 1918, 2; 26 January 1918, 2–3. 62 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 21 January 1918, 2.

590

NOTES

63 Novaia zhizn, 31 January 1918, 4. 64 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 27 February 1918, 1. 65 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 6 March 1918, 1. 66 Izvestiia Smolenskago soveta, 24 March 1918, 3. 67 Prodovol’stvennoe delo, 30 April 1918, 25–6. 68 Vpered!, 23 April 1918, 3; Izvestiia VTsIK, 10 May 1918, 4. 69 Izvestiia Sovetov rabochikh, soldatskikh, i krest’ianskikh deputatov g. Moskvy i Moskovskoi oblasti, 13 January 1918, 2. 70 Turnout among eligible voters was low and absentee rates of 45 to 50 per cent common. 71 At the end of 1919, non-peasant landowners held 8 per cent of all arable in the province. Otrub and khutor farms also continued to proliferate, and in 1925 accounted for a third of all peasant land. 72 Biulleten Moskovskago gorodskago prodovol’stvennago komiteta, 11 May 1918, 2.

Chapter 23 1

The monographs in English covering elements of this region during 1917 include Raleigh, D.J. Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov, Revolution on the Volga (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986); Figes, O. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

2

Data from Pervaia Obshchaia Perepis’ Naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897g. v. 89 Tomakh., 89 vols (St Petersburg: Izdnanie Tsentral’nago Statiticheskago Komiteta Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del’., 1897).

3

For an excellent general treatment of the region, see Hartley, J.M. The Volga: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

4

Sanborn, J.A. ‘Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Russia during World War 1’, Journal of Modern History, 77, 2, 2006, pp. 290–324.

5

Velikaia Oktiabr’skaia Sotsialisticheskaia Revoliutsiia: Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1987), p. 454.

6

National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART), f. 1246, op. 1, d. 46, p. 247. handwritten petition from Il’in to Kazan provincial commissar, undated.

7

Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 13, 25 April 1917, p. 2.

8

Izvestiia soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 24, 22 June 1917, p. 4

9

Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 148, 13 September 1917, p. 3

10 Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Hickey, M.C. ‘Moderate Socialists and the Politics of Crime in Revolutionary Smolensk’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 35, 2–3, 2001, p. 189.

NOTES

591

11 Izvestiia soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 44, 10 September 1917, p. 1. 12 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 17, pp. 165–9; letters dated 18 February 1917. 13 Izvestiia soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 24, 22 June 1917, p. 4. 14 Krasnoe znamia 4, 21 November 1917, p. 4. 15 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 49, p. 11; letter from Tsivilsk district commissar to provincial commissar, 30 June 1917. 16 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 41, p. 134; Report from Spassk district commissar to Kazan provincial commissar, 28 April 1917. 17 Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 95, 6 August 1917, p. 3; Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 35, 24 May 1917, p. 3. 18 Shul’gin, Za vlast sovetov, 114–15; Za vlast’ sovetov: vspominaet uchastniki bor’bi za vlast’ v Nizhegorodskoi gubernii (Gor’kii: Volgo-Viatskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1967). Hereafter, ‘Golov’s memoir’. 19 Chugaev, D.A., Gaponenko, L.S., Smuchebnikov, M.D., Tomashevich, I.U., Chernov, A.V. and Iakovlev, L.E. Revoliustsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v iiule 1917g. Iiulskii krizis (Moscow, 1959), doc. 110, pp. 133–4, from the newspaper International (Nizhnii Novgorod, 12 July 1917). 20 Shul’gin, Za vlast sovetov, 117–18; Golov’s memoir. 21 See Astashov, A.B. Russkii front v 1914–nachale 1917 goda : voennyi opyt i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2014), pp. 466–94, for comprehensive treatment of desertion from the Russian army during the First World War. 22 Wildman, A.K. The end of the Russian Imperial army: The road to Soviet power and peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 367. 23 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 51, p. 207; report written by instructor of the office of petty credit of the provincial zemstva M Sermets, 23 May 1917; NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 43, p. 179; report from instructor of the office of petty credit of the provincial zemstva M. Sermets, 23 May 1917. 24 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 54, p. 416; telefonogram to president of State Duma Rodzianko, from Rydnovskii, 20 May 1917. 25 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 41, p. 413; letter from Zhediavsk county committee, Spassk district, to Kazan provincial commissar, 10 July 1917. 26 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 54, pp. 331–2; letter from landowner of Laishevsk district, Natalia Vasil’evna Neratova, to Kazan provincial commissar, 27 May 1917. 27 State Archive of Nizhegorod oblast (GANO), f. 1887, op. 1, d. 3, p. 2; report of the member of the Soviet of soldiers’ deputies Alexander Kuprianov. 28 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 43, pp. 264–5; protocol of Mamadyshsk district committee of public safety, 14 August 1917. 29 Izvestiia soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 45, 14 September 1917, p. 2. 30 Rachamimov, A. POWs and the Great War (Oxford: Berg, 2002), pp. 34–44.

592

NOTES

31 Maksimov, E.K. and Totfalushin, V.P. Saratovskoe Povolzhʹe v Gody Pervoĭ Mirovoĭ Voĭny (Saratov: Nauch. kn, 2007), p. 36. 32 ‘From information reports of the Main administration for militia affairs about peasant movement, 21–23 May 1917’, in Revoliutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii v Mai-Iiune 1917g. Iiunskaia Demonstratsiia, Iiunskaia Demonstratsiia 7 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1959)., p. 401, doc. 346. 33 GANO, f. 733, op. 1, d. 1, p. 157; order from Moscow military okrug, regarding closer supervision over prisoners of war, 16 April 1917. 34 Izvestiia soveta rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov 16, 22 May 1917, p. 4. 35 GANO f. 815, op. 1, d. 8, pp. 1–3; two circulars from provincial commissar, dated early and late August 1917. 36 NART, f. 1352, op. 1, d. 3, p. 178; protocol of Spassk district committee of public safety, 13 June 1917. 37 Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 15, 27 April 1917, pp. 2–3. 38 Semenova, E.Iu. ‘Vzaimodeystvi Gorozhan i Bezhentsev Na Territorii Tylovogo Goroda v Gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny Po Materialam Povolzhya’, Izvestiia Samarskago Nauchnogo Tsentra Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 16, 3 (2) (2014): 436–43, p. 436, p. 440. 39 Sokolova, V.I. and Kharitonova, S.B. ‘Razmeschenie i trudoustroystvo evakuirovannyh i bezhentsevv simbirskoy gubernii v gody pervoy mirovoy voyny’, Vestnik Chuvashskago universiteta, 2, 2013, p. 58. 40 Gatrell, P. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 179. 41 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 73, p. 55; Protocol of Tsarevokokshaisk district, 10 May. 42 Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 85, 25 July 1917, p. 3; report of the provincial committee of public safety, 23 July 1917. 43 Saratovskii vestnik, 6 January 1917. 44 Semenova, ‘Vzaimodeystvi Gorozhan i Bezhentsev’, 439. 45 Semenova ‘Vzaimodeystvi Gorozhan i Bezhentsev’, 442. 46 Nizhegorodskaia zemskaia gazeta 36, 7 September 1917, p. 10. 47 ‘Report of the Minister of Internal Affairs A.M. Nikitin to the Minister of War A.E. Verkhovskii about the dispatch of cavalry squadrons for the use of provincial commissars for the suppression of the peasant movement in central Russia, Volga region and Ukraine, 19 October 1917’, in Revoliutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii Nakanune Oktyabr’skoe Vooruzhennoe Vosstanie (1-24 Oktiabria 1917g.), Velikaia Oktiabr’skaia Sotsialisticheskaia Revoliutsiia (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962), pp. 459–50; doc. 515. 48 Pouezdnyi itogi Vserossiiskoi sel’sko-khoziaistvennoi i pozemel’noi perepisi 1917 goda po 57 guberniiam i oblastiam, vol. 2, Trudy tsentral’nago statisticheskogo upravleniie 5 (Moscow, 1923), pp. 102–3.

NOTES

593

49 Kondratev, N. Rynok Khlebov i Ego Regulirovanie vo Vremia Voiny i Revoliutsii (Moscow, 1922), pp. 202–3; part 1, supplement 1: Surplus and deficit of grain per person, 1909–13. 50 Zaitsev, K.I. and Dolinsky, N.V. ‘Organisation and Policy’, in Struve, P. (eds.), Food Supply in Russia during the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 5–17. 51 Lih, L.T. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 84. 52 Demosthenov, S.S. ‘Food Prices and the Market in Foodstuffs’, in Struve Food Supply in Russia, pp. 269, 271, 275, 278. 53 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 1783, op. 6, d. 165, ll. 1–12. Report on the provisions situation in the regions 21 September–6 October 1917; 12 October 1917. 54 Lih, Bread and Authority, 77–81. 55 NART, f. 1246, op. 1, d. 44, p. 16; telegram from the provincial provisions administration to the provincial commissar, 5 July. 56 GANO, f. 27, op. 1, d. 4, p. 5. from Town Duma records, telegram sent to DV Sirotkin of the Nizhegorod Purchasing commission, and read out in the Duma chamber, 5 October 1917. 57 Finkel, E., Gehlbach, S and Kofanov, D. ‘(Good) Land and Freedom (for Former Serfs): Determinants of Peasant Unrest in European Russia, March-October 1917’, Slavic Review, 76, 3, 2017, pp. 710–21. 58 NART 983, 1, 18, pp. 53–4. Undated appeal from peasant community in Tsarevokokshaisk district, Kazan province. 59 Pouezdnyi itogi Vserossiiskoi sel’sko-khoziaistvennoi i pozemel’noi perepisi 1917 goda po 57 guberniiam i oblastiam. pp. 34–41; 66–9; 102–13. 60 Moon, D. The Russian Peasantry 1600–1930: The World the Peasants Made (London: Longman, 1999). Ch. 4. 61 For pre-revolutionary peasant resistance to changes in land tenure, see Pallot, J. Land Reform in Russia 1906–1917. Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), esp. chapters three and six. 62 ‘From information reports of the main administration of milita affairs about the peasant movement, 11–12 May 1917’, in Revoliutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii v Mai-Iiune 1917g. Iiunskaia Demonstratsiia, p. 396, doc. 340 63 For example, NART 1246, 1, 48, p. 135; telegram to Koz’modem’iansk district commissar from provincial commissar, 27 May 1917. 64 GANO, f. 1882, op. 1, d. 13, p. 155–9; protocol of the meeting of district commissars in Nizhegorod province, 10–11 April 1917; GANO, f. 1882, op. 1, d. 28, p. 445. Report of the provincial commissar to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 23 October 1917.

594

NOTES

65 GANO, f. 815, op. 1, d. 30, p. 8; decree from peasants of Zakharave village, Khvostikovsk county, Semenevsk district, 17 April 1917. 66 Pouezdnyi itogi Vserossiiskoi sel’sko-khoziaistvennoi i pozemel’noi perepisi 1917 goda po 57 guberniiam i oblastiam. pp. 34–41; 66–9; 102–13. 67 See also Retish, A. Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Baker, M. Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research institute, 2016). 68 ‘Telegram of Anastovk county committee, Kurmyshsk district, Simbirsk province, to the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers’ deputies, 8 April 1917’, in Revoliustsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii v Aprele 1917g. Aprel’skii Krizis, Velikaia Oktiabr, skaia Sotsialisticheskaia Revoliutsiia 7 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1958), p. 583, doc. 569. 69 ‘Telegram from the president of NIkolaevsk district Executive Committee of People’s Power V. Ermoshchenko (Samara province) to the Minister of Internal Affairs G.E. Lvov, 26 June 1917’, in Revoliutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii v Mai-Iiune 1917g. Iiunskaia Demonstratsiia., p. 436, doc. 383. 70 GANO. F. 1882, op. 1, d. 13, p. 155–9; protocol of the meeting of district commissars in Nizhegorod province, 10–11 April 1917. 71 NART 983, 1, 23, p. 208; Protocol of soldier-peasant meeting, 6 May 1917. 72 ‘Protocol of Pavlovsk village commune, Khvalynsk district, Saratov province, 26 April 1917’ in Revoliustsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii v Aprele 1917g. Aprel’skii Krizis.p. 646, doc. 646. 73 NART 1246, 1, 75, 224; resolution of peasants of Ivanovko village, Kazansk district, 19 May 1917. 74 NART, 1246, 1, 75, 225; letter from landowner Mukhamed Galeevich Bashkirov to Kazan Union of Agriculturalists, 26 July 1917. 75 Kazanskaia rabochaia gazeta 119, 6 September 1917, p. 3. 76 NART 1246, 1, 50, pp. 136–7; two letters from Chistopolsk district commissar to provincial commissar, 13/18 August 1917. 77 ‘Report authorised by peasants of Staroe Vsevolodchino, Saratov district, Saratov province, to the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers, deputies, 16 March 1917’, in Revoliutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Rossii Posle Sverzheniia Samoderzhaviia, Velikaia Oktiabr’skaia Sotsialisticheskaia Revoliutsiia 7 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1957), pp. 681–2; doc. 652. 78 Pouezdnyi itogi Vserossiiskoi sel’sko-khoziaistvennoi i pozemel’noi perepisi 1917 goda po 57 guberniiam i oblastiam. pp. 34–41; 66–9; 102–13. 79 GANO, f. 1882, op. 1, d. 44, pp. 57–384 – telegrams from the districts to the provincial commissar, reporting peasant unrest, almost all of which was manifested as woodcutting, in March and April 1917.

NOTES

595

80 NART 1246, 1, 54, p. 180; report from Laishevskii district commissar to provincial commissar, 27 April 1917. 81 GANO 815, 1, 30, pp. 82–3; Protocol of the restoration of order in Semenov town, 20 September 1917.

Chapter 24 1

Vynnychenko, V. Vidrodzhennia natsiï; Zapovit bortsia za vyzvolennia (Kyiv: Knyha rodu, 2008), p. 31.

2

Tolochko, P.P. (ed.) Ukraїns’ka Tsentral’na Rada, dokumenty i materiialy u dvokh tomakh, tom 1 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1996), p. 7.

3

Periodization of the Ukrainian revolution remains an open issue in academic debates, see Kasianov, G. ‘Ukraine between Revolution, Independence, and Foreign Dominance’, in Dornik, W. et al. (eds.), The Emergence of Ukraine: Self-determination, Occupation, and War in Ukraine, 1917–1922 (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015), pp. 76–7.

4

Yekelchyk, S. ‘Searching for the Ukrainian Revolution’, Slavic Review, 78, 4, 2019, p. 946.

5

Soldatenko, V.F. V gornile revoliutsiĭ i voĭn: Ukraina v 1917–1920 gg.: istorikoistoriograficheskie esse (Moscow: Politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 2018), p. 25.

6

Von Hagen, M. ‘The Imperial Turn, the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions’ in Verstiuk, V. et al. (eds.), Revoliutssia, derzhavnist’, natsiia: Ukraïna na shliakhu samostverdzhennia (1917–1921 rr.): Materialy Mizhnarodnoï naukovoï konferentsiï (Kyiv, 1-2 chervnia 2017 r.) (Kyiv-Chernihiv, 2017), p. 43.

7

Thatcher, I.D. ‘Historiography of the Russian Provisional Government 1917 in the USSR’, Twentieth Century Communism, 8, 2015, pp. 108–32.

8

Iakupov, M.N. ‘Diial’nist’ konstytutsiĭno-demokratychnoï partiï v Ukraïni (1917–1918 rr.)’, Dysertatsiia na zdobuttia naukovoho stupenia kandydata istorychnykh nauk (Kyiv, 1994); Soldatenko, V.F. and Liubovets, O.M. Revoliutsiĭni al’ternatyvy 1917 roku ĭ Ukraïna (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 2010).

9

Gilley, C. ‘Untangling the Ukrainian Revolution’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 17, 3, 2017, p. 330.

10 Penter, T. Odessa 1917: Revolution an der Peripherie (Bӧhlau Verlag, 2000); Matvienko, T.O. ‘Zemstva Ukraïny v konteksti protsesu formuvannia instytutu komisariv tymchasovogo uriadu v berezni-travni 1917’, Istorychna pam’iat’, No.1, Poltava (2010), pp. 87–95; Lopatovsky, Yu.M. ‘Vykonavchi komitety hromads’kykh organizatsiĭ ta instytut komisariv Tymchasovoho uriadu: problema vzaemovidnosyn’, Istorychni Nauky, vyp. 114 (2016), pp. 39–43. 11 Soldatenko, V.F. Ukraïns’ka Revoliutsiia. Istorychnyĭ narys (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1999), p. 4. 12 Shkandrij, M. Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917–2017: History’s Flashpoints and Today’s Memory Wars (New York: Routledge, 2020), p. 9.

