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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.78: Neither War nor Peace

Last week we left off in Brest-Litovsk on January the fifth, 1918, with the Central Powers unrolling a radically re-imagined map of Eastern Europe depicting the dismemberment of the Russian Empire, and telling the Russian negotiating team, accept this map as the basis of peace or else. As this map represented abject capitulation to the Central Powers, Russian Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky knew it could have explosive political implications for the Bolsheviks back home. He told the Central Powers he would have to speak directly to his government, and later that day, boarded a train to return to Petrograd.

Meanwhile, on that same afternoon of January 5th, 1918, his comrades were dealing with another matter that could have explosive political implications. This was the day, the long awaited Constituent Assembly, promised ever since the moment Nicholas abdicated the throne, finally convened. It was finally, finally time for a democratically elected assembly of the nation to write a new post-revolutionary constitution for Russia. More immediately, this might very well spell the end of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevik party. There was a halfway decent chance that by the time Trotsky got back to Petrograd, he would no longer be commissar of foreign affairs. There may even be a warrant out for his arrest.

When the election results for the Constituent Assembly were announced in December, the frustrated rivals of the Bolsheviks thrilled at the knowledge that they would finally be able to oust Lenin’s unnatural government. The right SRs would control the largest block of votes, and they ran their printing presses night and day pumping out pamphlets, placards, newspapers, and leaflets, all trumpeting the slogan, all power to the Constituent Assembly. This was meant to replace and overcome the old slogan co-opted by the Bolsheviks, all power to the Soviets. The right SRs also sent activists into the trenches and to the barracks and the factories to talk up the Constituent Assembly as the sacred culmination of the revolution. But for all the right SRs talk about defending the Constituent Assembly, all they would do is talk about defending the Constituent Assembly. When militant members of the party showed the SR Central Committee their plan to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky, the central committee forbade the plot. When about 10,000 SR-aligned soldiers in Petrograd volunteered to stage an arm demonstration coinciding with the opening of the Constituent Assembly — to remind the Bolsheviks they weren’t the only ones who knew how to use a machine gun — the SR Central Committee rejected the offer. No guns, no violence. They believed the universally recognized sanctity of the constituent assembly would be all the protection it needed. And besides, civil war among the socialists would only benefit the counter-revolution. This latter point may well have been true, but it led the right SRs and their allies to unilaterally disarm on the eve of a major political showdown. When the SR regiments were told they could only demonstrate if they came out unarmed, they told the messenger, “Are you making fun of us comrade? You are asking us to a demonstration, but tell us to come without weapons. And the Bolsheviks? Are they little children? They will for sure fire at unarmed people. And we, are we supposed to open our mouths and give them our heads for targets? Or will you order us to run like rabbits?” If they were deprived of the means of fighting back, they would not come out at all. And so when the time came, they did not come out at all.

The Bolsheviks on the other hand, obviously had no scruples about coming out under arms. On January the third, Lenin’s government placed Petrograd under martial law. They prohibited public assemblies, and issued proclamations ordering soldiers to stay in their barracks and workers to stay in their factories. On January 5th, the day that Constituent Assembly opened, an SR delegate described the scene as he approached the Tauride Palace. The closer one approached, the fewer pedestrians were seen, and the more soldiers, Red Army men, and sailors. They were armed to the teeth, guns slung over the shoulder, bombs, grenades, and bullets in front and on the side, everywhere, everywhere that could be attached or inserted. The entire square in front of the Tauride Palace was filled with artillery, machine guns, and field kitchens. Machine gun cartridge belts were piled up pell mell. The number of armed men and weapons, the sound of clanking, created the impression of an encampment, getting ready either to defend itself or to attack.

Opposed to this clanking Bolshevik encampment was an SR-organized street demonstration under strict orders: no guns, no violence. Now perhaps as many as 50,000 people turned out for this demonstration, though, that is the high side of the estimate. Whatever the number was, though, it was less than the organizers had hoped for. They were also disappointed by the crowd’s composition. It was almost entirely middle-class professionals, basically the educated white collar types who had been on strike since the October Revolution. There were no workers. There were no common soldiers. It was not exactly a march of the masses that the SRs envisioned. As the demonstrators approached the neighborhood of the Tauride Palace, they encountered armed soldiers operating under the flag of martial law.

In at least two separate incidents, the soldiers opened fire on the unarmed procession, scattering them chaotically, and killing somewhere between 10 and 20 people. For all that it happened in 1917, this was actually the first time Russian soldiers had fired on unarmed demonstrators since the February Revolution. There was some brief hope among the SRs and the professional middle classes that this new Bloody Sunday would finally, fatally discredit the Bolsheviks; that the nation would rise in outrage against Lenin and his murderous thugs, revealed to be no different than the tsar and his Cossacks.

But, uh, here’s the thing: nobody cared. Nobody is going to care about any of this.

Meanwhile, inside the Tauride Palace, 463 deputies assembled for the opening session, roughly half the total number elected. Of those in the hall, there were 259 right SRs, 136 Bolsheviks, and 48 left SRs. This gave the right SRs, for the moment, an outright majority. Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik Central Committee were on hand to direct what they reasonably believed to be an incredibly precarious moment for their government — a government they had self-enshrined back in October. Given the SR majority, the venerable Victor Chernov was elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly.

But from the beginning, the session was unruly. The Bolsheviks were by now masters of vocal and physical disruption: whenever non-Bolshevik speakers rose, Bolshevik deputies jeered, hooted, booed and interrupted. The hall was also full of armed soldiers who were there to ‘provide security’ — all of them actively sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. What’s more, the soldiers had gotten into the vodka at a welcome banquet for delegates and they drank continuously for the next 12 hours. If they heard things they didn’t like, or saw people they didn’t like, they would point their guns at them, for drunken and menacing amusement.

Lenin’s strategy for the constituent assembly was to introduce a poison pill as soon as possible. This poison pill was a document called The Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Masses. The very first article stated, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a Republic of Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. All power, centrally and locally, is vested in the Soviets.” it then proceeded through short bullets, ratifying everything the Bolsheviks had done since October, and concluding with the statement, “The constituent assembly considers that now power must be vested wholly and entirely in the working people and their authorized representatives, the Soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants deputies. Supporting Soviet power and the decrees of the council of peoples commissars, the Constituent Assembly considers that its own task is confined to establishing the fundamental principles of the socialist reconstruction of society.”

If the Constituent Assembly approved this document, it meant they were abdicating their right to craft their own constitution. It simply handed all sovereign legitimacy to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had taken control of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers and Peasants’ Deputies. As Lenin expected, the SR majority defeated this motion 237 to 136. And with this done, the Bolsheviks declared that the Constituent Assembly was controlled by counter-revolutionary enemies of the Soviet, and staged a walkout. All of this was going a hundred percent according to plan, and the Bolshevik Central Committee convened in another room in the Tauride Palace. While Chernov and the SRs gave long-winded speeches in the main assembly hall, the Bolshevik leaders drafted a proclamation, dissolving the Constituent Assembly. This done, Lenin then issued instructions to the soldiers guarding the palace: don’t use force against any of the delegates. Don’t prevent anyone from leaving, but absolutely do not allow any new people in the building.

The session continued all night, but finally, at four o’clock in the morning of what was now January, the sixth, an armed sailor strode up to the Tribune just as Victor Chernov was in the middle of approving the confiscation of land without confiscation. The sailor unceremoniously interrupted Chernov and told him to stop talking and shut it down for the night. Chernov spent about twenty minutes trying to keep things going — and he had the support of his fellow delegates, but he did not have the support of the armed and drunken soldiers filling the assembly hall, shouting, “Enough, enough,” and “Down with Chernov,” So the delegates voted to adjourn.

Technically the SRs adjourned the constituent assembly until 5:00 PM. But when they left, the guards locked up the building and then blocked anyone trying to get in. Later that morning, Pravda published the government decree dissolving the Constituent Assembly. They justified this by saying “The right Socialist Revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assembly a most desperate struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow, and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by force of the working classes, which is essential in the interest of emancipation from exploitation. They are defending the saboteurs, the servants of capital, and are going as far as undisguised calls to terrorism, which certain unidentified groups have already begun. It is obvious that under such circumstances, the remaining part of the constituent assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.”

Now, it didn’t really matter that this is kind of the opposite of what the SR Central Committee had been doing over the last several weeks. Yes, they wanted a government enshrined by the Constituent Assembly to replace the Soviet government led by Lenin — but they were absolutely and explicitly trying to dampen down calls for violence. But like I said, that didn’t matter. And after a single session, lasting just about 12 hours, the long awaited Constituent Assembly never reconvened. That was it. It was done.

Now you might be asking yourself, how on earth can Lenin and the Bolsheviks get away with this? Hasn’t everyone been waiting for the Constituent Assembly since March? Didn’t most of the voters vote against the Bolsheviks? How can they just brazenly shut down the assembly without triggering like a mass uprising?

Well, here’s the thing: by January, 1918, the vast majority of Russians, including all of those tens of millions of voters, didn’t really care about the Constituent Assembly. At the local level, it was regarded as some far off assembly of elite intellectuals doing god knows what. The Decree on Peace satisfied the soldiers and sailors. The regulation on worker control satisfied urban labor. The Decree on Land was all the rural peasants had ever wanted. And remember too, for all of these groups, their local Soviets were the one political institution that continued to have real legitimacy. They were not far away assemblies of elite intellectuals, but local assemblies, composed of their own people. So when the news arrived that the Constituent Assembly had been dissolved because they opposed Soviet power — which is, after all, what Lenin had set them up to do — well, then who needs them? Who cares? All power to the Soviets.

On top of all that, Lenin was ready with the great alternative to the Constituent Assembly. On January 10th, the executive committee of the Soviets convened the Third All-Russian Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, deliberately convened at that moment to act as the popular alternative to what was now portrayed as a nefariously anti-Soviet Constituent Assembly. They also convened a Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies, composed almost entirely now of Bolshevik and left SR delegates. Those delegates voted on January 13 to merge with the Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, which also just so happened to be composed almost entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. Once these two congresses merged, they became the single All Russian Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants’ Deputies, and they claimed the mantle of legitimate popular sovereignty.

It would not be unreasonable to call this Congress the founding of the Soviet Union. The Congress overwhelmingly approved the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited Peoples, whose first article was, “Russia is hereby proclaimed a republic of soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasants’ deputies.” The second article then said, “The Russian Soviet republic is established on the principle of a free union of free nations as a federation of Soviet national republics.” And though there would be a few nomenclature shifts along the way, this is really the origin point to the Soviet Union, and why it’s called the Soviet Union. It also laid the permanent foundation of Russian communism. The Congress abolished private ownership of land, granted the Supreme Economic Council authority to convert factories, mines, railways, and other means of production and transport into state property, consolidated all banks into a single state institution. As a general statement of political and economic ideology, they said their fundamental aim was “… to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes, to mercilessly crush the resistance of the exploiters, to establish a socialist organization of society, and to achieve the victory of socialism in all countries.”

As this auspicious Soviet Congress wrapped up Lenin, addressed them: “Comrades,” he said, “before the Third Congress of Soviets closes, we must establish with complete impartiality the momentous part it has had to play in the history of the international revolution and of mankind. There are incontestable grounds for saying that the Third Congress of Soviets has opened a new epoch in world history, and there is growing awareness of it significance in these times of world revolution. It has consolidated the organization of the new state power which was created by the October Revolution, and has projected the lines of future socialist construction for the whole world, for the working people of all countries. The new system of the socialist Soviet Republic as a federation of free republics of the different nations inhabiting Russia has been finally accepted in this country in the sphere of domestic politics.”

