I wanted to provide some links here to some of the resources I've come across about the Russian Revolution in connection with the 100th anniversary date.
The Deutsches Historische Museum in Berlin has a webpage on Die Russische Revolution. And if you happen to be in Berlin, they are running a series of classic movies on the topic.
From the DHM's flyer on the exhibit:
The revolutionary events of 1917 and the civil war led to a fundamental, systemic change that influenced the entire 20th century. From a mental and cultural perspective, the revolution at first brought about radical changes in all areas of society. It led to new forms of economy, education and culture, fostered national, political and social freedom movements and inspired artists and people working in all areas of culture. But the forging of this new society was accompanied – from the outset – by terror, violence and repression. The exhibition 1917. Revolution. Russia and Europe explores the revolutionary events in Russia and the early Soviet Union and also examines the reactions and counter-reactions that the political and social upheaval triggered in Europe, by focusing on a selection of European countries.
Here is a 27-minute documentary on the Russian Revolution from RT, which the American media now routinely describes as a "Russian propaganda channel." (RT just agreed to register in the US as a foreign agent, but they aren't happy about it: Natasha Bertrand, RT editor-in-chief: US affiliate of Russia Today will register as a foreign agentBusiness Insider ) It's main message seems to be that the significance of the Russian Revolution is to provide material for kitchy novelty products and conversation topics for ditsy idealists. Revolution: 100 years young. Lenin’s socialist vision in capitalist world 11/05/2017:
YouTube lists a number of reports and documentaries, most from dubiously-name providers I've never heard of. But if you want to hear a conventionally Marxist-Leninist take on the October Revolution, in this episode of Empire Files on the left channel TeleSUR English, Abby Martin interviews Brian Becker of an American political sect called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, What the Russian Revolution Proved Possible 11/07/2017. I'm afraid his main achievement here is to make the whole thing sound boring.
This 3 1/2 minute documentary spot from the Smithsonian Channel is about Mutiny in Petrograd, about the February Revolution, some of which is a docudrama-style reconstrution:
Mitchell Cohen in What Lenin’s Critics Got RightDissent (Fall 2017) Kind of a classic social-democratic commentary on the October Revolution. He gives a lot of legitimacy to the Constituent Assembly elected in November 1917 and dismissed by the Bolshevik government in January 1918.
Jacobin has been running articles all this year, with links collected as The Russian Revolution at 100. Here are some that I find particularly worthwhile:
The New York Times has been running a series of articles under the rubric of Red Century, several of which deal directly with the October Revolution. They are worth checking out, though I've seen a couple that I'm thinking were not edited carefully enough.
I've completed my numbered series of posts on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. It's been interesting to take a new look at some of those events and to read some of the published articles marking the anniversary.
The Russian Revolution began with the February Revolution in 1917 and really came to an end in 1921 with the conclusion of the longer, difficult, bloody civil war that I described in some of my recent posts.
March 1921 saw a turn from the economic policies of "war communism" to what was called the New Economic Policy (NEP). The most important political aspect of the NEP was that it put an end to the forced requisitions from the peasants that had led to increasing discontent as the civil war drew to an end.
War communism was primarily an emergency measure, though it also involved the kind of nationalizations that had been part of the Bolshevik program prior to the revolution. But it was also a response to the desperate pressure to marshal resources for the civil war that began in 1918, after years of devastation and death in the war with Germany in the First World War. It involved strict requisitioning of grain and the state taking control of even relatively small businesses.
Yesterday I saw Ivan Afanasyevich Chekunov. It turned out that he had already been to see me in 1919 on the question of a congress of toiling peasants. Now he says: it is better to start with regional ones.
He Sympathises with the Communists, but will not join the Party, because he goes to church and is a Christian (he says he rejects the ritual but is a believer).
He has been improving his farm. He has toured Nizhni-Novgorod and Simbirsk gubernias. He says the peasants have lost confidence in the Soviet power. I asked him whether we could right things with a tax? He thinks we could. In his own uyezd, he has succeeded, with the help of the workers, to substitute a good Soviet authority for the bad one.
That is the kind of people we must do our utmost to hold on to, in order to restore the confidence of the peasant mass. This is the main political task and one which brooks no delay. My earnest request: see that the “apparatus” standpoint does not run away with you, and do not worry too much over it. Devote more attention to the political attitude towards the peasantry.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) represented a backing off of the extreme control of industry, business and agriculture, especially the latter. This policy was in effect until 1929, when it was succeeded by collectivization of agriculture and what is often called "forced industrialization," i.e., a high-pressure effort to expand the USSR's industrial base.
Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsold sketched out the contours of the NEP this way (How the Soviet Union Is Governed, 1979):
The so-called "commanding heights" of large-scale industry remained under state administration, though even these enterprises, organized in the form of trusts, were to be operated on commercial principles with substantial freedom to buy and sell on the open market and with the obligation to operate on a basis of profitability. In actuality, the "commanding heights" (which included all heavy industry, the transportation system, and the central banking system) did dominate the industrial scene, employing 84 percent of the industrial labor force. However, so far as the consumer was concerned, much of the tone of NEP was set by the private sector. Although small in size, the private industries constituted 88.5 percent of the total number of enterprises, and the trade network was virtually all private. The symbol of the era became the so-called Nepmen who arose to carry on the functions of buying and selling, sometimes through private trading concerns of their own, sometimes concealed as cooperatives, and not infrequently as official agents of the state trading organizations themselves. [my emphasis]
Evaluations and political positioning around the NEP became major factors in the political struggles of the 1920s, including the most significant one, that between Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky for leadership of the Communist Party.
Viktor Mikhaylovich Chernov (1893-1952) was a founder and a leder of the peasant-based Social Revolutionary Party, who served as Agricultural Minister under Kerensky and who endorsed Kerensy's policy of continuing the war. He was brought into the Kerensky's regime on May 5 as part of the first "coalition" government. He became the President of the Constituent Assembly that the Bolshevik government dissolved after its first day in operation in January 1918. He associated briefly with one of the counterrevolutionary White governments, and in 1920 emigrated to France and later to America.
Rex Wade recounts how during the July Days unrest in 1917, Chernov was taken hostage by a group of the famously militant Kronstadt sailors, angry at him for not taking a more radical position. "The worker who shook his fist in Chernov’s face and yelled 'Take power you son-of-a-bitch when it is offered to you' illustrated the frustration of the crowd. It was only with difficulty that Leon Trotsky, who had already become a popular radical, got him freed."
Lenin speaking with Trotsky standing by the podium to his left
In 1924 after Lenin's death, the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal published a kind of obituary polemic by Chernov against his old enemy, Lenin (2:3; 03/15/1924).
It's a confusing and confused essay, in which he declares in the first part, "Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple. Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise, that was the only virtue; hesitation, that was the only crime."
Yet he also writes, "Foresight on a large scale, however, was the very thing he lacked. He was a fencing master first of all, and a fencer needs only a little foresight and no complicated ideas." Which would imply that Lenin thought almost purely tactically, the opposite of the previous description. He reinforces this with, "This perfect and immediate tactical sense formed a complete contrast to the absolutely unfounded and fantastic character of any more extensive historical prognosis he ever attempted - of any program that comprised more than today and tomorrow."