596

NOTES

13 Likholat, A.V. Razgrom natsionalisticheskoĭ kontrrevoliutsii na Ukraine (1917–1922 gg) (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1954). 14 Sullivant, R.S. Soviet Politics and the Ukraine, 1917–1957 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 25–37. 15 Baker, M. ‘Beyond the National: Peasants, Power, and Revolution in Ukraine’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 24, 1, 1999, p. 42. 16 See Verstiuk, V. ‘Vid “Velikoĭ Oktiabr’skoĭ sotsialisticheskoĭ revoliutsii i grazhdanskoĭ voĭny na Ukraine (1917–1920)” do ‘Narysiv istoriï Ukrains’koï revoliutsiï’ i dali: istoriia zmin doslidnyts’koï paradyhmy’, in Verstiuk Revoliutssia, derzhavnist’, natsiia, pp. 11–30. 17 Ford, C. ‘Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921: The Dialectics of National Liberation and Social Emancipation’, Debate: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 15, 3, 2007, p. 281; see also Kappeler, A. ‘From an Ethnonational to a Multiethnic to a Transnational Ukrainian History’, in Kasianov, G. and Ther, P. (eds.), A Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), pp. 51–80. 18 Yekelchyk, ‘Searching for the Ukrainian Revolution’, 942–8. 19 von Hagen, ‘The Imperial Turn’, 40. 20 Tsentral’na Rada, 38–9. 21 Tsentral’na Rada, 45–6; Khmil, I.V. Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia Ukraïnskoï derzhavnosti (Ukraïnskyĭ natsional’nyĭ kongres-z’izd 6–8 kvitnia 1917 r.) (Kyiv: Akademiia nauk Ukraïny, Instytut istoriï Ukraïny, 1994), 4. 22 Tsentral’na Rad, 48. For more, see Plokhy, S. Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 72–91. 23 Khmil, Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia, 4–5. 24 Stojko, W. ‘Ukrainian National Aspirations and the Russian Provisional Government’, in Hunczak, T. (ed.), The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977), pp. 6–7; Reshetar Jr., J.S. The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920. A Study in Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 49–50; Khmil Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia, 20–2. 25 Khmil, Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia, 32–3. More on those who supported the Ukrainian national movement in spring 1917 and who did not, see 9–14, 16–9, 33–7. 26 Tsentral’na Rada, 67, 75. 27 Remy, J. ‘“It Is Unknown Where the Little Russians Are Heading to”: The Autonomy Dispute between the Ukrainian Central Rada and the All-Russian Provisional Government in 1917’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 4, 2017, pp. 701–4.

NOTES

597

28 Verstiuk, V. ‘Zemel’ne pytannia u stinakh Tsentral’noï Rady’, in Ukraïna: kul’turna spadshchyna, natsional’na svidomist’, derzhavnist’, 15, 2006–2007, 646; Khmil, Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia, 26. 29 Khmil, I.V. Pershyĭ Vseukraïns’kyĭ selians’kyĭ z’ïzd (28 travnia-2 chervnia 1917) (Kyiv: Akademiia nauk Ukraïny, Instytut istoriï Ukraïny, 1992), p. 5. 30 Khmil, Pershyĭ Vseukraïns’kyĭ, 14. 31 Tsentral’na Rada 101, 158, 159. 32 Remy, ‘It Is Unknown’, 710–11. 33 Remy, ‘It Is Unknown’, 712–17. 34 Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsiï, 173–7. 35 Tsentral’na Rada, 206–7, 221. Full text of the Instruction in Pipes, R. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 64–5; Stojko, ‘Ukrainian National Aspirations’, 19–26. 36 Khrystiuk, P. Zamitky i materiialy do istoriї ukraїnskoї revoliutsiї. 1917–1920 rr., tom 1 (New York: Vydavnytstvo Chartoryĭs’kykh, 1921), pp. 97–8, 113–16. 37 Tsentral’na Rada, 465. 38 Basara-Tylishchak, H. ‘Vid provintsiĭnoï hlybynky do revoliutsiĭnoho tsentru: politychni ta sotsiokul’turni aspekty rozgortannia Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï v povitovykh mistakh’, in Verstiuk Revoliutssia, derzhavnist’, natsiia, 521. 39 von Hagen, M. ‘Part II: Revolution as War: The Western Borderlands Post-October’, in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: WilleyBlackwell, 2020), pp. 249–50. 40 Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union, 118–20; von Hagen, ‘Revolution as War’, 250. 41 Pinak, Ie. and Chmyr, M. Viĭs’ko Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv (Kharkiv: Klub simeĭnoho dozvillia, 2017), p. 22. 42 Tsentral’na Rada tom 1, 529. 43 Tsentral’na Rada tom. 2, 69. 44 Verstiuk, ‘Zemel’ne pytannia’, 658. 45 Basara-Tylishchak, ‘Vid provintsiĭnoï hlybynky’, 522. 46 On the German involvement in Ukrainian affairs since December 1917, see Chernev, B. Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 154–96; Dornik, W. and Lieb, P. ‘The Administration of the Occupation’, in The Emergence of Ukraine, 202–34. 47 Verstiuk, ‘Zemel’ne pytannia’, 645. 48 This was certainly the case for peasants of the Kharkiv province. It is likely that peasants elsewhere in Ukraine had the same interpretation of the two documents. Baker, ‘Beyond the National’, 60.

598

NOTES

49 Baker, M. Peasants, Power, and Place. Revolutions in the Village of Kharkiv Province, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian research Institute, 2016); Guthier, S.L. ‘The Popular Base of Ukrainian Nationalism in 1917’, Slavic Review, 38, 1, 1979, pp. 30–47. 50 Gilley, ‘Untangling the Ukrainian Revolution’, 329. 51 On the lack of trust between the Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians in 1917, see Liber, G.O. Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 57–67; Abramson, H. A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 1999), pp. 61–6. 52 As quoted in Schmid, U. ‘Volodymyr Vynnyčenko as Diarist, Historian and Writer. Literary narratives of the “Ukrainian Revolution”’, Studi Slavistici, 15, 2018, pp. 147–8. 53 Khmil, Na shliakhu vidrodzhennia, 28–9. 54 Boiko, B.M. (ed.) Ukraïns’kyĭ z’ïzd u Chernihovi (8–10 chervnia 1917 r.): materialy ta komentari (Chernihiv: Sivers’kyi tsentr pisliadyplomnoi osvity, 2012), 31. 55 Tsentral’na Rada, 323–4. 56 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, tom 2, 14–15. 57 Tsentral’na Rada, 401 58 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, tom 2, 15. 59 Yarosh, D.V. ‘Pravovi zasady formuvannia orhaniv mistsevoï vlady i mistsevoho samovriaduvannia v period diial’nosti Tsentral’noï Rady’, Universytets’ki naukovi zapysky, Khmel’nytsky, 25, 1, 2008, p. 20. 60 Lebedeva, I.M. ‘Problema stvorennia orhaniv mistsevoï administratsiï v Ukraini za doby Tsentral’noï Rady’, Storinky istorii, 49, 2019, pp. 22–30. 61 Dvirna, K. and Storchaus, V. ‘Formuvannia mistsevoho samovriaduvannia iak skladova parlamentaryzmu doby Tsentral’noï Rady (berezen’ 1917–kviten’ 1918)’, Naukovi zapysky z ukraïnskoï istorii: zbirnyk naukovykh statei, PereiaslavKhmel’nytsky, 26, 2011, p. 153. 62 Baker, ‘Beyond the National’, 49–50. 63 Khmil, Pershyĭ Vseukraïns’kyĭ, 23. 64 Verstiuk, ‘Zemel’ne pytannia’, 648. 65 Khmil, Pershyĭ Vseukraïns’kyĭ, 16–18, 19, 23. 66 Ukraïns’kyĭ z’ïzd u Chernihovi, 42. 67 Khmil, Pershyĭ Vseukraïns’kyĭ, 28; Dvirna and Storchaus, ‘Formuvannia mistsevoho samovriaduvannia’, 149. 68 Baker, ‘Beyond the National’, 59–67; Skalsky, V.V. ‘Guberns’ki selians’ki z’ïzdy iak skladova ukraïnskoï revolutsiï 1917–1921’, Problemy vyvchennia istoriï Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï 1917–1921 rokiv, 4, 2009, pp. 89–146.

NOTES

599

69 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, tom 2, 63, 64. 70 Kornovenko, S.V. ‘elians’ki respubliky pochatku XX stolittia iak vyiav selians’koï revoliutsiĭnosti v Ukraïni,” ‘Ukraïns’kyĭ selyanyn, 18, 2017, pp. 30–1; Shubin, A. ‘T‘e Makhnovist movement and the national question in the Ukraine, 1917–1921’, i’, Hirsch, S. and van der Valt, L., Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1870–1940. The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism and Social Liberation (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 147–91. 71 Kornovenko, ‘Selians’ki respubliky’, 30; Kotliar, Yu.V. Povstanstvo. Selians’kyĭ rukh na Pivdni Ukraïny (1917–1925) (Mykolaiv, Odesa: TOV ‘ViD’, 2003); Mitrofanenko, Yu. ‘Otamanshchyna 1918–1919 rokiv’, in Lobodaev, V., Viĭna z derzhavoiu chy za derzhavu? Selians’kyĭ rukh v Ukraïni 1917–1921 rokiv (Kharkiv: Klub simeĭnoho dozvillia, 2017), pp. 100–47. 72 Wade, R.A. ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and “Soviet Power”: Kharkiv, 1917’, in Krawchenko, B. (ed.), Ukrainian Past, Ukrainian Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), pp. 70–83. 73 Soldatenko, V gornile revoliutsiĭ, 99. 74 Samsonova, I.V. ‘Vidnosyny mizh hromads’kymy vykonavchymy komitetamy ta radamy robitnychykh, soldats’kykh i selians’kykh deputativ na prykladi Kharkivs’koï, Chernihivs’koï ta Poltavs’koï guberniĭ’, Sums’kyĭ istoryko-arkhivnyĭ zhurnal, 8–9, 2010, pp. 168–73. 75 Soldatenko, V gornile revoliutsiĭ, 135. 76 Soldatenko, V gornile revoliutsiĭ, 173–4. 77 Pinak and Chmyr, Viĭs’ko Ukraïns’koï revoliutsiï, 22. 78 Soldatenko V gornile revoliutsiĭ, 122. 79 Kulchytsky, S. ‘Chomy v Ukraïni peremohla radians’ka vlada?’ in Verstiuk Revoliutssia, derzhavnist’, natsiia, pp. 101–10. 80 Gilley, ‘Untangling the Ukrainian Revolution’, 331. 81 Penter, T. and Sablin, I. ‘Soviet Federalism from Below: The Soviet Republics of Odessa and the Russian Far East, 1917–1918’, Journal of Eurasian Studies, 11, 1, 2020, pp. 41–3, 44–6; Vintskovskyi, T.C. ‘Vil’ne misto Odesa v dobu Tsentral’noï Rady: Revoliutsiĭna interpretatsiia politychnoho separatyzmu’, Ukraïns’kyĭ istorychnyĭ zhurnal, 1, 2013, pp. 80–91. 82 Turchenko, H. ‘Transformatsiia rosiĭs’koho separatyzmu na Pivdni Ukraïny u 1917–1918’, in Verstiuk Revoliutssia, derzhavnist’, natsiia, pp. 176–7. 83 Velychenko, S. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 103. 84 Astashkevich, I. Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), pp. 7–8. 85 Lebedeva, ‘Problema stvorennia’, 28; Velychenko, State building in revolutionary Ukraine, 102–4.

600

NOTES

86 Dvirna and Storchaus, ‘Formuvannia mistsevoho samovriaduvannia’, 153–4. 87 Verstiuk, ‘Zemel’ne pytannia’, 654. 88 Ford, ‘Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution’, 287. 89 Schmid, ‘Volodymyr Vynnyčenko’, 147. 90 Ford, ‘Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution’, 297. 91 Graziosi, A. ‘A century of 1917s: Ideas, representations, and Interpretations of the October Revolution, 1917–2017’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 36, 1–2, 2019, p. 29.

Chapter 25 1

Safarov, G. Kolonial’naia Revoliutsiia: Opyt Turkestana (Moscow: 1921, reprint Almaty: Zhalyn, 1996), p. 89.

2

Chokaev, M. Otryvki Iz Vospominaniĭ o 1917 g. (Central Asian Research Series, Tokyo & Moscow: Islamic Area Studies Project, 2001), p. 10.

3

Vaillant-Coutourier, P. Mittelasien Erwacht. Ein Reisebericht (Moscow: Verlagsgenossenschaft Ausländischer Arbeiter in der UdSSR, 1932), pp. 56–7.

4

Machatschek, F. Landeskunde Von Russisch Turkestan (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns Nachf., 1921), p. 132; Masal’skiĭ, V.I. Turkestanskiĭ Kraĭ. Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva (St.-Peterburg: izdanie A.F. Debriena, 1913), p. 45.

5

Buttino, M. Revoliutsiia Naoborot. Sredniaia Aziia Mezhdu Padeniem Tsarskoĭ Imperii i Obrazovaniem SSSR (Moscow: Zvenia, 2007), p. 71.

6

For example, Chokobaeva, A. et al. (eds.) The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

7

See Hallez, X. and Ohayon, I. ‘Making Political Rebellion “Primitive”: The 1916 Rebellion in the Kazakh Steppe in Long-Term Perspective (C. 1840–1930)’, in Chokobaeva et al. (eds.), The Central Asian Revolt.

8

Shestakov, A.V. ‘Vosstanie v Sredneĭ Aziĭ v 1916 g. (k desiatiletiiu sobytiĭ)’, IstorikMarksist, 2, 1926, p. 113.

9

Khalid, A. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 241–2.

10 See Buttino, M. ‘Economic Relations between Russia and Turkestan, 1914–18, or How to Start a Famine’, in Pallot, J. (ed.), Transforming Peasants: Society, State and the Peasantry, 1861–1930 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 11 Sahadeo, G. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 170–6. 12 Pokrovskiĭ, M.N. ‘Iz Dnevnika A.M. Kuropatkina: S Predisloviem M. N. Pokrovskogo’, Krasnyĭ Arkhiv, 1, 20,1927, p. 60. 13 Khalid, A. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), pp. 60–5, Fedtke, G. ‘Two Letters to

NOTES

601

Lenin: Muslim Communist Narratives and the Political Language of the Revolution in Turkestan’, in Redkollegia (ed.), The Written and the Spoken in Central Asia / Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in Zentralasien – Festschrift für Ingeborg Baldauf (Potsdam: edition-thetys, 2021), pp. 285–316. 14 Abdullaev, R. M. Natsional’nye politicheskie organizatsiĭ Turkestana v 1917–1918 gody (Tashkent: Na’vroz, 2014), p. 69. 15 Fedtke, G. Roter Orient. Muslimkommunisten und Bolschewiki in Turkestan (1917–1924) (Wien-Köln-Weimar: Böhlau, 2020). 16 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 60–2. 17 Explored in Khalid, Politics. 18 Explored in Baldauf, I. ‘Jadidism in Central Asia Within Reformism and Modernism in the Muslim World’, Die Welt des Islams, 41, 1, 2001, pp. 72–88. 19 See Choriyev, Z. Turkiston Mardikorlari. Safarbarlik Va Uning Oqibatlari (Taschkent: Sharq, 1999); Fedtke, Roter Orient. 20 Pobeda Oktiabrskoĭ Revoliuciĭ v Uzbekistane: Tom1. Ustanovlenie Sovetskoĭ Vlasti v Uzbekistane. Sbornik Dokumentov (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoĭ SSR, 1963), p. 239, hereafter PORvUz I. 21 PORvUz I, 204–5. 22 Sahadeo, Colonial Society, 194–5. 23 Buttino, Revoliutsiia Naoborot, 176–7. 24 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 86. 25 Buttino, Revoliutsiia Naoborot, 180–204. 26 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 123–38. 27 Abdullaev, Natsional’nye politicheskie organizatsiĭ, 122. 28 Khalid, Politics, 268. 29 Abdullaev, Natsional’nye politicheskie organizatsiĭ, 157. 30 A’zamxo’jayev, S. Turkiston Muxtoriyati: Milliy-Demokratik Davlatchilik Qurilishi Tajribasi (Tashkent: Ma’naviyat, 2000), pp. 80–112. 31 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 155–62. 32 See Iskander, Kniaz’ A. ‘Nebesnyĭ pochod’, in Volkov, S.V. (ed.), Soprotivlenie bolʹshevizmu. 1917–1918 gg (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2001). 33 See Buttino, ‘How to Start’. 34 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 87. 35 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 98–114. 36 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 274–83. 37 Nasha gazeta 88, 1.5.1918. 38 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 142–8. 39 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 220–32.

602

NOTES

40 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 232–47. 41 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 247–53. 42 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 192. 43 Sartori, P. ‘What Went Wrong? The Failure of Soviet Policy on sharī’a Courts in Turkestan, 1917–1923’, Die Welt des Islams, 50, 3, 2010, pp. 402–7. 44 Nasha gazeta 200, 16.9.1919. 45 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 294–301. 46 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 301–5. 47 Fedtke, Roter Orient, 306–16, 328. 48 Obertreis, J. Imperial Desert Dreams: Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2017), p. 476.

Chapter 26 1

This essay is drawn from the author’s The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2017). Apart from the notes below, that is where detailed references to the sources used can be found.

2

This scheme is a considerable oversimplification and has shortcomings, but the objective was to provide clarity and historical perspective. The author has resisted the temptation to use the abbreviation FRE, or Former Russian Empire.

3

The Grand Duchy extended to the unsettled northern White Sea, but for reasons of distance the region will be treated as part of the inner periphery rather than central zone.

4

By the end of the seventeenth century the Russian state claimed territory as far east at the Sea of Okhotsk, a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean, but settlement and control were sparse. Eastern Siberia was almost an overseas territory, until the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s.

5

Eastern Siberia had nominally been Russian territory for many decades, but development came late, and railway construction – as in the United States and Canada – was vitally important. Finland was geographically very close to Petrograd, but the historical and cultural differences were significant.

6

Arguably the Kingdom of Poland was the first region to be lost to Russia, in 1915. That loss, however, was as a result of military conquests by the German and AustroHungarian armies rather than by nationalist insurgents. Piłsudski’s Polish Legions, supported by Austria-Hungary, did play a minor role.

7

Istoriia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza: Atlas (Moscow: Institut Marksizma-Leninizma, 1977), p. 53.

8

The Latvian Soviet Republic is discussed in more detail in Swain’s contribution to this Handbook.

