This might seem odd on the face of it, because there was mass discontent and a revolutionary party in the Bolsheviks that had a mass base among urban workers. And it was a radical change of government. The famous seizure of the Winter Palance in Petrograd could certainly be take to resemble a putsch, and that act involved relatively little actual violence. But the equally crucial Bolshevik seizure of power in Moscow did involve some deadly street-fighting, albeit relatively briefly.
As Hildermeier explains, the Bolshevik Revolution should be understood not as taking place on October 25-26 (Old Style), but as beginning then and continuing through the very eventful 1917-1921 period.
The "putsch" claim that he describes is part of a narrative that argues that developments in Russia were going in a good, democratic, peaceful direction, despite the antiquated Czarist regime. This viewpoint sees the Russian Revolution of 1917 not just as part of a larger story of the First World War, but an event caused by the First World War that side-tracked the benign and progressive development of Russian history. "Ohne Krieg – so die Quintessenz dieser Sichtweise – keine Revolution" ("Without the war, according to the quintessence of this viewpoint - no revolution"), he writes.
He also explains that the other major Western narrative, a sociological one, focused instead on the rapidaly developing urban capitalist economy, the rapid increase rise in numbers of an urban working class, and a imperial ruling house too enthralled to the traditionalist landowners of what was still a predominantly rural country to be able to modernize governance sufficiently to accommodate the demands of urban dwellers and workers and the requirements of a Russian capitalist economy in intense international competition.
Hildemeier writes that in the sociological narrative, the importance of the First World War and its incredible burdens on the Russian people played an important role in generating revolution, "genau genommen aber nur als zusätzliche Ursache der Revolution, nicht als einzige und auch nicht als hauptsächliche" ("but taken more precisely as only an additional origin of the revolution, not as the only one and also not the main one").
Fifty years ago in the 1967 anniversary year of the October Revolution, George Kennan pointed to those two broad narratives in The Russian Revolution: Its Nature and Consequences Foreign Affairs 46:1 (Oct., 1967):
Even today, a half-century later, it is difficult to assess the meaning of this collapse. Was the Tsarist autocracy so largely an anachronism, were its weaknesses and failures of such gravity, that it was bound to fall in any case at an early date, and did the war merely hasten its end? Or was it Russia's participation in the war that destroyed what would otherwise have been, for the régime, a reasonable chance of adjustment, of adaptation, of survival into another age? [my emphasis]Kennan says this about the role of the war in the context of these two competing historical narratives:
What, then, the outcome might have been had there been no war is most unclear. One thing alone is certain: if there was any chance for the autocracy to evolve peacefully and successfully into another age, there could not be added to its long-term burdens - added to them for the second time in a decade - the strains of a great modern war. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 had already brought the system to the verge of collapse. How anyone seeing this - be it the Tsar's ministers or his French allies - could have imagined that it could with impunity, only ten years later, take upon itself the far greater strains of a war with Germany, remains one of the mysteries of the age. Perhaps the autocracy, all unknowing, was already doomed to an early demise when the Tsar gave the order for mobilization in July 1914; that it was irrevocably doomed from that moment on is beyond the realm of speculation. [my emphasis]It's also important to remember that the Czarist administration was highly centralized. So that, in comparison to western European countries, it was possible to take immediate control of the national government in a putsch by seizing control of a relatively small number of physical locations in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow. But taking control of those two cities didn't guarantee control of the country. And while the specific operation that seized control for the Bolsheviks on October 25-26 (Old Style) was a planned military operation, it founded on a much larger and geographically spread mass movement among workers, soldiers and the peasants. All across Russia since the February Revolution, peasants had been seizing land from the large landowners with the partial and nominal support of the Provisional Government. But it was obvious that the Kerensky regime was unenthusiastic at best about the land seizures. And the role of national movements for independence from or autonomy within the Russia Empire were a major factor, one that the Bolsheviks had explicitly encouraged.
S. A. Smith writes in The historiography of the Russian revolution 100 years on (Kritika 16:4; Fall 2015):
From the February Revolution onward, moreover, the course of the revolution was intimately connected to the struggles of non-Russian peoples in the Baltic, the western borderlands, the Caucasus, and Central Asia to achieve varying degrees of national or ethnic self-determination. So far as the politics of 1917 as such is concerned, however, we may be in danger of losing sight of the fact that a peculiarity of the Russian Revolution--compared with later revolutions in China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, or Cuba--was the paramountcy of class as the dominant frame in which politics was fought out, which is not to deny that national identities, frequently overdetermined by class, were increasingly influential.
Excellent studies of the revolution in the provinces have appeared in recent years. However, mention should first be made of Alexander Rabinowitch's study of the first year of Bolshevik rule in Petrograd, which represents a fine sequel to his classic account of the October seizure of power. His study charts the ways in which the political, military, and economic crises of 1918 transformed Soviet rule into one-party rule, a challenge to the revived tendency to sideline contingency in favor of ideological or organizational determinism. So far as revolution in the provinces is concerned, Soviet historians were under pressure to show that these were essentially variants of a uniform revolutionary process--the inexorable advance of "Soviet power"--which did not vitiate the quality of the best work, such as Grunt's study of Moscow or Gerasimenko's study of the Lower Volga. Recent studies of the revolution in the provinces, however, challenge this conception and question the notion that the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd was the decisive break with the old order. In reality, the struggle to establish Soviet power in the towns and cities of European Russia and Siberia began only after October and continued in fits and starts in many regions into 1920. Sarah Badcock's comparative study of two Volga provinces, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan--the former ethnically Russian and relatively industrialized, the latter ethnically mixed and economically less developed--demonstrates the importance of local connections in determining patterns of politics in two cities where organized parties were weak. [my emphasis]
No comments:
Post a Comment