Chernov denied that Lenin was a "blind dogmatist." Instead, "he often became a quack, an experimenter, a gambler; this is why he was an opportunist, which is something diametrically opposed to a dogmatist."
It's not unusual for political polemics to be inconsistent. Nor for actual people to have strange contradictions in their behavior.
But regardless what one thinks of his goals or his methods, the notion that for Lenin, "Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise, that was the only virtue; hesitation, that was the only crime," doesn't reflect the reality of Lenin's political career, and particularly not that of 1917.
The cascade of events of that year and the victory of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution can't be recounted without the remarkable story of Lenin's role as the primary Bolshevik leader. The Bolsheviks had relatively little influence on the Provisional Government under Kerensky, which depended in its various changing formations during the year by Liberals, rightwingers, Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries. The Social Revolutionaries were the primary party among the peasants, who constituted the majority of the population.
When Lenin returned to Russia from years of exile after the February Revolution, he initially stood alone among the leadership of the party in demanding that the Bolsheviks oppose the Provisional Government. During the July Days unrest, he opposed calls from some other Bolsheviks to attempt an immediate seizure of power. But after the Kornilov Revolt of August was suppressed, he found himself again initially alone in pressing for military preparations for a forcible seizure of power in the immediate future.
Starting from the moment of the February Revolution, pulling off the subsequent October Revolution required both strategic sense and tactical talent and dexterity on the part of the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin in particular. Do they support the Provisional Government or not? Do they support the election of a Constituent Assembly or not? Should they take a prowar position in defense of the new government or continue to oppose the war? What kind of opportunities did the July Days present? How will the public react after Kerensky's accusations that Lenin was an agent of the German Kaiser? How big of a danger did the Kornilov Revolt present to the Provisional Government and the broader revolutionary movement? Should the Bolsheviks defend the Provisional Government in that particular situation or not? Do the Bolsheviks pursue an alliance with the Left Social Revolutionaries or try to go it alone in seizing power? Do they make the workers' and soldiers' councils (soviets) the basis of their legitimacy or do they continue to support the elections for the Constituent Assembly after October 26?
And in those days before TV and perpetual public opinion polls, the Bolsheviks also had to gauge public opinion on the war, the hunger crisis, and the confusing series of crises foreign and domestic. They had to do the usual things politicians do in normal times: making contacts with other, striking deals, building alliances, rolling out political mobilization programs. In addition, there was a heavy military component to the politics. The Bolsheviks had to organize their own military command under intense time pressure, coordinate with the soldiers' soviets, gauge the capabilities and likely responses to military commanders to changing political situations. And there were the Germans, still taking more Russian territory and attempting to defend the country under the Provisional Government just as they had been doing with the Czar in power.
Another major factor was the "dual power" arrangement. There was a Provisional Government. But there was also a separate and independent revolutionary structure composed of the soviets, the workers' and soldiers' councils. The dual powers each had to coordinate and compete with the other. And it was obvious to all that having two separate governmental structures for the same political entity was not a sustainable situation. And overlaying the two government structures were the partisan conflicts of the various parties jockeying for position in both the Provisional Government and the soviets.
Navigating this political situation was difficult for everyone. And to come out on top as the Bolsheviks did, and to establish and maintain their power and legitimacy as a government during a bitter two-year civil war, they had to know what they were doing on a lot of fronts and many levels. Luck always plays a role in politics, and the same was true in 1917 in Russia.
Lenin mugging for the camera
Lenin and the Bolsheviks didn't drop out of the sky, or emerge from the nether regions of the earth, as their most hostile critics might prefer to say. They had been involved in politics actively, including competing for seats in the (largely toothless) parliament, the Duma. They had experienced leaders and seasoned activists that had worked together for years, often under very adverse conditions. Lenin himself was very active within the Socialist International agitating against the war. His exile in Poland and later in Switzerland weren't long vacations. He was not only intensely involved in Russian politics and partisan journalism from afar. That also gave him experience and insight into the foreign policy approaches of the European powers who would be critical as allies or enemies in the event of a revolution.
He wasn't, say, just some real estate and casino magnate with a side career in show business who took over leadership of the country with little or no actual experience in politics or government.
George Kennan took a very different view of the nature and importance of Lenin's leadership (The Russian Revolution: Its Nature and ConsequencesForeign Affairs 46:1; Oct 1967) in the Russian Revolution from 1917 on:
... it is tempting to say that Bolshevism triumphed because no unity existed among its major political opponents, and none of those opponents, in any case, would have been remotely capable of ruling the country. But it would be an oversimplification to attribute the Communist success solely to these negative factors. No less central to it were positive ones as well: the extraordinary discipline, compactness and conspiratorial tightness of the Communist Party; the magnificent political leadership - bold, ruthless, determined and imaginative - given to it at all times by its dominant figure, Vladimir Il'ich Ulyanov-Lenin; and the driving, unrelenting military leadership which the party gave to the Red Army units in the civil war. In the vast fluid confusion that followed the breakdown of the old order, the cutting edge of these qualities was of far greater effectiveness than any of the shifting, undependable winds of popular sympathy. The Bolsheviki came out ahead very largely because they were, in this maelstrom of poorly organized political forces, the only political force that had hardness, sharpness, disciplined drive and clearly defined purpose. [my emphasis]
Today is the actual anniversary of the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks' initial seizure of power took place during the night of October 25-26 (Old Style) which is November 6-7 in the New Style calendar adopted by the new government which took effect on February 1, 1918 (New Style).
Part of the challenge in understanding the Russian Revolution is that the past has been continually reinterpreted. That happens with all historical events, of course. But the interpretations of Soviet history were not only very, very many in number. But some of those interpretations were perceived by the players as very high stakes.
But even this phrase did not satisfy Stalin: The following sentence replaced it in the final version of the Short Biography: "In 1938, the book History of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks), Short Course appeared, written by comrade Stalin and approved by a commission of the central committee, All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks)." Can one add anything more?
(Animation in the hall.)
As you see, a surprising metamorphosis changed the work created by a group into a book written by Stalin. It is not necessary to state how and why this metamorphosis took place.
A pertinent question comes to our mind: if Stalin is the author of this book, why did he need to praise the person of Stalin so much and to transform the whole post-October historical period of our glorious Communist party solely into an action of "the Stalin genius"?
Did this book properly reflect the efforts of the party in the socialist transformation of the country, in the construction of socialist society, in the industrialisation and collectivisation of the country, and also other steps taken by the party which undeviatingly traveled the path outlined by Lenin? This book speaks principally about Stalin, about his speeches, about his reports. Everything without the smallest exception is tied to his name.
And when Stalin himself asserts that he himself wrote the Short Course, this calls at least for amazement. Can a Marxist-Leninist thus write about himself, praising his own person to the heavens?