But as Lenin and his government were set to embark on this new epoch in world history, after apparently winning the political war at home, they faced a looming threat from abroad that might tend to turn this from an epoch into a tiny blip. The armies of the Central Power were massed on the Russian border, representing the or else if the Russians did not sign the terms of the treaty Trotsky brought back with him from Brest-Litovsk. And so we now turn our attention from domestic politics to foreign affairs.

Just days after successfully shuttering the Constituent Assembly, a group of about eighty Bolshevik leaders convened to discuss the terms of the peace. Three factions emerged from this discussion. The smallest was led by Lenin, who advocated signing the terms, now, without delay or argument. Lenin’s read on the situation was the Russian army was in no position to fight. He said, “There is no doubt that it will be a shameful peace, but if we embark on a war, our government will be swept away.” For the moment, he said they needed to focus on ensuring the revolution survived in Russia. “Germany has only just now pregnant with revolution,” he said, “but we have already given birth to a completely healthy baby.” Besides, he said, “The bourgeoisie has to be throttled, and for that, we need both hands free.” In Lenin’s opinion resuming the war with Germany would be absolutely catastrophic.

But Lenin once again found himself opposed by a majority of his own party. Most Bolsheviks favored turning this imperialist war into a revolutionary war, to do as the Jacobins had done in 1792, and call upon the people to defend the revolution, and then march off and crushed the fragile old powers of Europe. This faction was led most passionately by Nikolai Bukharin, who had joined the party as a teenager after the Revolution of 1905. After years of loyal service to the party in exile, Bukharin became one of the most influential political leaders in Moscow in 1917, and he directed the Bolshevik takeover of Moscow in the midst of the October Revolution. As a reward for this, he was now editor of Pravda. Bukharin was also now the leading voice of what would be called the left communists, who organized around total opposition to peace with the Central Powers, and the immediate declaration of revolutionary war to the death.

In between Lenin and Bukharin was Commissar of Foreign Affairs Trotsky. He concurred with Lenin that the Russian army was an absolutely no position to fight a war, but he was also acutely aware that if the Bolsheviks did not prove their hostile independence from German imperialism, and shut down rumors, that they were just a bunch of paid German agents, the revolutionary project both at home and abroad would be wrecked. So Trotsky formulated a novel slogan: neither war nor peace. The Russians would reject the German terms, and then simply announce that so far as they were concerned, the war was over. The inner circle of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party was wary of both Lenin’s demand for peace at almost any price and Bukharin’s call for revolutionary war, and so they voted to endorse Trotsky’s diplomatic novelty, neither war nor peace.

So Trotsky returned to Brest-Litovsk and the talks resumed on January 15. Trotsky went right back to trying to play for time with all the rhetorical stalling he could muster, hoping against hope the German proletariat would rise up and make all of this a moot point. But by now, even the patiently tolerant Baron Von Kuhlman was getting extremely annoyed at the stalling. Finally, on January 27th, the Baron received a telegram from the kaiser demanding action. “This must be ended as soon as possible,” the kaiser wrote. “Trotsky must sign by 8:00 PM tomorrow without procrastination peace on our terms. In the event of refusal or attempts to procrastination and other pretexts, the negotiations are broken off at eight o’clock on the night of January 28th, and the armistice will be terminated.” That same day at another negotiating table in Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers negotiated a peace with representatives of the Ukrainian Rada, now recognized as the independent Republic of Ukraine. In exchange for peace and recognition, the Rada pledged massive shipments of grain to feed the famished populations of Germany and Austria. They also gave permission for the armies of the Central Powers to enter Ukraine, which was pretty important, because on that same day, a small army of Red Guards led by Moravia — the guy who led the defense of Petrograd at the battle of Pulkovo — pushed its way into Kiev and took control of the city on behalf of a Bolshevik aligned Ukrainian soviet, which denounced the rod has claim to political legitimacy. Civil war in Ukraine was now well underway, and both sides would need all the help they could get.

Meanwhile, back at the Russian negotiating table, Trotsky came back on January the 28th to respond to the final final ultimatum. Almost everybody expected him to just sign the treaty, there was nothing else for him to do. But instead, Trotsky carried his program of neither war nor peace to its logical and somewhat absurd conclusion: he said Russia would not sign the ignoble terms as presented by the Central Powers, and they would not be an accomplice to the dismemberment and destruction of the Russian Empire.

So would they go back to fighting?

No, absolutely not. Trotsky announced to a stunned audience, “We are demobilizing our army. We refuse to sign a peace based on annexations. We declared that the state of war between the central empires and Russia is at an end.” The war was over, but there would be no peace treaty. Baron von Kühlmann exclaimed, “This is unheard of!” but there was nothing he could actually do in that moment. Trotsky and the rest of his negotiating team got on the train and left.

Now as the German leaders huddled to figure out how to respond to this, I must stop briefly here and insert every historians’ favorite Soviet decree. On January the 25th, 1918 Pravda announced a new policy that would take effect at the end of the month. This decree read:

In order to establish in Russia the same way of counting time as used by almost all civilized people, the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars decrees the introduction of the new calendar into lay use after the end of the month of January of this year. Accordingly, one, the first day after 31 January of this year is to be counted not as the 1st of February, but as the 14th of February. The second day counted as the 15th, and so on.

That’s right. This is the moment Russia drops the Julian calendar and adopts the Gregorian calendar. So they went from January 31st, 1918 to February 14th, 1918, and that was that. From here on out, there will be no more triple cross checking different sources and books to make sure the proper dating chronology is being followed. From here on out, all dates everywhere will be the same. Thank god. Long live the revolution.

While the calendars were unifying, the kaiser got his advisors together. Though nobody wanted to resume the war against the Russians, Hindenburg and Ludendorff told the kaiser that all of their plans for a final campaign in the west in the spring of 1918 required the absolute guarantee the Russian army was finished, and it required access to Ukrainian agriculture. They couldn’t afford to fight on the eastern front, but they also couldn’t afford not to fight on the eastern front. So on February 17th, 1918 of the now blessedly unified calendar, the Central Powers launched an offensive campaign against Russia. The Germans advanced from west to east; the Austrians moved from southwest to northeast; the Turks move from south to north; all of them advancing rapidly through territory undefended by any army. One German commander remarked at the outset of this campaign, “This is the most comic war that I have ever experienced. It is waged almost exclusively in trains and automobiles. One puts on the train a few infantry with machine guns and one artillery piece and proceeds to the next railroad station, seizes it, arrests the Bolsheviks, and trains another detachment, and moves on. The procedure has in any event, the charm of novelty.”

With an unstoppable invasion now under way, the Bolshevik Central Committee convened on February 18th, and Lenin finally secured a one vote majority for his motion to sign the peace treaty right now, immediately, no more delays. The deciding vote came from Trotsky. Neither war nor peace had now run its course, and peace was the only viable option left. Lenin transmitted Russia’s surrender without delay, but then the Central Powers just ignored him. They did not respond. Their armies simply kept advancing. In the north German armies entered Lavonia; in the center, enemy forces entered Minsk and Pskov; in the south, Austrian, Hungarian, and Turkish armies kept pushing into Russian territory. This went on for days and days and days without them ever acknowledging the Russian willingness to sign the peace treaty. With the total envelopment of Russia now on the table, Lenin finally admitted they might have no choice but to fight back. On February 22nd, the government published a decree under the headline, “The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger.” Point one announced a sort of Russian levée en masse, declaring, ” The country’s entire manpower and resources are placed entirely at the service of revolutionary defense.” This levée en masse called for a scorched earth defensive war waged by all Russians everywhere. It hearkened back to the great patriotic war against Napoleon. Workers and peasants were ordered to engage in all manner of sabotage and self destruction to deny the invaders access to food resources or industrial technology. After calling for mass labor efforts to build trenches, defenses and fortifications, point six of the decree said, “These battalions are to include all able-bodied members of the bourgeois class, men and women, under the supervision of Red Guards. Those who resist are to be shot.” Then the eighth and final point read, “Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies are to be shot on the spot.”

These two points, making summary execution the first, last, and final punishment for hindering the defense of the revolution, gave the recently established Cheka the legal mechanism they would use to mercilessly defend the Soviet government going forward. It can also reasonably said to mark the beginning of the coming Red Terror.

In the midst of this now declared national emergency, Lenin and the other Bolsheviks also reached out to the Allies, to see if they might be interested in supporting them. And unlike the Decree on Peace, which the Allies ignored, the British and French responded very quickly that they were absolutely willing to give whatever monetary and material aid necessary to help Lenin’s government fight the Central Powers and keep the eastern front of the war alive. Like I said before, at this point, any ideological or clash of civilization-style considerations were absolutely irrelevant to the decision-makers of the Allied Powers. They were willing to support anybody who promised to keep Russia in the war. For his part, Lenin was certainly not going to let ideological purity get in the way of access to vital resources to defend the Soviet government. Caught up in other business, Lenin voted in favor of accepting allied aid in absentia, writing a note to Trotsky that read, “Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” But all of this became irrelevant that same day. The Germans transmitted new terms on February 23rd, which were far harsher than they had been in December. And though Bukharin, the left Bolsheviks, and the left SRs wanted to keep fighting Lenin, convinced the majority of the Central Committee that they needed to sign whatever the Germans put in front of them. Right now. Or it would be the end of all of them.

So, a Russian delegation returned to Brest-Litovsk on March the first — and I should mention that Trotsky resigned as commissar of foreign affairs so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to sign this ignoble piece. When the team arrived, they announced that they would sign whatever the Central Powers put in front of them, a kind of final protest to prove that they were doing this with a bayonet to their throat and a gun to their head. But this time, it was the Central Powers who stalled, and while they kept the Russians waiting, their armies entered Kiev, and evicted the small force of Soviet Red Guards. Finally, on March the third, 1918, the Russian Soviet Republic and the representatives of the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

It was a doozy of a treaty. With the stroke of a pen, the Russians renounced 750,000 square miles, abandoning essentially all territory Russia had acquired since the 1600s. They renounced all claims to Poland, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Transcaucasia, all of which would become either nominally independent states under German protection, or in many cases directly annexed into the German Empire. This amounted to roughly a third of the total population of the Russian Empire, a third of their most productive agricultural land, a quarter of their industrial capacity, a quarter of their railroad tracks, and three quarters of their coal and iron deposits. The treaty also granted German national special economic exemptions inside of Russia, leaving German owned property exempt from any nationalization efforts on the part of the Soviet government. This I should mention immediately led to a massive sell-off of Russian owned property, industry factories, and estates to German buyers, turning Russia overnight into something of a colony of German capital.

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk probably saved the Soviet government, but it did so at an almost unfathomable cost. Right, left, and center, all howled upon reading the terms of one of the most pathetically abject capitulations in the history of modern diplomacy. It of course infuriated patriots and nationalists, as it surrendered a gobsmacking amount of wealth land in people to the Germans. It also infuriated the growing coalition of left communists, who believed Lenin had treacherously sold out the international proletariat, extinguished all hopes for worldwide revolutionary, and turned Russia into an exploited colony of German imperialism. The treaty would in time cause the permanent rupture of the Bolsheviks and the left SRs, who hated the treaty with every fiber of their being. But for Lenin, however ignoble the treaty, however pathetic the treaty, it was a necessary treaty. It was necessary both for the sake of the Soviet socialist government, but also for global socialist revolution. In response to critics from the left, Lenin could point out the simple fact that while they called for a levée en masse, the people were not actually willing to take up arms. The peace might be unpopular among the political leadership, but war was even more unpopular among the masses. And for all its negative aspects, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had one unmistakable virtue: the Soviet government was left in tact. The revolutionary baby was not smothered in the crib. Between the Third Congress of the Soviets enshrining what amounts to a Soviet constitution, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the Soviet government won international recognition, Lenin believed he had a small but fertile plot where the seed of future worldwide socialist revolution could be planted, tended, and sewed.

