Rabinowitch - The Bolsheviks Come to Power - New Edition: the Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd

NEW EDITION

Alexander Rabinowitch

First published in 1976 by W.W. Norton and Company, New York

This new edition first published 2017 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright 1976, 2004, and 2017 by Alexander Rabinowitch

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 9999 7 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 9998 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0102 9 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0104 3 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0103 6 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset in the United States of America

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For Ellen and Misha

T his book could not have been completed without the generous support of several funding institutions. A postdoctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to begin research at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, in 1967. Grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the American Council of Learned Societies made it possible to spend the fall semester 19701971 gathering material in Moscow and Leningrad as a participant in the Senior Scholars Exchange between the United States and the USSR, and the remainder of the year finishing research and drafting the initial chapters in Washington, D.C. Summer faculty fellowships from Indiana University and its Russian and East European Institute allowed me to devote summers to work on the book. The bulk of the manuscript was completed in 19731974 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, where my stay was supported partially by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to the staffs of the Lenin Library and the Fundamental Library of the Social Sciences in Moscow; the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library and particularly the Academy of Sciences Library in Leningrad; the Hoover Institution; the Indiana, Columbia, Georgetown, and Stanford university libraries; the New York Public Library; and the Library of Congress. I am especially grateful to Anna M. Bourguina of the Hoover Institution for help in obtaining several important sources unavailable elsewhere.

In the Soviet Union my work was enriched by consultations with Academician P. V. Volobuev. Professors George F. Kennan, Carl Kaysen, and Robert C. Tucker helped make my year at the Institute for Advanced Study one of the most memorable and without doubt the most productive of my life. Margaret Van Sant at the Institute for Advanced Study and Deborah Chase and Nancy Maness of the Indiana University Department of History and Russian and East European Institute, respectively, somehow managed to maintain good humor throughout the arduous task of typing the chapters.

I am grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to quote from my study Prelude to Revolution: The Petrograd Bolsheviks and the July 1917 Uprising, and to James L. Mairs and Emily Garlin, my editors at Norton, for their help in preparing the present book for publication.

The greatest debt that I have incurred is to my wife, Janet Rabinowitch. A constant source of intellectual stimulation and encouragement, she went over successive drafts with an experienced editorial eye and made countless suggestions for improvement. Whatever merits this book may possess are due in no small part to her interest and patience.

Special thanks are also due my colleague Stephen F. Cohen; his invariably sound advice and perceptive criticism were of enormous benefit at every stage of my work. Leopold Haimson, who has been the source of inspiration for a whole generation of American students of Russian labor history, shared useful thoughts relating to this study during several discussions in the spring of 1974. I owe much to them, as well as to John M. Thompson, George F. Kennan, William G. Rosenberg, S. Frederick Starr, Stephen Soudakoff, and Donald Raleigh, who read and commented on some or all of the chapters. Their suggestions have been invaluable in revising the manuscript. I alone, of course, bear responsibility for the remaining shortcomings.

T he system of transliteration employed in this work is the one used by the Library of Congress, with some simplifications. When appropriate, proper names are spelled in their more customary English forms.

All dates are given according to the Julian calendar, in use in Russia until 1918, rather than the Gregorian calendar of the West. In 1917 the former was thirteen days behind the latter.

As used in this book, soviet or soviets refers to the elected councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies, representative revolutionary organizations that sprang up throughout Russia in 1917, rather than to people or institutions of the USSR, the most common current meaning of these words. The term Soviet refers more specifically to the central institutions of the soviets in 1917, usually the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies and the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Peasants Deputies. The two All-Russian Executive Committees often met and acted jointly.

W ith the perspective of a full century, the October revolution of 1917 in Russia appears as a seminal phase in a complex and dynamic political and social process deeply rooted in the profound injustices of late Imperial Russia and greatly exacerbated by Russias participation in a losing world war. This phase began in Petrograd, then the capital and industrial center of the Russian empire, shortly after the February 1917 revolution that ended with the overthrow of Nicholas II and the end of the three-centuries-old tsarist regime. Primarily as a consequence of popular frustration with the cautious domestic and foreign policies of the liberal Provisional Government established after the fall of the tsar, this phase culminated eight wildly turbulent months later in the coming to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks (renamed Communists in March 1918) and the birth of Soviet Russia.

The Bolshevik triumph in the fierce struggle for power in 1917 Russia and in the terrible three-year civil war that followed led to the gradual formation of the ultra-authoritarian Communist-controlled Soviet regime that dominated Russian politics and society and was the central factor in international affairs for the better part of the last century. At another level, the Bolsheviks coming to power marked the start of a gigantic, although ultimately failed, experiment in egalitarian socialism of worldwide impact in the near term and of enduring global interest. Surely, then, the October revolution of 1917 in Petrograd was one of the seminal events, and arguably, the single most important historical development, of the twentieth century.

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Let me begin by recalling the influences that shaped my thinking about the Russian Revolution before I began my own professional study of it. Undoubtedly the most important of these influences was my upbringing in a family of liberal Russian