I'm not especially concerned here with the exact role of Stalin in preparing the Short Course. But in the course of describing it, Brandenberger talks about the internationalist position that was reflected in the drafts prepared by the committee for Stalin's review. Stalin's edits on the Short Course, in Brandenberger's account, removed much of the internationalist focus focus from the text and instead gave more emphasis to the leadership of the Communist Party, a change reflecting Stalin's priorities of the moment.
Brandenberger describes the kind of internationalism that was part of Soviet ideology:
Propaganda and indoctrination played a central role in the Bolshevik movement from its earliest days. The party leadership’s demands in this regard changed after the October 1917 revolution, of course, when it set about transforming itself into a ruling institution. Mass agitation and indoctrination now became major priorities as the party sought new slogans and rallying calls with which to mobilize Soviet society. That said, the process of adapting Marxist-Leninist ideology and the party’s revolutionary experience into an appealing, accessible and evocative propaganda line turned out to be easier said than done. Ultimately, what Henry Steele Commager has referred to as ‘the search for a usable past’ preoccupied the party leadership well into the 1930s. Over the course of this long process, one of the few constants in the official line was its emphasis on the centrality of internationalism to the Soviet experiment. [my emphasis]
Initially, there were high hopes by Lenin and other Communist leaders immediately after the October Revolution that there would be other revolutions in Europe, Germany in particular. It didn't wind up happening. But it wasn't a completely unrealistic expectation. The Marxist theories dominant in the Second International assumed that a socialist revolution in a "backward" country with many more peasants than industrial workers would not be able to maintain itself without assistance from a socialist revolutionary government in a rich country. And until 1917, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was generally viewed as the world's leading party in the pursuit of socialism.
The writers of the Short Course draft described the initial period of the revolution this way:
Invoking the global dimensions of the Bolshevik experience in the introduction to their manuscript, they then promptly returned to the subject shortly thereafter in order to declare that that at the turn of the twentieth century Russia stood at the epicentre of the worldwide revolutionary moment. Industrialization was more rapid in Russia than elsewhere, conditions were more oppressive and the working class was more aware of how little it had to lose. V. I. Lenin argued in this regard that Russia represented a weak link in the international capitalist system and offered an ideal site for revolution. What was needed was a disciplined revolutionary vanguard of radicals – a position that led Lenin and his Bolsheviks into conflict with more conciliatory, ‘opportunistic’ Menshevik elements within Russian Social Democracy. Lenin clashed with the Second Communist International during these years on account of the unwillingness of Social Democrats such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel to endorse his revolutionary activism. Even leftists like Rosa Luxemburg did not automatically side with Lenin.
Even this account reflects post-1917 priorities and perceptions. It requires imagination to argue that "at the turn of the twentieth century Russia stood at the epicentre of the worldwide revolutionary moment," although the 1905 revolutionary outbreak in Russia did attract considerable interest and attention in other countries of Europe. Some of it sympathetic, some of it horrified.
Brandenberger continues that account:
The fall of the Russian autocracy in February 1917 gave Russian Social Democrats an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Second International and resume their commitment to worldwide revolution. According to Iaroslavskii and Pospelov, however, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries refused to capitalize on the extraordinary disruption that the war was causing, revealing their parochial, bourgeois orientation. Lenin, by contrast, continued to press the case for a new International and socialist revolution, both in exile and upon his return to Russia in April 1917. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government that October, Iaroslavskii and Pospelov quoted Stalin as attributing the victory to three international factors. First, the revolution had taken place at a time when the world’s major imperialist powers were preoccupied by their own internecine conflict. Second, the ongoing war led many in foreign lands to sympathize with the Russian revolution’s call for a cessation to the ongoing hostilities. Third, the war had created a revolutionary crisis throughout the combatant countries that won the Bolsheviks new allies in the struggle against imperialism.
That view of matters does give an idea of how for many people in other countries, the October Revolution was viewed with sympathy and hope. That may be more difficult for people to envision now. But czarism had been dearly hated by European democrats, including socialists, for a century or more. After Russia's defeat of Napoleon's invasion and the establishment of a restorationist peace with the Treaties of Paris of 1814-1815, Russia was widely perceived as a bulwark of royalist and reactionary regimes in continental Europe. And Russia had indeed played that role in the democratic revolutions of 1848.
Iaroslavskii and Pospelov framed the 1918–21 civil war in global terms, tracing it to international imperialism’s attempt to suppress the threat of world revolution. Hardfought Bolshevik victories against both foreign and domestic enemies in 1918 contributed to the collapse of the old order in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Soviet power was then at least briefly established in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Germany, the communist Spartacists under Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht rose in rebellion before being betrayed by local Social Democrats. In Hungary, communists also briefly took power, while other movements emerged in Switzerland, France, Poland, the United States and elsewhere. Although these risings faltered due to right-wing reaction, left-wing weakness and Social Democratic treachery, they proved Lenin to have been right about the revolutionary nature of the international situation. Eager to support such radicalism, Lenin quickly founded the Third Communist International – the Comintern – to serve as the ‘military headquarters’ of the world revolutionary movement.
Again, the authors were writing an official history, not a scholarly treatise. And that during the time of the Great Purges of 1934-1938. But its a good description of how the international role played by the October Revolution was viewed by the Soviet Communists at the time of the revolution and afterward.
Returning again to the October Revolution as a part of the First World War, the devastation left by the world war and the civil war that was quickly followed by the civil war that lasted until 1921, even into 1922 in east Siberia, left incredible damage behind.
As Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod put it How the Soviet Union Is Governed (1979):
... the real test of the Bolsheviks came not in November [1917, New Style] 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; that 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. [p. 73]
The magnitude of the human cost can be seen, in one of many ways, by the effect on children. Michael Sontheimer writes („Das Kollektiv erziehen" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):
Nach Krieg und Bürgerkrieg gab es in der Sowjetunion bis zu neun Millionen heimatlose Kinder und Jugendliche, die in furchtbarem Elend zu überleben versuchten, als Bettler, Diebe oder Prostituierte; traumatisierte Kinder, von denen manche nicht einmal ihren Namen kannten.
[After war and civil war, in the Soviet Union there up up to nine million homeless children and young people who tried to survive in terrible misery as beggars, thieves or prostitutes; traumatized children, many of whom didn't even know their names.]
The civil war was widespread. And though the seizure of power in Petrograd on October 25-26 was relatively bloodless, the following three years were a bloodbath. Ralf Zerback writes ("Land in Blut und Feuer" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):
Immer wieder rennen die Weißen gegen die Roten an, umkreisen deren Herrschaftszone. Immer wieder ziehen Truppen beider Seiten durch dieselben Dörfer, rauben und morden. Moderne Waffen wie Artillerie und Maschinengewehre steigern die Todesraten. Allein die Zahl der zivilen Opfer in dem dreijährigen Blutvergießen wird auf acht Millionen geschätzt. Alles ist Front, alles Krieg, der Kampf gegen den äußeren Feind vermengt sich mit dem gegen den inneren.
