October Revolution (13): Navigating the major narratives around 1917

It's especially difficult with a major, iconic historical event like the October Revolution to distinguish clearly between empirical accounts of "what really happened" and the historical narratives by which those events have been framed over the last century. And since we're talking about political events, how the players understood their actions at the time was heavily shaped by the immediate practical political consequences and by the political ideologies they were applying to those events.

Lars Lih has a couple of articles for the left journal Jacobin dealing with that problematic. In The Lies We Tell About Lenin 07/23/2014, he stresses the entanglement of practice and theory in 1917 Russia. Here he is talking specifically about the two wings of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks who supported the Provisional Government established by the February Revolution and the Bolsheviks whose policy was to overthrow it:

This approach is correct about one thing: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks did resort to Marxist concepts such as these in their 1917 polemics. Yet doctrinal arguments of this kind were far from the heart of the matter. Indeed, they were essentially add-ons, attempts to give doctrinal legitimacy to positions based on empirical readings of Russia in 1917. The real question facing the socialist parties was this: could the crisis engulfing Russian society be solved by cooperation with educated society, or did a solution require a new sovereign authority based exclusively on the narod [the common people], i.e.], the workers and the peasants?

He is writing there about two kinds of narratives on the Russian Revolution that are among the most influential still.

One is a Trotskyist narrative which obviously annoys him. Because of the pronounced edge of ideological purity that annoys most people about Trotskyist narratives. As he puts it, "many shrewd and essential insights into the Russian Revolution come from the Trotskyist tradition. Yet I cannot help feeling that writers in this tradition are often more interested in their doctrinal abstractions than in the human reality of the Russian Revolution as experienced by those who lived through it."

The Trotskyist version he describes essentially focuses on the person of Leon Trotsky and argues that when the Bolsheviks agreed with him, things went fine. When they disagreed, things got screwed up.

One of the outlooks he describes comes from a liberal perspective, here is the broad sense of the word (not just the American and Canadian current meaning):

There is also a certain sort of bien-pensant liberalism that uses Bolshevism to point out the dangers of having exalted political goals. Want to create a workers’ paradise? Watch out that the very nobility of the goal does not lead to terrible crimes. During the Russian Civil War, people were fighting over the most elementary, most unavoidable questions: who will rule the country? How can we put the country back together? Will Russia survive as a state?

Our liberal looks at all this turmoil and sermonizes: now, now, don’t get carried away with dreams of a perfect society! Be like us, with our safe, sane, and sober politics. Moderation, moderation in all things!

That view has its merits in a larger sense. But Lih's point in this context is that it impedes rather than facilitates understanding what happened in the Russia Revolution.

In another piece from this year, From February to October 05/11/2017, he uses a primary source as a point of departure, Rheta Childe Dorr Inside the Russian Revolution, which as he explains went to press after the February Revolution but before the October one. In that article, Lih stresses the continuity between the February and October Revolutions:

Basic to the usual understanding of 1917 is a contrast between “February” and “October.” The educated reading public is given a liberal version of this contrast: February is the good revolution of political freedom and democracy, and October is the bad, illegitimate revolution of tyranny and extremist utopianism. On the Left we find a similar contrast, but with the value-signs reversed: the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” versus “the socialist revolution.”

Overlooked is the strong continuity between February and October. Right from its beginnings in February, the upheaval in 1917 should be seen as an anti-bourgeois democratic revolution. Soviet power was actually proclaimed in February — the role of October was to confirm that it would not leave the scene peaceably.

The soviets (workers and soldiers councils, later peasant versions, as well) and the Provisional Government were both center of authority during the "dual power" period between the February and October installments of the revolution. Consequently, "government commitment [or lack thereof!] to carrying out key parts of the soviet program and the ultimate loyalty of the armed forces to the soviet rather than the Provisional Government — determined the course of politics for the rest of the year." Another element of continuity he describes is the fact that Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government until the October Revolution, "was inserted into the government as a soviet representative."

As he notes, the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks were both committed to the concept of a Constituent Assembly as the vehicle to write a new Constitution and set up a permanent government. But: "More and more, the Constituent Assembly became the centerpiece of attempts at a soft coup, that is, of inducing soviet power to bow out gracefully." I wrote about the convening and immediate dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in the 10th installment of these blog posts.

That article is helpful in explaining how the Social Democrats of the Second International more generally thought of the relationship between "bourgeois-democratic" and "socialist" revolutions. "bourgeois" in this context does not mean snooty manners or dreary conformity; it means "capitalist." Matthew Rendle describes in Making Sense of 1917: Towards a Global History of the Russian Revolution (Slavic Review 76:3; Fall 2017) how the French Revolution of 1789 and its subsequent course was a major frame through which many Russians viewed the events of 1917: "Familiarity with the French Revolution in particular, it has been argued, helped shape political discourse across the revolution; it misled many intellectuals who failed to appreciate the peculiarities of Russia’s position in their constant search for a Russian Danton, Robespierre, or Bonaparte, whilst the Bolsheviks saw it as a source of ideas on how revolutions worked in practice."