But, before they could export their produce abroad, they must first harvest it at home.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.77: Brest-Litovsk

We need to start this week with a couple of short corrections. First, I’m not quite sure how I did this, but it was General Krymov who was with Kerensky at the Battle of Pulkovo. I said it was some guy named General Krilov, who — there is no General Krilov. That was just some mistaken mishmash of sounds I made because there are so many generals in the Russian civil war whose name starts with K: Kornilov, Kaledin, Krymov, Kolchak. It’s not a big thing, but I completely invented a general named Krilov, he didn’t exist.

The second thing is, speaking of one of those K generals: Nikolai Krylenko was an ensign when he became commander and chief of the Russian army, not a lieutenant, so again, it was Ensign Krylenko who became commander in chief of the Russian army, not Lieutenant Krylenko. Sorry about that. I get things wrong sometimes.

Now we spent the last two episodes on the Bolshevik’s initial consolidation of power on the home front. This week, we are going to turn our attention to what was happening on the war front. What did the October Revolution mean for Russia’s place in the great war? And beyond that, what did it mean for their standing among the other great powers. And what we will find today, is that as the old stately Quadrille continued to swirl around to polite classical music with everyone wearing tuxedos and sequins, the Bolsheviks are about to come charging onto the dance floor like they’re diving into a mosh pit. And while technically it was a kind of dance, they were also there to just kind of, y’know, trash the scene.

So let’s go back to the night of October 26th. I remember the very first thing the Bolsheviks did after seizing power: issue the Decree on Peace. The Bolsheviks had been the anti-war party going back so long it was arguably the single most distinguishing feature about them going all the way back to 1914. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the most cohesive block in the Zimmerwald left, and they consistently attacked the war as nothing more than a small greedy clique of capitalist imperialists feeding the people of Europe into a meat grinder.

What Lenin wanted to do was reorient the war, to stop make it peoples fighting against peoples, and instead, make it the people rising up to overthrow their common enemy, the ruling classes of Europe. Lenin wanted to turn foreign war into civil war. And a huge amount of Bolshevik strategy, tactics and ideology rested on the belif that World War I represented the final crisis of the old world of capitalism, and from its ashes would be born a new world of socialism. Now that they held power in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks plan to strike out boldly to bring their international socialist dreams to fruition. But, they got off to a rocky and sometimes comical start. Trotsky took over the foreign office as commissar of foreign faced with the consequences of the white collar strike that had greeted the October Revolution none of the functionaries, bureaucrats or clerks who staffed the ministry office showed up for work. Trotsky had trouble tracking down the people who had the keys to the doors and the safes of the building. Now he responded to these insulting hitches with a kind of breezy disdain. Trotsky said that one of the consequences of the revolution would be an end to all this old style European diplomacy where fat cats congregated behind closed doors and treated the people of the world as expendable and exploitable ponds over brandy and cigars. “What sort of diplomatic work will we be doing, anyway?” Trotsky said. “I shall issue a few revolutionary proclamations to the peoples and then shut up shop.”

But despite this posturing, it was going to be a wee bit more complicated than all that. On November 9th, the Soviet government transmitted the Decree on Peace to all the other belligerent powers, inviting everyone to take it as the starting point for a general peace. But if you will recall, it also aimed itself over the head of the governments of Europe and spoke directly to the people. Lenin had very few illusions about the response from the other powers. “The proposal of peace will be met with resistance on the part of the imperialist governments,” he said. ” We don’t fool ourselves on that score. But we hope that revolution will soon break out in the belligerent countries and that is why we address ourselves to the workers of France, England, and Germany.”

By issuing this call to all the belligerent powers, Lenin was also engaging in a little bit of public relations work. Because while Lenin did not expect the governments of France or Britain to respond favorably, he absolutely expected the Central Powers to jump at the chance to sign a peace treaty with Russia. One of the things that had dogged Lenin and the Bolsheviks for all of 1917 was the accusation that they were a bunch of paid German agents, that they had been delivered to Petrograd in a German train car with instructions to wreck Russia from the inside. Now, Lenin did absolutely take from the kaiser what the kaiser offered in 1917: logistical and monetary support. But Lenin is not a German agent.

It is, however, somewhat of a creative puzzle to imagine how exactly Lenin could have behaved differently if he was a German agent. Because after returning to Russia, he spent every waking moment attacking the legitimacy of the provisional government, denouncing the war, and fomenting an atmosphere of chaos. All of this culminated with an armed seizure of power, with their very first decree being a call for the Russian army to stop fighting the Germans. I mean, back in Berlin, the decision to put Lenin on a train in March 1917 was looking like the single best decision they had made since the war began.

To help paper over this German agent narrative, Lenin issued a call for a general peace, so that when the allies inevitably rejected this call, he could move to direct negotiations with the Central Powers without making it look like he was just a puppet dancing for its masters. And the Russians never failed to mention that the other powers were always welcome to join the peace talks at any time.

But the Allied Powers were not biting, and as much as Berlin and Vienna thrilled at the events of October, Paris and London were a gast policy towards Russia was to keep Russia in the war. Hell, it was French foreign policy going all the way back to the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 that French national security depended on keeping a massive Russian army pinning down Germany’s east flank. You might remember that when Nicholas and Alexandra appeared personally responsible for Russian wartime dysfunction, France and Britain were very quick to shrug their shoulders at the overthrow of the monarchy and recognize the provisional government within a matter of days.

Not so much for the Bolsheviks in October. France and Britain did not recognize Lenin’s government, and in fact in the days after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the allied governments directed most of their diplomatic recognition to General Dukhonin at Russian military headquarters.

As events unfolded over the next several months and years, Russia’s now former allies would have ideological and political reasons for opposing the Bolshevik regime, but in late 1917, their interest was in supporting anyone who would keep Russia in the war, and Lenin and his government very much did not appear to be those people. With the Allies literally not responding to the offer of a general peace, Trotsky cabled the central powers on November 14, indicating Russian willingness to deal with them directly. As you can imagine, the Bolshevik seizure of power was something of a miracle for the Germans and Austrians and Turks. No less than the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were both themselves tottering on the brink of total collapse, while the Germans saw an opportunity to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat come the spring of 1918. If they signed a treaty with the Russians to shut down the eastern front of the war, they could pour men guns and material into one last decisive offensive in the west. And the Germans were themselves in desperate straits and things looked pretty terrible, both at home and abroad, including the depressing reality that the United States had just joined France and Britain.

But there was still time to sneak in a knockout blow before American weight became decisive. But the Germans absolutely needed the Russians out of the war, or they were done for. So the Central Powers cabled their willingness to negotiate an armistice, followed by a formal peace treaty. They invited a Russian delegation to come to Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German army in what is now Belarus. Brest-Litovsk was a bombed out shell of itself, with only the former military fortress still standing. But the fact that the talks went on there spoke volumes for the military realities underlying the talks. The June Offensive had resulted in the Germans advancing hundreds of miles. They presently occupied large chunks of Russian territory in Poland and up in the Baltic. The German army stood poised to capture Petrograd, which was absolutely a huge background crisis that drove events towards the October Revolution. That the Russian delegation had to come to German military headquarters to work out a peace rather than mutually agreeing to a neutral location spoke volumes for how much this was effectively the Russians coming to surrender.

The Bolshevik delegation left Petrograd for Brest-Litovsk on November 18th. The head negotiator was a guy named Aldolph Joffe, a former Menshevik and friend of Trotsky’s who had wholeheartedly embraced radical Bolshevism after returning from Siberian exile after the February Revolution. Also on the negotiating team was Kamenev, who was welcomed back into the Bolshevik fold after realizing that he kept resigning in protest from the winning team. Lenin and the others led him back into the inner circle, but would forever bring up his October episode when they wanted to rub his face in the fact that Kamenev had spent those crucial days in October trying to derail them from their date with historical destiny.

But though it looked like the Russian delegation was coming hat in hand to beg for peace at Brest-Litovsk, they were not there to just surrender and sign peace at any price. They planned to use the negotiations as a platform to spread revolutionary gospel. And they very visibly positioned themselves as a completely new political animal on the world stage, one that represented the people, not just the ruling class. Though their principle negotiators were intellectuals, they also brought as equal members of their negotiating team, a soldier, a sailor, a worker, a peasant, and a woman. Now the woman on the team was a left SR named Anastasia Bitsenko, who was famous for assassinating the former minister of war in November 1905. She shot him dead at point blank range in the home of the governor of Saratov, who you might remember, was Peter Stolypin. Bitsenko spent more than a decade in Siberian exile before coming home after the February Revolution. Having a terrorist assassin sitting amidst the Russian negotiators certainly signaled that this was not the, uh, same old negotiating team everyone was used to.

There’s also a great story about the peasant delegate, a guy called Roman Stashkov. As the negotiating team was on their way to the train station, Joffe and Kamenev realized they had forgotten to secure a peasant delegate. Then they saw this old peasant walking on the side of the road, and they pulled over and offered him a ride. When he got in, they quizzed the perplexed old man about his politics. When he said he was an SR like everyone in his village, they said, come with us to Brest-Litovsk to make peace with the Germans. Now, he was understandably reluctant, but they offered him a chunk of cash to overcome his doubts and off he went, as the newly minted plenipotentiary representative of the Russian peasants.

The conference formerly began on November the 20th, with this motley array of scruffy Russian revolutionaries seated across the table from a phalanx of aristocratic old world diplomats and generals. The leader of the central powers negotiating team was German foreign secretary Baron von Kühlmann. Kühlmann was worldly, cultured, polite, and just the prototypical European diplomat. He also fancied himself something of a self-styled expert on Russia. While negotiating from a position of strength, Kühlmann believed his job was to provide language and terms that would allow the Russians to sign an honorable peace. He was convinced Germany was done for if the two-front war continued, but also convinced that if the Germans came off as punitive or vindictive towards the Russians, it would maybe drive the Russians back into arms, and almost certainly convince France and Britain to fight to the last man.

Seated beside the German foreign minister was the Austrian foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, who was acutely aware that catastrophe loomed over the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and they absolutely could not go on fighting the Russians. He was there to make sure the Russian signed a peace treaty on whatever terms got them to sign a peace treaty.

Beside both of them was General Max Hoffman, chief of staff of Germany’s armies on the eastern front, who had just overseen the capture of Riga. He was there to make sure the Russians understood they had lost the war and were in no position to bargain.

The two teams quickly agreed to a temporary ceasefire, as a prelude to a more stable armistice, as a prelude to an official peace treaty. But as negotiations commenced at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky finally got the safes open at the Russian foreign ministry, and proceeded to publish all the secret terms of all the secret treaties the tsar’s government had signed with France and Britain. Things like Russia being promised Constantinople and hegemony over the Balkans. That the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires would be dismembered. That France and Britain’s imperial projects would be protected and expanded.

All of this made Russia, France and Britain looked pretty bad. But Trotsky published these terms along with a note to the peoples of the world who would read all about this in their local newspaper. Trotsky said, “The bourgeois politicians and newspapers of Germany and Austria Hungary will no doubt seize upon the published documents and will try to represent the diplomatic work of the central empires in a favorable light. Such an attempt is fordoomed to failure, and this for two reasons. In the first place, we intend in a short time to present at the bar of public opinion a series of secret documents which amply illustrate the diplomatic methods of the central empires; in the second place, and this is most important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as international as those of imperialistic plunder. When the German proletariat by revolutionary means gets access to the secrets of the chancelleries of its government, it will discover documents in them of just the same character as those we are about to publish. It is to be hoped that this will happen at an early date.”