[Again and again, the Whites {counterrevolutionary forces} rushed against the Reds, encircling their zone of control. Again and again, the troops of both sides moved through the same villages, robbing and murdering. Modern weapons like artillery and machine guns drove up the death rate. The number of civil victims in the three-year bloodbath is estimated at eight million. Everything is the front, everything war, the fight against the outer enemy commingled with that against the inner.]
Counting bodies is always grim business, even at the distance of a century in the history books. One can easily find hardline anti-Russian and anti-Communist claims that seem to claim everyone who died in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1945 of all causes as victims of Communist dictatorship. So numbers of casualties reported for the USSR need to be viewed carefully and critically for this whole period. There are, sadly, no shortage of bodies to found as the results of internal state actions.
Rex Wade in The Russian Revolution, 1917 (2017 edition) gives this overview of the conflict among nationalities and different versions of nationalism during the civil war that is generally considered a part of the revolution marked by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917:
The “nationality question,” as it was called, was complex. The term encompassed a large and diverse population: more than 100 different ethnicities (including about twenty major nationalities) of widely differing size, culture, language, beliefs, and economic development. Moreover, the sense of nationality varied widely. At one extreme were individuals, especially urban and educated, who were basically Russified and had left their ethnic origins largely behind, or who for ideological reasons (Marxism especially) rejected nationalism. In contrast were those, also largely urban and educated, who were strongly nationalist and demanded autonomy or independence. Yet a third extreme variant, perhaps largest of all, were rural populations who identified with their local region or clan and had only a weak sense of being “Ukrainian,” “Kazakh,” or other nationality (although they were perhaps distinctly aware of not being Russian). In between stood people of every gradation of national identity. Moreover, some ethnic groups had a strong sense of national identity while others had little. This had political implications. There were important differences, as far as political mobilization was concerned, among simple ethnic identity (a fundamental identity as Chechen or Latvian based on local custom, language and daily culture), national consciousness (a more complex political concept deliberately fostered by national elites and patriots), and nationalism (an ideology arguing for the establishment of some kind of nationality-based state). [my emphasis]
After the February Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists set up a ruling body called the Ukrainian Central Rada, which Wade explains whose political character reflected "a fusion of nationalism and moderate socialism." The Rada's demands in those early months was for an autonomous Ukraine within a Russia federal structure. And among the nationalists as well, the general approach was to advocate a form of federalism. But the national factor multiplied the complications of the revolutionary process.
"We Don't Want to Fight, But We'll Defend the Soviets" (1922)
And Wade describes how intermixed the populations of Ukraine were:
... the significant non-Ukrainian population – 20–25 percent – ... dominated the cities and government, the professions and commerce. Russians and Jews were the most important in a non-Ukrainian minority population that included Poles, Germans, Tatars, Greeks and others. They were concentrated in the cities, while Ukrainians were primarily rural and peasant. In Kiev, the presumed capital of Ukraine and where most of the Ukrainian congresses and organizations met, Ukrainians made up only 16.4 percent of the civilian population in 1917. Of the ten largest cities of Ukraine, only one had a Ukrainian majority, and in six of the ten Ukrainians were only the third largest group (after Russians and Jews). These urban, non-Ukrainian elements also were more likely to be literate, well educated and politically engaged than were the predominantly rural Ukrainian population. [my emphasis]
In the couple of months after the October Revolution, the Ukrainian nationalists pushed hard for national independence, despite the political differences among its diverse population.
Finland had a more developed nationalist movement, which began focused efforts for independence immediately after the February Revolution. By December, Finland declared its independence, which the new Bolshevik government in Petrograd recognized. But a civil war developed early in 1918 in Finland between Red and White forces, with the Germans intervening at one point on the side of the Whites. The Whites had successfully suppressed their Communist opponents by May.
In the Baltics, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 transferred formal control of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from Russia to Germany. Latvia became the scene of protracted conflict between Reds and Whites, with continuing intervention by German troops and "volunteers," aka, the Freikorps. By the end of 1919, a non-Communist government had established control and German forces had been cleared out of Latvia. A peace treaty with the Soviet Union in August 1920 recognized Latvian independence.
In Estonia, the Red Army attempted to take control in late 1918. But an Allied-backed government with troops from Finland and naval assistance from Britain pushed the Soviet forces back in early 1919. A Soviet government was established in Lituania in the first half of 1919 but was driven out by conservative forces backed by Poland and the Western Allies.
Red Army recruitment poster
Then there were various Muslim groups in the Russian Empire, 90% of them of the Turkic ethnicity. Wade describes this population at the time of the revolution:
Most of the Muslim population was distributed in three major blocks: the Central Asians (modern Tadzhiks, Turkmen, Kirghiz, Uzbeks,Kazakhs); the Azeri Turk (Azerbaijanid) population of Transcaucasia; and the Tatars of the Volga River, Ural Mountains and Crimean regions. The first two groups lived in reasonably compact population regions, but the third was more scattered geographically and more interspersed with Russians. Muslims were a population united by a common religion but divided in many ways: by spoken language, history, geography, social-cultural characteristics, social-economic class, ethnicity and a sense of being different peoples. In many areas, especially Central Asia, identities were not well fixed in modern nationality terms, and many names were in use for various groups (Sarts, for example) that are no longer used. Moreover, many specific local issues drove the revolution in the different Muslim areas.
In the Muslim areas during the revolutions of 1917, along with the secular political ideologies, Islamic modernizers were contending with more conservative traditionalists for hegemony, as well. Wade observes of this period in Muslim areas:
All generalizations about people acting on the basis of class, ethnicity or religion become difficult, especially about their turning those identities into political action. Some Muslims joined local branches of the national political parties – Kadet, Bolshevik, SR, Menshevik – but most identified with Muslim or nationality-based parties of various social and political orientations. A unified Islamic movement failed to develop.
And if those weren't sufficient complications, Georgia and Armenia presented special challenges of their own. Violent, even genocidal Ottoman Turkish hostility toward Armenians strongly inclined Armenians in the Russian Empire toward a strong link to the central government, including after the October Revolution.
The Treaty of Breast-Litovsk in March 1918 was concluded at Lenin's insistence on peace. That insistence was partially political, because anger at the continuation of the war had been a major reason for the fall of the Czar's government in 1917 and then Kerensky's government later that year.
It was also plain realism. The Russian army had largely collapsed. They couldn't maintain the resistance against the German forces. It was a plain matter of national interest to cut their losses in a war that was clearly lost. The cost was high (Ralf Zerback, "Land in Blut and Feuer" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmach/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016):
Die sowjetische Regierung schließt im März 1918 den erniedrigenden Frieden von Brest-Litowsk - mit dem Regime des kaiserlichen Deutschland. Es sind verfreundete Halbverbündete, ein Teil der Bolschewiki spricht von einem „unverschämten Frieden". Russland verzichtet auf Finnland, das Baltikum, Polen und die Ukraine - und damit auf ein Viertel der Bevölkerung, ein Drittel der Textilindustrie, drei Viertel der Eisen- und Kohleproduktion. Lenin will Frieden um jeden Preis, weil er ihn versprochen hat und weil die Armee auseinandergelaufen ist.
