committed, came to an end when the leadership of the People’s Will voted unanimously for the only item on the agenda: to execute Alexander II without further delay. The execution was successfully carried out under the command of Sofiya Perovskaya; during the ensuing repression, the small groups that had survived were crushed. The impact of these events on all the Russian political parties that emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century should not be underestimated.
Wishful thinking on the part of liberal historians and ideologues has helped sustain the view that had it not been for the Bolshevik ‘aberration’, the course of Russian democracy would have flowed smoothly and fed into the Western European marsh. What democracy has ever flowed smoothly? This did not happen in 1991 any more than it would have in 1917. In reality, given the relationship of forces and the continuing war, the most likely eventuality would have been the rise to power of a hard-core military dictatorship through mass pogroms and large-scale repression, with Entente support designed to keep Russia in the war.
The February Revolution produced a weak government that was incapable of dealing with the crisis and committed to the war. There were only two forces that could have filled the vacuum: the Bolsheviks, after they received a vigorous reeducation course from Lenin, and Generals Kornilov, Denikin, Kolchak and Wrangel and Wrangel’s cohort, who led the Whites during the civil war that followed the revolution.
When there is no revolutionary party or one that has been defeated and decapitated, it is reaction rather than reform that triumphs. This pattern has remained constant from Cavaignac and Louis Napoleon to Groener, Noske, Mussolini and Hitler, from Suharto to Pinochet and in the work of virtually every American president.
Why would Russia have taken a different course had there not been a revolution or if the Red Army had lost the civil war?3 Liberal and conservative historians often belittle the events of October 1917 as a ‘coup’. This was not the case. True, the urban proletariat on which the revolution based itself was a minority of the population, dominated by a peasantry that dotted the large rural hinterlands of the country and that supported the Bolshevik decrees on land ownership immediately after October. Without this growing support among the poor peasants, the Bolsheviks could not have won the civil war. Lenin’s dictum that the strategic majority needed for success must have a decisive preponderance of force in the decisive place at the decisive time had a relatively restricted meaning in Russia.
It was only after the Bolsheviks won majorities in the soviets that they set the date for the insurrection. Lenin can be denounced for basing himself exclusively on the workers, but here he was following the instructions of the founding elders of the movement, Marx and Engels. This was also the reason he dissolved the Constituent Assembly in November 1917. Here the Bolsheviks argued that the soviets were a higher form of democracy and that they were not going to waste time debating the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in a chamber that had been overtaken by revolution. The Bolshevik vote in these elections, however, did signify huge support in the towns. Out of a total of 37.5 million votes cast, 16 million (mainly in the rural areas) voted for the SRs, 10 million (mainly in the urban areas) for the Bolsheviks and 1.3 million (of which 570,000 were in the Caucasus) for the Mensheviks.
Revolutionary periods invariably encompass a huge fluctuation of political consciousness that can never be registered accurately by any referendum. The fact that the garrisons in Petrograd and Moscow came over so rapidly to the Bolsheviks’ side related to the acceleration of disasters on the front. The peasants in uniform, politically radicalised by the war, simply did not wish to fight any longer for a regime that was not interested in them, their families, their welfare or the conditions in which they fought. Lenin’s pithy slogan embodying the Bolshevik transitional programme – ‘Land, Peace and Bread’ – was brilliant (as even his many enemies were forced to acknowledge). Behind each word lay a set of ideas encompassing Bolshevik strategy.
No revolutionary vanguard party can ever triumph on its own. This is why those addicted to the word ‘coup’ have little understanding of revolution. Whether we ever see one again (a different matter and a different discussion), proletarian revolution as conceived by Marx and Lenin is a gigantic awakening of the millions of exploited, who believe in their own capacity to emancipate themselves.
Fractures in the state, divisions in the ruling class and indecision on the part of the intermediate classes pave the way for dual power, which, in Russia, led to the creation of new institutions and later, in China, Vietnam and Cuba, rested on revolutionary armies with varying class compositions that were locked in battle against their respective state machines.
In the Russian case, Lenin spelt this out with customary clarity a few weeks before the October Revolution:
To be successful, insurrection must rely, not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon an advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, halfhearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point. These three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism. Once these conditions exist, however, to refuse to treat insurrection as an art is a betrayal of Marxism and the revolution.
After the debacle of the July Days, when the masses had attempted to lead the party during an unripe situation, the Bolshevik press was banned, some of its leaders imprisoned and Lenin exiled to Finland. It was from there that he sent the most urgent political letters in revolutionary history, pleading, explaining, arguing that July was a temporary setback, that the masses would rise again and the party must be prepared. He pointed out, accurately, that it was Marx who ‘had summed up the lessons of all revolutions in respect to armed uprisings in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known: de l’audace, de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.’ In a more truculent mood he would provoke Menshevik and Bolshevik critics by quoting Napoleon: ‘First engage, then see.’
Two key members of the Bolshevik Central Committee – Kamenev and Zinoviev – were not convinced and strongly opposed the insurrection, publishing its date in Gorky’s newspaper. In fact it was hardly a secret that the Bolsheviks were planning a revolution. Lenin had said as much when he arrived at the Finland Station. His rage when the Bolshevik versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the Central Committee revealed the date of the planned insurrection is understandable – the element of surprise being crucial in all wars, including social and political conflicts – but in the end, it didn’t matter at all. The insurrection still took place, proving that a ruling class in total disarray is helpless against masses that are raring to move forward, even when its members know the date of the revolution.
Why is insurrection an art? Because an armed uprising against the capitalist state or occupying imperialist armies has to be choreographed with precision, especially during its final stages.4 The armed workers’ militias and soldiers have to be coherently led in order to achieve victory. The final decision was left to the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet, which was chaired by New Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and had a Bolshevik majority. And the victory, too, was reported to the Soviet, then in session at Smolny, Petrograd.
Every upheaval has its own peculiarities, but there are broad similarities between revolutions as well. The three great revolutions in European history all went through two distinct phases, each taking a more radical turn in the second and final act. Colonel Thomas Pride’s purge of the House of Commons on 6 December 1648 was the precursor to the trial and execution of Charles Stuart, the key dividing line in the English Revolution that made further compromise impossible. The Jacobin ascent to power in the French Assembly (or descent, given where they sat) in 1793 played a similar role in accelerating the revolutionary process, with the public execution of Louis Capet and Marie Antoinette in October of that year.