So this is basically an open call from the Russian foreign minister for the German people to rise up and overthrow the head of state of an empire he is currently in peace negotiations with. This is well outside of established diplomatic protocol. But though the publication of the secret treaty sent a wave of heartburn through the capitals of Europe, it did not derail the peace talks in Brest-Litovsk, because both sides needed a peace. On December 2nd, the two sides agreed to a month long armistice. Now for the Russians, signing the armistice was simply giving official designation to an already existing reality that was far beyond the control of their negotiators or their government. Since the October Revolution — and really for all of 1917 — the Russian military had been undergoing what one might call self-demobilization: Russian soldiers were simply quitting and going home. Now that they had the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land in hand, the mostly peasant soldiers were just going home. They were pushed by a desire to get as far away from the trenches as possible, and pulled by the promise of radical land redistribution back in their home villages. So the Russian empire was just disintegrating. An American observer said that when it came to the Russian government needing to sign a peace, it was “indeed urgent and active, but it was much the case of a man blowing with his breath in the same direction with a full grown natural tornado.”

The Russian army was going home, and even if Lenin and Trotsky wanted to keep fighting, there was no way they could have made that army keep fighting. Lenin considered peace essential to the long-term stability of his regime. If he tried to keep the Russian army in the field, he said, “the peasant army unbearably exhausted by the war will overthrow the socialist workers’ government.”

But though the Russians needed a piece because they didn’t really have an army to continue the war, the Bolshevik negotiators were not in Brest-Litovsk to sign peace at any price. The main sticking point was what to do about the territory currently occupied by the armies of the Central Powers. The Bolshevik government had issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of russia just a few weeks earlier, which promised everyone autonomy and self-determination. The Bolshevik negotiators at Brest-Litovsk insisted that peace with Germany meant the mutual evacuation of all occupied territories on all sides, and recognition of the right of all peoples to determine their own fates. And though the immediate sticking point was territory in Poland and the Baltic, the biggest issue loomed just in the background: Ukraine.

Ukraine was a vital importance to the Russian Empire. Ukrainians made up the single largest block of non-Russians in the empire, just about 30 million people, making them a majority of the population in a half-dozen provinces down in the southwestern corner of the empire. More importantly, Ukraine accounted for like 75% of all the coal produced in the Russian Empire, 66% of its iron ore, 75% of its magnesium, 66% of its salt, 80% of its sugar, and 90% of all wheat exports. It was a vital part of the Russian Empire’s economy, and for all the talk about autonomy and self-determination, both the Russians and Germans saw Ukraine as a vital part of their post-war economies. The Germans had been cultivating Ukrainian separatists since the beginning of the war, hoping to turn a nominally independent Ukraine into a German client state. After the February Revolution, a group of Ukrainian leaders formed what they called the Rada. Self-appointing themselves as the legitimate leaders of Ukraine, they spent the next six months and occasionally hostile relations with the various Russian provisional governments. In fact, one of the proximate causes for the Kadets quitting Kerensky’s government over the summer was that Kerensky recognized the legitimacy of the Rada’s authority in Ukraine. Now that the Bolsheviks were in charge, the wheel of revolution turned again. And with the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia in hand, the Rada prepared to declare independence.

But, not so fast. While Lenin and Trotsky very publicly proclaimed that they had no problem with the people of Ukraine charting their own destiny, the self-organized Rada wasn’t necessarily the true voice of the people. And while the countryside was almost universally Ukrainian, the cities and larger towns were very much more ethnically mixed. The population of Kiev for instance, was actually a majority Russian and Jewish. The government in Petrograd was not thrilled with reports it received that the Rada was allowing free passage of officers, men, and volunteers moving towards the Cossack regions to join what was fast becoming the anti-Bolshevik White Armies.

On December 3rd, Lenin issued a manifesto to the Ukrainian people with an ultimatum to the Ukrainian Rada. It opened, “The Council of People’s Commissars, the socialist government of Russia, reaffirms that the right to self determination belongs to all nations oppressed by tsarism and the great Russian bourgeoisie, up to and including the right of these nations to secede from Russia. Accordingly, we, the Council of People’s Commissars, recognize the people’s Ukrainian republic, and its right to secede from Russia or enter into a treaty with the Russian Republic on federal or similar relations between them.”

Okay. So what exactly is the problem here? The problem was the Rada, who Lenin then rattled off a bunch of charges against, including:

“The Rada has been extending support to the Kadet-Kaledin plot and revolt against Soviet power. The Rada has allowed its territory to be crossed by troops on their way to Kaledin, but has refused transit to any anti-Kaledin troops.” Because of this, Lenin said, “… even if the Rada had received full formal recognition as the uncontested organ of supreme state power of an independent bourgeois Ukrainian republic, we would have been forced to declare war on it without any hesitation, because of its attitude of unexampled betrayal of the revolution.”

Then he issued the ultimatum:

“In the event, no satisfactory answer is received to these questions within 48 hours, the Council of People’s Commissars will deem the Rada to be in a state of open war with the Soviet power in Russia and the Ukraine.”

Lenin would not receive a satisfactory answer from the Rada within 48 hours, but Germany promptly issued an invitation to the Ukrainian Rada to send representatives to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate the recognition of an independent Ukraine, and a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers. Ukraine was now a theater of the blossoming Russian civil war.

Meanwhile, at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans were growing impatient and very suspicious of Russian intentions. On December 13th, the Russian government proudly proclaimed their allocation of 2 million rubles to create and spread revolutionary propaganda throughout Europe. It seemed increasingly obvious that the Russian goal was to stall long enough for revolutions in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere to render the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk totally moot. On December 21st, the Executive Committee of the Soviet issued a public statement for worldwide consumption.

It said, “The joint meeting appeals to you, workers of Germany, you to whom the predatory aims of German imperialism are as alien as the aggressive aspirations of Russian imperialism are to us. You should support in every way the struggle of the Russian people for a just and universal peace. For three years now, the people have been shedding blood on all fronts, but neither victory nor defeat have brought nearer the longed for peace. Only the will of the peoples can compel the imperialists of all countries to conclude a democratic peace.”

Then they broadened their appeal beyond just the Germans:

“Workers of France, Britain, and Italy, peoples of blood-soaked Serbia and ravaged Belgium! You too should raise your voice. Let your governments know that you are no longer willing to shed blood for annexationist aims alien to you. We do not want a piece that would sanctify the old injustices, forge new chains, and burden the working people with the grievous consequences of the war. We want a peace of the peoples, a democratic peace, a just peace. And we shall secure such a peace only when the peoples of all countries dictate its terms by their revolutionary struggles.”

So this was the new style of Russian diplomacy: calling on the peoples of the world to overthrow their governments.

With the leaders in Germany getting increasingly impatient, quite correctly recognizing the Russian negotiators simply stalling for time until revolution broke out in Berlin, they leaned on Baron von Kühlmann to press harder for a final treaty. To resist this pressure, Lenin sent Trotsky to take over negotiations personally, telling Trotsky before he left, “we need someone to do the delaying, and you will do it better than anybody. String out the talks until there is a revolution in Germany, or as long as possible.”

Trotsky’s arrival at Brest-Litovsk was his arrival on the world stage as an international figure. He spent most of his life as an incredibly obscure radical intellectual, activist, and journalist. He had earned himself enormous celebrity inside Russia as the dynamic face and voice of Bolshevism, but it was here at Brest-Litovsk that he really came to the attention of the international press, who were all on hand to cover the momentous negotiations.

Trotsky absolutely reveled in the opportunity to cross rhetorical swords with the high and mighty representatives of the old world aristocracy, who were used to dealing with men of the same class, breedings, and manners as themselves, not scruffy exiled revolutionaries who spent their formative years couch surfing through the underground of Europe. Trotsky turned all of his talents up to 11, and dazzled the packed house of diplomats and observers with his undeniably brilliant oratorical and intellectual skills. Baron Von Kühlmann, for his part, seemed content to let Trotsky lead the discussion through a variety of philosophical digressions, including long abstract debates about the nature of self-determination, a monologue on the basic tenants of Marxism, and pointed demands to investigate the meaning of practically every word in the draft of the treaty. On December 30th, for instance, Trotsky amused the audience by demanding that the stock phrase about the two parties living in peace and friendship be amended. “I would take the liberty to propose that the second phrase,” Trotsky said, mentioning the bit about friendship, “be deleted. It’s thoroughly conventional ornamental style does not correspond, so it seems, to the dry business-like sense of the document. Such declarations copied from one diplomatic document into another have never yet characterized the real relations between states.” He did not want to be friends with the Germans, he wanted peace with the Germans, and that was very different.

He also continued to object to the German plan to keep occupying captured territory, demanding instead, the total evacuation and renunciation of any plans for permanent annexation. Baron von Kühlmann appears to have let all of this go on because he remained convinced that this was just the Russians allowing themselves to rationalize and endorse the final terms of the treaty, which Kühlmann still expected to dramatically favor Germany. But his political masters back in Berlin, Ludendorff and Hindenburg especially, were getting awfully testy, and they prevailed upon the kaiser to demand his majesty’s negotiators skip to the end of the page, and issue an ultimatum.

At the negotiating table, General Hoffman voiced this frustration on behalf of the German military: “The Russian delegation has spoken as if it represented a victorious invader of our country. I should like to remind its members the facts point to the contrary. Victorious German troops are on Russian soil. I should further like to say that the Russian delegation demands that we should recognize the right of self-determination in a form and on a scale which its own government does not recognize. German supreme command thinks it necessary to repudiate it interference in the affairs of the occupied areas.” Hoffman said bluntly there would be no further negotiations about any evacuation. The Germans would keep what they had won. The German armies were not going anywhere.

Trotsky tried to dance around a little bit more, but on January the fifth, 1918, the other side had had enough. General Hoffman rolled out a map, which he said would be the basis of all future relations between Germany and Russia. It laid out new borders between Germany and Russia, and what it showed was the effective dismemberment of the Russian Empire. It would leave Germany much, much stronger and Russia, much, much weaker. Hoffman’s point, of course, was at the Bolsheviks may have won their little revolution, but they had lost the war, and it was time for them to quit stalling and admit it. Trotsky’s theatrical may have dazzled, but they were no match for the material and military reality of the situation. The Russian army was in a state of acute disintegration. For all their own internal problems, the Central Powers had been humoring the Russians. They could steamroll the eastern front anytime they wanted, and now that threat was on the table. Trotsky was told, accept this, or we will advance. Trotsky took this ultimatum and said, look, I cannot accept this at the moment. I have to go home and confer with my government. The testy Central Power negotiators allowed this final delay, but they were now prepared to resume the war.

Next week, we will recombine our narratives, and look at the massive and potentially fatal dilemmas facing Lenin’s government at home and abroad, because back in Petrograd on that very same January 5th, 1918, a long awaited constituent assembly finally convened. With its majority of delegates likely hostile to the Bolsheviks, they posed just as much of a threat to Lenin as the Germans, who were themselves gearing up to invade further if their demands were not met.

It would appear that though the Bolsheviks had survived longer than anyone expected, there was very little chance they would survive the winter.

 

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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.

 

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Episode 10.14: The Tsar Liberator

On a very superficial level, the Russian Empire got through the period between the Decemberist Revolt of 1825 and the Revolutions of 1848 in pretty good shape. The long reign of Nicholas the First had been book-ended by the easy smothering of liberal revolutionary aspirations. And in the case of 1848, this was accompanied by a rousing display of Russia’s final boss style military might in Hungary. So one might be tempted to think this was proof that the imperial regime was strong, both at home and abroad. Except if you scratch the surface even a little bit, you found the Russian Empire was its own Potemkin village. Politically, the appointment of military officers to run ministries they didn’t really understand led first to inefficiency and incompetence, then outright graft and corruption, because even with the Third Section running around out there, follow through on directives and oversight of lower officials could be appallingly bad, a fact taken advantage of at nearly every level of government.