[The Soviet government concluded the humiliating Peace of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918 - with the regime of Imperial Germany. They are friendly half-allies, a portion of the Bolsheviks talk about a "shameless peace." Russia gave up Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and the Ukraine - and thereby a fourth of the population, a third of the textile industry, three quarters of the iron and coal production. Lenin wants peace at any price, because he had promised it and because the army has come apart.]
Zerback notes that 14 different foreign powers were intervening in the former Russian Empire during the civil war, including five thousand Americans along with some French and British troops. The opposition included 20 regional governments, who were unable to ever unite into a single command.
Given that the Russian population was exhausted by three years of war in 1917, it is remarkable that the Communist government was able to keep the war effort going to victory in the civil war. How they did it involved a combination of persuasion, inspiration and coercion. It included a Red Terror, which in that context meant giving a great deal of leeway for arrests and punishments to the government, on the model of the Terror during the French Revolution. "Terrorism" today generally refers to attacks on civilian noncombatants but the older meaning of state terror was much more familiar a century ago.
Trotsky, then the head of the Red Army, published a tract in 1920 called Terrorism and Communism, a polemic against a leading German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, who was criticizing the Soviet government for dictatorial methods. Trotsky:
The man who repudiates terrorism in principle – i.e., repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism. ...
If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for four years, in spite of democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity – here also he will be right.
All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real conditions. The contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois manikins produced in the retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as they have emerged from the last imperialist slaughter.
Trotsky was engaging in a polemic within the socialist movement in the common vocabulary of that movement at the time. But he was making an argument that, in different terms, almost any governing party fighting for its government's survival in the middle of a civil war against both foreign and domestic enemies would make, that martial law or emergency measures would be justified. For that matter, any government in peacetime would use "suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed" opposition forces engaged in anti-government violence or imminent preparation for it.
That doesn't exhaust the very important question about the effect that the desperate circumstances and avowedly dictatorial measures to which the Communist government resorted immediately after the revolution and during the civil war had on the nature of the later peacetime government and, a decade and a half later, on the Great Purge. Such measures don't take place only in the abstract, but with very specific actions and decisions. The actions of the national police, the Cheka, during that time provide many specific targets for criticism. (The Cheka is usually referred to as the "secret police," though its existence was hardly secret.)
The months immediately after the October Revolution (Nov. 6, New Style) included several major inflection points: the Constituent Assembly elections, the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly, the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, founding of the Red Army, the beginning of the civil war.
The Provisional Government headed by Kerensky had come to power in February (March, New Style) in the wake of a popular uprising that was directed in major part against the continuation of the war. Kerensky set himself on a course to continuing it, which was a major reason the "dual power" of the Soviets remained strong enough to sustain the October Revolution. Lenin as the head of the new government was determined to get Russia out of the war. And he was willing to make major concessions to do so. In a couple of weeks at the beginning of December 1917, the Soviet government negotiated an armistice in place on the German-Russian front. "This agreement provided for a cessation of hostilities up to the 14th of January, 1918, and stipulated that the two parties would immediately proceed to the inauguration of negotiations for a full-fledged peace treaty." (George Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 1956)
The very new Soviet government hoped seriously for an immediate revolution in the West, particularly in Germany, that would also be directed against a continuation of the war. Immediate as in weeks. That did not occur. And the Soviet authorities were quickly forced to recognize that in the context of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, which were headed on the Soviet side by Leon Trotsky. Kennan:
The refusal of the Allies to join in the armistice negotiations, coupled with the continued failure of the proletariat of the western countries to overthrow their governments in the expected manner, confronted the Soviet leaders with the necessity of preparing alone—an isolated, inexperienced, precariously situated regime, with a disintegrating army—to face the formidable representatives of Imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk. This constituted the first serious reversal of Soviet diplomacy, and it was followed by evidences of sharpest resentment on Trotsky's part, directed against the Allied representatives in Petrograd. One has the impression that once the decision was made to proceed independently with the peace talks, the men in the Smolny Institute [in Russia] saw no reason why they should continue to observe any particular restraint with regard to the Allied representatives. Both the British and French Embassies experienced at that time severe difficulties and embarrassments at the hands of the Soviet authorities. [my emphasis]
Kennan devotes a chapter of Russia Leaves the War to the "Kalpashnikov Affair," which occasioned the Soviet government giving up on the hope that the United States would support them in seeking an early end to the war. Without going into the melodramatic details, the result was "a moment in the middle of December 1917 when the American representatives in Petrograd stood in acute danger of arrest and persecution, if not worse, at the hands of the Soviet authorities."
It included a dramatic moment in which Trotsky incited a crowd to sound like a 2016 Trump campaign rally in denouncing the American Ambassador David Francis in a way that inspired the crowd to cry, "Arrest Francis! Hang him! Shoot him!" It didn't come to that. But the whole sequence of events illustrated the tension and confusion and mutual distrust that hung over the relationship between the new Bolshevik government and the American representatives on the scene. Francis reportedly said during this period of the new regime, "I shall never recognize them nor have anything to do with these murderers. If ever the United States recognizes this anti-democratic party, as Robins seems to think, probably it will only be after I have resigned."
Due to some kind of miscalculation on the Soviet side, they did not sign the treaty initially negotiated with the Germans, thinking that the ceasefire would hold indefinitely. But this didn't take into account the fact that the Germans were in by far the more powerful position at the moment. Without concluding the actual peace agreement, Trotsky broke off the formal negotiations and announced a demobilization on the Russian western front. The Germans resume military operations and took effective control of even more territory. So the Russians then settled on new and less favorable German terms, concluding a treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3. Ukraine, then not controlled by the Soviet government, had settled three weeks early. The two together are known as the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, although the one usually referenced as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the March 3 one between Russia and Germany.
Joint German-Soviet military parade celebrating the agreement
The result was that the Soviets conceded control over the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuanian), Finland, Ukraine, and Polish territories held by the Czar.
Simone Bernard et al in "Der hohe Preis des Friedens" Die Russische Revolution (GeoEpoche 83:2017) explains that the Brest-Litovsk agreement reduced the territory under the Russian government's control to a space similar to that of the 1600s. Along with taking 55 million people out of what had been the Czarist Empire, it also initially deprived Russia of "a third of its agricultural lands, 54% of its industry, and 89% of its coal mines." (my translation)
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better know to the world by the last name he adopted, Lenin, was by all accounts the most important leader of the Russian Revolution in the 1917-1922 and in the years leading up to it. Albert Resis in his biographical sketch of Lenin for the reliably staid Britannica Online (accessed 09/23/2017) writes:
If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1916)
He fell seriously ill in early 1922, possibly due to the effects of a failed assassination attempt on him in 1918. By the end of that year, he was no longer active in leadership. A stroke in March 1923 left him without speech, and he passed away in January 1924 at the age of 53.
Spiegel TV has a two-minute video of silent clips of Lenin, apparently all from the time of the revolution, although it does not include commentary or captions: Lenin - Führer der Revolution.
Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was one of the two major contenders for the Communist Party leadership, along with Josef Stalin, after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated a different development policy and international political strategy than those identified with Stalin's commitment to "socialism in one country." Up until Trosky's death in Mexico at the hands of an assassin wielding a pickax in 1940, Trotskyism was the most important dissenting ideology that identified itself as part of the Communist left.
Leon Trotsky (1918)
In the later ideological disputes, Stalin and Trotsky and their partisans did their utmost to boost the importance of the one during the 1917-1924 period and to denigrate that of the other.
Trotsky had been a visible if erratic figure in the Russian revolutionary movement prior to 1917, sometimes finding himself in agreement with the Bolsheviks, other times not. He was the only one of the three who ever visited the United States, from January to May of 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in August. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in directing troops loyal to the Bolsheviks in the October 25-26 (Old Style) seizure of power. He later became Foreign Minister responsible for negotiating peace with Germany and the leader of the Red Army during the civil war.
When Lenin fell ill in 1922, the Bolshevik leaders elevated a troika composed of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev in preference to giving the central leadership position to Trotsky. Stalin had a established himself as the main leader by 1923, a status he retained until his death. In 1926, Trotsky would join with Kamenev and Zinovyev in what was called the United Opposition to Stalin. He was exiled from the USSR in 1929, and in exile formed the Fourth International, a collection of rival communist parties to those of the Moscow-led Third International.
Trotskyism has been a persistent strain in left thought ever since. Trotskyists are known for presenting themselves as the most uncompromising of revolutionaries while also at times taking positions that echo those of rightwingers and counter-revolutionaries. I once heard a useful definition which said that the Trotskyists are people who support revolution everywhere except where one is actually taking place.
Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin, aka, Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922, soon becoming the main political leader of the Soviet Union and remaining so until his death in 1953. Though he is widely remembered today as a villain, he was also one of the few most consequential political leaders of the 20th century, leading the USSR in the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s and during what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. And his role during the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 has also been contested in great detail, both by his partisans and his enemies.
Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin
Stalin was from Georgia, then a part of the Czarist Empire. He studied at a Greek Orthodox seminary, where he became attracted to Marxist revolutionary ideas. Which were definitely not part of the seminary's preferred outlook! He joined the Russian Social Democratic party in 1898 and left the seminary the following year, devoting himself to revolutionary political activity. Among other things, he pulled off robberies to fund party activities, notably including a spectacular robbery of a shipment of money to the State Bank at Tiflis in 1907.
Stalin's role during the Russian Revolution itself was significant, though not as visible as that of Trotsky.
Uwe Klußman writes in "Der letzte freie Leser" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016:
Im März 1917, kurz nach dem Sturz des Zaren, schloss sich der aus der sibirischen Verbannung heimgekehrte Stalin in Petrograd seinen bolschewistischen Genossen an. Im April 1917 wählten sie ihn zum Mitglied des Zentralkomitees. In dieser Funktion bereitete er den Aufstand der Bolschewiki vor. So wurde Stalin Teilhaber der Macht, als Mitglied der von Lenin geführten Regierung, des „Rates der Volkskommissare". Dort war er zuständig für Nationalitätenfragen.
[In March 1917, shortly after the overthrow of the Czar, he [Stalin] joined up with his Bolshevik comrades in Petrograd after returning from Siberian exile. In April 1917, they voted him to be a member of the Central Committee. In this function, he prepared the uprising of the Bolsheviks. Thus Stalin became a holder of power, as a member of the government led by Lenin, of the "Council of People's Commissars." There he was responsible for nationality questions.]
In the Russian Empire, the nationality problems were extremely important ones. Russia ruled various non-Russian nationalities and was known as the "prison house of nations." During a stay in Vienna to acquaint himself with European Social Democracy, Stalin prepared his best-known theoretical work at the time of the Revolution, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in which he advocated for the right on national self-determination on the part of the nations of the Empire. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and various nationalist groupings made cause with the Whites in the civil war, they were forced to take a more, shall we say, nuanced view of those nationalist movements.
During Stalin's stay in Vienna for six weeks in 1913, two other men who would become major antagonists of his later in life: Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. There is no evidence that Stalin's paths crossed with the impoverished young rightwing fanatic Hitler, who was then living in a shelter for homeless men who had been surviving on the margins of society. However, Herbert Lackner ("Stalin unser" Der Erste Welkrieg-Profil History April 2013) recounts that that Stalin did meet Trotsky for the first time in Vienna at Trotsky's apartment at Kolschitzkygasse 30 in the Wieden district. In an account written many years later, in 1939, Trotsky described his first impression of Stalin as not very positive. It was also during his stay in Vienna that he started using the name Stalin, first as a pen name on an article of his that appeared in the newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat.
Klußman writes further about Stalin's role in the Revolution:
Lenin schätzte Stalin als Multitalent der Machtsicherung. Während des Bürgerkriegs sandte die Partei ihn daher an verschiedene Frontabschnitte zwischen Perm am Ural und Petrograd. In Zarizyn an der Wolga, der Stadt, die später als Stalingrad weltbekannt wurde, zeigte er seinen rigorosen Führungsstil: Stalin ließ Getreide requirieren, Gegner hinrichten und Kritiker unter den aus der Zarenarmee übernommenen Militärberatern einsperren. Für seine militärischen Leistungen verlieh die sowjetische Führung ihm 1919 die höchste Auszeichnung, den Rotbannerorden.
[Lenin valued Stalin as a multi-talent for the securing of power. During the civil war, the Party sent him {Stalin} to different portions of the front between Perm on the Urals and Petrograd. In Tsaritsyn {Volgograd} on the Volga, the city that later would become world famous as Stalingrad, he showed his rigorous leadership style: Stalin had grain requisitioned, enemies executed, and critics among the military advisers taken over from the Czarist army imprisoned. For his military services, the Soviet leadership awarded him the highest recognition, the Order of the Red Banner.
An additional item on the Constituent Assembly that I discussed in the previous post in this series.
Martin McCauley and Dominic Lieven in their current article on Russian history for Britannica Online present the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 after its first and only meeting as the last gasp for democratic government in Russia during the course of the revolution.
Lenin, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October (November, New Style) 1917, managed to secure and head a solely Bolshevik government - the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks also had a majority in the Soviet Central Executive Committee, which was accepted as the supreme law-giving body. It was, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks’ party, in which true power came to reside. This governmental structure was to last until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not hold a majority, Lenin disbanded the assembly, setting the stage for civil war. If the October Revolution was accepted as democratic - supported by a majority of the population - then it ceased to be so soon after this event. In the immediate post-October days, a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee favoured a coalition government, and Lenin eventually had to give in. Some Socialist Revolutionaries were added in December 1917, but the first and last coalition government remained in office only until March 1918 ... [my emphasis]
To be clear on the dating, the Bolsheviks renamed their party the Communist Party in March 1918, weeks after the Constituent Assembly had been dismissed.