NOTES

9

603

Western Ukraine (Galicia in Austria-Hungary) only became part of the USSR in 1939 (after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and after the 1945 Yalta conference). It is now part of the independent Ukraine established in 1991.

10 Exporting the revolution to Poland is discussed further in Swain’s contribution to this Handbook. 11 The revolutionary implications of the change of power in Baku are discussed further in Swain’s contribution to this Handbook. 12 Events in Tashkent are discussed in Fedtke’s contribution to this Handbook.

Chapter 27 1

Reed, J. Ten Days That Shook the World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 231.

2

Chamberlin, W.H. The Russian Revolution 1917–1921, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 491–3.

3

Carr, E.H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), p. 151.

4

Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, 111; Lincoln, W.B. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (London: Cardinal, 1991), p. 372.

5

Heywood, A.J. ‘War Destruction and Remedial Work in the Early Soviet Economy: Myth and Reality on the Railroads’, Russian Review, 64, 3, 2005, p. 475. Transport problems during the civil war were generally a consequence of economic collapse rather than shortages of locomotives or the destruction of infrastructure. Although some railway lines and bridges were damaged in civil war fighting, the extent of this has been exaggerated, and remedial work was swift. See also Heywood, ‘War, Civil War and the “Restoration” of Russia’s Industrial Infrastructure, 1914–25: The Fate of the Railway Locomotive Stock’, Revolutionary Russia, 25, 1, 2012, pp. 31–59.

6

Read, C. War and Revolution in Russia, 1914–22: The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013) p. 158; Markevich, A. and Harrison, M. ‘Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia’s National Income, 1913 to 1928’, Journal of Economic History, 71, 3, 2011, p. 683.

7

Koenker, D.P. ‘Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War’, in Koenker et al. (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 81.

8

Brower, D.R. ‘“The City in Danger”: The Civil War and the Urban Population’, in Koenker et al. (eds.), Party, State, and Society, p. 61.

9

Gorky, M. Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 102.

10 Vlast’ sovetov, 1923, 6–7, 156–7. 11 For more on this, see Frame, M. ‘Crime, Society and “Revolutionary Conscience” during the Russian Civil War: Evidence from the Militia Files’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/Crime, History & Societies, 17, 1, 2013, pp. 129–50.

604

NOTES

12 Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2017); Musaev, V.I. Prestupnost’ v Petrograde v 1917–1921 gg. i bor’ba s nei (St Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 2001). 13 Mawdsley, E. The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 285–7. 14 See, for example, Aksenov, V.B. ‘Ot ‘revoliutsionnogo psikhoza’ k ‘kontrrevoliutsionnomu kompleksu’: psikhoemotsional’naia dinamika rossiiskogo obshchestva v statistike, diagnozakh i otsenkakh obyvatelei v gody revoliutsii i Grazhdanskoi voiny’, in Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii: zhizn’ v epokhu sotsial’nykh eksperimentov i voennykh ispytanii, 1917–1922 (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2020), pp. 337–56; Buldakov, V.P. ‘Emotsional’nye narrativy Grazhdanskoi voiny v Rossii (provintsial’naia gazetnaia poeziia, 1918–1920 gg’, in Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii, pp. 321–36. 15 On the making and unmaking of the Bolshevik coalition with the Left SRs, see Swain, G. ‘A Soviet Government?’ in Orlovsky, D. (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), pp. 331–9. 16 See Bukharin, N.I. ‘The Theory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (1919) and ‘The Economics of the Transition Period’ (1920) in Bukharin The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), edited by K. J. Tarbuck. 17 Quoted in Williams, B. Lenin (Harlow: Longman, Essex, 2000), p. 101. 18 The 1918 constitution remained in place until the promulgation of the first constitution of the USSR in 1923. 19 According to the constitution, the Congress of Soviets was expected to be in session at least twice a year, but in fact it met less frequently than that. For the remainder of the civil war period it met in November 1918, December 1919 and December 1920. 20 Bunyan, J. (ed.) The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917–1921: Documents and Materials (Baltimore: Hoover Institution, 1967), pp. 507–24. 21 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, 134–59. 22 See Wade, R. Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). 23 Frame, M. ‘Concepts of Policing during the Russian Revolution, 1917–1918’, Europe-Asia Studies, 68, 10, 2016, pp. 1654–71. 24 Following convention and contemporaneous practice, the two names – Bolshevik Party and Communist Party – are used interchangeably in this chapter. For some years, the formal name of the party was ‘Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)’. For further discussion of the relationship between the Sovnarkom and Politburo, see the contribution of Douds to this Handbook. 25 Douds, L. ‘Executive Power in the Early Soviet Government: Party and State, 1917–22’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 4: Reintegration – The Struggle for the State (Bloomington: Slavica,

NOTES

605

2018), pp. 343–70; Rigby, T.H. Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 26 Mawdsley, Russian Civil War, 7, 190, 246. 27 Pipes, R. Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919–1924 (London: Fontana Press, 1994), p 446. 28 Rosenberg, W.G. (ed.) Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Russia. Part 1. The Culture of a New Society: Ethics, Gender, the Family, Law, and Problems of Tradition, second edition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990), p. 170. See also Hazard, J.N. ‘Soviet Law: the Bridge Years, 1917–1920’, in Butler, W.E. Russian Law: Historical and Political Perspectives (Leyden: Sijthoff, 1977), pp. 235–57. 29 Frame, ‘Crime, Society and “Revolutionary Conscience”’, pp. 132–7. 30 Kucherov, S. The Organs of Soviet Administration of Justice: Their History and Operation (Leiden: Brill, 1970), p. 594. 31 Pipes, R. Legalised Lawlessness: Soviet Revolutionary Justice (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1986). Bolshevik jurists were divided over this approach. Kozlovsky, for instance, initially supported an informal approach that stressed local variation. Others, such as Justice Commissar Dmitrii Kurskii, advocated a standardized legal system as an essential tool of governance during the transitional period, a view that Lenin eventually sided with, setting in motion preparations for the new criminal code that appeared in 1922. 32 Retish, A.B. ‘Judicial Reforms and Revolutionary Justice: The Establishment of the Court System in Soviet Russia, 1917–22’, in Read et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front, p. 383. 33 Rendle, M. The State versus The People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s Civil War, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 267. 34 Ryan, J. ‘The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War’, Slavic Review, 74, 4, 2015, pp. 808–18. 35 Quoted in Thatcher, I. Trotsky (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 102. 36 Bunyan, J. (ed.) Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia: April-December 1918. Documents and Materials (Baltimore: Hoover Institution, 1936), p. 239. 37 Quoted in Mel’gunov, S.P. Krasnyi terror v Rossii, 1918–1923 (New York: Brandy, 1979), p. 44. 38 Leggett, G. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 463. 39 Leggett, Cheka, 463–8. 40 Novikova, L.G. ‘Russia’s Red Revolutionary and White Terror, 1917–1921: A Provincial Perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies, 65, 9, 2013, pp. 1755–70. 41 As a description of the Bolshevik approach to economic management during 1918–21, the term ‘war communism’ was first used by Lenin in the draft of his pamphlet ‘The Tax in Kind’ (March–April 1921, published in May 1921), see Malle, S. The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921

606

NOTES

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 11. The term had been used earlier, in 1917, by Alexander Bogdanov to describe features of the First World War economy, see Pliutto, P.A. ‘Aleksandr Bogdanov on the Period of “War Communism”’, Revolutionary Russia, 5, 1, 1992, pp. 46–52. 42 Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, 96. 43 Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 460–2. 44 Lih, L.T. ‘Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism’, Slavic Review, 45, 4, 1986, pp. 673–88. See also Malle, Economic Organization, chapter 8. 45 On local implementation and responses to prodrazverstka see, for example, Fraunholtz, P. ‘The Collapse and Rebuilding of Grain Procurement Authority in Civil War Russia: The Case of Penza, 1919’, in Badcock, S. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 1: Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015), pp. 67–86; and Landis, E. ‘Between Village and Kremlin: Confronting State Food Procurement in Civil War Tambov, 1919–20’, Russian Review, 63, 1, 2004, pp. 70–88. 46 Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 397–9. 47 Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 435–9. 48 Bunyan, Origin of Forced Labor, 110. 49 Thatcher, Trotsky, 104–10. 50 Bunyan, Origin of Forced Labor, 172. 51 Marks, S.G. ‘The Russian Experience of Money, 1914–24’, in Frame, M. et al. (eds.), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memory (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014), pp. 128–9. 52 Marks, ‘Russian Experience of Money’, 133; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, 104. 53 Bukharin, N.I. and Preobrazhensky, E.A. The ABC of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 389. 54 Quoted in E.H. Carr’s introduction to Bukharin and Preobrazhensky ABC of Communism, 26. 55 Marks, ‘Russian Experience of Money’, 137–8, 141–6. 56 Chamberlin, Russian Revolution, vol. 2, 105. 57 Malle, Economic Organization, 504. 58 See, for example, the discussion in Wright, A.S. ‘Stemming the Flow: the Red Army Anti-Desertion Campaign in Soviet Karelia (1919)’, Revolutionary Russia, 25, 2, 2021, pp. 141–62. 59 For analysis of strikes and rebellions throughout the civil war period, see Brovkin, V.N. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 60 Coopersmith, J. The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 175.

NOTES

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61 Remington, T.F. Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia: Ideology and Industrial Organization, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1984), p. 132. 62 The following discussion draws partly on Frame, M. ‘Early Soviet Culture: Education, Science, and Proletkult’, in Orlovsky, A Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 369–76. 63 Bogdanov, A.A. Voprosy sotsializma: raboty raznykh let (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), p. 421 (Bogdanov’s italics). 64 For Bogdanov’s thinking on culture, see White, J.D. Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov (Leiden: Brill, 2019), esp. chapters 9 and 13. 65 Lenin, V.I. V. I. Lenin o kul’ture, second edition (Moscow: Politizdat, 1985), p. 179. 66 For detailed examples, see Stites, R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For more detail on issues of culture, see Fischer von Weikersthal’s contribution to this Handbook. 67 In the early eighteenth century, Peter the Great replaced the independent patriarchate of the Orthodox Church with a Holy Synod which was effectively a department of state overseen by a lay bureaucrat known as an Over-Procurator. This lasted until the 1917 revolution when the patriarchate was restored. 68 Kenworthy, S.M. ‘Rethinking the Russian Orthodox Church and the Bolshevik Revolution’ Revolutionary Russia, 31, 1, 2018, pp. 1–23; Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, chapter 7; Rogoznyi, P.G. ‘The Russian Orthodox Church during the First World War and Revolutionary Turmoil, 1914–21’, in Frame, M. et al. (eds.), Russian Culture in War and Revolution, pp. 349–75. 69 Clements, B.E. ‘The Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations’, in Koenker, D. P. et al. (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War, p. 110 and passim. 70 Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, ABC of Communism, 227. 71 Clements, ‘Effects of the Civil War on Women and Family Relations’, p. 109. 72 White, E. ‘Gender and the Russian Revolution’, in Orlovsky A Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 287–96; Wood, E.A. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 73 On Bolshevik propaganda, see Kenez, P. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Part 1; on mass festivals, see Von Geldern, J. Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkerley: University of California Press, 1993); on the arts, see Russell, R. ‘The Arts and the Russian Civil War’ Journal of European Studies, 20, 3, 1990, pp. 219–40.

Chapter 28 1

Pethybridge, R. The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917 (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. x–xii.

608

NOTES

2

See Kakurin, N.E. Kak srazhalas’ revoliutsiia, vol. 1–2 (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1925–1926); Grazhdanskaia voina i voennaia intervenciia v SSSR. Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1987); Robinson, P. The White Russian Army in Exile 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Golovin, N.N. Russakaia kontrrevoliutsiia v 1917–1918 gg. Parts I–IV, in twelve books (Paris: Ilustrirovanaia Rossia, 1937).

3

Brovkin, V.N. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 72–3.

4

See the series of volumes Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–1922 published under the general editorship of Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren McDonald and John W. Steinberg. These volumes were published in Bloomington by Slavica, between 2014 and 2022.

5

‘Tyl’, in Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’ Brokgauz-Efron, vol. XXXIV. (St Petersburg, 1901), pp. 264–6.

6

See Beyrau, D. and Shcherbinin, P.P. ‘Alles für die Front: Russland im Krieg 1914–1922’, in Bauerkämper, A. and Julien, E. (eds.), Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), pp. 151–77.

7

Ingold, F.P. Russische Wege. Geschichte – Kultur – Weltbild (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), pp. 25–6; Krivonos, V.Sh. ‘Provinz’, in Franz, N.P. (ed.), Lexikon der russischen Kultur (Darmstadt: Primus, 2002), pp. 363–4.

8

See Holquist, P. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 6.

9

On the case of the Ukraine, see Schnell, F. Räume des Schreckens. Gewalträume und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine, 1905–1933 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2012), pp. 164–90.

10 Posadskii, A.V. (ed.) ‘Atamanshchina’ i ‘partizanshchina’ v Grazhdanskoi voine. Ideologiia, voennoe uchastie, kadry (Moscow: AIRO-21, 2015). 11 See Sunderland, W. The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); Kuz’min, S.L. Istoriia barona Ungerna: opyt rekonstruktsii (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo nauchnykh izdanii KMK, 2011; Bisher, J. White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian (London: Frank Cass, 2005). 12 Grebenkin, I.N. Dolg i vybor: Russkii ofitser v gody mirovoi vojny i revoliutsii. 1914–1918 gg (Moscow: AIRO-21), 2015, pp. 411–39. 13 Mawdsley, E. The Russian Civil War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 160. 14 See Kanishcheva, N.I. and Shelokhaev, V.V. (eds.) Vserossiiskii Natsional’nyi Тsentr. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001); Kanishcheva, N.I. et al. (eds.) Takticheskii Tsentr. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012; Krasnaia kniga VCHK, vol. 1–2, second edition (Moscow: Politizdat, 1989).

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15 Kirmel’, N.S. Belogvardeiskie spetssluzhby v Grazhdanskoi voine, 1918–1922 gg. (Moscow: Kuchkove pole, 2008), pp. 312–55; Shishkin, V.I. ‘Krasnyi banditizm v sovetskoi Sibiri’, in Shishkin, V. I. (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriia. Problemy i uroki (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1992), pp. 3–79. 16 Thus for Struve, Obolenskii, V.A. ‘Krim pri Vrangele’, Na chuzhoi storone, 9, 1925, p. 7. See also Trukan, G.A. Antibol’shevistskie pravitel’stva Rossii (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000), pp. 123–34. 17 Leonhard, J. Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014), pp. 651–61 (published in English by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); Smith, J. The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 3, 20. 18 Denikin, A.I. Ocherki russkoi smuty, vol. 1–5 (Paris: Povolozky, 1921–1926), vol. 5, p. 139. On the White vision of empire, see Rosenberg, W.G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 134–69. 19 Shul’gin, V.V. Dni. 1920. (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), p. 528. 20 Ross, N.G. Vrangel’ v Krymu (Frankfurt: Posev 1982), p. 85. 21 See Luschnat-Ziegler, M. Die ukrainische Revolution und die Deutschen 1917–1918 (Marburg: Herder Institut, 2021); Lannik, L.V. Posle Rossiiskoi imperii. Germanskaia okkupatsiia 1918 g. (St Petersburg: Evrazia, 2020). Kenez, P. Civil War in South Russia. 1918. The First Year of the Volunteer Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) and his Civil War in South Russia. 1919–1920. The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 22 Procyk, A. Russian Nationalism and Ukraine. The Nationality Policy of the Volunteer Army during the Civil War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1995), p. 166. 23 Rosenberg, Liberals, 12–20. 24 The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: Petr Vrangel’ Collection, box 30, folder 7. 25 Engelstein, L. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press), 2018, pp. 363–82; Lazarev, A.V. Donskie kazaki v grazhdanskoi voine 1917–1920 gg. Istoriografiia problemy (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii, 1995). 26 Danilov, V. et al. (eds.) Filipp Mironov. Tikhii Don v 1917–1921 gg. (Moscow: Fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1997). 27 Vachagaev, M.M. Soiuz gortsev Severnogo Kavkaza i Gorskaia respublika. Istoriia nesostoiavshegosia gosudarstva. 1917–1920 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2018); Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii i musul’mane. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Moscow: Tsentr strategicheskoi koniuktury, 2014). 28 Ross, Vrangel’, 51. 29 See for example Procyk, Russian Nationalism.

