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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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Episode 10.67: Liberty or Victory

Last time we covered the Bolsheviks’ first week in power, a week most of their enemies and rivals assumed would not be their first week in power, but their only week in power. But the Bolsheviks issued a flurry a proclamations explicitly crafted to win mass popular support while they fended off what turned out to be a pretty feeble political and military counter attack.

As we also saw, however, while the Bolshevik government in Petrograd publicly chased the legitimising power of mass popularity, they also laid the groundwork for a highly centralized one party state, so that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become synonymous with the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks.

Now, because so many of the dramatic event shaking the world have taken place in Petrograd, that is where we have been spending a lot of time. But let’s be real: we’re talking about a couple of thousand hardcore Bolshevik party members backed up by tens of thousands of sympathetic Red Guards, soldiers, and sailors in one single city. But the Russian Empire was quite literally the largest political landmass on earth, stretching from Helsinki to Vladivostok, from Archangel to Tbilisi. The total population was somewhere north of 120 million people, encompassing more than two dozen nationalities. Successfully taking over an assembly hall at the Smolny Institute in downtown Petrograd starts to look awfully small compared to that context. Now this is why the Bolsheviks knew it was so vital to do everything in the name of the Soviets. Because after six months of war, chaos, disappointment and disillusionment, since the February Revolution, the Soviets as an institution were probably the one thing left in the Russian empire that had any political legitimacy at all. There were local Soviets scattered everywhere, hundreds of them. Inside army garrisons and naval bases, factories and mines, big cities, small towns, tiny villages — each of those local Soviets enjoyed a great deal of local support. And so when word spread, either by telegraph or railroad or word of mouth, that the October Revolution stood for All Power to the Soviets, the news was greeted with enthusiasm.

Now, none of this was about people cheering the ascendancy of the Bolshevik party, mind you. It was about cheering the ascendancy of the Soviets, especially as news of the October Revolution in Petrograd was often accompanied by news of the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, the new worker regulations, and the Declaration of Rights for National Minorities. The October Revolution appeared to mean that the Russian Empire would finally undergo a real political and social revolution. It stood for mass empowerment and individual rights and dignity, replacing the hated centralized bureaucracy with its secret political police and huge military apparatus only serving a tiny clique of out of touch officials.

[Stares in foreshadowing.]

But though the verdict of the October Revolution was initially accepted, it was hardly uncontested. The most immediate example was in Moscow. As soon as Moscow learned of the events of October 25th, political leaders split into two hostile camps, with the Bolsheviks on one side, and a coalition of SRs, Mensheviks, moderate socialists, Kadets and army officers on the other. Inner Moscow turned into a war zone during the last week of October, as both sides raised armed attachments to fight for control of the city. This street fighting in Moscow, along with the little battle of Pulkovo outside Petrograd we talked about last week, count as the first shots of the Russian Civil War. And both ended almost the same way: just as the Cossacks were surrendering outside Petrograd on October 31st, the Bolshevik dominated Moscow Soviet went on the offensive and declared victory the following day. The two biggest and most important cities in the empire were now in the Bolshevik Soviet camp, but only after expending a lot of bullets and a lot of artillery.

There were a couple of other big regions that resisted the Bolsheviks and Petrograd — one of them, Ukraine, I’m going to set aside until next week, because that requires more discussion and ties more directly to post-October Russia’s relationship with the rest of the world, which we’re going to talk about next week — but another was the Cossack regions in the south along the lower Don River. This area would become the original home base of the White Armies, which were already well on their way to being formed in November 1917. For centuries, the Cossacks had enjoyed semi-autonomy and special privileges from the tsar in exchange for their fearsome military service. And because of that long history of service to the tsar, the Cossacks were a major boogeyman for the Russian socialists and revolutionaries. And specifically, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks made plans to seize power in October 1917, they harped on the counter-revolutionary threat posed by Cossack general Alexei Kaledin.

Kaledin had been implicated in the Kornilov Affair, but then he refused an order to resign, and instead headed back to his home territory, where he sat at the head of three armies and dared anyone to tell him what to do. Bolshevik newspapers in the fall and winter of 1917 consistently raised the spectre of the three Ks of counterrevolution: Kerensky, Kornilov, and Kaledin.

Now, I think it’s fair to say that after the October Revolution, the Cossacks had little loyalty for either the deposed tsar or Alexander Kerensky, but they were absolutely opposed to the Bolshevik seizure of power, and their homeland would become a safe haven for all those who shared that opposition. And, their homeland would be the ground within which the first white flags would be planted.

