The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Russia and the Bolshevik RevolutionAuthor(s): John D. BasilReviewed work(s):Source: Russian Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 42-53Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/127227 .Accessed: 06/05/2012 01:03

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

By John D. Basil

STUDENTS of Russian history quickly learn that the problem of ascribing limits to the Bolshevik revolution can become a frustrating snare if not treated with the utmost caution and

clarity, and thus the first task preceding a discussion of the revolution is to define it; in fact, before this essay attempts to

compose such a definition it might benefit by reviewing just a few of the multitude of interpretations that have thus far found their way into print. The definition implied in the slogan used

by official historians during the anniversary year (1967), "The Bolshevik Revolution: Fifty Years Later," is often useful, but it

instantly implies that the revolution started by Lenin and his followers ended on November 7, 1917,1 or perhaps a few days or weeks after that date. But if the revolution is seen in this

perspective, one takes the risk of emphasizing the celebrated events connected with the November, 1917, coup d'etat and neglecting many important institutional changes the Communist party introduced into Russian life under Lenin and Stalin. Another view, quite different from the official one, is held by an American historian who wrote that the Bolshevik revolution was only the closing phase of a greater Russian revolution that began with the rigorous industrial activity of the late nineteenth century, and was stimulated by men possessed with the "ambi- tion to surpass and overtake the leading 'capitalist' coun- tries ...2 But while it is true that Russia industrialized quickly,

'Dates will conform to the Gregorian calendar. 2Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin, Why Stalin? A Reappraisal of the Rus-

sian Revolution, 1900-1930, New York, 1964, p. 220.

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

many communities industrialzed rapidly without undergoing the changes we have watched take place in the Soviet Union. In addition, men possessing the "ambition to surpass and overtake the leading 'capitalist' countries" have appeared in abundance in the pages of Russian history since the reign of Peter the Great; thus, this appraisal seems too imprecise to be very useful. An- other interesting interpretation concerns those historians who have chosen to define the revolution by identifying it with one of its leaders. But in this case the writers study the motivations of the leader and usually expend little effort analyzing the actual changes the leaders brought about. Thus, for example, our libraries hold many books treating Lenin's and Stalin's views toward the education of youth, but few works that would permit a student to answer the question: How did the Communist lead- ers actually change the school system inherited from imperial Russia? Some follow the leader so closely they conclude that the Bolshevik revolution ended not in Russia at all, but near Mexico City in 1940.3 In addition, such an emphasis tends to focus excessive attention on the distinguishing features among revolu- tionary leaders and obscure the continuity that has been one of the hallmarks of Soviet history.

But let us discuss the Bolshevik revolution as a Russian phen- omenon, in a context that had vast significance for the Russian people themselves. Let us ignore the biographies of its leaders, set aside for a time a study of its implications with Western Europe, shelve the question of the doctrinal purity of the pres- ent leaders of the Soviet Union, and investigate instead the great

3Isaac Deutscher often identifies the course of the revolution with the ideas and tactics used by its leaders. Thus, for example, he holds that the path of the revolution changed once Trotsky, lost his position of promi- nence in the Soviet Union. "Postscript: Victory in Defeat," in The Pro- phet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929-1940. Trotsky himself would probably have agreed with Deutscher; merely the title of his Revolution Betrayed makes the reader suspicious that the former Bolshevik viewed the rule of his opponent, Stalin, as different in kind from the one initiated by the revo- lutionary leaders in November, 1917.

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institutional changes brought to the Russian state and society by the Communist party. Let us study the revolution as a campaign directed by men who changed the character of organized Rus- sian society in the belief that such a change would alter the character of Russian social life and ultimately the character of the Russian citizen himself. Let us study the continuous cam-

paign that began with the Bolshevik coup d'etat in the fall of 1917 and ended in the early 1930s with the collectivization of

agriculture, the revolution as it affected the great masses of the Russian people. Once we discuss the changes brought by the revolution we can conclude by comparing the institutional struc- ture of Russia in 1917 with the institutional structure of the U.S.S.R. today, and try to understand the depth to which the BolshevLk revolution penetrated into Russian society.

At the dawn of the revolution two particular actions under- taken by the Bolshevik leaders made it clear that Lenin and his followers had no intention of recognizing the constitutional

precedent begun in Russia when Nicholas II signed the October Manifesto establishing a State Duma. Both the dissolution of the

Preparliament (Provisional Council of the Russian Republic) on November 7, 1917, and the disbanding of the Constituent

Assembly on January 19, 1918, served as harbingers, warning that the revolution and the future government ruling Russians would break continuity with the past by putting an end to the division of power within the Russian state structure. An end had come to the institutional devices through which the Rus- sian community had shared power with Nicholas II. The vic- tories gained from the monarchy as a result of the struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that resulted in the

founding of the Duma, focal point of legal opposition to the

imperial government, were snatched from the hands of socialists and liberals alike. The Bolshevik state was to be absolute.