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30 See Bartov, O. and Weitz, E.D. (eds.) Shatterzone of Empires. Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 31 ‘Dnevnik P.N. Miliukova (Miliukov i Belaia Armiia)’, Novyi Zhurnal, 67, 1962, pp. 189–90. See also ‘Iz arkhiva V.I. Lebedeva’, Volia Rossii, 8–9, 1928, p. 152. 32 Volkov, S.V. (ed.) Pokhod na Moskvu (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2004). 33 See Puchenkov, A.S. Ukraina i Krym v 1918 – nachale 1919 goda. Ocherki politicheskoi istorii (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia,2013); Pereira, N. ‘Oblastnichestvo i gosudarstvennost’ v Sibiri vo vremia grazhdanskoi voiny’, in Poliakov, Iu.A. Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii: Perekrestok mnenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), pp. 201–14; Kobzov, V. S. and Sichinskii, E.P. Gosudarstvennoe stroitel’stvo na Urale v 1917–1921 gg. Cheliabinsk: Cheliabinsk iuridicheskii institute MVD, 1997; Kobzov, V.S. and Shvedov, I.V. Ural v period potriasenii 1917–1921 godov. Monografiia (Cheliabinsk: I. P. Miakotin, 2017). 34 See Morozov, K. ‘The Unrealized Alternative to Tsarism and “to Bolshevism Right and Left”: The Socialist Revolutionary Party in the Era of Wars and Revolutions, 1914–22’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 4: Reintegration – The Struggle For the State (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 279–313 and Swain, G. ‘The Democratic Counterrevolution Reconsidered’, in the same volume, pp. 403–23. 35 See Smele, J. Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak 1918–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Pereira, N.G.O. White Siberia. The Politics of Civil War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). 36 Izmeneniia i dopolneniia statei polozheniia o polevom upravlenii voisk v voennoe vremia, posledovavshie v period vremeni s 20-go iiulia 1914 g. po 1-e marta 1916 g. (Petrograd: Voennaia tipografiia Imperatritsy Ekateriny Velikoi, 1916). See also amended edition of 1 March 1919 issued in Arkhangel’sk’1919. 37 Denikin Ocherki, vol. 4, p. 201; Letter of Iu.A. Martov to P.B. Aksel’rod of 1 December 1917 in Brovkin, V.N. (ed.) Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1991), p. 56). 38 Zhuravlev, V.V. ‘“Prosvoiv takomu litsu naimenovanie Verkhovnogo Pravitelia”: K voprosu o titule, priniatom admiralom A.V. Kolchakom 18 noiabria 1918 g’, Antropologicheskii forum, 8, 2008, p. 366. 39 Diary entry of General A. Budberg, 6 July 1919, see ‘Aleksei Budberg: Dnevnik 1919 god’, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 14, 1924, p. 312; Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 4, p. 201. See also Tsvetkov, V.Zh. Beloe delo v Rossii. 1919 god (formirovanie i evoliutsiia politicheskikh struktur Belogo dvizheniia v Rossii) (Moscow: Posev, 2009), pp. 163–70. 40 Rutych, N.N. Belyi front generala Iudenicha: Biografii chinov Severo-Zapadnoi armii (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2002), pp. 57–62.

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41 Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVPRF), f. 324, o. 894, d. 2, l. 175, Kolchak to Denikin, 17, 9, 1919. 42 See Brüggemann, K. Die Gründung der Republik Estland und das Ende des ‘Einen und unteilbaren Russland’. Die Petrograder Front des Russischen Bürgerkriegs 1918–1920 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002); Smolin, A.V. Beloe dvizhenie na Severo-zapade Rossii 1918–1920 gg (St Petersburg: D. Bulanin, 1999). 43 Novikova, L.G. Provintsial’naia ‘kontrrevoliutsiia’: Beloe dvizhenie i Grazhdanskaia voina na russkom Severe, 1917–1920 (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2011). 44 Sokolov, B.F. ‘Padenie Severnoi oblasti’, Arkhiv russkoi revoliutsii, 9, 1923, pp. 57–8. 45 Lazarski, C. The Lost Opportunity: Attempts at Unification of the Anti-Bolsheviks, 1917–1919. Moscow, Kiev, Jassy, Odessa (Lanham: University Press of America, 2008). 46 Katzer, N. ‘Der weisse Mythos. Russischer Antibolschewismus im europäischen Nachkrieg’, in Gerwarth, R and Horne, J. (eds.), Krieg im Frieden. Paramilitärische Gewalt in Europa nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), pp. 57–93. 47 Kenez, P. ‘The Ideology of the White Movement’, Soviet Studies, 32, 1, 1980, pp. 58–83. 48 Dekrety Sovetskoi vlasti, vol. 1 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1957), p. 124. 49 For the example of Viatka Province, see Retish, A.B. ‘Poisk spravedlivosti v revoliutsii: Mestnaia sudebnaia sistema Viatskoi gubernii v 1917–1922 gg’, in Abrosimova, T.A. and Kolonitskii, B.I. (eds.), The Epoch of Wars and Revolutions 1914–1922 (St Petersburg: Nestore-Istoria, 2017, pp. 100–11. 50 Hoover Institution Archives, Petr N. Vrangel’ Collection, box 136, file 2: Minutes of the meeting of the Osoboe Soveshchanie of 21.5.1919; Rako, V.V. ‘Uchrezhdeniia senatskogo tipa v nebol’shevistskikh gosudarstvennykh obrazovaniiakh v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny’, in Uchenye zapiski: elektronnyi nauchnyi zhurnal Kurskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 2011, No. 3–2 (19), pp. 196–211. https:// cyberleninka.ru/article/n/uchrezhdeniya-senatskogo-tipa-v-nebolshevistskihgosudarstvennyh-obrazovaniyah-v-gody-grazhdanskoy-voyny/viewer 51 See Vrangel’ Collection, box 136, file 3, Vrangel’s orders of 25.9 and 10.10. 1920. 52 Gins, G.K. Sibir’, soiuzniki i Kolchak. Povorotnyi moment russkoi istorii. 1918–1920 gg, vol. 2 (Peking: Oshchestvo vozrozhdenii Rossii v gorode Kharbine, 1921), p. 31. 53 Varneck, E. and Fisher, H.H. (eds.) The Testimony of Admiral Kolchak and Other Siberian Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935), pp. 209–10. 54 See Smith-Peter, S. ‘How to Write a Region: Local and Regional Historiography’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 5, 3, 2004, pp. 527–42; Raleigh, R.J. (ed.) Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).

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55 Tumanova A. S: Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914 – fevral’ 1917 g.) (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2014). 56 Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 3, p. 260. 57 Volkov, S.V. Tragediia russkogo ofitserstva. (Moscow: Fokus, 1999), pp. 38–59, 308–24. 58 See ‘Petr N. Vrangel’: Zapiski (noiabr 1916 g. – noiabr 1920 g.). Part 1’ Beloe delo. Letopis’ beloi bor’by. 5, 1928, p. 217; Kirmel’ Belogvardeiskie spetssluzhby, pp. 81–2. 59 Denikin, Ocherki, vol 4, pp. 94–5. See also Bortnevski, V.G. ‘White Administration and White Terror (The Denikin Period)’, The Russian Review, 52, 3, 1993, pp. 354–66. 60 Ustrialov, N.V. V bor’be za Rossiiu. Sbornik statei (Kharbin: Okno, 1920), p. 76. 61 Narskii, I. Zhizn’ v katastrofe. Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917–1922 gg (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), pp. 490–7. 62 Shil’, S.N. Krymskie zapiski. 1916–1921 (Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2018), p. 228. 63 Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 332–3. 64 See Borisova, L.V. Voennyi kommunizm. Nasilie kak element khoziaistvennogo mekhanizma (Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi fond, 2001); Pavliuchenkov, S.A. Voennyi kommunizm – vlast’ i massy (Moscow: RKT Istoriia, 1997); Landis, E.C. ‘The Political Economy of War Communism’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 341–55; Malle, S. The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 65 Kondrashin, V.V. ‘K voprosu ob itogakh i perspektivakh izucheniia ekonomiki Rossii v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny v otechestvennoi i zarubezhnoi istoriografii’, in Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta (Seriia: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 4, 2020), pp. 20–8, https://DOI.org/10.37482/2227-6564-V029. 66 Harrison, M. and Markevich, A. ‘Russia’s Home Front, 1914–1922: The Economy’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 3: National Disintegration (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp.23–44.; Davies, R.W. (ed.) From Tsarism to the New Economic Policy: Continuity and Change in the Economy of the USSR (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 67 Markevich. A. and Harrison, M. ‘Great War, Civil War, and Recovery: Russia’s National Income, 1913 to 1928’, The Journal of Economic History, 71, 3, 2011, pp. 672–703. 68 Novikova, Provintsial’naia ‘kontrrevoliutsiia’, 153–90; Smele, Civil War in Siberia, 327–471; Kenez, Civil War, vol. 1, pp. 191–218; vol. 2, pp. 85–109. 69 Davydov, A.Iu. ‘Tretii front grazhdanskoi voiny v Rossii: meshochnichestvo v proryve bol’shevistskoi osade derevni’, Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 8, 2, 2018, pp. 337–54 (https://doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu24.2018.204); and his Nelegal’noe snabzhenie rossiiskogo naseleniia i vlast’. 1917–1921 gg.: meshochniki. (St Petersburg: Nauka, 2002).

NOTES

613

70 See Sokolov, A.K. (ed.) Golos naroda. Pis’ma i otkliki riadovykh sovetskikh grazhdan o sobytiiakh 1918–1932 gg (Moscow: ROSSPEN 1997); Golosa krest’ian: sel’skaia Rossiia XX veka v krest’ianskikh memuarakh (Moscow: Aspekt Press, 1996). 71 Osipova, T.v Rossiiskoe krest’ianstvo v revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voine (Moscow: Strelets, 2001), pp. 5–8. 72 Svobodnaia Rech’ (Ekaterinodar), 11.10.1919. 73 Aver’ev, V. ‘Agrarnaia politika kolchakovshchiny’, Na agrarnom fronte, 6, 1929, p. 32. 74 Sokolov, K.N. Pravlenie generala Denikina. (Iz vospominanii) (Sofia: RossiiskoBolgarskoe Knigoizdat, 1921), p. 189. 75 Ross Vrangel’ v Krymu, pp. 139–90; Bruisch, K. Als das Dorf noch Zukunft war. Agrarismus und Expertise zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), pp. 151–8. 76 Denikin, Ocherki, vol 3, 12; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, 214. 77 I. Kal’nin, I. ‘Trud pri belykh. (Po arkhivam ministerstva truda)’, Sibirskie ogni, 3, 1929, p. 134. 78 Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 4, 214. 79 Gins, Sibir’, vol. 2, 20. 80 Mal’t, M. ‘Denikinshchina i rabochie’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 5, 28, 1924, pp. 64–85; Kenez, Civil War, vol. 2, 102–9. 81 Grazhdanskaia voina i voennaia interventsiia. Entsiklopediia, pp. 75–6, 577, 521–22. See also Kovalenko, D.A. Oboronnaia promyshlennost’ Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1920 gg (Moscow: Nauka, 1970). 82 For a survey of current research, see Hughes, M. ‘Revolution and Foreign Policy’, in Orlovsky (ed.), A Companion to the Russian Revolution, pp. 297–305; Bystrova, N.E. ‘“Russkii vopros” v 1917 – nachale 1920 g’, in Sovetskaia Rossiia i velikie derzhavy (Moscow, St Petersburg: Tsentr gumanitanykh initsiativ, 2016), pp. 222–32; Foglesong, D. ‘Inostrannaia interventsiia’, in Acton, E. et al. (eds.), Kriticheskii slovar’ russkoj revoliutsii: 1914–1921 (St Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2014, pp. 108–15. 83 See for example the booklet by the socialist William Paul Hands Off Russia! An Analysis of the Economics of Allied Intervention in Russia (Renfrew, 1919). 84 Grishachev, S.V. and Datsyshen, V.G. ‘Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War and Japanese Troops in Russia’s Far East, 1918–1922’, in Streltsov, D.V. and Nobuo, Sh (eds.) A History of Russo-Japanese Relations. Over Two Centuries of Cooperation and Competition (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 137–51. 85 Sammartino, A.H. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 86 Mikhailovskii. G.N. Zapiski. Iz istorii rossiiskogo vneshnepoliticheskogo vedomstva. 1914–1920, vol. 2 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1993), pp. 208–13. See also Smolin, A.V. U zakrytykh dverei Versal’skogo dvortsa. Parizhskaia mirnaia konferentsiia i russkaia diplomatiia v 1919 godu (St Petersburg: Nauka, 2017), pp. 48–61.

614

NOTES

87

Proctor, T.M. Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010), p. 15.

88

Lohr, E. Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 115–31.

89

See Palat, M.K. (ed.) Social Identities in Revolutionary Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Heretz, L. ‘The Psychology of the White Movement’, in V.N. Brovkin (ed.), The Bolsheviks in Russian Society. The Revolutions and the Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 105–21.

90

Ritter, L.S. Schreiben für die Weisse Sache. General Aleksej von Lampe als Chronist der russischen Emigration, 1920–1967 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019), pp. 121–39.

91

See Lohr, E. et al. (eds) The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington: Slavica, 2014); Sanborn. J.A. Drafting the Russian Nation. Military conscription, total war, and mass politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).

92

Kenez, P. ‘Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War’, in Klier, J.D. and Lambroza, Sh. (eds.), Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 293–313.

93

See the booklet issued by the leader of an agitprop column Aleksei I. Ksiunin Obmanutyi narod. Chto obeshchali i chto dali bol’sheviki (Rostov on Don, 1919).

94

Ross, Vrangel’, 271–2.

95

‘Sotsialisticheskoe otechestvo v opasnosti!’ Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars, 21.2.1918.

96

‘Iz dokumentov belogvardeiskoi kontrrazvedki 1919 g’. Russkoe proshloe 1, 1991, pp. 150–73 and 2, 1991, pp. 339–47; Bortnevskii, V.G. ‘K istorii osvedomitel’noi organizatsii “Azbuka”’, Russkoe proshloe, 4, 1993, pp. 160–93.

97

Shishkin, V.I. (ed.) Pis’ma vo vlast’ v epokhu revoliutsii i Grazhdanskoi voiny (mart 1917 – mai 1921g.) Sbornik dokumentov, second edition (Novosibirsk: Parallel’, 2015).

98

See Iarov, S.V. Chelovek pered litsom vlasti, 1917–1920-e gg (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014); Volobuev, P.V. (ed.) Revoliutsiia i chelovek. Byt. Nravy. Povedenie. Moral’ (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii RAN, 1997).

99

Narskii, I.V. ‘Kak kommunist cherta rasstreliat’ khotel: apokalipsicheskie slukhi na Urale v gody revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voiny’, in Narskii (ed.), Slukhi v Rossii v XIX-XX vekov. Neofitsial’naia kommunikatsiia i „krutye povoroty’ rossiiskoi istorii. Sbornik statei (Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi Poias, 2011), pp. 231–55.

100 See Sablin, V.A. Krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo na Evropeiskom Severe Rossii (1917–1920) (Moscow: Acedemiia, 2009); Kondrashin V.V. Krest’ianstvo Rossii v Grazhdanskoi voine: k voprosu ob istokakh stalinizma (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009). 101 Retish, A.B. Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

NOTES

615

102 See Steinberg, M.D. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Iarov, S.V. Proletarii kak politik. Politicheskaia psikhologiia rabochikh Petrograda v 1917–1923 gg (St Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999). 103 See Kabytov, P.S. ‘Antivoennye nastroeniia rossiiskikh krest’ian’, in Sevost’ianov, G.N. (ed.), Rossiia v XX veke. Reformy i revoliutsii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp.521–8; Kureniev, A.A. ‘“Revoliutsionnaia voina” i krest’ianstvo’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 6, 2001, pp. 33–46; Danilov, V.P. (ed.) Mentalitet i agrarnoe razvitie Rossii (XIX-XX vv.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1996). 104 Shatsillo, M.K. Rossiiskaia burzhuaziia v period Grazhdanskoi voiny i pervye gody emigratsii, 1917 – nachalo 1920-kh godov (Moscow: Nauka, 2008), p. 30; Gatrell, P. A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 187–96. 105 See Lih, L.T. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia. A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 211–37. 106 Katzer, N. Die weisse Bewegung in Russland. Herrschaftsbildung, praktische Politik und politische Programmatik im Bürgerkrieg (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1999), pp. 311–38; Lazarski, C. ‘White Propaganda Efforts in the South during the Russian Civil War, 1918–19 (The Alekseev-Denikin Period)’, Slavonic and East European Review, 70, 4, 1992, pp. 688–707. 107 ‘Chastnye pis’ma epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny’, in Neizvestnaia Rossia: XX vek Book 2 (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledia, 1992), p. 243. 108 The pacifist Aleksandr Dneprovskii reported on the ‘psychology’ of deserters in Zapiski dezertira: voina 1914–1918 gg (New York: Al’batros, 1931). See also Figes, O. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 316–20. 109 See for example Efron, S.Ia. Zapiski dobrovol’tsa (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1998), pp. 165–72. 110 Landis, E.C. Bandits and Partisans. The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), pp. 41–59; Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines, 127–62. 111 Paul’, S.M. ‘S Kornilovym’, Beloe Delo. Letopis’ beloi bor’by. 3, 1927, p. 67. 112 Vrangel’, P.N. Vospominaniia, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1969), p. 53. 113 See von Hagen, M. War in a European Borderland. Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). 114 Cadiot, J. Laboratoriia imperii: Rossiia / SSSR, 1860–1940 (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2010), pp. 155–8. On the connotations of ‘nation’ and ‘race’, see Mogil’ner, M. Homo imperii. Istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii (konec XIX – nachalo XX v.) (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008), pp. 460–1, 492–3.

616

NOTES

115 See Sanborn, J. ‘War of Decolonization: The Russian Empire in the Great War’, in Lohr et al. (eds.), The Empire and Nationalism at War, pp. 49–71. 116 Denikin, Ocherki, vol. 5, pp. 270–6. 117 Il’in, I.A. ‘Belaia ideia’ Beloe Delo 1, pp. 7–15; fon Lampe, A.A. Puti vernykh. Sbornik statei (Paris: n. p., 1960), pp. 65–6.

Chapter 29 1

Swain, G. Trotsky (London: Pearson, 2006), pp. 28–30.

2

Frankel, J. ‘Lenin’s Doctrinal Revolution of April 1917’, Journal of Contemporary History, 4, 2, 1969, p. 125.

3

Frankel, ‘Lenin’s Doctrinal Revolution’, 129.

4

Frankel, ‘Lenin’s Doctrinal Revolution’, 134.

5

Lenin, V.I. Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1970), p. 385.

6

Lenin, Between the Two Revolutions (Moscow: Progress, 1971), pp. 477–8.

7

The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), August 1917–February 1918 (London: Pluto Press, 1974), pp. 97, 104.