Another small but vital center of resistance that the Bolsheviks knew they would have to snuff out immediately was the general staff of the army. When the October Revolution hit, the Russian army was led by Commander in Chief Nikolai Dukhonin. He was a 40 year old former quartermaster who Kerensky had appointed commander in chief in the wake of the Kornilov Affair, and — don’t worry about him too much, he’s not going to be around for more than a couple of minutes. After Kerensky and Kornilov failed to recapture Petrograd on October 30, which we talked about last week, Dukhonin signaled that the general staff intended to resist the Bolsheviks. But I’m sure you can guess what happened when he told his soldiers to get ready to march on Petrograd: yeah, nobody listened. The Decree on Peace was enormously popular with the men, they were all done fighting, and they were certainly not going to fight against a government that promised to end the war.

The Bolsheviks briefly tolerated General Dukhonin, but on November 9th, lenin ordered him to begin negotiations with his German counterparts for an immediate armistice. When Dukhonin refused, Lenin relieved him of command and replaced him with Lieutenant Nikolai Krylenko, veteran of the Bolshevik military organization, delegate to the second Congress of Soviets, one of the trio of commissars in the government responsible for military affairs, and now, commander in chief of the Russian army.

As Lenin dispatched Krylenko to take over at headquarters, Lenin issued a radio appeal to the soldiers, encouraging them to take the matter of revolutionary peace into their own hands. “Soldiers,” he said, “the cause of peace is in your hands. You cannot let the counter-revolutionary general sabotage the great work of peace. You will place them under guard in order to prevent lynchings, which are unworthy of the revolutionary army, and to ensure that they will not escape the tribunal which awaits them. You will observe the strictest revolutionary and military order. The frontline regiments are immediately to elect delegates to begin formal negotiations with the enemy for an armistice. The Council of People’s Commissars authorizes you to do this. Inform us by every means possible the progress of negotations. The Council of People’s Commissars alone has the authority to sign the final armistice.”

With Krylenko on the way, General Dukhonin and the rest of the sitting general staff tried to depart for the relative safety of Kiev, but their own men blocked them from leaving on November 18th. Meanwhile, old General Kornilov and his host of loyal officers had just been sitting around nearby under the loosest of house arrests since September. On November 19th, they all just got on their horses and rode away. They headed towards the Don Cossack region, where they would form the senior officer corps of a volunteer army to fight the Bolsheviks. Among those riding away with Kornilov was the notoriously antisemitic right-wing general, Anton Denikin.

The next day, Krylenko arrived at headquarters with a detachment of Red Guards and armed sailors. General Dukhonin met him at the station, but was placed under arrest by his own men. Not exactly listening to Lenin’s literal words, but certainly taking matters into their own hands, the soldiers bayoneted Dukhonin to death right there at the train station.

Now, next week, we’re going to talk about the external results of the October Revolution and follow the peace talks with the central powers at Brest-Litovsk, but today we are going to stay with the internal dynamics, because we are finally approaching something that has been dangled out in front of everybody’s nose since the February Revolution: the constituent assembly.

As we talked about way back in Episode 10.63, a constituent assembly had been promised on the very day Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne. The provisional part of the provisional government was because they were supposed to be merely caretakers until the convening of the constituent assembly. But then, it just kept getting delayed. Now, partly the delay was caused by a kind of overly judicious sloth from the people who were supposed to be running the elections, but partly, it was because there was an unstated assumption that the constituent assembly should not be convened until after Russia had won the war. When Kerensky’s June offensive failed, which was supposed to be the moment Russia went off and won the war, everyone just seemed to freeze like deer in the headlights. The Bolsheviks were able to make great political use of the delay, and as we noted in Episode 10.73, on the eve of launching their insurrectionary coup, one of their publicly stated planks was guaranteeing the constituent assembly would finally be convened as promised.