Unlike Lenin, the leaders of the 1917 February revolution did not try to erase the lines that separated powers within the state

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

structure, but retained the division of authority. Although the Duma itself did not play a significant role during 1917, the socialist leaders used the precedent established by the Duma. The Mensheviks in the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies secured the legal right to re- view legislation passed by the Provisional Government, and held considerable control over the Government in other ways. Ra- bochaia Gazeta, the official Menshevik publication in Petrograd in 1917, made clear the conditions under which non-Bolshevik socialists would support the Government: "If the Provisional Government fulfills its duty, if it begins to act, without reserva- tion and delay, in the way that the interests of democractic Rus- sia demand,... then it will inevitably enjoy the confidence of the people."4 But at the same time Mensheviks explained to the Russian people their very good reasons for refusing to dissolve the Provisional Government and seize all state power for them- selves. "If the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Petrograd took government power into its own hands, this government power would turn out to be a shadow and would lead us quickly into civil war."5 In fact, the notions of separation of authority within the state structure and political liberty were so closely linked in the Russian political tradition that Kadets directing the Provisional Government and Mensheviks leading the Soviet worked to keep both institutions independent and influential in political affairs. Neither group of men wanted to return the state structure to its former absolute nature by sub- merging their competition and seizing all power.6

During 1917 the Mensheviks in the Soviet of Workers' and

4"Vremennoe Pravitelstvo, "Rabochaia Gazeta, no. 1 (March 20, 1917). 5"Sovet rabochikh i soldatskikh deputatov," Rabochaia Gazeta, no. 1 (March 20, 1917).

6The conscious desire to prevent the state authority from returning to its former absolute nature was obvious among the political leaders during 1917. To accuse a liberal or a non-Bolshevik socialist of wanting to seize

: :-:-alI power amounted to spreading slander. "Protivopolozhnosti skhodiatsia," Den, no. 101 (July 5, 1917), and Rech, no. 158 (July 8, 1917).

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Soldiers' Deputies were not the only leaders that upheld the

precedent established in 1905. The Preparliament founded in October, 1917, served much the same purpose the Soviet and the Duma had; it was an assembly with legal authority to review or qualify government legislation, and was used until the Bol- shevik coup on November 7, 1917. But most politically active Russians felt the fulfillment of the potential embodied in the 1905 October Manifesto was to be realized in the meeting of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. Meeting here, Russians

hoped to secure the division of authority within the state struc- ture for all times, and leave the executive branch of government responsible to a legislative assembly. During 1917 all parties were outspoken in their desire to convoke the Constituent As-

sembly as soon as practicable, and survivors of the revolution still charge one another with bearing the burden of responsibility for failing to bring the Assembly into reality.

Lenin had little interest in helping to perpetuate traditions that encouraged the separation of powers within the state structure. On the same morning the cruiser Aurora was sailing into the Neva River, an armoured car filled with Bolshevik in-

surgents arrived at the Marian Palace (home of the Parliament) where its occupants disembarked and announced to the as- sembled delegates that the Preparliament was now dissolved. The following day, after the fall of the Provisional Government, Lenin declared that the Bolshevik controlled Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was the sole source of government au-

thority in Russia. On January 19, 1918, the precedent estab- lished in 1905 by the October Manifesto vanished from the Russian political scene when Lenin dispersed the popularly elected Constituent Assembly; he showed his contempt by re-

ferring to the Assembly as parliamentary cretinism.7 Thus, dur-

7During the revolution of 1917, Lenin wrote three major articles on the Constituent Assembly, all of which clearly expressed his opinion regarding parliamentary government in general and the Constituent Assembly in

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

ing the early days of the Bolshevik revolution an important po- litical institution founded by those Russians opposed to the ab- solute power of the imperial regime was quickly brought to an end through the use of force, and all imperium gathered into the hands of the Bolshevik party.

Once the division of powers within the state structure had been dissolved, institutions loosely connected to the state struc- ture, as well as some enjoying partial independence, lost all autonomy to the new Bolshevik state in Petrograd. The zem- stvos, the peasant cooperatives, many banks, the volost courts, many small and large industries-all of which had emerged since the reforms of Alexander II-were either dissolved or their leaders forced to surrender the autonomy of their organiza- tions to the new authority ruling Russia. And the Bolshevik lead- ers went far beyond simply retrieving the power lost to the im-

perial government during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Soon all private organizations, including the inde- pendent bar, professional unions, trade unions, and academic societies (outside the supervision of the state) came to an end. The International Red Cross, the Free Economic Society, many industries and commercial houses, political parties (after the Kronstadt revolt), and religious societies were dissolved; even the Boy Scouts were dissolved. The new state constructed by the Bolshevik leaders to change Russian society was to have no private institutions competing with its authority.