8

Daniels, R.V. (ed.) A Documentary History of Communism, vol. 2 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1985), p. 20.

9

Keep, J.H.L. The Debate on Soviet Power: Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets of the Second Convocation, October 1917–January 1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp.149–53.

10

Keep, Debate, 168–9.

11

Keep, Debate, 187.

12

Lenin, Selected, vol. 2, 43.

13

Lenin, Selected, vol. 2, 382–3.

14

Swain, G. The Origins of the Russian Civil War (London: Longman, 1996), p. 97.

15

Daniels, Documentary, 21–2.

16

Swain, Trotsky, 79.

17

Swain Trotsky, 79.

18

Swain, Origins, 98–9.

19

Swain, Trotsky, 80.

20

Wheeler, R.F. ‘Revolutionary Socialist Internationalism: Rank and File Reaction in the USPD’, International Review of Social History, 22, 3, 1977, pp. 336–7.

21

Swain, Trotsky, 82.

22

Swain, Origins, 134.

23

Blanc, E. Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working Class Politics across the Russian Empire, 1882–1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 307–8.

NOTES

617

24 Tikka, M. ‘Finland’s Civil War of 1918’, in Marshall, A. et al (eds.), The Global Impacts of Russia’s Great War and Revolution: Book 1 – The Arc of Revolution, 1917–1924 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019), p. 83. 25 Blanc, Revolutionary, 310. 26 Tikka, ‘Finland’s’, 84. 27 Blanc, Revolutionary, 312; Tikka, ‘Finland’s’, 85–9. 28 For events on the Romanian Front, see Swain, G. ‘British Adventurers and Revolutionary Russia’s War over Bessarabia’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 2, 2021. 29 Lenin, Selected Works, vol. 2, 677. 30 Lenin Selected Works, vol. 2, 680. 31 Swain, G. Russia’s Civil War (Stroud: Tempus, 2000) 75. 32 Swain, G. A Short History of the Russian Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) 192–4. 33 Swain, G. ‘The Democratic Counterrevolution Reconsidered’, in Read, C. et al. (eds.), Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 4: Reintegration – the Struggle for the State (Bloomington: Slavica, 2018), pp. 416–20. Further material supporting the contested case for a People’s Army counter-attack in early November 1918 can be found in Ganin, A.V. Izmena komandirov (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Slavonic Studies, 2020), pp. 77–81. 34 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 73–4. 35 Drachewych, O. ‘The Bolsheviks’ Revolutionary International: The Idea and the Establishment of the Communist International, 1914–22’, in Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D. et al. (eds.), Russian International Relations in War and Revolution, 1914–22. Book 2: Revolution and Civil War (Bloomington: Slavica, 2021), pp. 322–3; McDermott, K. and Agnew, J. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1996), pp. 12–13. 36 Adams, A.E. Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: the Second Campaign (Yale: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 89–113. 37 Adams, Bolsheviks, 215–19. 38 Darch, C. Nestor Makhno and Rural Anarchism in Ukraine, 1917–1921 (London: Pluto Press, 2021), p. 52. 39 Meijer, J.M. (ed.) The Trotsky Papers, 2 vols. (Mouton & Co.: Hague, 1964), vol. 1, p. 375. 40 Adams, Bolsheviks, 218. 41 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 90–1. 42 Adams, Bolsheviks, 233. 43 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 100. 44 Swain, G. ‘Starting the World Revolution: Latvia’s Soviet Republic of 1919’, in Marshall, A. et al. (eds.), The Global Impact of Russia’s Great War and Revolution. Book 1: the Arc of Revolution, 1917–24 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019), p. 138.

618

NOTES

45 Swain, ‘Starting’, 149. 46 Swain, ‘Starting’, 145. 47 Swain, ‘Starting’, 146. 48 Swain, ‘Starting’, 147–8. 49 Swain, ‘Starting’, 142. 50 Swain, ‘Starting’, 143–4. 51 Swain, ‘Starting’, 140–1. 52 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 95–7, 103. 53 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 138. 54 Davies, N. ‘The Missing Revolutionary War: The Polish Campaigns and the Retreat from Revolution in Soviet Russia, 1919–21’, Soviet Studies, 27, 2, 1975, p. 182. 55 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 138. 56 Service, R. Lenin: a Political Life. Vol. III, The Iron Ring (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 119. 57 Swain, Trotsky, 127. 58 Service, Lenin, 119. 59 Drachewych, ‘The Bolsheviks’, 325; McDermott, Comintern, 17. 60 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 139. 61 Blanc, Revolutionary, 405. 62 Croll, K.D. ‘Soviet-Polish Relations’, University of Glasgow, PhD, 2008, pp. 138–40. 63 Croll, ‘Soviet-Polish’, 141–3, 166. 64 Croll, ‘Soviet-Polish’, 147–8, 151, 159. 65 Croll, ‘Soviet-Polish’, 152–3, 162. 66 Meijer, Trotsky Papers, vol. 2, p. 255. 67 Schwonek, M.R. ‘Strategy for an Emerging State: Poland and the War with the Bolsheviks, 1919–21’, in Marshall et al. (eds.), The Arc of Revolution, p. 308 68 Swain, Trotsky, 128. 69 ‘Vystuplenie V.I. Lenina na IX konferenstsii’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 1, 1, 1992, p. 28. 70 See Swain, Origins, chapters 6–8. 71 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 72–4. 72 Swain, Russia’s Civil War, 92. 73 Swain Russia’s Civil War, 128–34. 74 Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 30 (Online edition: Marxists Internet Archive, 2003), p. 160. 75 Butt, V.P. et al. (eds.) The Russian Civil War: Documents from the Soviet Archives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 159.

NOTES

619

76 Matin-asgari, A. ‘The Bolshevik Revolution’s Impact on Iranian Modernity’, in Chatterjee, C. et al. (eds.), The Global Impact of Russia’s Great War and Revolution. Book 2: The Wider Arc of Revolution, Part 2 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2019), pp. 211–12. 77 Jacobson, J. When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 63–5. 78 Jacobson, When, 65–6; Afary, J. ‘The Contentious Historiography of the Gilan Republic of Iran’, Iranian Studies, 28, 1–2, 1995, p. 13; Jafari, P. ‘When the Red Flag Flew over Iran’, The Jacobin Magazine, 11, 9, 2020 (https://jacobinmag. com/2020/11/soviet-socialist-republic-iran-gilan-history-imperialism). 79 Drachewych ‘The Bolsheviks’, p. 330; Marshall, A. ‘Lenin and World Revolution, 1917–24’, in Marshall et al. (eds.), The Arc of Revolution, pp. 55–6. 80 Chaqueri, C. ‘The Baku Congress’, Central Asian Survey, 2, 2, 1983, pp. 105–6. 81 Afary, ‘Contentions Historiography’, 1–14; White, S. ‘Communism and the East: the Baku Congress, 1920’, Slavic Review, 33, 3, 1974, p. 512; Jafari, ‘When the Red Flag’. 82 Jacobson, When, 67; Jafari, ‘When the Red Flag’; Marshall, ‘Lenin and World Revolution’, 56. 83 White, ‘Communism in the East’, 507.

Chapter 30 1

Lenin, V.I. ‘Report of the Substitution of a Tax in Kind for the Surplus Grain Appropriation System’, 15 March 1921, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1934), vol. 32, pp. 214–28.

2

Holquist, P. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914–1921 (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2002); Orlovsky, D. A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). See also volumes in the series ‘Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22’, edited by Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren MacDonald, and John Steinberg, published in Bloomington by Slavica.

3

Kröner, A. The White Knight of the Black Sea: The life of General Peter Wrangel (The Hague: Leuxenhoff Publishing, 2010), pp. 318, 324.

4

Mawdsley, E. ‘The Civil War: An Overview’, in this volume. See also Mawdsley, E. The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2002); Swain, G.R. The Origins of the Russian Civil War (Harlow: Longman, 1996).

5

Smele, J. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916–1926: Ten Years that Shook the World (London: C Hurst & Co, 2015), p. 247.

6

Katzer, N. ‘The White home front’, in this volume.

7

Jon Smele’s study of the ‘civil wars’, for example, puts their start and end dates as 1916–26, taking anti-Russian/anti-Soviet unrest in Central Asia as a starting point,

620

NOTES

and the dismantling of the last active military front in Turkestan as a conclusion (note 5 above). Liudmila Novikova’s study of the anti-Bolshevik movement in North Russia emphasizes the heterogeneity of the White movement and the importance of understanding local conditions and organization, see Novikova, L. An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: the White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). See also Brovkin, V.N. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Raleigh, D.J. Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov 1917–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 8

Swain, G. ‘The Bolsheviks and World Revolution’, in this volume.

9

Landis, E.C. ‘Between Village and Kremlin: Confronting State Food Procurement in Civil War Tambov 1918–20’, Russian Review, 63, 1, 2004, pp. 82–3, and also his Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

10 Landis, ‘Between Village and Kremlin’, 200. 11 Landis, E.C. ‘Waiting for Makhno: Legitimacy and Context in a Russian Peasant War’, Past and Present, 183, 2004, p. 199. 12 Landis, ‘Waiting for Makhno’, 227–8. 13 Fraunholtz, P. ‘Peasants in the Russian Revolution: Adaptation, Anxiety, Action’, in this volume. 14 Landis, ‘Waiting for Makhno’, 220–6. 15 Brovkin, V.N. ‘Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919’, Slavic Review, 49, 3, 1990, pp. 350–73. 16 On Kronstadt, see Getzler, I. Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 17 Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 242. 18 Boniece, S. ‘The October Revolution: Soviet Power and Socialist Government’, in this volume. 19 Douds, L. ‘The Early Soviet Government, 1917–23’, in this volume, and also her Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 20 Frame, M. ‘Red home front: Building the Early Soviet Order 1918–21’, in this volume. 21 Frame, ‘Red home front’. On education see also White, E. ‘Childhood and Youth in the Russian Revolution’, in this volume. 22 White, E. ‘Childhood and Youth in the Russian Revolution’, in this volume. 23 Ruthchild, R.G. ‘Russia’s Revolutions in 1917: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?’, in this volume. 24 Hearne, S. ‘Masculinity in 1917’, in this volume.

NOTES

621

25 Goldman, W. Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life 1917–1936 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 49–52, and also her Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 26 Hearne, S. ‘Masculinity in 1917’, in this volume. 27 See Willimott, A. Living the Revolution: Urban Communes and Soviet Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 28 Stites, R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 207–12. 29 Edgerton, W. (ed.) Memoirs of Peasant Tolstoyans in Soviet Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Alston, C. Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), pp 39–47. 30 Fischer von Weikersthal, F. ‘Culture and Revolution: Destruction, Creation and Preservation in the First Decade after the Revolution’, in this volume. 31 Ball, A. ‘Building a New State and Society: NEP 1921–1928’, in Ronald Suny, R. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 168–91. 32 Swain, G. ‘The Bolsheviks and World Revolution’, in this volume. 33 Agnew, J. and McDermott, K. The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 1996), pp. xxii. 34 Fayet, J. F. ‘Paul Levi and the Turning Point of 1921: Bolshevik Emissaries and International Discipline in the Time of Lenin’, in LaPorte, N., Morgan, K. and Worley, M. (eds.), Bolshevisation, Stalinization and the Comintern 1917–53 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 105–23. 35 Rendle, M. ‘The “Revolution From Above”: Tsarist Elites and the Revolutionary Process’, in this volume. 36 Robinson, P. The White Russian Army in Exile 1920–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 16, 30. See also Raeff, M. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration 1919–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Andreyev, C. and Savicky, I. Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora 1918–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); and Williams, R.C. Culture in Exile: Russian émigrés in Germany 1881–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972). 37 See for example White, E. The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party 1921–1939 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 38 Alston, C. ‘News of the Struggle: the Russian Political Press in London 1953–1921’, in Bantman, C. and da Silva, A. (eds.), The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth Century London (London: Bloomsbury 2018), p. 168; Hillis, F. Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s–1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 239–41.

622

NOTES

39 On Chernov see Immonen, H. Mechty o Novoy Rossii: Viktor Chernov 1873–1952 (St. Petersburg: European University in St Petersburg, 2015). 40 Smele, J. ‘“Mania Grandiosa” and “The Turning Point in World History”: Kerensky in London in 1918’, Revolutionary Russia, 20, 1, 2017, pp. 1–34; Abraham, R. Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York: Colombia University Press, 1987); and recently on Kerensky as revolutionary leader Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 41 Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 131–48, 214–31; Tromly, B. Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 23–46. 42 Badcock, S. ‘Broadening Understandings of 1917’, History Compass, 6, 1, 2008, pp. 243–62; Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Badcock, S. et al. (eds.) Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution 1914–1922: Book 1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (Bloomington: Slavica, 2015). 43 Hickey, M. ‘The Revolution in Smolensk Province’, in this volume. 44 Badcock, S. ‘1917 on the Volga’, in this volume. 45 Fedtke, G. ‘Revolution in Turkestan, 1916–1920’, in this volume. 46 Katzer ‘White home front’, in this volume. 47 Kibita, N. ‘Ukrainian Revolution in 1917: Successful Failure’, in this volume. 48 Weeks, T. Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier 1863–1914 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); and ‘Russification and the Lithuanians 1863–1905’, Slavic Review, 60, 1, 2001, pp. 96–114. 49 Chernev, B. Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Re-Making of East Central Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 49–79. 50 Alapuro, R. State and Revolution in Finland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 51 Kibita, ‘Ukrainian Revolution in 1917’, in this volume. 52 Jones, S.F. Socialism in Georgian Colours: The European Road to Social Democracy 1883–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 236–88. 53 Borzecki, J. The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Making of Interwar Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 54 Martin, T. ‘An Affirmative Action Empire: the Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism’, in Suny, R.G. and Martin, T., A State of Nations: Empire and NationMaking in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 67–90; Slezkine, Yu. ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review, 53, 2, 1994, pp. 414–52. 55 The most famous being John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), republished in 1922 with an introduction written by Lenin, and translated into many languages. But there were accounts from all sorts of other

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observers and participants to, from Konstantin Nabokov’s Ordeal of a Diplomat (London: Duckworth and Company, 1921) to Alexandra Tolstoy’s I Worked for the Soviet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935); not to mention Kerensky’s many volumes of memoir material. 56 White, J.D. ‘Leon Trotsky and Soviet Historiography of the Russian Revolution, 1917–1931’, Revolutionary Russia, 34, 2, 2021, p. 276. 57 White ‘Leon Trotsky and Soviet Historiography’; see also his The Russian Revolution 1917–1921: A Short History (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 253–60. 58 Trotsky, L. History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932–33); Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (b) (ed.) History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (New York: International Publishers, 1939). 59 Frame, ‘Red home front’, in this volume. 60 Neumann, M. and Willimott, A. (eds.) Rethinking Revolutionary Russia as Historical Divide (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–19. 61 White, E ‘Childhood and Youth in the Russian Revolution’, and Hearne, S. ‘Masculinity in 1917’, in this volume. 62 Ryan, J. ‘The Politics of National History: Russia’s Ruling Elite and the Centenary of 1917’, Revolutionary Russia, 31, 1, 2018, pp. 24–45.

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Book Series In 2014 Slavica Publishers (Bloomington, Indiana) started to publish a series of volumes with the general title Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914–22 under the editorship of Anthony Heywood, David MacLaren MacDonald and Jonathan Steinberg. With some twenty volumes envisaged by the end of 2022, it represents an invaluable source for historians and many of its contributions are cited in this Handbook.

Other Handbooks Acton, E. Cherniaev, V. Iu. and Rosenberg, W.G. (eds.) Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution (London: Arnold, 1997). Orlovsky, D. (ed.) A Companion to the Russian Revolution (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). Shukman, H. (ed.) The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

Survey Histories Engelstein, L. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914–21 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Keep, J.L.H. The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilisation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976). Read, C.J. From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–21 (London: UCL Press, 1996). Read, C.J. War and Revolution in Russia, 1914–22: The Collapse of Tsarism and the Establishment of Soviet Power (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). Smith, S. A. Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Swain, G.R. A Short History of the Russian Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). Steinberg, M.D. The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Wade, R.A. The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). White, J.D. The Russian Revolution 1917–1921: A Short History (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).

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625

Detailed Studies Abraham, R. Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (New York: Colombia University Press, 1987) Abramson, H. A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 1999). Adams, A.E. Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign (Yale: Yale University Press, 1963). Alston, C. Tolstoy and His Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). Alston, P.L. Education and the State in Tsarist Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969). Archibald, M. Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova – the Anarchist Joan of Arc (Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2007). Badcock, S. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Baker, M. Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research institute, 2016). Balzer, H. (ed.) Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). Bisher, J. White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian (London: Frank Cass, 2005). Brooks, J. When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Brooks, J. The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Brovkin, V.N., The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). Brovkin, V.N. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia 1918–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Brovkin, V.N. The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and Civil Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Burdzhalov, E.N. Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Byford, A. Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Chatterjee, C. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). Chernev, B. Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). Clark, K. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Clements, B.E. Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

626

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Conroy, M.S. (ed.) Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (The Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government and the State Council before and during World War (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1998). Cotlenko, M. Maria Nikiforova: The Revolution without Delay. The Odyssey of an Anarchist throughout Ukraine (1885–1919) (Amsterdam: Roofdruk Editions, 2018). David-Fox, M. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). Dornik, W. et al. (eds.) The Emergence of Ukraine: Self-determination, Occupation, and War in Ukraine, 1917–1922 (Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015). Douds, L. Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Figes, O. Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Figes, O. and Kolonitskii, B.I. Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Frankel, E.R., Frankel, J. and Knei-Paz, B. (eds.) Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Fuller, W. C. Jr. The Foe Within. Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Galili, Z. The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Gatrell, P. A Whole Empire Walking. Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Getzler, I. Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Getzler, I. Nikolai Sukhanov: Chronicler of the Russian Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Gilbert, G. The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia (London: Routledge, 2015). Gill, G.J. Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979). Gleason, A. et al. (eds.) Bolshevik Culture. Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Glisic, I. The Futurist Files. Avant-Garde, Politics, and Ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018). Goldman, W. Women, the State and Revolution. Soviet Family Policy and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Haimson, L.H. Russia’s Revolutionary Experience, 1905–1917: Two Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Hasegawa, T. Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). Hasegawa, T. The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Heinzen, J. Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917–1929 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).