When they took power, the Bolsheviks felt obligated to live up to their word. One of the earliest decrees that came out of that first week in power said that the elections for the constituent assembly, which were now scheduled for mid-November, would go ahead as planned without alteration or delay. Now, Lenin of course was personally not on board with that at all. He argued in favor of either manipulating the electoral system to ensure the Bolsheviks and their left-SR allies held a voting majority, or just abandoning the whole thing entirely. But he was out voted on the Bolshevik Central Committee, as everyone else thought it would be political suicide to try to manipulate or cancel something that had been promised for so long, and which had been so immediately promised by the Bolsheviks. For opponents and rivals of the Bolsheviks, the constituent assembly was being set up as something of a final boss that they could count on to crush the insurgent Bolshevik dictatorship. It was taken for granted the Bolsheviks would not win anywhere close to a majority of the seats, so the Bolshevik adventure would last until the constituent assembly convened, whereupon the voting majorities in that constituent assembly would draft a new constitution. At a minimum, the Bolsheviks would have to accept the status of junior partners in any future government, and if they did not accept that, then they could go to the dustbin of history.

The SRs in particular believed the constituent assembly would solve everything, and that the Bolsheviks wouldn’t dare try to overthrow a truly democratic assembly of the nation. One SR said of his comrades, “They thought the constituent assembly was protected by some vague power. The great people of Russia would not permit any profanation of the noblest ideal which had sprung from the revolution.” But just to be sure, they formed the Union for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly, composed mostly of that same collection of SRs, Mensheviks, intellectuals, and municipal officials who had been actively opposing the Bolsheviks since October 25th.

Elections to the constituent assembly unfolded over the last two weeks of November 1917. They were held on the basis of universal suffrage — truly universal suffrage. All adults were allowed to vote, both men and women. Now down the road, the Soviets would sometimes imply women won the right to vote as a result of the socialist revolution, but we should be clear that women were granted the right to vote in the electoral law of July 20th, back when Lenin was still settling into hiding in Finland. All told, about 45 million people voted. It was a huge turnout given the circumstances. It was nothing less than the single largest election in Russian history to date.

The official results would not be announced until the end of September, but the picture soon became very clear: of the 767 seats elected from the 74 districts that we have data from, the vast majority of the electorate voted socialist of one stripe or another. Something like 75 to 80% of the total votes went to socialist parties. The liberal Kadets, once the leading political party in Russia, won just four and a half percent of the vote, for a grand total of 16 seats. The Kadets could not even muster more than a quarter of the vote in the cities where they were supposed to be strongest. So, one thing for sure that we can take away from all this is that in the fall of 1917, there was no right-wing block, nor even a progressive liberal block. Everyone voted socialist. We also do not find among the vast Russian peasantry, as we did find among the French and German peasants after 1848, any hint of forming a conservative base for reactionary neo-absolutism. The Russian peasants were radical socialists, and more than anything else, they were voting for the radical redistribution of land.

But that leaves us to disentangle that socialist vote, because we know that not all socialists are the same. As anticipated, the SRs won 17 million votes or about 37% of the total, netting them 324 seats. They would form the largest single block in the assembly. The SRs had been the party of the peasants from the beginning, and they were the best known party out in the villages, and they feel that the best known candidates out in the villages. They were also joined by Ukrainian SRs running in their own territory as their own party — the Ukrainian SRs won 12% of the total vote, and 110 seats, pushing the SR delegation right to the threshold of an outright majority. But complicating things is that after October, the right SRs and the left SRs have broken into rival camps. Now, in many places, the party lists were drawn up before this split became real, and there’s a huge amount of ongoing debate among historians about how much the voting peasants were aware of the split. It seems like in some places there were rival lists presented to the voters, and in other places not. So though the SRs were the largest single party, it is not clear at all how their individual members would vote. I should also say that it does seem very clear that whether the peasants were voting right SR or left SR or just for any SR, the peasants are voting for radical redistribution of land. That’s what they want.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks won 10 million votes, or 23% of the total, netting them 183 seats. This was simultaneously an incredible advance for a party that had been an unknown fringe minority on the verge of extinction just a few months earlier, but also, obviously, it is a big problem for a party claiming to speak on behalf of the people of Russia. The Bolsheviks had basically zero connection to the peasants, and they collected all their votes from the urban parts of central Russia. The further you got from the city centers and the further you got from the center of Russia, support for the Bolsheviks tapered off rapidly. Lenin took some solace in the fact that his party did very well in key military garrisons: in army units in central and western Russia, the Bolsheviks were clearing 60% of the vote. In the Moscow and Petrograd garrisons, they were winning 80% of the vote. All told, about 5 million soldiers voted, and the SRs and Bolsheviks wound up running neck and neck with each other, each taking about 40% of the vote.