By amassing absolute power into the hands of the state, the revolutionary leaders controlled all avenues of communication, bringing something quite new to Russia. Before 1917 the im- perial government certainly enforced censorship laws and often used administrative devices to restrict communication among the less subtle critics of the government and society, but during the reign of the last three Romanovs the rules limiting free

particular. V. I. Lenin, Sochineniia, 4th ed., Vol. XXV, "0 konstitutsion- nykh illiuziiakh," Vol. XXVI, "Tezisy na Uchreditelnom Sobranii," and "Rech o raspuske Uchreditelnogo Sobraniia."

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communication among citizens and groups were relaxed. Dur- ing the last part of the nineteenth century scholarly journals printed by the universities and learned societies of St. Peters- burg and Moscow were published untouched by the censor, and Russia's great novelists writing in the realist style were able to communicate with little hindrance from the hand of the gov- ernment; even the Marxist George Plekhanov found he was able to publish some of his writings in the legal press. In the early twentieth century once rigorous censorship laws were relaxed to the extent that Russian art, music, and literature could enjoy one of its greatest periods of development and ex- perimentation. It is true that the bureaucracy and the police continued to circumvent the law on special occasions, using ar- bitrary means to prohibit the circulation of many publications, but experts agree that after 1905 the cause of free communica- tions in Russia had advanced considerably.8

The leaders of the revolution ended the movement toward complete relaxation of government censorship. The Bolshevik leaders began by prohibiting the printing and circulating of those newspapers whose editors and contributors held hostile views toward the revolution. At first this ban included only the press of rival political parties such as the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Kadets, but soon all printing was sub- ordinated to the control of the state, bringing government con- trol far beyond the limit it reached under the emperors before 1917.9 By December of 1920 even the private literary journal Proletkult, by no means a publication hostile to the Bolshevik revolution, was brought under the control of the new state.

8Jacob Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Polit- ical and Social Institutions Under the Last Three Tsars, New York, 1962, p. 120.

9Political rivals made attempts to avoid the Bolshevik suppression by changing the name and location of their publications. For months after the November, 1917, coup d'etat the Mensheviks, for example, changed the name of their official organ no less than seven times. The game of cat and mouse was played with the Bolsheviks ultil March, 1918, when the newspaper was closed for the last time.

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

Although it is true that the period of the New Economic

Policy saw the reappearance of many independent publications, the press in Russia did not retrieve the freedom it lost in Novem- ber, 1917; during the NEP period the Communist party made no secret of the fact that access to the printing press would de-

pend on the sympathy of writers and editors toward the revolution; so-called counterrevolutionary figures could publish only illegally.10 And even though party leaders themselves be- came entangled in a maze of abstractions trying to cope with the problems presented as a result of clashes among fellow travelers and various Communist literary groups during the NEP

period, writers were never left to doubt that political matters would always be served first and that the Communist Party had no intention of relinquishing its supervisory position over all

literary activity." Beginning in 1926, the Soviet government be- gan to limit all private printing, and by the early 1930s even writers loyal to the revolution once again found printing and the circulation of printed material completely under the control of the state.

Although educational institutions are rarely considered in a discussion of the communications media, we would be ignoring an important chapter in describing the institutional changes the Bolshevik revolution brought to Russia if we overlooked this link. During the nineteenth century Russian universities fought for independence and won practical victory during the revolu- tion of 1905 when complete autonomy was restored by the im- perial government once it realized that only the most ruthless repression could keep this area of communication under state control. The Russian institutions of higher learning reflected the freedom they enjoyed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the works of V. 0. Kliuchevsky, A. M. Soloviev, and

?Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928- 1932, New York, 1953, pp. 21-22.

10On the Policy of the Party in the Field of Belles-Lettres: Resolution of the TSK RKP(8), July 1, 1925. Translated in Ibid., pp. 235-240.

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P. N. Miliukov, for example, stand as monuments to the creative efforts of learned Russians who taught (and still teach) stu- dents of Russian history in America as well as Russia.