Tauride Palace (2016), where the Constituent Assembly met in January 1918
(Source: Andrew Shiva/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Rex Wade also provides some valuable context in The Russian Revolution (2017):
Part of the problem for the Constituent Assembly’s adherents was that for the worker, soldier and peasant masses the importance of the assembly had declined. It was still desirable in some vague way, but no longer essential. The soviets – through the Congress of Soviets, the Sovnarkom and local soviets – had already acted to fulfill their main aspirations, making the Constituent Assembly less important, even unnecessary. The Decree on Land had given the peasants land; they did not need the Constituent Assembly to decide that. The soldiers’ yearning for peace had been met by the armistice, which validated the new government in their eyes andmade the Constituent Assembly less important. For the workers, the new Soviet government had given them “workers’ supervision” and various other benefits. For all these key constituencies, what then was the practical purpose of the Constituent Assembly? Moreover, Soviet power and the soviets, central and local, were their institutions, responsible to them and representing their aspirations. The Constituent Assembly, on the other hand, represented all social and political groups and therefore was to be viewed with apprehension; the “bourgeoisie” might somehow yet use it to wrest control of power and nullify their gains. [my emphasis]
I'm leery about using "inevitable" for particular developments in this period in Russia. But Wade also concurs that, given the constellation of political actors, dismissing the Constituent Assembly effectively made civil war inevitable:
The assembly planned to reconvene at noon [January 6, 1918, Old Style], but before then the Bolshevik–Left SR led Central Executive Committee ordered its dissolution and Red Guards prevented the delegates from reentering the meeting hall. Immediate efforts by the SRs to stage demonstrations in support of the assembly were broken up by force, and longer-term efforts on its behalf foundered on popular apathy. The indifference to its fate outside political circles indicated the extent to which the population was politically weary and had little understanding of or care for abstract political symbols or democratic procedures.
The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly effectively marked the end of the revolution, now to be followed by civil war. By this action the Bolsheviks announced that they would not be voted from power. If they could not be voted from office, then political struggle was no longer an option and the only alternative was armed opposition. Only by force could they be removed. Civil war was inevitable and would now determine the future of Russia and its peoples. [my emphasis]
In the context of thinking about the October Revolution, it's useful to focus on the nature of the state that was initially created after the revolution. Most people know that it was called a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and most of them assume the term was largely some kind of excuse for dictatorship. And no doubt many of its practioners saw it that way.
In one pragmatic way of looking at it, there was a lot of improvising. The Tsarist government fell in February, replaced with a liberal government that immediately squandered much of what credibility it had by dedicating itself to continuing the now very unpopular war. The workers councils ("soviets") formed a kind of parallel government to Kerensky's official one. And when the soviets gave the Bolsheviks a majority, that was the basis of legitimacy on which Lenin relied in taking power in October.
They immediately faced an issue with the Constituent Assembly elections in October.
George Kennan relates the background results of the elections in November in Russia Leaves the War (1956). The February Revolution, which Kennan refers to as March in the following, had set up plans for a Constituent Assembly:
When the first Russian Revolution occurred, in March 1917, one of the basic points in the political program of the first provisional ministry had been the early convening of a constitutional convention, or "constituent assembly" as it was usually called in English usage, to determine the permanent form of national government. The intention to hold a constituent assembly accorded with the wishes of every major political party and faction operating in Russia during the period of the Provisional Government. It was the basis of the very expression "provisional government." The parties of the left, including the Bolsheviki, not only subscribed to the principle of holding such an assembly, but demanded it — repeatedly and insistently.
There was an Election Commission working on scheduling the election for it at the time the October Revolution took place.
Here's where its worth remembering that revolutions are revolutions. When they take place outside the established official order - which is not a requirement for a revolution to be an actual revolution - then they are faced with the task of constructing a new regular order with some new elements and some adaptations of the old government.
Here the example of Venezuela in the summer of 2017 is a useful approach to conceptualizing this. Hugo Chávez styled his government as a revolutionary one, the "Bolivarian Revolution." He was repeatedly re-elected as President and carried forward wide-ranging economic reforms, including exerting full public control over the PDVSA, the national oil company. Even after the 2002 US-backed coup against him fizzled, he maintained an electoral government and the national Constitution. He deferred plans for a new Constitution, judging that there wasn't public backing for it. But his government's policies were shaped by the known hostility of the US against him, which became more pronounced under the Obama Administration, whose Latin American policies were generally sharply conservative. The Cuban anti-Communist groups in the US made Venezuelan regime change a special project, which was eagerly championed by Republicans like Florida Sen Marco Rubio.
When Chavez died in 2013, a new Presidential election brought Nicolás Maduro to power by a narrow but clear margin in a highly competitive election. The opposition became increasingly militant, and the Venezuelan petrostate was hard hit by the worldwide slump in oil prices, causing new economic distresses. The Obama Administration heightened the pressure by declaring Venezuela a threat to US national security, a fairly absurd description on its face, but necessary to invoke the legal sanctions Obama had determined to impose on Venezuelan officials. The rightwing opposition became increasingly militant over time, with violent demonstrations a common occurrence by 2017. By this year, the CIA Director was talking openly about the US providing aid to supposedly democratic opposition groups. The Trump Administration even threatened military intervention.
Maduro's government decided to proceed with the process of creating a new Constitution, presenting it as a way to reconcile the pro- and anti-government factions on a peaceful basis. When the National Assembly authorized a referendum on setting up a Constituent Assembly that would prepare a new Constitution, the opposition boycotted the referendum. They and their American allies demanded that the referendum not be held. Afterward, the fact that the referendum had been carried out was used by the opposition to denounced Maduro's government as illegitimate, including the Trump Administration, which used it as an excuse to push for additional sanctions.
I don't take this as an analogy. But it's another example of a case in which a government in a precarious position had to make practical decisions around a Constituent Assembly that carried some kind of official legitimacy but one which very much subject to being contested among the contending parties.
Kennan relates what happened when the Constituent Assembly election took place on November 25, 1917:
The Electoral Commission itself Electoral Commission "refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Bolshevik seizure of power, and continued to implement preparations for the election in accordance with the instructions of the defunct Provisional Government. This procedure was viewed with sharpest misgiving by the Bolshevik authorities, but they did not seriously interfere.
The Bolsheviks' misgivings proved to be well-founded:
The result was highly unfavorable to the Bolsheviki. Out of a total of 707 deputies elected, 410 were Social-Revolutionaries, only 175 Bolsheviki. Even with the addition of the Left S-R's, who at that time split away from their own party and joined with the Bolsheviki, the Bolshevik faction still had the support of less than a third of the body. The Bolsheviki, as was to be expected, proved to have their strength in the big cities, where the moderate conservative parties ran them a close second. But the peasantry, by far the most numerous segment of the population, voted almost solidly for the S-R's [Socialist Revolutionaries].
Kennan describes the November 25 elections rather grandly. "They represented the first sounding of the popular will ever conducted in Russia under rules comparable to those which prevail under western parliamentary systems. That they were, in general, honestly held and that they constituted a faithful reflection of the feelings of the voters does not appear to have been seriously challenged by historians of the Revolution."