Economically, Russia was not following the industrialization path being blazed in the west, and they were falling further behind by the day. Most of all, the Russian Empire was hampered by the archaic institution of serfdom, which defined the social, economic and legal slavery of something like a third of the population. This is what you would get a glimpse of if you scratched the surface of the Russian Empire around 1850. Now, what if you took a scrub brush and really went to town? Well, you would get to see the whole thing laid bare, and we call that scrub brush, the Crimean War.

 We touched on the Crimean War at the beginning of Series Eight, because it was now Emperor Napoleon the Third’s first big foray into international affairs after declaring himself Emperor Napoleon the Third. The proximate causes and blow by blow of the Crimean War are not important for us here today. What is important, is the consequences for Russia, because the Crimean War was a complete disaster and a humiliating defeat. The war itself began in 1853, and saw Britain and France supporting the Ottoman Empire against Russia, making this the first full blown great power conflict since the treaty of Vienna. And though the Russian soldiers themselves fought valiantly and the siege of Sevastopol was endured with a kind of grim courage, the Crimean War signaled the arrival of modern industrial warfare to Europe, and Russia found itself fatally unprepared to fight in this new world. As it turns out its military, government, economy, all were in an appalling state. When the Russian Empire came into direct conflict with the military and economic strength of Britain and France, a systemic stagnant rot was revealed. The scrub brush of the Crimean War exposed it for all to see.

The failure of the Russian army in the Crimean War was especially ironic given Tsar Nicholas’s own presentation of himself and his empire as essentially a military dictatorship. The army and navy occupied pride of place in the budget. The peacetime army was somewhere between 800,000 and a million men. Military officers were so trusted they ran the civilian government too. Nicholas insisted on smartly dressed, well-drilled and firmly disciplined regiments that were ready to show off their spit-polished sharpness and parades and demonstrations. But the army was a microcosm of the general problems of the empire. Yes, its budget was massive, but it was bloated. The officer corps had settled into lethargic corruption. They were skimming off the top, cooking the books, pocketing pay. There was graft and corruption on the supply chain, providing the food and clothes and boots and weapons for the soldiers. Expenditures were bled from a million little pinpricks. Meanwhile, the common soldiers were all unhappy conscripts serving twenty-five year hitches, often suffering the consequences of being badly supplied by corrupt agents. And then, when they finally got into a real fight with real great powers, they lacked for everything: their weapons were outdated; there were no railroads to speak of; the high command was stuck in the past strategically; the field officers were stuck in the past tactically; their parade drills counted for nothing when the shooting started. Tsar Nicholas lived just long enough to see his beloved army collapse under the weight of 25 years of corrupt stagnation. He died in February 1855, just before the final surrender in the Crimean War came, refusing treatment for what turned out to be fatal pneumonia. One can only guess why he refused treatment.

This left the Russian Empire to his 36 year old son Alexander, who now assumed the imperial throne as Emperor Alexander. The second Alexander was born in 1818 after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So unlike his father, he was not forged in the furnace of desperate life and death, military campaigns. He grew up in a time of peace. Alexander was also seven years old when his father became tsar and he himself became heir to the throne. So again, unlike his father, Alexander was raised with the understanding that his education and life experience must be directed towards preparing him to one day assume command of the empire. This left him in a better position, I think, to evaluate the empire he was inheriting, to have already thought a lot about what he was going to do when he inherited the throne, the kinds of changes he would make, the kind of ruler he would like to be, the kind of ruler the empire needed him to be. The fact that he became emperor just as Russia was enduring a humiliation at the hands of Britain and France only confirmed ideas that were floating around in his head. Russia needed to grapple with reality at this moment, Russia was on the brink of not being a great power. So for the sake of national honor, the wellbeing of its people, the strength of the empire and the legitimacy of the Romanov dynasty, Russia was going to have to be dragged out of the past and into the present. Otherwise there would be no future. So Alexander came to power prepared to implement the largest and most consequential set of social and political reforms Russia had seen since Peter the Great and one could argue that these reforms would be even more consequential, because they would impact more than just the elite of that first Russia we talked about when we discussed the Decembrists, it would affect that other mass that was the other Russia: the majority of Russia. Alexander was going to do what no tsar before him had dared to do: he was going to free the serfs.

As we noted in Episode 10.9, serfdom had taken final, permanent legal route in Russia by the end of the 1500s. And since that day, reform minded ministers and intellectuals had pondered how to liberate them. Generation after generation concluded it was too difficult, too complicated, too dangerous. Serfdom is terrible, it’s frankly an embarrassment, but now is not the right time. Most recently, Alexander the First had considered emancipating the serfs early in his reign, but then dropped it. Nicholas the First was personally opposed to serfdom, but also judged emancipation to be too dangerous, a shock to the imperial order. For the enlightened leadership, the empire serfdom was one of those classic conundrums, you have a problem, you know what the solution is, but you are frankly more afraid of the solution than you are of the problem. The fear in this case was that emancipation would precipitate one of the two great types of rebellion Russian history is so familiar with: the palace coup and the peasant revolt. In these manifested fears, the palace coup would be led by reactionary nobles who did not want to lose their property. The peasant revolt would be led by a wild mob drunk on heretofore unknown liberty. But Alexander the Second now proposed that the problem was indeed scarier than any proposed solution. That unless Russia freed itself from these medieval shackles, they could no longer compete economically and politically and militarily with the west. And perhaps even scarier, emancipation was going to come eventually, it was inevitable. And the threat of revolution caused by freeing the serfs was nothing compared to the threat of revolution by not freeing the serfs. So in March of 1856, Alexander addressed the nobility in Moscow and told them, we have to do it. He said, “My intention is to abolish serfdom. You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below.”

This announcement, understandably caused an uproar amongst the nobility. But for the moment, all Alexander was saying is, this is what I want to do, this is what we’re going to do, now let’s figure out how to do it. So in January of 1857, Alexander created a committee staff by reformist ministers to study the question. Emancipation had the tsar’s personal blessing, but there were still a lot of conservative interference out there, so at the beginning these deliberations and in secret behind closed doors. But freeing the serfs could not be done entirely in secret behind closed doors. Opinion was going to have to be solicited. And so at the end of 1857, a memo went out to provincial governors asking them to make suggestions how to best implement emancipation in their own districts. The memo to the provincial governors was published out in the open, so educated members of the community debated the idea amongst themselves. And the government truly wanted to hear educated opinion on this matter, and so censorship was loosened up a bit to facilitate something resembling a public debate that would forge a national consensus about how to enact this great, but no doubt highly disruptive, reform.

So, what we’re looking at here is an empire between 60 and 70 million people, with maybe a hundred thousand of those owning pretty much all the land, and owning about a third of all the people. There were 23 million privately owned serfs. Now, unlike forms of ancient slavery, and modern western chattel slavery, where you take people from their homes and relocate them somewhere else, serfdom was a legal status that had fallen upon the population of Russian peasants who themselves had not moved. So the basic social and economic relations of production at the village level remained essentially unchanged. And those relations had a uniquely Russian character. For example, the village, called the mir, was not a collection of individuals who owned individual property. The village controlled property collectively, and they doled it out to be worked in strips to the families of the village. And this didn’t change with the arrival of serfdom. Now, of course, the landed gentry, the nobles, now owned the land, you just worked it, but the village was still the one doling out who worked what specific strip. What changed was everyone’s legal status. You could not leave your home without the lord’s permission. You couldn’t get married without the lord’s permission. You were obligated to provides all kinds of service for the lord. You were no longer a free person. You were a number in a ledger book of the lord’s personally owned property to be bought and sold along with the land upon which you lived. But the day to day rhythms of village life remained pretty much the same.

So if the emperor has just said, we’re going to abolish serfdom, what is that going to look like in practice? Are we just going to change the legal status of the people, but leave the land itself still owned by the nobility? Or when we free the serfs, do we also need to give them some land to legally own and work for themselves? Otherwise they might just become sharecroppers or day laborers, and you’ve hardly done anything for them at all. And if you do emancipate the serfs with land, how much land do they get? Who does the land go to? Are we going to keep the ancient form of collective ownership to have the village now own land as a whole collective? Or are we going to go a step further and wipe that out too, and hand out parcels to be owned by individuals? And if this all sounds a little bit familiar, it’s because we just talked all about these same issues when we talked about the Mexican Revolution, it’s the same deal. Every possible proposal had its defenders and critics, and five years were spent trying to come up with a plan that would both satisfy the gentry who were about to lose their serfs and maybe some of their land, and the serfs themselves who were about to be pushed out into the big world as free people and who would need the means to at least survive. And since the reformers in charge of pushing emancipation were not themselves social revolutionaries, how do we go about doing this while maintaining the basic social order intact? Because the main idea here is to head off a social revolution, not cause one.

Finally, after endless rounds of acrimonious fighting, Tsar Alexander felt he had a package in hand that he could take a chance on. The serfs would be freed. And when they were freed, they would also be given land. There was just no other way to do it. So the tsar sat down and signed an emancipation decree dated February the 19th, 1861. The government let this momentous proclamation sink in among the educated classes for a few weeks before it started being read aloud in churches across Russia to a bewildered and sometimes disbelieving population of now… freed serfs? Did, did he just say we’re free?

Depending on who you ask, the emancipation of the serfs was either the single most momentous piece of social legislation in the history of Russia, or it was not worth the paper it was printed on. So how do you have those two massively contrasting takes on this thing? Well, as always, the devil is in the details.

So what are the details of actual emancipation? First, despite all the fears in the corridors of power, emancipation came with some unrest, but in the grand scheme of things, the response was surprisingly muted. Emancipation did not automatically unleash the furies. But the abolition of serfdom did mean that the peasants were now free people, they were not anyone’s property, it meant what it said. They were no longer inked into the ledgers of an accounting of a lord’s personal wealth. They were free to marry without permission, conduct trade without permission, they could sue and be sued. They now enjoyed liberty and all the rights, such as they were, that went with personhood, not propertyhood. This is all great stuff. But Alexander had to balance this against the understandable anger of those who have just watched their property become people. There had to be some kind of balancing compensation, strings were going to have to be attached. The nobles were not going to swallow it any other way. Someone was going to have to pay the price for the serfs freedom, and as it turned out, that price was going to be paid by the now ex-serfs themselves.

So first starting in 1861, there would be a two-year transition period to ease everyone into this new legal arrangement, where the serfs would still owe essentially the same services to the nobles that they had been bound to provide for generations. So right off the bat, nothing changes for like two years. The second, while each individual now had legal freedom, the social and economic relations of production often changed very little. Because the tsar’s final decision was that it would be best to keep communal village ownership in place. That which had proceeded serfdom would continue after the demise of serfdom. And when the nobility handed over a portion of their estates, it went to the village collectively, who would continue to dole it out to be worked by individual families. Now, I am speaking broadly here, there were exceptions in status and rollout and implementation, and some free peasants were better off than others, and they did start building their own private portfolios of land, and there was private ownership of land, but generally speaking, post-emancipation life was very similar to pre-emancipation life, and it revolved around collective ownership by villages. The villages managed the land collectively, and as an individual or a family, you were still bound to adhere by their collective decisions.