During the revolution a radical change was introduced into university life. For only a short time after November, 1917, professors were allowed to work in comparative peace, and soon members of the humanities faculties who were not members of the Pokrovsky "school" were subject to harassment. In 1922 a number of professors were actually expelled from Russia.12 It is true that the leaders of the revolution relaxed their grip on uni- versity activity during the NEP period, but not to a substantial

degree. In 1929 when Stalin commanded the entire Soviet edu- cational system to turn its efforts toward building utopia, little resistance was offered by the student body or the faculty. Ob-

viously the new state had not surrendered sufficient control over the universities during the 1920s to enable so-called hostile

groups to organize.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primary and secondary education were, for the most part, already under state supervision, but schools did enjoy a degree of auton- omy, especially those established by the zemstvos. In the early twentieth century Russia also witnessed a significant growth in private education, especially that kind designed for the in- struction of adults; in fact, by 1917 some adult education insti- tutions were experimenting with the Montessori system. The revolution changed the structure of Russian primary and second- ary school systems swiftly; in 1918 Sovnarkom (the Council of

People's Commissars) directed that all elementary and second- ary schools in Russia be transferred under the direct control of the People's Commissariat of Education.13

The drive launched by the Bolshevik leaders that extended

12Bernard Pares, A History of Russia, 5th ed., New York, 1947, p. 489. 13Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krestianskogo pravitel-

stva, no. 509 (Moscow, 1919), p. 482.

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolttion

the control of the state over Russian society reached its greatest degree of penetration during the period of the First Five Year Plan. The collectivization drives brought to an end the com- munal land tenure observed by most Russian peasants, and brought to a close independent farm ownership in Russia, dras- tically limiting the opportunities that had been offered to the Russian peasant in 1906 when the Duma approved Peter Stoly- pin's laws making it possible for the peasant to withdraw from the commune.14 By bringing agriculture under the direct control of the state, the Communist leaders under Stalin reversed the trend developing toward independent enclosure that had begun as early as 1870 in many parts of Russia;l5 they regimented the greatest bulk of the Russian population in state farms or artels, which were controlled from the Machine-Tractor Stations where farm machinery owned by the state was housed. The period of the First Five Year Plan also included an intensive and largely successful drive to bring the remaining private industrial and commercial institutions in Russia under the control of the state. During the First Five Year Plan the leaders of the Com- munist party extended the power of the Russian state into areas of organized social activity that had remained free of state supervision even in the lands ruled by the great despots of im- perial China.

If we compare the institutional organization of the Soviet Union today with that of the early 1980s we are immediately struck by a profound similarity. Despite the fact that written constitutions have appeared in the Soviet Union guaranteeing the separation of powers within the state structure and pro- tecting the freedom of groups to assemble, organize, and pub- lish, the state has nevertheless remained consolidated in the

14Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement, from Emancipation to the First World War, Princeton, 1957, pp. 48-49.

1Alexander Nikolaevich Chelintsev, Selsko-khoziastvertnaia geografiia Rossii Berlin, 1923, pp. 118-119..

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hands of the Communist party, and the state remains the sole legal center of authority in the U.S.S.R.; the right of Russians to found institutions outside the state structure, or to participate in politics through a legislative assembly is recognized in print, but denied in fact. A comparison of Russian institutions between 1930 and 1967 reveals further that modern developments in the field of mass communications such as the motion picture, tele- vision, the distribution of newspapers on a massive scale, and

high speed transportation have only served to maintain and in

many cases strengthen the grip the leaders of the Communist

party secured by 1980. Despite the party purges during the 1930s in which many leaders directing important areas of the Soviet state were executed by Stalin, despite the War during which large areas of the Soviet Union were occupied by enemy forces for several years, and despite the fact that the Russian

people have shown no signs that a continuation of the present political leadership would be welcomed by them, Russian so-

ciety in 1967 can still express itself only through channels owned and controlled by the Communist party. Only the Russian Orthodox Church survives the continuing attempts by the state to close its doors; it is the only nationally organized private institution legally functioning in the U.S.S.R today, and its pub- lication, Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii, remains the only pri- vately owned publication in the Soviet Union today.

It has not been the object of this article to treat the question of doctrinal purity in the present leaders of the Soviet Union, nor to suggest that historians will find no features distinguish- ing the leadership of Lenin from that of Stalin or Khrushchev. Nor has it been stated or implied that many changes that have taken place in Soviet life since 1930 are insignificant and un-

worthy of serious attention; it has not been suggested that Soviet artists and scientists have made anything less than remarkable contributions in their fields, or that the Soviet leaders found nothing useful in the political tradition inherited from imperial

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Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution

times. The hypothesis presented was that the institutional changes brought to Russia by the Bolshevik leaders were no less than enormous; the Communist leaders broke continuity with the past by consolidating the state structure into the hands of one institution, and took away the autonomy of all private in- stitutions. It was concluded that the state established a monopo- ly on all avenues of communication among Russian citizens ex- cept that one which passes by word of mouth. We have also sug- gested that the sustained drive to change the institutional struc- ture of Russian society began on November 7, 1917, subsided after 1930, and that during this drive the Communist party pulverized Russian organizational development far beyond the limits reached by the most powerful Romanov monarchs. Fi- nally, a comparison of the Soviet Union in 1930 with the Soviet Union today revealed the ability of the state to maintain its con- trol over Russian society, and the reluctance of its leaders to surrender to Russians the freedom to organize and express them- selves through channels beyond the control of the Communist party.

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