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627

Heywood, A.J. Modernising Lenin’s Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Hickey, M.C. (ed.) Competing Voices from the Russian Revolution: Fighting Words (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011). Holquist, P. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis 1914–1921 (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2002). Hosking, G.A. The Russian Constitutional Experiment. Government and Duma 1907–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Hunczak, T. (ed.) The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977). Immonen, H. The Agrarian Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1988). Kachurin, P. Making Modernism Soviet. The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Katkov, G. Russia 1917: The Kornilov Affair: Kerensky and the Breakup of the Russian Army (London: Longman Press, 1980). Kenez, P. Civil War in South Russia. 1918. The First Year of the Volunteer Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Kenez, P. Civil War in South Russia. 1919–1920. The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Khalid, A. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Khalid, A. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Kirschenbaum, L. Small Comrades. Revolutionising Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (London: Routledge Falmer, 2001). Koenker, D.P. Republic of Labor. Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Koenker, D.P. and Rosenberg, W.G. Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 314–6. Koenker, D.P. et al. (eds.) Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Kolonitskii, B. Comrade Kerensky: The Revolution Against the Monarchy and the Formation of the Cult of the Leader of the People’ (March–June 1917). Translated by Arch Tait (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). Landis, E.C. Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). Lazarski, C. The Lost Opportunity: Attempts at Unification of the Anti-Bolsheviks, 1917–1919. Moscow, Kiev, Jassy, Odessa (Lanham: University Press of America, 2008). Lih, L.T. Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Lindenmeyr, A. Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).

628

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Mathew, T. Greetings from the Barricades: Revolutionary Postcards in Imperial Russia (London: Four Corners Books, 2018). Mandel, D. The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime; from the February Revolution to the July Days (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Mawdsley, E. The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, February 1917 – April 1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978). Mawdsley, E. The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2002). McReynolds, L. The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a MassCirculation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). McReynolds, L. Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Melancon, M. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement 1914–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990). Melancon, M. and Pate, A. K. (eds.) New Labor History\; Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1848–1918 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2002). Melancon, M and Raleigh, D.J. (eds.) Russia’s Century of Revolutions: Parties, People, Places; Studies Presented in Honor of Alexander Rabinowitch (Bloomington: Slavica, 2012). Murray, N. Art for the Workers. Proletarian Art and Festive Decorations of Petrograd, 1917–1920 (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Neumann, M. The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1931 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). Neumann, M. and Willimott, A. (eds.) Rethinking Revolutionary Russia as Historical Divide (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–19. Novikova, L. An Anti-Bolshevik Alternative: The White Movement and the Civil War in the Russian North (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Pallot, J. Land Reform in Russia, 1906–1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin’s Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Pearson, R. The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsardom, 1914–1917 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977). Pereira, N.G.O. White Siberia. The Politics of Civil War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). Pethybridge, R. The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917 (London: Macmillan, 1972). Philipps, L.L. Bolsheviks and the Bottle. Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000). Plokhy, S. Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the writing of Ukrainian history (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Rabinowitch, A. Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton and Co., 1976). Rabinowitch, A. The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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Radkey, O.H. The Sickle Under the Hammer: The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953). Radkey, O.H. The Agrarian Foes of Bolshevism: Promise and Default of the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, February to October 1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Radkey, O. Russia Goes to the Polls: The Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 1917 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Raleigh, D.J. Experiencing Russia’s Civil War. Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917–1922 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Read, C. Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Rendle, M. Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Rendle, M. The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s Civil War, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Reshetar (Jr.), J.S. The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920. A Study in Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). Retish, A.B. Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Rigby T.H. Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Rosenberg, W.G. Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). Ruthchild, R.G. Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press 2011). Ryan, J. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2012). Sahadeo, G. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Sanborn, J.A. Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). Sanborn, J. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Service, R. The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–23. A Study in Organizational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979). Shkliarevsky, G. Labor in the Russian Revolution: Factory Committees and Trade Unions, 1917–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). Siegelbaum, L. Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Siegelbaum, L. and Suny, R.G. (eds.) Making Workers Soviet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Siegelbaum, L.H. The Politics of Industrial Mobilisation in Russia, 1914–17 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983).

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Smele, J. Civil War in Siberia: The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak 1918–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Smele, J. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: C Hurst & Co, 2015). Smith, D. Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy (London: Macmillan, 2012). Smith, S.A. Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Smith, S.B. Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Steinberg, M.D. (ed.) Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Steinberg, M.D. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). Steinberg, M.D. Petersburg Fin-de-Siecle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). Steinberg, M.D. and Khrustalev, V.M. The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Stites, R. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Stites, R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Stockdale, M.K. Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). Stockdale, M.K. Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Stoff, L.S. They Fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). Stone, D.R. The Russian Army in the Great War. The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2015). Suny, R. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. III: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Suny, R.G. Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Sunderland, W. The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Swain, G.R. The Origins of the Russian Civil War (Harlow: Longman, 1996). Thatcher, I.D. (ed.) Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia. Essays in Honour of James D. White (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). Velychenko, S. State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). Velychenko, S. Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine. Leaflets, Pamphlets, and Cartoons, 1917–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Von Geldern, J. Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkerley: University of California Press, 1993).

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Wade, R.A. Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984). Wade, R.A. (ed.) Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Waldron, P. Between Two Revolutions. Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London: UCL Press, 1998). White, E. A Modern History of Russian Childhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). White, J.D. Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Wildman, A.K. The End of the Imperial Russian Army. 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 & 1987). Wood, E.A. The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

INDEX

ABC of Communism (Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii) 300, 437, 440 Açık Söz (The Frank Word) 337 Adler, F. 166 administrative culture and structures 69–70 Aleksandrov, P. 172 Alekseev, M. V. 32–6, 46, 63, 227, 411, 416, 448 Alekseev, P. A. 336 Alexander II 16, 298 all-Bolshevik government 86, 95 ‘All power to the soviets!’ (slogan) 75–7, 80, 83, 89, 144, 146–8, 150–1, 159, 196, 232, 252, 264, 387–8, 476 All-Russian Congress of Soviets 78–9, 83–5, 94, 96, 133–4, 152, 252, 431 All-Russian Council of the National Economy 204 All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control 205 All-Russian Executive Committee of the Railway Union 67 All-Russian Muslim Soviet 279 All-Russian Soviet Congress 76, 78, 96, 350, 352–3 All-Russian Union of Railway Workers (Vikzhel). See Vikzhel all-socialist government 75, 77–80, 83, 85–6, 88–9, 128, 150–1, 161, 247–9, 253–4, 476 All-Ukrainian Congress 378, 387, 465 All-Ukrainian Council of Peasant Deputies 386 All-Ukrainian National Congress 378 Alston, C. 2–3, 6 American Relief Administration (ARA) 308 anarchist 167, 169–70 and Bolsheviks 177, 180–3, 348, 351 Petrograd 170–3

Saratov 178, 182 violence 178 Anarchist March (song) 169–70 Anderson, K. B. 150 Andreevna, M. 318 anti-Bolshevism 449 anti-bourgeois 196, 313, 329 Antonov movement 475 Antonov, V. 239 Antonovych, A. 475 Antonovych, D. 242, 375 Anweiler, O. 93–4 April Crisis 48, 127 April Theses (Lenin) 142–6, 277, 458–60, 464 Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) 420–3 Ashurxo’jayev, T. 401 Astashov, A. B. 224–5 ­Astrov, N. 21 Austria-Hungary 11, 16–17, 412, 415, 417, 424, 458, 464 Avilov, G. 166 Avksentiev, N. 133, 447 Avraamov, A. 317 Badcock, S. 5, 214 Baker, M. 213, 377 Bashkirov 372 Basmachi 401 Bazili, N. A. 33 Beliaev, M. A. 30 belobiletniki 231 Benois, A. 318 Berdiaev, N. 187, 314 Berg, E. 176 Beriia, L. P. 425 Bertgol’d, R. 172 bezprizorniki 298, 308–9 Bibliographic Chamber (Knizhnaia Palata) 329

INDEX

Black Guards 181 Blanc, E. 145, 150 Bleikhman, I. S. 171, 528 n.12, 531 n.53 Bochkareva, M. A. 229, 277, 292 Bock, G. 561 n.54 Bogdanov, A. A. 47, 123, 133, 145, 153, 316–17, 438 Bogdanov, B. 252 bol’shak 283–4 Bolshevik/Bolshevism 54, 120, 144–5, 233–4, 266, 301, 382, 388, 425 anarchists and 177, 180–3, 348, 351 April Theses 143–6 dictatorship 2, 94, 152 and February Revolution 140–2 insurrection 151–3 and Left SR coalition 87–8, 356 military offensive 147–9 non-Bolshevik 156, 181–2, 249, 252, 312, 314, 330, 387–8, 440, 445, 447, 455, 480 recovering 149–51 revolution 2, 53, 153, 281, 295, 311, 376–7, 391, 398, 440, 457 rule 2, 85, 297, 339, 357, 430 seizure of power 132–5 women 142–3 worker militias 146–7 Bolshevik Central Committee 78–9, 87, 129, 151, 168, 278, 353, 356, 421, 459, 461–2, 468 Bonch-Bruevich, M. 48, 177 Boniece, S. 4, 476 bourgeois 313 parliamentary democracy 1–2, 91 revolution 457–9, 472 specialists 69, 266, 576 n.53 ­Brest Litovsk treaty 104, 156, 168, 181, 356, 412, 414–15, 428–30, 445, 460–3, 468, 470, 482–3 Brianskii, V. 17 Brooks, J. 190 Brovkin, V. N. 443 Brusilov, A. A. 229 Brzezinski, Z. 92 Bublikov, A. A. 31, 375 Budennyi, S. M. 423, 425 Bukharin, N. 300, 430, 437, 572 n.3 Bukhshtab, P. 353

633

Buldakov, V. 153 Burdzhalov, E. N. 26 bureaucratic police school 299 burzhui (bourgeois) 169, 177, 355 Buttino, M. 393 Central Committee 43, 68, 78–80, 86–7, 93–4, 98–101, 103–5, 111, 127, 129, 131–2, 135, 140–1, 146–9, 151, 167, 278, 320, 351, 353, 356, 383, 387, 405, 421, 432, 459, 461–2, 468, 470, 477, 480, 512 n.53 Central Executive Committee (CEC) 75–6, 78–9, 81, 85–8, 92, 95–7, 132, 152, 181, 253–4, 387, 431 Central Rada 50–2, 242–3, 246, 376, 378–89, 412 Central Ukrainian Cooperative Committee 243 Chaikin, V. 395 Chaikovskii, N. V. 174, 449 Chamberlin, W. H. 435, 437 Channon, J. 216 Chapaev, V. I. 182, 426 chastushka (folk ditty) 122, 319 Cheka 88, 172, 178, 181–2, 265–6, 295, 358, 414, 430, 432, 434–5, 445, 464, 468, 475 Chekhonin, S. V. 318 Chelnokov, M. 21 Cherkes, L. 395, 398 Chernov, V. 4, 45, 125–7, 137–8, 173–4, 176, 247, 281, 481, 511 n.44 Bolshevik seizure of power 132–5 coalition 131–2 Constituent Assembly 135–7 July Days 129–31 Ministry of Agriculture 127–9 war and peace 125–7 childhood, modernization of 307–9 children rights 302–4 Chkeidze, N. S. 276 Chokaev, M. 391, 393–4, 396–7, 400 Churakov, D. O. 202 civil-military conflict 233–4 civil war 5–6, 92, 94, 99–101, 103–4, 409–11 first period 411–17 second period 417–23

634

third period 423–6 and unrest 474–6 ­coalition government 97, 111, 128, 130–2, 152, 159, 161, 254, 350, 352–4, 448, 463 Code of Laws on Acts of Civil Status, Marriage, Family and Guardianship Law 303–4 Cohen, S. 93 Cold War 10, 93 collective responsibility 194, 200, 562 n.5 committee class 228, 234 Committee of Public Safety (CPS) 354–5 Committee to Save the Revolution (KSR) 354 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels) 155, 303 Communist Party of Turkestan (CPT) 399, 402–3, 405 Communist Youth League (Kommunisticheskii soiuz molodezhi) 305 Congress of Public Figures, The 263–4 Constituent Assembly 2, 4, 36, 41–4, 49–52, 54, 76, 81, 84–5, 95–6, 125, 128–37, 141, 156, 159, 161, 167, 177, 215, 217, 236, 244, 253, 261, 272–3, 277–82, 355, 357–8, 411, 445–7, 477 contemporary criticism 57–60 cooperative movement 243–5 Cossack 86, 115, 117, 140, 172, 176, 231, 235, 329, 351–4, 364, 381, 383, 388, 411, 415–16, 420–1, 423, 426, 446–7, 467 Council for the Defence of Children (Sovet zashchity detei) 308 counter-revolution 4, 26, 32, 77, 81–2, 88, 98, 115, 144, 149, 151, 169, 171, 175, 178, 203–7, 234, 257–8, 260–1, 263–5, 351, 353, 381, 386, 411–12, 418, 420, 426, 431, 433–5, 439–40, 443, 457–8, 463–7 Crosley, P. 279 culture/cultural 311, 316 front 316 heritage 311, 313–14, 317–19, 571 n.2, 577 n.64 level of 193

INDEX

political 109–10, 123, 145, 171, 305–6, 359 preservation 317–19 revolution 309, 312, 315–16, 319–20, 572 n.3–572 n.4 Curzon Line 424–5, 467–8 Curzon, Lord 424 Czechoslovak Legion 413–16 Dal’skii, M. 170 Dan, F. 156, 161, 249–50, 253–4 David-Fox, M. 311 Davidov, I. 200 Davidovich, M. 341 Davis Jr., R. H. 580 n.26 death battalions 229 Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights, The 44, 226–7, 233 Declaration of the Rights of the Child (Ventsel) 303 ‘Decree on Workers’ Control’ 204–5 demobilization 122, 150, 237, 355, 357, 414, 419 democracy/democratization 1–2, 4, 25, 31, 39–41, 46, 54, 67, 76–8, 85, 91–2, 95, 97, 104, 121, 131, 141, 150, 158, 161, 168, 171, 196, 206–7, 214, 225–9, 235–7, 246–54, 266–8, 274, 277, 280, 291, 336, 344, 347, 353, 360, 383–4, 433, 450, 585 n.79 Democratic Conference 43, 78–9, 131, 247–9, 251–3, 264 Denikin, A. I. 233, 416, 418–26, 435, 445–8, 450, 454, 456, 467, 470–1 ­Dewey, J. 302 Dierks, D. 5 Dobroliubov, N. 298, 302 Donskie oblastnye vedomosti (News of the Don Region) 329 Doroshenko, D. I. 379 Douds, L. 4, 477 dual power 26, 29, 76, 106, 115, 196, 214, 248, 251, 328, 342–3, 347, 375, 396, 481, 582 n.34 Duma 3 in 1905 13–16 Committee 3, 25–6, 29–37, 48, 110, 328, 583 n.48 and government 15

INDEX

Revolution 260 war effort 10–13 Dybenko, P. 136, 176, 281 Dyrektoria 386–7 Dzerzhinsky, F. 434, 468–9 Dzevaltovsky-Gintovt, I. L. 233 Eastern Front 55, 147, 168, 224, 356, 404, 415, 420, 459–60 East peoples 469–72 Eberlein, H. 465 Ebert, F. 480 Economic Council and a Main Economic Committee 42 Edālet (Justice) 337 education 44, 104, 193, 246–7, 298–304, 306–7, 309–10, 314–17, 477, 569 n.18 Efimov, S. 343–4, 347, 349–51, 354 Eighth Party Congress 99, 102, 319, 432, 470, 576 n.53 Eikhenbaum, B. 170 Eisenstadt, Sh. N. 160 Eisenstein, S. 317 Eleventh Party Congress 101–3 elites alienation of 258–61 February Revolution 261, 265 role of 257–8 El’nia 343, 348, 350 emigration 57, 76, 112, 141, 144, 282, 314, 337, 401, 480–1, 488 n.4, 515 n.9 Enderlein, E. 562 n.57 Engels, B. A. 2, 28, 211, 296, 300, 303, 430 Erdeli, I. G. 230 Ermanskii, O. A. 165 European revolution 417, 457–9, 464 Evreinov, N. 440 export revolution 462–3 Extraordinary Peasant Congress 87 factory committee 146–7, 149, 193, 195–206, 291, 356, 430, 468, 478 Family Code 439, 478 Far Eastern Republic (FER) 426 February Revolution 3, 5, 25–8, 40, 44, 54, 57, 60, 62, 68, 70, 75–6, 78, 88, 109–11, 113, 122, 125–6, 137,