I should mention before we move on here that the Mensheviks are dead. All told, they’re going to win 3% of the total vote, just a handful of seats, and not unlike the imperial general staff, they wind up looking like a group of generals without an army.

As the picture of the electoral results started to clarify, the Bolsheviks were left with a choice. As they entered the constituent assembly as a minority faction, if they failed to win enough votes for their preferred policies, would they accept the verdict of the assembly win or lose, even if it meant giving up power? They did not have long to decide. But I should say that whenever the possibility of the Bolshevik government shutting the assembly down entirely, the SR Victor Chernov said, “They wouldn’t dare.”

While the elections unfolded, a missing pillar of Soviet authority convened. That oh so all important Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies had been just that: a congress of soviets of workers and soldiers’ deputies. The peasant soviets did not take part in it. As an organizational institution, the Congress of Peasant Soviets, dominated by SRs, protested the convening of the Second All-Russian Congress, and refused to send delegates. One wonders how history might have been changed if those peasant SR delegates had shown up in Petrograd instead of turning up their noses. It’s entirely possible the Bolsheviks would not have had enough votes to push through what they pushed through on the night of October 25th, which I guess we’ll just file under history is made by those who show up.

On November 26th, a new Congress of Soviets of Peasant Deputies convened in Petrograd. Before this Peasant Congress convened, the Bolsheviks and their left SR allies managed to alter the rules of representation to the Peasant Congress, adding slates of delegates from local military garrisons, which were more properly represented by the Soviets of Soldiers’ Deputies, but since they were heavily Bolshevized, Lenin pushed through a rule change to pack in as many Bolsheviks as possible. And as we just discussed, it’s not like there were any actual peasant Bolsheviks to call on. The Congress was a chaotic mess from the start: Bolsheviks and left SRs were by now experts at tactical disruption, yelling, hooting, heckling, and physically pushing their way on stage if they didn’t like what was being said. One of the main points of contention at the present Congress was the constituent assembly. Lenin himself delivered a speech to the Congress where he floated the notion that really, when you think about it, there’s no need for a constituent assembly, because the Soviets are already a higher form of democracy. In response, Victor Chernov put forward a resolution that said, “The Congress believes that the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’ Deputies, as the ideological and political guides of the masses, should be strong combat points of the revolution standing guard over the conquest of peasants and workers. With such legislative creativity, the constituent assembly must translate into life the aspirations of the masses, as expressed by the Soviets. In consequence, the Congress protests against the attempts of individual groups to put the Soviet and the constituent assembly against one another.” With Lenin clearly aiming to do just that, the Congress approved Chernov’s resolution by a vote of 362 to 321. But with the left SR leader Maria Spiridonova chairing the Congress, the Bolsheviks convinced her to set this vote aside. This brought the Peasant Congress to a crashing halt. The right SRs walked out and reconvened elsewhere, declaring themselves the legitimate Peasant Congress, while those they had left behind, merely an illegitimate rump. The Bolsheviks and left SRs who had been left behind said exactly the same thing. The matter was ultimately settled by the power of, well, power. The Bolshevik and left SR Congress approved a slate of delegates to go off and join the executive committee of Soviets that they had formed after the October Revolution, that would be a precursor to calling for a third All Russian Congress of Soviets, this one of workers, soldiers, and peasant deputies, which would indeed be set up as an alternative to the constituent assembly. And the reason that worked, the reason all of that was considered legitimate, is because the Bolsheviks won.

And indeed Lenin and the Bolsheviks are playing to win. On December 1st, just after the constituent assembly elections ended, the Bolshevik government straight up outlawed the Kadet Party — not a prescription of individual Kadets, but a blanket ban on the party. Lenin still believed that as the party of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the Kadets represented a major threat, particularly if they were able to link with the reactionary elements in the military. Lenin, in fact, referred to them in public as the Kadet-Kaledin party, that is, the Cossack general setting up white armies down in the south.

Just as with the press censorship decree, Lenin was assailed for his attack on civil liberties. Those liberties were supposed to be one of the cornerstones of any post revolutionary regime. We overthrew tsarist tyranny in part because of all the censorship and political controls, remember? And here you are simply putting all of that back into place. Lenin’s old friend Maxim Gorky, who I should mention Lenin still allowed to publish, attacked the criminalization of the Kadets as fundamentally incompatible with political liberty. Even the left SRs who were on the verge of joining Lenin’s government protested against his actions. But Lenin didn’t care. Political victory was far more important to him than something so trifling as political liberty.

