Rupert Colley - The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

History in an Hour

Rupert Colley

History in an Hour is a series of ebooks to help the reader learn the basic facts of a given subject area. Everything you need to know is presented in a straightforward narrative and in chronological order. No embedded links to divert your attention, nor a daunting book of 600 pages with a 35-page introduction. Just straight in, to the point, sixty minutes, done. Then, having absorbed the basics, you may feel inspired to explore further.

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Contents

Note on dates

Until January 1918, Russia used the Old Style Julian Calendar that before 1900 was 12 days behind our Gregorian calendar, and after 1900, 13 days behind. This text uses the New Style throughout.

The communist system unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest political experiment ever conducted. The Revolution promised freedom from the shackles of Imperialism, corruption and exploitation but until its collapse in 1991, the peoples of the vast Soviet empire endured seventy years of misguided socialism and totalitarianism.

The last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, ruled over a vast empire that was backward, impoverished and in some respects largely resentful of his autocratic rule. Its people demanded reform and change. The effects of the outbreak of war in 1914 finally, in March 1917, brought down the Tsar and the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty.

The Provisional Government that replaced the Tsar proved equally ineffectual at addressing the needs of Russias major problems. Only the representatives of the workers, or Soviets, seemed to understand the problems that lay at the heart of the empire. From the various Soviet parties it was the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Vladimir Lenin, that seized power and established the Soviet Union with its promises of a new socialist utopia. The consequences shaped the entire twentieth century and their ramifications were felt across the world.

This, in an hour, is the Russian Revolution.

On 3 March 1861, Alexander II issued what seemed on the face of it the most revolutionary reform in Russias history his Manifesto on the Emancipation of the Serfs. The edict freed 23 million serfs from their bondage to landowners, and wrested ownership of 85 per cent of Russias land from private landowners in favour of the peasants. The landlords, understandably, opposed such a sweeping change but were told by the Tsar, It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.

Alexander II, c.1870

The high ideals of Alexander IIs emancipation of the serfs fell very short of its ambition. Landowners held onto 15 per cent of the land and this was, invariably, the best land; while peasants had to buy back their land from the nobles, usually at an inflated price. The majority were, inevitably, unable to afford the cost, and were offered a loan by the government, repayable at 6 per cent over forty-nine years. The peasant, freed from serfdom, was no better off and no happier.

Twenty years later, on 13 March 1881, a group calling themselves the Peoples Will threw a bomb at the Tsars carriage in St Petersburg, fatally wounding Alexander II. The Tsars son (Alexander III) and twelve-year-old grandson (Nicholas II) were witness to Alexanders violent end. As future tsars they never forgot.

Ironically, Alexander II had, just hours before his death, put his signature to a draft decree to establish a parliament, a Duma, the first step towards a constitutional monarchy. He knew that the emancipation of the serfs had failed, and that his reforms, though laudable, merely created demand for greater reform. Thus, by their very action, the terrorists had unwittingly aborted any chance of constitutional reform. Instead, they got a new Tsar, Alexanders son, Alexander III, who immediately tore up his fathers parliamentary proposal, undid his reforms and intensified the level of repression.

The new Tsars Manifesto on Unshakable Autocracy , issued within two months of his fathers death, summed up Alexander IIIs view on how Russia should be ruled. Liberalism and democracy were considered signs of weakness; for the benefit of all, his people needed to be ruled with a firm hand and the nation needed to be more Russian. Ethnic languages and nationalistic tendencies were repressed. The vast empire was to be subject to the Tsars Russification and autocratic rule.

The Tsar intended to start teaching his son the art of statesmanship once Nicholas had reached the age of thirty. But on 1 November 1894, aged only forty-nine, Alexander III died of kidney disease. His son was still only twenty-six. Following the death of his father, a fearful Nicholas was thrust unprepared into the limelight, reputedly asking, what will become of me and all of Russia?

Russia in the early twentieth century was a mesh of nationalities and ethnicities Ukrainian, Georgian, Finnish, Baltic, Armenian, German, and Polish among others. According to the Russian census of 1897, Russians themselves only constituted 44 per cent of the Tsars sprawling empire. This was far from a happy conglomeration of nationhood, and the Tsar needed all the mechanisms of State control to maintain command of his subjects.

Imperial Russia

Determined to follow in his fathers footsteps and rule by autocratic means, Nicholas misread the underlying discontent within the empire as the malign influence of the Jew, rather than as genuine grievance. Organizations such as the pro-tsarist Black Hundreds instituted pogroms against the Jews; their communities were forced to settle in the Western reaches of the empire, the Pale of Settlement, where their movements were curtailed.

Nicholas II, c. 1900

Sergei Witte, Russias minister of finance and, after 1905, Russias first prime minister, was convinced that if Russia was to hold its own against the great European powers, it needed to industrialize. He financed Russias industrial and economic progress through large foreign loans, burdening Russia with foreign debt, and heavy indirect taxation. This particularly affected the peasants, as rents rose and grain prices fell; in some areas the effect was devastating such as the famine in central Volga in 189899.

Socialists

In 1898, amidst this turmoil, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RDSRP) emerged as the leading advocates of Marxism and revolution. In 1902 its newest member, Vladimir Lenin, published his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? in which he firmly allied the Party to the interests of the working classes. Only the Party truly understood the needs of the workers, more so than the workers themselves, who, left to their own devices, were concerned only with narrow ambitions, such as improved pay and conditions. It was down to a party of professional revolutionaries, fighting on their behalf, the vanguard of the proletariat, to bring about wholesale revolution.

Declared illegal, in 1903 the RDSRP had to hold its Second Congress in London where its members quarrelled to the point the Party split into two factions Bolshevik and Menshevik. ( Bolshevik translates as the majority faction, the Mensheviks being the minority; confusingly, the Mensheviks were the majority faction until 1917.) Both factions agreed that the three-century-old Romanov dynasty had to go, but whereas Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocated a core of professional revolutionaries under centralized leadership who would lead workers into revolution, the Mensheviks proposed a more gradual approach. Come the revolution, the Bolsheviks would immediately transfer power to the urban working classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks followed the more traditional Marxist thinking that Russia had first to develop as a capitalist economy before being ready to undergo a transition to socialism, requiring them to work with the Duma. Opposing both, another new party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, believed the route to revolution lay not with the urban working classes but the peasants.