635

140, 143, 150, 156–8, 165, 169, 171, 182, 194, 215–16, 218, 220, 257–61, 266, 272–4, 281, 290–3, 312–13, 328, 336–7, 361, 368, 411, 429, 431, 434, 439, 459, 471, 480, 483 Fedtke, G. 5, 481 Figes, O. 214 Figner, V. 275–6, 278, 281, 561 n.49 Finance Capital (Hilferding) 145 Finkel, E. 544–5 n.105 Finland 15, 27, 49–50, 80, 121, 130, 148, 151, 174, 277, 410, 413, 446, 448, 462, 482, 602 n.5 Finnish Social Democrats 462 Firsenkov, I. 182 First All-Ukrainian Peasant Congress 379, 385 First Cooperative Congress of Unions of Ukraine, 244 First Free Cooperative Congress of Kyiv Province 244 First World War 3, 9–10, 111, 125, 139, 155, 157, 189, 200, 209, 212, 223, 259, 288, 290, 295, 324, 361, 367–8, 376, 378, 389, 411–12, 415, 417, 428, 437–8, 444, 453–4, 457–8, 482 Fischer von Weikersthal, F. 5, 478 Fomichev, T. 171 food dictatorship 435 Frame, M. 6, 484 fraternization 224, 229, 236 Fraunholtz, P. 4, 475, 479 Frederiks, V. 170 freedom fighter 110, 113, 179 Freemasonry 110 Freikorps 419, 466–7 Friedrich, C. 92 Frolov, A. N. 70 Frunze, M. V. 404–5, 425–6 Furmanov, D. 182 Gaidar, A. 307 Galin, V. A. 351–4 Gallipoli campaign 62 Garin-Mikhailovskii, N. 299 garrisons 55, 81–2, 86, 119, 129, 135, 152, 195, 225–8, 230–2, 235–6, 339,

636

341–4, 346, 348, 351–4, 357, 360, 362, 364, 374, 394, 419, 444 Gaudin, C. 213–14 Gazeta kopeika 328 gendarmes 70, 231, 340–2 gender revolution 283–5, 296 General Secretariat 52, 380–1, 383–6, 388 George, L. 277, 423 German revolution 457, 459–63 Getzler, I. 47, 551–2 n.10 Gilan Soviet 471–2 Goikhbarg, A. 303–4 Goldman, E. 174–5, 275 Golov, F. E. 364 Golovin, N. N. 229 Gorbachev, M. 91 ­Gordins, A. 529 n.23 Gordin, V. 172, 529 n.23 Goremykin, I. 12–15, 20 Gorev, B. 528–9 n.21 Gorky, M. 2, 157, 176, 287, 309, 318,  429 Gots, A. 133 Grabar, I. 318 grain registration 219 Graziosi, A. 390 Great Turn (velikii perelom) 309, 320 Great War 76, 88, 209, 304, 340–2 Grigoriev, N. A. 418–19, 465–6 Grinevetskii, V. I. 57 Guchkov, A. I. 20, 33–4, 40, 63, 226–7, 232, 366 Gulyai-Pole 386 Gurevich, L. 278, 349 Gvozdev, S. 190 gymnazia 299 Häfner, L. 4, 211 Hagen, M. 581 n.31 Hasegawa, T. 3, 583 n.48 Hearne, S. 5, 478, 484 Helsinki 146, 150–1, 176, 226, 462 Heywood, A. 3 Hickey, M. 5, 214, 481 Hilferding, R. 145 Hillyar, A. 274 historiography 25, 92–4, 180, 194, 241, 248–9, 317, 324–8, 377–8, 393, 474

INDEX

History of the Russian Revolution to BrestLitovsk (Trotsky) 483–4 Hojiboyev, A. 391–3 Holquist, P. 214, 220 Holubovych, V. 382, 389 House of the Free Child (Dom svobodnogo rebenka) (Ventsel) 302 Hrushevsky, M. 242, 245, 376, 379 Hümmet (Solidarity) 337 Hungary 418, 457, 465–6, 480 Iakovlev, I. 180 Iarchuk, E. 176 Iaroslavskii, A. 180 Ibragimov, Y. 404 Ilin, S. 363 Immonen, H. 4 Indiakov, L. S. 373 internationalism 126, 155–7, 166, 305, 417, 483 internationalists 139 Menshevik-Internationalists 75, 77–80, 82–4, 86, 88–9, 94, 156–7, 160–2, 164–5, 167, 235, 348, 352 newspapers 162–4 SD Internationalists 83–5, 168, 348, 504 n.26 ­International Women’s Day 140, 194, 272–4, 281–2 Ioffe, S. 354 Iroshnikov, M. P. 93 Itkin, M. L. 197 Iudenich, N. N. 422–3, 445, 448 Iurenev, P. P. 69 Ivanenko, A. 171 Ivan III, Prince 409 Ivanov, D. 4 Ivanov, N. I. 32 Izvestiia revoliutsionnoi nedeli (News of the Revolutionary Week) 97, 195, 250, 328, 583 n.48 Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (SERP) 343–4, 353 Johnson, R. 211, 215 July Days (the Aleksandrov Commission) 43, 68, 114–15, 130, 148–9, 173–5, 203, 232–4, 294, 329, 350, 387, 462, 466, 469

INDEX

Kadets 12, 14–15, 56, 69, 78, 115, 120, 126–32, 137, 249, 251, 343, 348, 416 Kakurin, N. 447 Kalandarishvili, N. 179–80, 183, 532 n.72, 532 n.74 Kaledin, A. 117, 176, 448 Kalinin, M. 120 Kamenev, L. B. 75, 77–8, 80, 83–4, 86, 100, 102, 105, 132, 141–6, 149, 151–2, 251–2, 432, 459–60 Kamenev, S. S. 421 Kamkov, B. D. 127, 160, 167 Kanatchikov, S. 191 Karelin, V. A. 78 Kaspii (The Caspian Sea) 337 Katzer, N. 6, 474, 481–2 Kazan 46, 49, 158, 215, 217–18, 289, 361, 363–6, 369–73, 415–16 Kerenshchina 120–3, 511 n.46 Kerensky, A. F. 4, 27–8, 30, 35–6, 50–1, 53, 77–8, 81–2, 109, 123, 129–32, 174–5, 226, 230, 234, 254, 275, 291–3, 295, 481, 491 n.48 agreement with Kornilov 117–20 court 115–17 feminization of 116, 121, 295 first citizen 109–12 and the Kerenshchina 120–3 Minister of War 112–15 Khabalov, S. S. 26 Kharkiv province 211–13, 245, 385, 387–8, 418, 597 n.48 Khaustov, F. P. 233 Khrystiuk, P. 241–2, 384 Khudaikulov, M. 181 Kibita, N. 5, 242 Kievlianin (newspaper) 247 Kirianov, I. 189 Kirpichnikov, T. I. 27–8, 225 Kisliakov, V. N. 63 Klevleev, G. 402 K novoi zhizni (Towards a New Life) 337 ­Kobozev, P. 402 Koenker, D. 206 Kokoshkin, F. 177–8 Kokovtsov, V. 15 Kolchak, A. V. 417–18, 420–4, 426, 445, 447–8, 450, 470

637

Kollontai, A. 140, 142–9, 153, 273–5, 278, 281, 303, 561 n.49 Kolonitskii, B. I. 4, 6, 27, 145, 165, 230, 274, 481, 573 n.16, 578 n.5 Kommissiya dlya nesovershennoletnikh 304 Kommuna 171–4, 316 Komsomol 297, 304–7, 309, 477 Komuch 400, 415–16 Konopatskii, N. 351–2, 357 Konovalov, A. I. 55–6, 63 Kornilov, L. G. 46, 48, 69, 77–81, 233–4, 351, 411 affair 48, 69, 117–21, 149, 203, 249, 251, 329 counter-revolution 81 programme 117, 233–4 revolt 80, 234–5, 257, 553 n.3 Kornilovshchina 120–1 Korovichenko, P. 398–9 Kovalevich, K. 182, 533 n.93 Kovalevsky, M. 385–6 Koval, V. 242 Kozlovsii, M. 433 Kras 395–6, 398 Krasin, L. 318 Krasnaia gazeta (Red Newspaper) 336 Krasnov, P. N. 415, 420 Krasnyi 346, 359 Kreis, O. 177 Kriven’kii, V. 171–2 Krivoshein, A. V. 11, 19 Kronstadt 33, 77, 150, 171–3, 176, 183, 226, 438, 476, 479 Kropotkin, P. A. 174–5, 530 n.40 Kruglikova, G. A. 320 Krupskaia, N. 142, 204, 300–1, 319, 569 n.18 Krylenko, N. 233, 236 Krymov, A. 118 Kryzhanivsky, F. 242 Kuchik, M. 471–2 Kuhr-Korelev, C. 310 Kun, B. 480 Kupreianov, N. 576 n.51 Kuropatkin, A. N. 213, 394–5 Kurskii, D. 605 n.31 Kutuzov, G. 349 Kyiv 242–7, 286, 375, 378–80, 382, 385, 389

638

Labour Code of 1918 436 Landis, E. 475 ­land redistribution 358 Lapin, S. 397, 399 Larin, Y. 437 Lashkov, V. 172 Latsis, M. 434–5 Latvian Bolsheviks 466 League for Women’s Equal Rights 276, 278 Left SRs 4, 75–9, 83–9, 94–8, 103, 127, 131–7, 148, 151–2, 156–61, 164–8, 181–2, 353–60, 429–30, 434, 440, 463–5 legacy 56, 60, 249, 258, 298, 416, 456 legal framework 44, 227, 328–30 Leggett, G. 435 legitimacy 10, 29, 31, 34–7, 39–41, 47, 91, 174, 304, 309, 340, 378–9, 381, 415, 432, 439, 441, 477 Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917– 1922 (Rigby) 94 Lenin, V. I. 2, 4, 26, 57, 411, 584 n.62 April Theses 142–6, 277, 458–60, 464 in the Congress 134 with the Germans 130 government 91–2, 94, 354, 357, 360, 413, 421, 473, 478 illness 102 Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government 431, 464 Istpart 483 patriotism 470 Politburo 101 State and Revolution 150, 205, 430 Third Congress of the Komsomol 306 ‘triumphal march of Soviet power’ 411 Leont’ev, Ia.V. 179 Lianozov, S. G. 448 Liber, M. 173 Liebknecht, K. 166, 480 Lih, L. T. 141–4, 150–1, 217 Lissitzky, E. 317 Litbel 419 Liverovskii, A. V. 68–9 logistics challenge 60–2 wartime politics of 55–7 Lotman, J. 183

INDEX

loyalty 2, 40, 46, 81, 162, 214, 454–6, 474, 579 n.11 Lunacharsky, A. 300, 318, 576 n.50 Lurich, G. 287 L’vov, G. E. 9, 18, 21–3, 36, 42, 50, 63–4, 72, 128–9, 276 McDermid, J. 274 Macey, D. 212 Mai-Maevskii, G. Z. 418, 421 Makarenko, A. 309 Makhno, N. 175, 386, 435 Mamadyshsk 364–5 ­Mamontov, K. K. 421, 423 Marchlewski, J. 468–9 Martov, J. 75, 77–8, 80, 82–4, 94–5, 156–7, 160, 167, 248–50, 252, 551 n.10 Marxism 160, 187, 190, 457 Marx, K. 2, 91, 296, 300, 303 masculinity models of 285–7 1917 revolution 290–6 wartime 287–90 mass mobilization 287–8, 292, 374 Matsuzato, K. 217 Mawdsley, E. 6, 474 Mayakovsky, V. 287, 317, 440 Mdivani, B. 471–2 Mel’nik, D. 514–15 n.1 Mensheviks 11, 139, 141, 143–4, 147, 203, 250–3, 375, 475–6, 480, 501 n.1 Menshevik-Internationalists 75, 77–80, 82–4, 86, 88–9, 94, 156–7, 160–2, 164–5, 167, 235, 348, 352 Menshevik-SR leadership 76–9, 81–3, 85, 88, 94–5, 115, 129, 131, 241, 251, 351–2, 356 meshchanstvo 248, 253 Mezhraionka 76, 140, 144, 149, 156–7, 164, 273 Mezhraiontsy 157, 161, 165, 167, 488 n.4, 515 n.9 Miasnikov, A. 356–7 Miasoedov-Ivanov, V. A. 496 n.18 Michael, Grand Duke 41, 50 migration 211, 220, 284–5, 296, 368 Mikhail Alexandrovich, Grand Duke 32–7, 122

INDEX

Mikhailov, N. 4, 6, 147 Mil’chik, I. I. 28 Military Commission of the Duma Committee, The 28–30, 48 military mobilization 60, 362 Military-Revolutionary Committee (MRC) 48, 80–3, 86–9, 152, 176, 178, 235–6, 352, 354, 463 militia 31, 70, 81, 86, 146, 172, 181, 203, 342, 351, 364–6, 369, 373, 384, 395, 430–2, 434, 444 Miliukov, P. N. 10–12, 31, 33, 35–6, 40–1, 56, 62–3, 127–8, 145, 174, 271, 276, 447 Miller, E. 445, 448 Minister of Agriculture 127–9, 131 Minister of War 11, 51–2, 112–14, 133, 226–7, 229–30, 293 Ministry of Ways of Communication (Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia) (MPS) 56–8, 61–3, 65–70, 498 n.34 Mironov, B. 187, 189 mobilization 16, 57, 60, 118–19, 122, 150, 179, 183, 189, 196, 212–13, 216, 223, 278–9, 287–8, 292, 339, 344, 360, 362, 374, 393–4, 430, 453, 455 Mokrousov, A. 176–7, 531 n.52 Moore, C. 216 Moscow 307, 404–6, 410, 413–15, 421, 426, 429, 445, 447, 467–8 Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups, The 169, 171, 181–2 Mūǧaljar 404 Nalivkin, V. 396 Narkompros 300–1, 305, 309, 316, 318, 320, 576 n.51–576 n.52 ­Nashe slovo (newspaper) 257 nations and nationalities 49–52 Nekrasov, N. V. 56, 63, 66–70, 73, 129 Nepenin, A. I. 226 Neratova, N. 365 netrudovi hospodarstva 380 New Economic Policy (NEP) 101, 255, 305, 312, 314, 435, 437, 451, 473, 476, 479 newspapers 61, 115, 117–23, 162–5, 244–5, 280, 327–38, 580 n.26, 581 n.31

639

Nicholas 13, 21, 31–6, 209, 259, 284–5, 290 Nicholas I 401 Nicholas II 9, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, 32–3, 36, 122, 182, 259, 271, 273, 284, 290, 295, 342, 393, 412, 416, 435 Nicholas Nikolaevich, Grand Duke 34, 36, 401, 448 Nikiforova, M. 172, 175, 178–9, 183 Nikitin, A. 250, 367 Nikitin, B. 173 Nikolaeva, K. 142 Nikolai Nikolaveich, Grand Duke 19 1905 revolution 110, 140, 192, 194, 201, 214, 271, 299, 370, 457 1917 revolution 1, 39–40, 53, 109, 139, 169–70, 194–5, 212, 214, 216, 359, 367 Nizhegorod 46, 218, 365–73 Nizhnii Novgorod 157–8, 231, 281, 363–4, 366, 369 Novaia zhizn’ (newspaper) 165 Novikova, L. 435, 620 n.7 Novozhiznentsy 157, 161, 165–6 October revolution 25, 39, 46, 50, 67, 75, 81–3, 87, 89, 91, 93–4, 96, 98, 100, 103, 153, 176, 180, 239, 248, 257–8, 265–7, 305, 312, 315, 317, 329–30, 360, 392, 399, 411, 415, 417, 427, 432, 443, 445, 462, 466, 474, 481–3 Odesa 388 offensive and consequences 147–9 June 45–6, 49, 116, 230, 262–3, 348 minister of 112–15 preparation 228–31 Office for the Protection of Maternal and Infant Care (Okhrana materinstva i mladenchestva, OMM) 307–8 Okopnaia pravda (Truth from the Trenches) 329 Omsk 158, 235, 416–17, 420, 422, 447, 452, 470 ‘On the Meaning of Authority in Education’ (Dobroliubov) 298 Order No. 1 47–8, 53, 225–7, 291, 342 Ordzhonikidze, S. K. 197, 425

640

Orgburo 100–1 Orlovsky, D. 4 Orthodox Church 259, 264, 299, 313–14, 336, 439 Osinskii, N. 102–3, 105–6, 205 Osipov, K. 403 Osorgin, M. 314 Ostrogozhskii listok (Ostrogozhsk Newssheet) 326–7, 583 n.43 Otkhod 211 ­ al’chinskii, P. A. 63–4 P Pallot, J. 210, 212 Pankhurst, E. 277 Pares, B. 19 party-state 91–3, 98–106, 432, 441 Pasternak, L. 288 peasants 209–10, 216, 367–8, 371 adaption 210–12 Aryshkadza 372 farming 370 land and provisions crisis 217–18 participation and power 214–15 peasant-soldiers 216 republics 386 resistance 219 Ukrainian 245–6 union 215, 240, 245, 386, 475 war and land 215–16 war and revolutionary dynamics 212–13 worker and 190–4 Penza Provincial Peasant Congress 217, 219 People’s Commissariats 88, 93, 95, 329 People’s Will, The (newspaper) 244 Pereverzev, P. N. 130, 172–3 Petersburg Committee 120, 129, 141–4, 151, 195–6 Pethybridge, R. 49, 443 Petrograd Central Council 198 Petrograd Council of Trade Unions 203 Petrograd Military District 235 Petrograd Soviet 25–6, 29–33, 37, 41, 47–9, 75–6, 79–82, 89, 109–10, 127, 131, 134, 140–2, 146, 148, 150–3, 173, 183, 195, 226, 229, 235, 251–2, 262, 272, 291, 295, 328, 344, 379 petty bourgeois 166, 168, 239, 241–2, 248, 252, 254, 311–15, 458, 464

