(6) October Revolution: Lenin and the methodology of revolution

Tamás Krausz takes a look at the Russian Revolution with emphasis on Lenin's view of events, and the political strategy based on the Leninist view that made the revolution successful against the very considerable counter-revolutionary opposition it faced, in One Hundred Years, One Hundred Messages Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017). And he gives a good description on the continuing appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet state to many, even after the revelations about about the revolutionary state terror of the 1930s:

Across the world, the Russian Revolution brought the desires, especially of the lower social classes, out of the realm of utopia and into reality: the elimination of illiteracy, unemployment, and extreme social inequalities; the introduction of free education and health care; the liberation of women from the world of medieval repression, and more. As if overnight, millions of people felt emboldened to believe that they could build a more humane society, without oppression, governed by social self-organization and unbound from wage labor.

These fundamental humanist values of the revolution - social liberty, social equality, an economy founded on community - still capture the imagination. The October Revolution as an experience of history, remembered as a methodology for the transformation of the world into a community, has persisted far beyond the failed experiment of state socialism itself. In terms of its global effects, the October Revolution gave decisive encouragement to national liberation movements and the larger struggle against colonialism—whose real outcomes were ushered in by victory in the Second World War.

None of this should distract from the great dilemmas of what came after the revolution, which Lenin - paraphrasing Klyuchevsky - put as follows: even Peter the Great used barbaric means to sweep away barbaric conditions. This is perhaps the question left to posterity: is it possible to sweep barbaric conditions out by means that are not barbaric? I have no answer. Yet I am convinced that in structural terms, the objective conditions for new revolutions are continuously present in several regions of the global system - though in different forms and stages of maturity. This is the light in which it is worth looking back on those world-historical events of 1917, on their hundredth anniversary. [my emphasis]

Monthly Review is a left journal, and often it is writers of the left, and not just Marxists, who articulate well the broad and very complex repercussions of the Russian Revolution in the world.

But that's a generalization that needs to be carefully qualified. There have been plenty of left perspectives since 1917 who want to paint the event in the darkest terms. And no shortage of liberals and conservatives who attempted to take a realistic view of the event and its longer-term effects. There have also been conservatives of the Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn stripe who viewed the October Revolution and everything connected with it as the embodiment of evil and even wanted to exaggerate its effects to paint the left-center as just another continuation of its malign influence.

The October Revolution, which began with the February Revolution followed by the Bolshevik seizure of power on October 25-26 (Old Style) and the events of those years certainly involved plenty of violence.

But the seizure of power in Petrograd in October that brought the Bolsheviks to power was not in itself a particularly violent event. It certainly was not a pacifist takeover. But it was also not the culmination of a long insurrectionary war. The period after the February Revolution was a time of "dual power," involving the official government of Kerensky, on the one hand, and the soviets (workers and soldiers councils) on the other. The Bolshevik takeover on October 25-26 could be understood in the context of those two days as a successful putsch by the Bolsheviks, basing their power on the support of the soviet portion of the dual power. However, that was only the beginning of the Bolshevik phase of of the revolution that began in February, which soon developed into a civil war against the "Whites" (counter-revolutionaries) who were backed by foreign intervention, including US and British forces.

In what Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod describe in a "crucial point" in How the Soviet Union Was Governed (1979):

... the real test of the Bolsheviks came not in November, but in the coming three years. They had to demonstrate an ability to rule that no one expected this group of fractious extremists to have; they had to build an army from a war-weary population after having promised peace; they had to win a Civil War while extracting grain by force from peasants in the countryside, while attempting to reinstitute authority relations in the army and the factory, and while ending the wildly free politics of 1917 and emasculating the soviets in whose name they came to power. It was in 1917-1921 that the Bolshevik revolution was really won. [my emphasis]