But that’s not really bad. I mean, that was just their way of life. And if any of them thought about it at all, most peasants probably preferred it that way. It was at the very least the way it had always been done. But the worst part of emancipation was that to put through the mass transfer of so much land from the nobility to these villages, the tsar agreed that the landed gentry had to be compensated. Because on the one hand, Alexander is here trying to avoid peasant revolt and social revolution, but he also has to simultaneously avoid those pesky palace coups. And confiscating the nobility’s land at gunpoint and saying, thanks, see you later, was a good way to invite one of those pesky palace coups.

So part of the emancipation package was a thing called redemption payments. Redemption payments worked like this: the state determined an amount to be paid to compensate a noble for what they had just been ordered to surrender both in people and in land. Then, the state paid the noble one large lump sum that amounted to 75% of the agreed-to amount, right now, today, here you go.

Okay. You with me so far? Good.

But does the state want to be on the hook for that lump sum payment? Hell no, the empire’s financial situation is terrible. So what they decided was that the money should come from the freed serfs themselves. They were the ones benefiting, they should be the ones to pay. So this lump sum, the state paid out was put down in the books as a loan, provided by the state, for the villages, who would then repay this friendly loan in annual installments for the next 49 years at 6% interest.

But wait, there’s more. The state did not actually fork over a literal pile of money to each and every noble, because most of those nobles at this point were themselves deep in debt, thanks to decades and even centuries of profligate spendthriftery. So the lump sum quote unquote paid to the nobles often went towards paying down those debts that the nobles themselves had contracted from the state or from state connected banks. The money that changed hands was not money at all, it took the form of writing down existing loans. So, if you think about it, what is happening here is that the state is going to get paid back for the loans previously taken out by the nobles. It’s just that those loan payments have now been transferred to the peasants, and the loan would be paid off in annual installments for 49 years, at 6% interest.

It turns out you can put a price on freedom.

But still, it took everyone a little while to put all this together. Emancipation is still a huge and momentous moment in Russian history. Serfdom has been abolished forever and Alexander the Second gets to happily be hailed as the tsar liberator, long live the tsar liberator.

But this was only the beginning of Alexander’s reform project. Liberating the serfs was a huge deal, but it was not the whole ballgame. So a few years after emancipation came two more major reforms we need to talk about. The first was political. A decree in 1864 created a new assembly at the provincial and district level called the zemstvo. That’s probably right. Zemstvo. The function of the zemstvos was to act alongside and augment the work of agents of the central bureaucracy with a particular focus on local needs and infrastructure, right. Road, bridges, schools, doctors and hospitals, things of local concern. The big innovation here is that members of the zemstvo would be elected, introducing a heretofore practically unknown element of democracy into the administration of the Russian Empire. And it was meant, at least in part, to be an additional salve to the egos of the now massively dispossessed and de-surfed nobility, because these new assemblies would give them a voice, and a sense of being invited into the process.

But the zemstvo had administrative capacities, it had no real political power. If there was a conflict with the central bureaucracy, there was no conflict at all. The central bureaucracy had all the power. Nonetheless, the zemstvos, by virtue of their very existence, introduced elections, a representative body for discussion and debate among educated people, a forum for local civic engagement, and it thus brought together people who wanted to civically engage. And if you have a group of civic minded, educated professionals who want to debate local issues, you tended to be liberal in outlook. And so the zemstvos themselves tended to take on a general liberal flavor. Now they were never going to challenge the government for power — they had no power — but they were giving a generation some practice in democratic politics and maybe a sense of comradery if and when further down the road, further reforms decided to empower them further.

Now the other great reform we need to talk about was the complete overhauling of the court system. The laws of Russia had been compiled and recompiled over the years. Most recently in 1835 in a project overseen by a rehabilitated Mikhail Speransky. But the empire had never suffered from an excess of the rule of law. Lawyering was not a well-articulated profession, and the courts suffered from myriad problems. There were untrained judges, the trials were closed, they were not open to the public, they accepted written testimony only. There was no chance for an accused to confront witnesses, and at the end of the day the courts were subservient to the executive branch, they were not independent. The whole thing was kind of a bad joke.

So at the same moment in 1864, after years of study, the government rolled out a bold leap forward that gave Russia overnight practically the most progressive legal system in Europe. This new system would have adversarial trials, where the defendant would get a lawyer and could call witnesses. These trials would be open to the public to ensure accountability. There would be better training for judges who, once appointed, could only be removed for specific misconduct, not just, oh, you didn’t do what we wanted you to do. The state, meanwhile was now obligated to actually present a case, with evidence and everything, in order to secure a conviction.

But before we go too far, there are a couple of points we need to keep in mind. First, these reforms did not sink down to the village level where traditional village courts would still handle all civil cases and most minor criminal cases, and they used their own local traditions of justice, which were mostly based on comparing and contrasting the reputation of accuser and accused. So they’re not included in any of this. Second, state agents would very quickly find it frustrating that they had to bring people to trial in court because of the aforementioned case I have to make in evidence I have to produce, and they would soon discover that the Ministry of the Interior, for example, had the authority to just expel people from a city or province by fiat. And this was a practice that would soon become known as administrative exile, which got around the pesky courts, and still allowed the state to punish and exile those they just knew were guilty of something bad, even if they literally could not prove it in court

So the first decade of Tsar Alexander the Second’s reign goes down in the history books as the period of great reform, capital G capital R Great Reform. The serfs were emancipated, there are new elected assemblies, there’s an entirely new judicial apparatus. And Alexander was hailed as a visionary leader, a truly great father to his people. He was the Tsar Liberator. But in the years to come, discord began to creep in. When the expectations created by this era of great reform started to go unmet. When a village discovered that practically the whole produce of the land they now owned had to go to making redemption payments. When middle-class intellectuals who gathered in the zemstvo were let down by how little power they actually had. When the new progressive court system naturally led people to believe the rule of law was here to stay, and instead they found the state constantly skirting the rule of law, undermining it and outright ignoring it.

And there was a growing class of educated Russians, especially young educated Russians, who were disillusioned when the tsar stopped the process of Great Reform, rather than continuing on to what they thought was its logical conclusion, the promulgation of a constitution. If this is what the future looks like, they said, it looks a lot like the past. And among those who were disillusioned and disappointed by these unmet expectations, we find the first of a new generation of social revolutionaries who will propel events towards 1905 and then 1917. They said to themselves, long live the Tsar Liberator?

No.

For Russia to be free, truly free, the tsar must die.

 

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Episode 10.75: the People’s Commissars

So last time we finally reached zero hour. The Bolsheviks have now come to power. But as I said at the end of last week, it was only in retrospect that we know how important the events of October 1917 were to the history of Russia and the history of the world. Lots of people at the time, including a fair number of Bolsheviks, did not think the Bolsheviks had the personnel, the support, the talent, the wherewithal, or the popularity to actually survive in power. The American journalist John Reed, observing things from the wings and the days after October 25th, said, “… the bourgeoisie lay low abiding its hour, which could not be far off.” That the Bolsheviks would remain in power longer than three days never occurred to anybody, except perhaps to Lenin, Trotsky, the Petrograd workers and the simpler soldiers.

The Bolsheviks took power with the support of tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, workers, and Red Guards in Petrograd. But they claimed that power on behalf of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and the millions of Russians it allegedly represented. Bolshevik speeches and proclamations emphasized that they spoke on behalf of the workers, soldiers, and peasants of the empire in their many millions. But this did not exactly line up with reality. Most people in the Russian Empire, frankly, had never heard of such a thing as a Bolshevik. As we talked about two episodes back though, Lenin and Trotsky did not much care that they did not command an actual popular majority in October 1917. They believed that the seizure of power itself, and more importantly, how they wielded the power they had seized, would earn them all the popular support they would ever need. So they spent their first days in power issuing bold decrees designed to win the support of four critical groups: the peasants, the soldiers, the workers, and the minority nationality groups. The February Revolution had given each of these four groups hopes and dreams and ambitions, which had been stymied, put off, and delayed by the fundamentally ineffective provisional government. The Bolsheviks believed that if they delivered on the promises of the revolution, there was no reason to believe they would not become the most popular political party. Those four groups, after all, made up the vast majority of the population of the Russian Empire.

The Second Congress of Soviets reconvened on the evening of October 26th, now shed of the SRs and Mensheviks who had walked out the day before, and composed entirely of Bolsheviks and left SRs. They got right to work. The first thing, above all, was the question of peace. So to immediately win over all those soldiers and sailors out there, the Congress of Soviets approved The Decree on Peace, which called for, and I’m quoting here: “Immediate peace without annexations, i.e., without the seizure of foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation of foreign nations, and without indemnities.”

The decree also said, “The government considers it the greatest crime against humanity to continue this war over the issues of how to divide among the strong and rich nations the weak nationalities they have conquered, and solemnly announces its determination immediately to sign terms of peace to stop the war on the terms indicated…”

Until such a peace was signed, the decree said, “The government proposes an immediate armistice to the governments and peoples of all belligerent countries.”

So the decree on peace was aimed at that most vital of constituencies: all the soldiers and sailors out there who were sick of fighting and sick of dying. The Bolsheviks had always been the anti-war party, and now that they had a chance to end the war, they planned to end the war. But the decree on peace also said, “Our appeal must be addressed both to the governments and to the peoples. We cannot ignore the governments for that would delay the possibility of concluding peace, and the people’s government dare not do that, but we have no right not to appeal to the peoples at the same time.” The Bolsheviks, remember I see themselves as the spear tip of a European-wide proletarian revolution, and they planned to encourage the people of Europe to follow their lead if their respective governments refused to end the war.

 The second major decree on the night of October 26th was The Decree on Land, meant to win the support of the peasantry. The Decree on Land offered the sweeping transfer of property to the peasant villages. It was a four point plan that was brief and to the point, and so I’ll just go through it.

 One: landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation.

Two: the landed estates, as also crown, monastery, and church lands, with all their livestock, implements, buildings, and everything pertaining thereto, shall be placed at the disposal of land committees and Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies pending the convocation of the constituent assembly.

Three: all damaged to confiscated property, which henceforth belongs to the whole people, is proclaimed a grave crime to be punished by the revolutionary courts. The Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies shall take all necessary measures to assure the observance of the strictest order during the confiscation of the landed estates to determine the size of estates, and the particular estates subject to confiscation; to draw up exact inventories of all property confiscated; and to protect in the strictest revolutionary way all agricultural enterprises transferred to the people, with all buildings, implements, livestock, stocks of produce, et cetera.

 Four: the following peasant mandate shall serve everywhere to guide the implementation of the great land reforms until a final decision on the latter is taken by the constituent assembly.

Now, a couple of notes on this. First, this is not the Bolshevik land program. Lenin was a staunch believer in nationalization and consolidation. He had never advocated local peasant committees taking direct possession of the land, which was the program outlined in the Decree on Land. One outraged SR said, “Ah, the land decree, it is our decree. It is the Socialist Revolutionary program intact. My party framed that policy after the most careful compilation of the wishes of the peasants themselves.” Asked how he felt about the Bolsheviks, putting this out there under their own name, he said, “It is an outrage.”

But Lenin didn’t care about being doctrinaire at the moment, even about his own doctrines. The Bolsheviks needed to secure what they had never had: mass support of the peasantry. So, they announced a program that embodied everything the peasants wanted: local control over the former large estates in their area. When challenged that land decree was not in keeping with his own nationalization program, Lenin said, “That is unimportant. As a democratic government, we cannot simply ignore the wishes of the popular masses, even if we are in disagreement with them.” At a session of the Petrograd Soviet a few days later, Lenin would say, “The SRs charge us with stealing their land program. If that was so we bow to them. It is good enough for us.”

The Bolsheviks enacting the SR program may have rankled the SRs, but for Lenin, that was their problem. Not his. When the SRs held power in the provisional government and in the Soviet, they had refused to enact their very popular land program. And this was part of the Bolshevik pitch, that other parties do nothing while we act. Now. Immediately, without apology or hesitation. That was the Bolshevik way.