Then on December 5th, Lenin and the Bolshevik government took another step towards ensuring liberty did not interfere with victory. In a secret decree, they did not even make public, they abolished the Military Revolutionary Committee, and repurposed its constituent parts to create a new paramilitary apparatus with a far more all-encompassing mission to protect the revolution. The new group was called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage Under the Council of People’s Commissars. But since that is quite a mouthful, this group became known — when its existence became known by its shorthand name, the Cheka.

The Cheka would be run by its own separate committee that did not answer to the Executive Committee of the Soviets, nor even really to the government itself. It was just its own independent institution dedicated entirely to fighting counterrevolution. They were above, below, outside, and between the law. So, just as the tsar had his Okhrana, the Bolsheviks would have the Cheka. The new boss was starting to look an awful lot like the old boss.

The Bolsheviks then spent the rest of December consolidating as much political and economic power as they could. The initial decrees they issued had mostly been about securing popular support, whether those decrees were Bolshevik party policy or not. But in the weeks that followed, they embarked upon what was clearly their preferred project of centralization and nationalization of economic functions. On December the fifth, they created the Supreme Council for the National Economy to Coordinate, Manage, and Control Economic Production. Its leadership included the economic commissars of industry, food, agriculture, finance, and transport. On December 11th, the government created a commissar of public education who would remove childhood education from the hands of the church, and put it in the hands of the central state apparatus. On December 14th, they issued a decree giving the state a complete monopoly on banking. All private banking operations would be combined under a single state operation. And while they promised to preserve and protect individual savings accounts, they also authorized the immediate confiscation of any bullion they found. Then they moved on to major industry. On December 16th, the government confiscated the Russo-Belgian Metal Company, and on December 18th, the main electrical company. That same day, they abolished the open market for rent and living accommodations in all cities as a precursor to fixed rents, that would not be exploitable by landlords, who would soon be deprived of their property anyway. On December 24th, the famous Putilov Iron Works were taken over and nationalized.

Taken together, we see here a clear path for the Bolsheviks replacing the chaotic exploitation of capitalism with rational central planning. That was the plan anyway.

By the time we get to these later decrees, however, the government was no longer composed entirely of Bolsheviks. Having successfully worked together since October, and with the split between right SRs and left SRs irrepairable, especially after the breakdown of the Peasant Congress, the left SRs entered negotiations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks to join the government. The Bolsheviks of course retained their majority, but the left SRs were given important seats. As the SRs were the party of peasant socialism, they were given the Commissariat of Agriculture. They were also given pretty key roles for the internal governing of the empire, and left SRs now took over the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the Interior — excuse me, Commissariat. They also got the more minor seats of posts and telegraphs, and local self-government. They were also given seats on the committee in charge of the Cheka, so they could at least keep an eye on what the Bolsheviks were up to. When this merger was confirmed on December 12th, everyone just chilled out, right? After all, the big bad thing the Bolsheviks had done was not enter into a coalition with other socialist parties, right? Well, that’s over. Bolsheviks and SRs are now together in a coalition government. So everything is cool now, right?

Maybe not so much.

That same day, Lenin issued a set of theses regarding the coming constituent assembly. Knowing that the Bolsheviks had only won a quarter of the seats, Lenin spent 19 bullet points arguing that because the Soviets represented the only form of democracy that would ensure the proper transition to socialism, the constituent assembly better tread very carefully. Lenin made some fairly specious claims about the voting system for the constituent assembly being unfair, even though his own party had approved the system, but then he issued a fairly stark ultimatum. Lenin said, “That if the constituent assembly opposes Soviet power, it is condemned to inevitable political death. The interests of the revolution take precedence over the formal rights of the constituent assembly.”

So Lenin is once again very happy to just say out loud exactly what he’s planning to do. Victor Chernov and the other SRs were convinced Lenin wouldn’t dare move on something as sacred as the constituent assembly, as if they had never met Lenin before in their lives.

Next week, however, we will not move directly to everyone apparently meeting Lenin for the first time, because next week, we also have to start talking about what the Bolshevik revolution means for Russia’s place inside the war, and inside the world. They had promised peace without annexation or indemnity, and Lenin and Trotsky meant to secure an immediate armistice, and then permanent peace on those terms as quickly as possible.

The problem, of course, was what happens if immediate peace, and peace without annexation and indemnity, are simply incompatible.