The official Soviet histories did not see the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly as quite the historical tragedy that Kennan portrays. In the official 1939 Stalinist History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) - Short Course, the dismissal is described briefly:
In order to consolidate the Soviet power, the old, bourgeois state machine had to be shattered and destroyed and a new, Soviet state machine set up in its place. Further, it was necessary to destroy the survivals of the division of society into estates and the regime of national oppression, to abolish the privileges of the church, to suppress the counter-revolutionary press and counter-revolutionary organizations of all kinds, legal and illegal, and to dissolve the bourgeois Constituent Assembly. ...
The Ministries were abolished and replaced by Soviet administrative machinery and appropriate People's Commissariats. The Supreme Council of National Economy was set up to administer the industry of the country. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Vecheka) was created to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, and F. Dzerzhinsky was placed at its head. The formation of a Red Army and Navy was decreed. The Constituent Assembly, the elections to which had largely been held prior to the October Revolution, and which refused to recognize the decrees of the Second Congress of Soviets on peace, land and the transfer of power to the Soviets, was dissolved.
The Bolsheviks controlled Petrograd, where the Constituent Assembly convened in January. Kennan writes that by December "the control of the Assembly was in the main a battle between two strongly leftist parties: the S-R's, who had the majority in the Assembly, and the Bolsheviki, who controlled the city streets."
Pro-Constituent Assembly demonstrators - January 5, 1918
At this stage, it would be difficult to distinguish ideology from expediency in the actions taken. The Bolshevik government tried hard to intimidate the SR's in the leadup to the first meeting of the Assembly. Kennan:
As more of the deputies began to arrive in Petrograd, the Bolsheviki neglected no steps to impress upon them the danger in which they would be placing themselves if they dared to take action not consistent with Bolshevik purposes.8 On December 26, the Pravda published a set of "theses," drafted by Lenin, on the subject of the Constituent Assembly. In this document the shift of Bolshevik policy toward the Assembly was rationalized on grounds convincing only to those who shared a belief in the ultimate righteousness of the Bolshevik cause and held that this justified an unlimited policy of expediency. "The interests of this revolution," Lenin wrote, "stand over the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly." He warned brutally that a complete endorsement by the Assembly of the legitimacy and actions to date of the Soviet regime would be the only "painless solution" of the crisis that had arisen; if this course were not taken, the crisis would have to be resolved
... only in the revolutionary manner, only by the most energetic, swift, firm, and decisive revolutionary measures. ...
In those Theses On The Constituent Assembly, Lenin argued on pragramatic grounds that the process "is taking place under conditions which preclude the possibility of the elections to this Constituent Assembly faithfully expressing the will of the people in general and of the working people in particular." And he argued on the basis of Marxist theory, "the Republic of Soviets (of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies) is not only a higher type of democratic institution (as compared with the usual bourgeois republic crowned by a Constituent Assembly), but is the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to socialism." He also stressed the urgent priority of getting Russia out of the world war:
One of the particularly acute problems of national life is the problem of peace. A really revolutionary struggle for peace began in Russia only after the victory of the October 25 Revolution, and the first fruits of this victory were the publication of the secret treaties, the conclusion of an armistice, and the beginning of open negotiations for a general peace without annexations and indemnities.
Only now are the broad sections of the people actually receiving a chance fully and openly to observe the policy of revolutionary struggle for peace and to study its results.
At the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly the mass of the people had no such chance.
It is clear that the discrepancy between the composition of the elected Constituent Assembly and the actual will of the people on the question of terminating the war is inevitable from this point of view too.
When the Assembly finally convened, the arguments between the two sides were contentious, to put it mildly. Kennan gives this memorable description of Lenin at the session:
Lenin himself was present, and acted as master of ceremonies for his faction. It was plain to observers that every nerve of his politically impassioned being was aroused by this supreme parliamentary contest. His face deathly pale with tenseness, his burning eyes darting constantly over the scene and absorbing every detail, he directed his cohorts like a commander in battle, whenever there was any chance of their dominating the proceedings. When opposition speakers had the floor, he stretched out at full length on the steps leading to the podium and reinforced the harassing operations of his followers by appearing to go to sleep out of sheer boredom.
The following morning, the Soviet government officially dissolved the Assembly. "Thus ended Russia's one and only constitutional convention," writes Kennan.
In the course of a revolution called forth by the strength of the Soviets there are certain to be all kinds of errors and blunders. But everybody knows that revolutionary movements are always and inevitably accompanied by temporary chaos, destruction and disorder. Bourgeois society is the same war, the same shambles; and it was this circumstance that gave rise to and accentuated the conflict between the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. Those who point out that we are now “dissolving“ the Constituent Assembly although at one time we defended it are not displaying a grain of sense, but are merely uttering pompous and meaningless phrases. At one time, we considered the Constituent Assembly to be better than tsarism and the republic of Kerensky with their famous organs of power; but as the Soviets emerged, they, being revolutionary organisations of the whole people, naturally became incomparably superior to any parliament in the world, a fact that I emphasised as far back as last April. By completely smashing bourgeois and landed property and by facilitating the final upheaval which is sweeping away all traces of the bourgeois system, the Soviets impelled us on to the path that has led the people to organise their own lives. We have taken up this great work of organisation, and it is well that we have done so. Of course, the socialist revolution cannot be immediately presented to the people in a clean, neat and impeccable form; it will inevitably be accompanied by civil war, sabotage and resistance. Those who assert the contrary are either liars or cowards. (Stormy applause.) [my emphasis in bold]
When he spoke at that point of "civil war, sabotage and resistance," he was describing the immediate situation. Over the following decades when Lenin's words had taken on canonical status for Communists, statements like this by Lenin would become items in elaborate disputes among left factions and for opponents of socialism.
In this speech, which offers Lenin's overview of the previous year's revolutionary process, he concludes with this explanation of dissolving the Assembly:
To hand over power to the Constituent Assembly would again be compromising with the malignant bourgeoisie. The Russian Soviets place the interests of the working people far above the interests of a treacherous policy of compromise disguised in a new garb. The speeches of those outdated politicians, Chernov and Tsereteli, who continue whining tediously for the cessation of civil war, give off the stale and musty odour of antiquity. But as long as Kaledin exists, and as long as the slogan “All power to the Constituent Assembly“ conceals the slogan “Down with Soviet power“, civil war is inevitable. For nothing in the world will make us give up Soviet power! (Stormy applause.) And when the Constituent Assembly again revealed its readiness to post-pont’ all the painfully urgent problems and tasks that were placed before it by the Soviets, we told the Constituent Assembly that they must not be postponed for one single moment. And by the will of Soviet power the Constituent Assembly, which has refused to recognise the power of the people, is being dissolved. The Byabushinskys have lost their stakes; their attempts at resistance will only accentuate and provoke a new outbreak of civil war.
The Constituent Assembly is dissolved. The Soviet revolutionary republic will triumph, no matter what. the cost. (Stormy applause. Ovation.)