The last thing to come out of this session of the Soviet Congress was the formation of a new government. Thanks to the right SRs and Mensheviks walking out of the Congress the day before, and the left SRs declining to participate, the Congress approved a government made entirely of Bolshevik party members. Declining to call themselves ministers in order to break with the past, they dubbed themselves, the Council of People’s Commissars. Lenin became chairman of the council at the insistence of the Bolshevik Central Committee, who were not interested in the chief not being directly on the hook for the consequences of the thing he had so relentlessly pushed them to do, which was seize power. Lenin tried to make Trotsky minister of the interior, but Trotsky begged off, saying the Russian people would not accept a jew in that position.

“Of what importance are such trifles”, Lenin asked. Trotsky replied, “There are still a good many fools left.”

To which Lenin scoffed, “Surely we don’t step with fools.”

But Trotsky said, “Sometimes one has to make allowances for stupidity.”

Instead, Trotsky took over as commissar of foreign affairs, a role which probably better suited him anyway. I won’t bore you with the whole list of names except to note that at the bottom, the Georgian Joseph Stalin was made chairman of nationality affairs.

With a new government in place, and a couple of sweeping decrees proclaimed, the Second Congress finished its work by electing a standing executive council of about 150 members to serve as the sovereign host of Lenin’s new government. In theory, the government would be answerable to this executive committee of the Soviet, but this executive committee of the Soviet was of course chaired by the Bolshevik Kamenev, composed of a super majority of Bolshevik members, with a minority faction of left SRs. With this work done, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviet closed up shop on October 27th, having existed for just about 48 hours, serving mainly as the midwife of a regime composed entirely of revolutionary Bolsheviks.

In the chaotic atmosphere of the next few weeks, the Bolsheviks improvised their way through a minefield that everyone assumed would blow them up. And because they needed to improvise a course through this minefield, they did not put a lot of stock in the formalities of legislation. After the Second Congress formally dissolved, decrees would simply be published, signed by Lenin or some other commissar, most of them aspirational because frankly the Bolsheviks didn’t have the means to implement most of what they were announcing. On October 27th, for example, the Bolsheviks made their pitch for the third of the four groups they needed to win over, with their draft regulations on worker control. It was an eight point plan that started, “Workers control over the production, storage, purchase, and sale of all products and raw materials shall be introduced in all industrial. commercial, banking, agricultural and other enterprises.” So henceforth worker committees, were supposed to have the final say over what was going on in their workplace, not managers, and not owners. The regulations further said, “The decisions of the elected representatives of the workers and office employees are binding upon the owners of enterprises, and may be annulled only by trade unions and their congresses.” The regulations also said, “The elected representatives shall be given access to all books and documents and to all warehouses and stocks of materials, instruments, and products without exception.” So this is all very Marxist. The regulations are putting the means of production in the hands of the proletariat. But if you read between the lines, it’s also an admission the Bolsheviks don’t really have the ability to embark on anything more ambitious than simply telling the workers to take control of their own factories and manage their own affairs for themselves.

And that same day, Lenin issued another decree, not aimed at winning support, but on silencing dissent. It was a decree concerning the press. It said, “In the trying critical period of the revolution and the days that immediately followed it, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee was compelled to take a number of measures against the counter-revolutionary press of different shades.” It further said, “Everyone knows that the bourgeois press is one of the most powerful weapon of the bourgeoisie, especially at the crucial moment when the new power, the power of workers and peasants, is only affirming itself. It was impossible to leave this weapon wholly in the hands of the enemy. For in such moments, it is no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns.” The decree then laid out three criteria that would justify the government shutting down a journal or a newspaper:

One, if they call for open resistance or insubordination to the workers and peasants government.

Two, sow sedition through demonstrably slanderous, distortion of facts.

Three, instigate actions of an obviously criminal, i.e., criminally punishable nature.

This decree sent howls through the opposition. And even protests from people who were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, because they all quite rightly feared that the Bolsheviks would apply this criteria however they wanted, and simply shut down anyone who opposed them.

As the Bolsheviks flooded Petrograd with these decrees and proclamations, they were met by a very hostile and very vocal opposition — there’s a reason Lenin was trying to shut their presses down. The rivals and enemies of the Bolsheviks gathered to ensure the nascent regime was smothered in its grotesque infancy. The core of this group was the 300 or so demonstrators who had been threatened with a good spanking when they tried to go to the Winter Palace on the night of October 25th. They were leading members of the Petrograd municipal Duma, nearly all of whom were SRs, including the mayor of the city. The delegates who had walked out of the Soviet Congress, representatives from another assembly that we’re going to talk about next week, which is the All-Russian Congress of Peasant Soviets, plus leaders of the Union of Government Employees and other professional unions, and then just also random SRs and Mensheviks. Their position was that whatever was going on over at the Smolny Institute was neither valid nor legitimate. In fact, their claim was that the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets had never, in fact, convened, that what was going on over there was simply a private assembly of Bolsheviks. They all gathered at the assembly hall of the municipal Duma, and declared themselves to be the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution. They believed they represented the true spirit of legal democracy against a criminal gang of Bolsheviks. Among other things, the Committee of Salvation put out a call for workers to strike, particularly white collar professionals, functionaries, bureaucrats, bankers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The educated professional middle classes of Petrograd did not support the Bolshevik insurrection, and this call to strike was heeded in force. When Bolshevik commissars tried to take over leadership of the various ministries, they found the offices empty. But not just deserted, also in many cases trashed; typewriters destroyed, funds, files, documents, and records were destroyed or disappeared. The few workers who showed up at the central telegraph agency refuse to transmit commissar dispatches. Both private and state banks were closed, and the Bolshevik struggled to find anyone who would cash checks or provide funds. In the communist telling of all this, it’s an example of the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries nefariously sabotaging the people’s government. But all of these people opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power — they thought it was illegal. And they responded by playing by the same rules as Lenin: do what it takes to win. History has shown time and again that strikes are a good way to get your way. They knew they were indispensable cogs, not just in the machinery of state, but in the machinery of society. There’s nothing particularly nefarious about the white collar strike unless you think that only one side should be allowed to play for keeps while everyone else has to just roll over. They wrecked havoc with the Bolsheviks ability to run the country in the early days of their rule, which was entirely the point.

As the Bolsheviks grappled with this generally frustrating work stoppage, they also faced a more acute threat. The railway workers union led, primarily by Mensheviks and SRs, threatened to go on strike unless the Bolsheviks agreed to form a coalition government with the other socialist parties. Now, this was a real threat that had to be taken seriously. The railroads were the vital artery of the whole empire. Everyone remembered that it was their strike in 1905 that had brought Nicholas to his knees. They told the Bolsheviks, either come negotiate with the other parties under our auspices, or we will go on strike. The Bolsheviks could not afford to ignore this threat, so they sent Kamenev over to represent them, while Lenin and Trotsky focused on the looming military threat from Kerensky that we’re going to talk about here in a second. Kamenev was of course the Bolshevik most against his own party’s recent behavior and most in favor of cross-party coalition. But when he received their terms, even he was shocked by how extreme the demands were:

First, all troops must be placed under the authority of the municipal Duma.

Second, all workers must be disarmed and Kerensky’s forces must be allowed to enter the city.

Third, all arrested persons released and

Four, dissolve the MRC.

This was not coalition or compromise, this was a demand for the total capitulation of the Bolsheviks. The demand from the other parties was essentially that they repudiate everything that they had done, and give away everything that they had gained. The reason the terms were so one-sided was because the members of the Committee of Salvation did not believe the Bolsheviks would last the week. What military forces they had at their disposal — the MRC, the Red Guards, and the workers generally — were currently in the midst of succumbing to an epidemic of mass drunkenness. With the revolution of soldiers and workers now in full swing, the wine sellers of Petrograd were raided with enthusiastic abandon. Workers got wasted. Soldiers got wasted. Sailors got wasted. Men got wasted, women got wasted, everyone got wasted Anatov, the MRC leader who had arrested the provisional government on the night of October 25th, noticed the problem right away. The problem was particularly serious with the sellers at the Winter Palace, he said. One regiment, which had been put in charge of guarding them, got drunk and became quite useless. Another regiment went the same way. This pattern repeated for the next several days, and several weeks, and several months. Those who were supposed to guard or destroy caches of booze just drank it down, and then sold off the excess to waiting crowds. Let’s drink the Romanov leftovers was the order of the day. There were also plenty of rumors and anecdotes out there that mass quantities of booze were just suddenly appearing out of the blue, possibly supplied by the enemies of the Bolsheviks to keep the workers and soldiers on a fatal bender.

With the Bolsheviks grappling with all this inside Petrograd, they also had to deal with a great hammer looming over everything. Alexander Kerensky had slipped out of Petrograd on the afternoon of October 25th and gone to Pskov, where Nicholas had signed his abdication. Once there, he tried to rally troops to help him retake the capital from the criminal Bolsheviks. He also issued his own flurry of grandiose proclamations, reiterating his authority and rejecting any claim that he had been driven out of power. But here’s the rub, and this remains the rub of the whole thing: no one responded to this call. No one wanted to fight for Kerensky. The only person he could convince was General Pyotr Krasnov a right-wing ally of Kornilov, and the commander of the third cavalry corps, which was the same corp that had been dispatched to Petrograd a few months earlier during the Kornilov Affair. The men of this corp had no love for Kerensky, who they felt betrayed the honorable Kornilov, and caused the death of their esteemed commander, who you will recall from the end of that episode, shot himself in the heart. But though the men were standoffish, General Krasnov agreed to put them at the disposal of Kerensky. They marched first from Pskov to Gatchina, about 40 miles southwest of Petrograd, and then on October 28th, moved forward to Tsarskoye Selo on the outskirts of the city. Kerensky tried to win over the troops there, but most of them were either neutral or pro Bolshevik. They were certainly not going to fight for Kerensky.

In the meantime, not knowing exactly what forces Kerensky would be able to muster, the Bolsheviks scrambled to defend Petrograd. They tracked down a couple of regular army colonels willing to oversee the artillery placed on the Pulkovo Heights defending the southwest approach to the city. Unable to find anyone more reliable, Lenin tapped Colonel Mikhail Muravyov, an adventurous and ambitious officer known to have previously taken somewhat gleeful part in the suppression of the Bolsheviks back in July. But Muravyov swore he was more than happy to go blast the hell out of Kerensky, and without a better option, Lenin and Trotsky gave him command — although, Trotsky would also be on hand to oversee things, plus Muravyov was assigned a couple of political minders, with orders to put a bullet in his brain if he so much as hinted at betrayal. They then managed to order, rally, and harangue about 10,000 soldiers in the MRC chain of command. They were ordered to dig in on the Pulkovo Heights to defend the revolution.

Meanwhile, inside Petrograd, the Committee of Salvation was doing their part to instigate an uprising on the inside that would support Kerensky and Krasnov’s invasion from the outside. On October 27th, they issued a call to the citizens and soldiers of Petrograd: “Arm to resist the mad adventurers of the Bolshevik MRC. We call on all loyal troops of the revolution to assemble at the Nikolai Military College and unite around the Committee of Public Salvation.”

But here’s the thing. No one came. All the Committee of Salvation managed to do was incite a couple of hundred military cadets to briefly launch a little revolt, taking over a military installation and the telephone exchange. These cadets were quickly suppressed and forced to surrender by MRC forces. But no one else heeded the call. The dynamic inside the Petrograd Garrison remained what it had been from the start: the vast majority were neutral, the rest, pro Bolshevik. For all their pretensions to representing popular democracy against a tiny clique trying to seize power in an unpopular coup d’etat, the Committee of Salvation had to confront the fact that while it was true the Bolsheviks only had a very little bit of active support in the streets, they themselves had none at all. In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king, and in October 1917, the Bolsheviks were the one eyed kings of Petrograd.