INDEX

Philips, L. L. 290 Piłsudski, J. 424 Plekhanov, G. V. 67, 118 Podvitskii, V. 350 Pokrovskaia, M. I. 272 Poland 49, 51, 130, 189, 410, 417, 419, 423–5, 446, 457–8, 467–9, 473, 482–3 Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee (PPRC) 468–9 Politburo 2–4, 92, 94, 99–103, 105–6, 405, 432, 468, 477 Polivanov, A. 11 Polovtsova, E. 174–5 Popkins, G. 211 Porshneva, O. S. 225 power law 50 POWs 288, 415 Pravda (newspaper) 140–3, 148, 275, 315, 329, 469 Preobrazhenskii, E. 300, 437 press ­Bolshevik 76, 82 functions and significance 324–5 legal framework and social divisions 328–30 newspapers 61, 115, 117–23, 162–5, 244–5, 280, 327–38, 580 n.26, 581 n.31 in 1917 revolution 325–8 Price, M. P. 1, 3 Principles of Communism, The (Engels) 300 prodrazverstka (food levy) system 436–7 Progressive Bloc 11–13, 21, 259–60 proletarian culture 153, 305, 315–17, 438 democracy 92 revolution 147, 265, 417 Proletkult 312, 316–17, 319–20 Prospekt, N. 225, 275 Protasov, L. G. 280 Protopopov 11 Provisional All-Russian Government (PARG) 417 provisional executive committee (PEC) 232, 342–3 Provisional Government 3–5, 9–10, 23, 29, 31–2, 34–7, 39, 41–53, 62–70, 76–7, 79–84, 94–5, 109–11,

INDEX

114–17, 119–20, 127–30, 140–6, 172–5, 195, 214–21, 235–6, 246– 54, 261–4, 275–7, 291–5, 346–7, 367–73, 376–80, 482 Provisional Government (Browder and Kerensky) 585 n.65 Provisional Siberian Government (PSG) 416 Pskov 32–4, 157–8, 279–80, 462 pud-versts 59, 497 n.26 Qo’qon 399–402 Rabinowitch, A. 93, 139, 145 Rabotnitsa 142–3 Rada. See Central Rada Radkey, O. H. 277–8, 280–1 Radlov, S. 317 railway Batum-Baku 419 freight operations 59 investment 65 Kotlas-Viatka 58 lines 176, 402, 410–11, 419, 421, 426, 436, 444, 603 n.5 trade union 66–9 war 410 workers 67, 85–6, 204, 250, 392, 394, 397, 412 Rakovsky, C. 462–3 Rasputin, G. 28, 290 Ravich-Cherkasskii, M. 180 razdel 211, 215 Read, C. 3 Red Army 98, 181–3, 266, 306–7, 312, 357–8, 401, 403–4, 410, 414–26, 428–9, 431, 434–7, 445, 453–7, 465, 467–71, 474 Red Guard 146, 175–6, 179, 181, 306, 313, 354–8, 381, 411–12, 415, 431, 445, 462 ­Red Home Front 6, 430, 434–5, 440–1 Red Terror 434 Reed, J. 3, 427 Rendle, M. 4, 480 resources 450–4 Results and Prospects (Trotsky) 457–8, 464 Retish, A. 212, 214, 220

641

revolutionary conscience 315, 433, 477 culture 5, 304–7, 317, 478 life 438–40 war 458, 460–3, 467–70 Revolutionary Knight 126 Revolutionary Tribunals 265–6, 315, 355, 433–4 revolution in 1921 473–4, 483–4 civil war and unrest 474–6 empire 481–3 home and abroad 479–81 politics and society 476–9 Riabushinksii, P. P. 19 Riazanov, D. B. 201 Riazan province 279 Rigby, T. H. 94 Rodchenko, A. 317 Rodzianko, M. V. 16, 29–36, 57, 276–7, 491 n.51–491 n.52, 559 n.21 Rolf, M. 320 Roslavl 340–3, 346–8, 351–2, 357–8 Roy, M. N. 471 Rozmirovich 561 n.49 Rublev, D. 169, 174, 179, 182 Rudnev, V. V. 135 Rukhlov, S. V. 20, 56, 62 Rumcherod 463 Russia 17, 19, 49, 52–4 capitalism 161 internationalist newspapers 162–4 masculinity in 285–7 Turkestan 404–6 working-class 188–9 Russian revolution 3, 5, 25, 30, 37, 39–41, 47, 53–4, 80, 96, 123, 126, 146, 150, 156, 159, 161, 170, 187, 239, 241, 250, 267–8, 271, 277, 298, 308, 313, 323, 337, 376–7, 409, 458, 482–4 Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) 143–4, 156–8, 161, 167, 387 Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) 431, 437, 440 Russo-Japanese War 216, 285–6, 290 Russo-Ottoman conflict 61–3 Ruthchild, R. 5 Ruzskii, N. V. 32–3

642

Rykov, A. 102, 437 Ryskulov, T. 403, 405 S­ afarov, G. 391 Samarin, A. D. 260 Sandomirskii, G. 174–5 Saratov 47, 58, 178, 182, 198, 215, 235, 262, 326, 328–9, 336–8, 361–2, 365–70, 372–3, 414, 579 n.11 Saratovskaia zemskaia nedelia (Saratov Zemstvo Weekly) 326, 336 Saratovskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti (News from the diocese of Saratov) 336 Schapiro, L. 93 Schedewie, F. 5 Scott, J. 212 Second Peasant Congress 87, 217 Second Soviet Congress 78–81, 83–7, 89 Sejm 50–1 self-demobilization 237, 412 Sel’skokhoziaistvennyi vestnik Iugo-Vostoka (Agricultural messenger of the SouthEast) 336 Semenov, G. M. 426 Sestroretsk Arms Factory (Sestroretskii oruzheinyi zavod) 199 Shatskii, S. 301 Shcheglovitov, I. 272 Shcherbachev, D. 463 Shcherbatov, N. 21 Shidlovskii, N. V. 192 Shingarev, A. I. 56, 64 Shingarev, K. A. 177–8 Shishkina-Iavein, P. 275–6, 278 Shkandrij, M. 377 Shliapnikov, A. 140–1, 146, 483 Shul’gin, V. V. 33–4, 445–6, 448 Shur, S. 341, 347, 351–2, 355–6 Siberia 44, 62, 109, 141, 179, 393, 400, 410, 413–17, 419–20, 422–3, 426, 429, 444–5, 448–9, 453, 470, 473–4 Sidorov, A. L. 55 Simbirsk 365–7, 369–71, 414, 416 single power 40, 68, 115 Skobelev, M. I. 28–9, 128, 203, 252 Skobelev orders 203 Skoropadsky, P. (Hetman) 386, 389, 418 Slutskaia, V. 142, 153 sluzhashchie 240–1

INDEX

Smith, S. A. 183, 216 Smolensk 339, 587 n.7 Great War’s impact on 340–2 imperial 339–40 liberal-socialist coalition 342–7 moderate socialists 347–53 Soviet power 354–9 Smolenskii vestnik (newspaper) 341, 345, 349, 356 Smolensk provincial executive committee (SPEC) 344, 347, 350 Smolensk Provincial Peasant Congress 217 ­Smolentsev, M. 353–5 Smol’ianinov, V. 348, 353 Sobolev, O. 577 n.64 Sobolev, V. 343, 354 Social Democratic (SD) 83–5, 143, 166, 168, 340, 343, 346–8 social divisions 328–30 socialism 2, 98, 144, 146, 155, 159–60, 166, 168, 171, 190, 206, 247, 249, 259, 263, 273, 275, 300, 305, 318–19, 427, 431, 459–60, 478 socialist government 75, 77–80, 83, 85, 88–9, 125, 131, 137, 151, 161, 247–9, 253–4, 382, 389, 460, 480 Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) 1, 4, 26, 75–9, 83–9, 95–8, 110–11, 125–37, 141, 156, 220, 228, 244, 278, 340, 375, 395, 398–9, 402–3, 411, 429 Left SRs 4, 75–9, 83–9, 94–8, 103, 127, 131–7, 148, 151–2, 156–61, 164–8, 181–2, 353–60, 429–30, 434, 440, 463–5 Sokol movement 286 Sokolov, N. D. 31 soldatki 213 Soldatskaia pravda 329 soldiers aspirations 226 attitude to war 231–3 civil-military conflict 233–4 committees 30, 46, 53, 227–8, 233–4, 236–7, 261, 263, 291, 344, 351, 360 democratization of army 225–8 offensive, preparation for 228–31 peasant 213, 216, 386, 452 revolt 27–30

INDEX

Soviet power 235–7 violence 365, 398 South Russians 247 sovereign power 431 Soviet delegation 354, 459, 482 Soviet government 83–5, 97, 297, 401, 412, 466, 476 construction 94–9 Tashkent 400, 402 Ukrainian 381, 387, 465 Soviet Latvia 466–7 Soviet leaders 31, 33, 81–2, 91, 106, 110, 114, 148, 150, 276, 342, 344–6, 351–4, 356, 425 soviet power and democratization 235–7 establishing and consolidating 175–80 October revolution 354–9 and socialist government 88–9 Soviet Republic 91, 96, 105, 376, 400–4, 415, 418, 426, 434, 465, 471, 476, 480 soviet revolutions 464–7, 471 soviets 47–9, 53 Sovnarkom 85–8, 91–103, 105–6, 297, 304, 308, 381–2, 387–8, 431–6, 476–7 Spirin, L. M. 280 splintering 326 ­SR-Maximalists 156–9, 161, 164, 202–3, 340 Stalin 54, 92–3, 99–100, 123, 141–5, 148–9, 152, 304–5, 309–10, 315, 319, 467, 479, 483–4 Stal’, L. 142 state authority 205, 211, 216, 220, 343, 350, 376, 430–5 State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) 438 State Council 13, 15, 19, 259 State Duma 25, 32, 35, 37, 41, 56–7, 68, 70, 76, 109–11, 137, 192, 194–5, 225–6, 229, 275, 324, 328, 364, 396 state formation 447–50 State Publishing House 202 Stavka 32–4, 63, 65–6, 72, 262–3, 344, 348, 350, 352, 354 Steinberg, M. 214–16, 220 Steklov, I. M. 31

643

Stepun, F. 510 n.37 Stites, R. 150, 571 n.2 Stolypin, P. 14–15, 45, 211–12, 339, 370 storm detachments 229–31 Storming of the Winter Palace (Evreinov) 440 Struve, P. 445 Stučka, P. 466 Sturmer, B. V. 10 Sukhanov, N. N. 1, 3, 31, 80, 82, 84, 157, 168 Sukhomlinov, V. 11 Sukovkin, M. A. 379 Sumgin, M. E. 46 Suny, R. G. 141 Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) 205, 435 supreme power 21, 42, 50, 96, 380 Supreme Ukrainian Student Council 246 Swain, G. 6, 475, 479 Tağıyev, Z. 338 Takhtamyshev, G. V. 68 Tambov province 279, 281, 421, 475 Tarasov, K. 4 Tatar 361, 366 Tauride Palace 27, 29–30, 135–6, 148, 176, 225, 275, 281, 425 Tema’s Childhood (Garin-Mikhailovskii) 299 Temporary Committee 25, 30, 41, 47, 225–6, 328 Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed, John) 3 Tercümān / Perevodchik (Translator) 325 Tereshchenko, M. I. 56, 63, 379 Thatcher, I. 3 Third Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party 465 Third Duma 14, 299, 485 n.6 Third SR Party Congress 126 Tolstoy, D. 299 Tolstoy, L. 299 trade union 345 factory committees and 200–3 ­railway 66–9, 73 Trepov, A. F. 56, 62, 65 Trepov, D. 285 Trotskaia, N. 318

644

Trotsky, L. D. 79–80, 82, 84–7, 89, 92, 94, 99–100, 105–6, 131, 144, 149, 151–2, 157, 174, 241, 251–2, 273, 281, 412, 415, 421, 424–5, 427, 434, 436, 457–8, 460–5, 468–9, 479, 483–4 Trud i Svet (Labour and Life) 305 Trudoviks 11, 14, 110, 278, 336, 343–4, 359, 501 n.4 Trutovskii, V. E. 160–1 Tsar 3, 9, 11, 13, 15–16, 18, 21, 23, 26, 33–5, 37, 50, 56, 62, 70, 140, 182, 191, 209, 259–60, 272, 276, 284–5 Tsarevokokshaisk 366–7, 370 Tsarism 39, 44, 56, 183, 187, 258, 267, 299, 307 tsarist 10–11, 13, 15–16, 20–3, 25, 30, 39, 42–5, 55–8, 60–1, 64–7, 70, 72, 76, 95–6, 103, 110, 140, 144–6, 171, 214–15, 217, 257–8, 266, 271–2, 290, 292, 298–300, 343, 428, 458 autocracy 25, 55–6, 458 government 11, 13, 20, 61, 64–5, 145, 274, 290, 292–3, 299, 368, 415, 451 Tsarist officials (the Murav’ev Commission) 43–4 Tsaritsyn 58, 362, 467 Tsentral’na Rada 375–6 Tsereteli, I. 137, 161 Tsiurupa, A. 102 Tsyrkin, D. 336 Tucker, R. 93 Tukhachevskii, A. 341, 343–4, 347, 356 Tukhachevskii, M. I. 423 Turkestan 391 anticolonial revolt 393–4 autonomy 398–400 Commission 396, 398, 404–5 liberty 394–8 Muslim population 394–7 revolution in 391–3 Soviet Republic 400–4 Soviet Russia 404–6 Turkestan Council of People’s Commissars (TSNK) 399–401, 403 typhus 99, 357, 359, 367, 401, 429, 473 Tyrkova, A. 281, 561 n.48

INDEX

Ukraine 5, 51–2, 130, 168, 239, 241–7, 376–90, 412–14, 418–19, 465–6, 482 Ukrainian agreement 52 revolution 242–4, 376–83, 385, 387, 389–90, 482, 595 n.3 rule 51 teachers 246–7, 309 Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) 412, 418 Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) 375, 381–2, 384, 389, 412, 418 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) 418 Union of Landowners 259, 262, 349, 445 Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists 172, 528 n.21 ­Union of Towns 17, 19–22 Urals 62, 158, 188–9, 191, 197, 381, 409, 412–13, 415–16, 420, 422, 446–7, 453 Ustrugov, D. A. 63 Uvarov, M. 178 Vaksberg, A. 562 n.57 Vashkevich, V. 357 Veiner, P. 318 Ventsel, K. 302–3 Verkhovskii, A. 133, 364, 367 Verner, A. 210, 216, 220–1 Verstiuk, V. 389 Vestnik Povolzhskago okruzhnogo strakhovogo tovarishchestva (Messenger of the Volga region insurance association) 336 Viatka province 188–9, 212, 215 Viaz’ma 340–3, 348 Vikzhel 67–9, 73, 132–3 negotiations 85–7, 89 Viren, R. N. 226 Vishniak, M. 135 visual worlds 323, 326 Vitte, S. 285 Voeikov, V. 170 Volga region 361–7, 373–4 governance 367–73 Volin (Vsevolod Eikhenbaum) 170 Vol’nyi Don (Free Don) 329

INDEX

volonté générale 159 volost 49, 96, 104, 165, 211, 215, 217–19, 240, 343, 385 von Geldern, J. 573 n.13 von Hagen, M. 378 von Kaufman, K. P. 397, 404 Vostorgov, I. I. 260 vozhd’ 112, 509 n.15 Vrangel’, P. N. 420, 425–6, 446–7, 450, 454, 456, 474 Vyborg 15, 26–8 Vyborg District Committee 140–1, 146, 158 Vynnychenko, V. 380, 383–5 Waldron, P. 3 war communism 435–8, 451, 479, 605 n.41 war-industries committee 9, 19–20, 22–3, 56, 65, 240 Warsaw 12, 410, 424, 457, 468–9 water transport 58 waterways 58, 64–5, 72 Westwood, J. N. 57, 60 White Constabulary 462 White, E. 5, 477, 484 White home front 6, 443–7, 451, 453–6, 474, 482 White, J. D. 152 White movement 449 ­White war economy 451 Wildman, A. 224, 228, 233, 235 Wilson, W. 277 women emancipation 295, 439–40 19 March demonstration 274–6, 282, 291, 375, 378 organization 142–3 revolts 394 rights 44, 271–2, 274–6, 278, 291 suffrage 271–2, 274–7, 280–2, 291 war and citizenship 276–7

645

Worker-Peasant Militia 431, 434 workers constitution 4, 194–5, 199–200, 202–3, 207 democracy 196, 206–7 self-management 195, 197, 199, 206 and soldiers 25, 47, 76, 78–9, 87–8, 141–2, 144–5, 157, 198, 242, 246, 250–1, 254, 342, 344, 360, 373, 375, 379, 386–7, 392, 394–5, 398–9 strike movement 26–7 ‘workers’ control!’ (slogan) 195–200 world revolution 2, 6, 80, 89, 159, 168, 457, 459, 466–8, 479–80 Xudoyarxanov, I. 394–5, 401 Yekelchyk, S. 376 Young Communist League 306 younger generation 210–11, 267 Young Turk Revolution (1908) 337 youth Bolshevism and 304–7 Ukrainian school-age 246 Zakuta, O. 276 zemstvo/zemstvos 245–6, 250, 253, 336, 340, 351, 375, 377, 582 n.41 assembly 356 meetings 243, 245 and municipal councils 16–19 newspapers 245, 326–7 zemstvo 165, 231, 298 Zemstvo Union 9, 17–23 Zetkin, C. 273, 558 n.7 Zhelezniakov, A. 136, 172–3, 175–8, 183 Zhenotdel 440 Zinoviev, G. E. 80, 83, 86, 100, 106, 151–2, 465, 468, 471 Znamia truda (newspaper) 165

646

647

648