Until October 30th, though, it did really look like the Bolshevik adventure was not going to last a week. That was the day Kerensky and Krasnov put their force of about a thousand Cossacks in motion. When they set out, they believed they would be toasting victory in the reclaimed Winter Palace, and the Bolsheviks would all be dead or in hiding. But then something very unexpected happened. As the Cossacks approached the Pulkovo Heights on the outskirts of the city, the artillery under Muravyov and Trotsky started lobbing shells, blowing the Cossacks to pieces, forcing them to retreat and leaving hundreds dead on the field. They had absolutely not expected stubborn resistance. They had not expected any resistance at all. Kerensky and Krasnov retreated back to Gatchina. The men were furious. Having only reluctantly gone into battle, they were now done, angrier than ever so many of their comrades laid dead on Kerensky’s worthless behalf. Now surrounded by sullen and angry soldiers, and with rumors swirling, the men planned to offer Kerensky to the troops in Petrograd in exchange for Lenin, Kerensky contemplated suicide. But a small group of loyal SRs managed to break him out of headquarters by having Kerensky don a sailor’s uniform and aviator glasses so nobody would recognize him. Escaping from the army that was supposed to be restoring him to power, Kerensky will spend the next several months on the run, lurking in the vicinity of Petrograd on the assumption that Bolsheviks couldn’t possibly maintain their hold on power forever. And he got out just in time. The Third Cavalry Corps surrendered on October 31st, and handed General Krasnov over to the Bolsheviks.

The little battle of Pulkovo upended the political situation inside Petrograd. The Committee of Salvation had been high handed with the Bolsheviks on the assumption that they would be pretty quickly dispatched by a superior military force. But with the surrender of the Third Cavalry Corps, no such force now existed. The Committee of Salvation modified their terms for a coalition, but Lenin and Trotsky now had no interest in giving even an inch. Why should they? Even the leaders of the railway workers union now hesitated to pull the trigger on their threatened strike. They were no longer sure they could even get their workers to go along with it. Feeling their powerbase solidified, the Bolshevik government continued issuing decrees, and on November 2nd, they announced a big one aimed at securing the support of the fourth of those four important groups we talked about at the beginning of the show.

Bidding for the support of the minority nationalities in the empire, Lenin and Chairman of Nationality Affairs Stalin, issued a Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia. This declaration opened:

The October Revolution of the workman and peasants began under the common banner of emancipation. The peasants are being emancipated from the power of the landowners, for there is no longer the landowner’s property right in the land. It has been abolished. The soldiers and sailors are being emancipated from the power of autocratic generals, for generals will henceforth be elected and subject to recall. The working men are being emancipated from the whims and arbitrary will of the capitalists, for henceforth, there will be established the control of the workers over mills and factories. Everything living and capable of life is being emancipated from the hateful shackles. There remain only the peoples of Russia, who have suffered and are suffering oppression and arbitrariness, and who’s emancipation must immediately begin, whose liberation must be effected resolutely and definitely.”

The decree then announced a four point program.

One, the equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia.

To the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state.

Three, the abolition of any and all national and national religious privileges and disabilities.

Four, the free development of national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia.

Like all the other decrees we’ve talked about today, this appeared to be a renunciation of centralized domination. All the dreams of liberation and self-determination were wholeheartedly being embraced. Even if the empire itself continued, and it was not entirely clear that it would, it would certainly be some kind of confederation of autonomous peoples.

When we take all the decrees issued by the Bolsheviks in their first week on the job, a very clear program emerges, and it was emphasized in the declaration of the rights of the peoples of Russia when it talked about emancipation, emancipation, emancipation, workers peasants, and minority nationalities were all told the future of Russia would be radically decentralized, and emphasizing at every point local self direction. The local village and the individual factory committee would wield most of the power. Minority nationality groups would be completely autonomous. It was an inverted power structure that was practically drawn straight out of the pages of the anarchists.

But while these decrees proliferated in the streets, Lenin and the Bolsheviks simultaneously crafted the foundation of the opposite of all that, a highly centralized one party dictatorship. Well, not all the Bolsheviks. Kamenev and his faction still believed they needed to enter some kind of coalition government with the other socialist parties in order to survive. Kamenev also doubled as chairman of the executive committee of the Soviet and so had to deal directly with the left SR members of that executive committee, who were growing very concerned Lenin and his fellow commissars were just issuing decrees without debate or even consultation. One left SR said in a session, “Accountability and strict order in detail are mandatory not only for bourgeois government. Let us not play on words and cover up our mistakes and blunders with a separate odious word. Proletarian government, which is in its essence popular, must also allow controls over itself. This hasty cooking of decrees, which not only frequently abound in your additional omissions, are often illiterate, leading to still greater confusion of the situation.”

Opposing a move towards a government composed only of Bolsheviks that unilaterally issued decrees that were often vague and didn’t make a lot of sense, Kamenev and a half dozen other commissars resigned their government also their leading positions in the Soviet Executive Committee, and their spots on the Bolshevik Central Committee. On November 6th, they published a statement defending themselves that said:

“We believe that it is necessary to form a socialist government, including all the parties of the Soviet. Only such a government can assure the fruits of the heroic struggle of the working class and the revolutionary army in the October and November days. We believe that a government which has exclusively Bolshevik can maintain power only by political methods of terror. The Council of People’s Commissars is starting on this road. We cannot follow it.”

These were prophetic words, and a warning echoed by all of Lenin’s critics going all the way back to the original Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. That at heart, he was nothing but an iron-willed authoritarian.

But even as Lenin is very clearly setting up a system whereby he and the other Bolshevik commissars could issue decrees rubber stamped by the Bolshevik dominated Soviet executive committee, all acting under Bolshevik party discipline, and that in retrospect, all of the decrees we talked about today might be taken as nakedly cynical ploys to lull the masses to sleep, it’s not at all clear at this point — at least not in my reading — that Lenin didn’t think the masses would follow the party, and that they would all go forward together, destroying the machinery of the bourgeois state, and building a new world of worker and peasant power. That all of these decrees weren’t just temporary emergency expedience necessary to secure the decisive transition towards the dictatorship of the proletariat in the classic Marxist sense. That for the first time in history, the majority would wield power.

But next week, theory and fantasy will begin to meet reality. The long delayed elections to the constituent assembly began in mid November, and the Bolshevik government would very soon have to grapple with the threat posed not only by Kerensky or Cossacks, white collar workers on strike, boardwalk capitalists and angry liberals, but the voters of Russia.

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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Episode 10.74: The Great October Socialist Revolution

So here we are, everything we’ve been building to for the last, I dunno, zillion episodes. On the list of great moments in revolutionary history, the Bolshevik Uprising of October 1917 is right there with the Fall of the Bastille in July 1789 at the center of the inner circle. And those two events certainly serve as temporal bookends defining what, in retrospect this here Revolutions podcast has been all about. But it’s not like we’re anywhere close to being finished, because just as with the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, the October Revolution only becomes recognized as the epicenter of a historical earthquake because of what came after. Lots of times throughout history, a capital city has been rocked by riots, uprisings, and street violence to no great permanent effect. The existing government refines its footing and life goes on. But sometimes, tumultuous events spanning just a few calendar days change the course of human history, as happened both in July 1789 and October 1917. So while we have been building to this moment, the rest of the Revolutions podcast will chronicle the struggle of the Bolsheviks to make October 1917 the beginning of a world historical earthquake rather than a forgotten flash in the pan. But it will also chronicle those revolutionaries who struggled against the Bolshevik vision of revolution, because that too is the story of the Russian Revolution.

In the last week of October 1917, the air in Petrograd was thick with anticipation. As we discussed at length last time, everyone knew the Bolsheviks were planning an uprising to coincide with the convening of the second All Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25th. It was really just a matter of how events were going to play out: whether the Bolsheviks would win or lose, not whether they would try. And a leading Menshevik told American journalist John Reed, “Well, perhaps the Bolsheviks can seize power, but they won’t be able to hold it for more than three days. They haven’t the men to run a government. Perhaps it’s a good thing to let them try. That will finish them.”

Alexander Kerensky, meanwhile, didn’t think they’d even make it that far. When he got word on the night of October 23rd that the Bolshevik dominated military revolutionary committee had backed down from its claim to veto power over all military orders in Petrograd, Kerensky took it as a sign that he could safely launch a preemptive strike and snuff out the Bolshevik coup before it even began. Kerensky ordered a loyal detachment of soldiers — mostly Kadets from a military academy — to seize and destroy the Bolshevik presses. In the predawn hours of October 24th, 1917, these soldiers pushed their way into the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashed up the joint, and placed a standing guard at the front door. To give this attack the veneer of legitimacy, Kerensky also ordered two extreme right-wing newspapers s shut down. But given the timing, it was obvious to everyone that this was aimed squarely at the left, and squarely at the Bolsheviks.

Kerensky’s decision to strike first gave the Bolshevik leaders exactly the pretense they needed to frame their actions as a defense of the revolution. In October 1917, Bolshevik leaders owned many different hats that they could take on and off as the situation necessitated. Trotsky, for example, was simultaneously a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, president of the Petrograd Soviet, and a leading member of the Military Revolutionary Committee. With his political party under attack, he could don the cap of the leader of the Petrograd Soviet, and frame Kerensky’s actions as an attack on free speech. When guards were dispatched to open the Bolshevik presses, Trotsky said it was because, “The Soviet workers and soldiers’ deputies can not tolerate suppression of the free word.” Then, donning the cap of leader of the MRC, he sent out orders to everyone recently incorporated into their chain of command. “Directive Number One,” the order read, “the Petrograd Soviet is in direct danger. You are hereby directed to bring your regiment to battle readiness. Any procrastination or interference in executing this order will be considered a betrayal of the revolution.” Across the city, soldiers started mobilizing. The attachment sent to the Bolshevik newspaper offices easily pushed aside the Kadets standing guard, and by 9:00 AM, the Bolshevik newspaper was back up and running. It should come as no surprise to any of you out there that no soldiers were sent to reopen the two right-wing papers in the name of freedom of freedom of speech.

As all of this unfolded, Kerensky hustled over to the Mariinsky Palace, where the Pre-Parliament was holding a session. He delivered a speech to ensure their support for his actions against the Bolsheviks. He got up and addressed them, saying, “I will cite here the most characteristic passage from a whole series of articles published by Ulyanov Lenin, a state criminal who is in hiding and who we are trying to find. The state criminal has invited the proletariat and the Petrograd garrison to repeat the experience of July, and insists upon the immediate necessity of an armed uprising.” Kerensky then quoted from Lenin’s open letter to his comrades that we talked about last week that very much advocated immediate, armed insurrection. Having made a pretty clear cut case that the Bolsheviks were planning to overthrow the government, Kerensky left the Pre-Parliament to debate the exact wording of their support for him. Then he headed back to the Winter Palace to orchestrate what he believed would be the final blows against Lenin and his gang of criminals.

But before we go on, let’s just remember that Kerensky’s government and this Pre-Parliament are not exactly paradigms of sovereign legitimacy. As we discussed two episodes back, the hastily arranged democratic conference in mid-September — itself not particularly legitimate — had explicitly rejected the formation of the present government. Facing this rejection, a self-appointed committee of Mensheviks, SRs, progressives, and liberals had then engaged in freelance negotiations with each other to select a slate of ministers of their choosing. The Pre-Parliament, meanwhile, was an assembly of leaders from various parties also self-appointed, and which Kerensky’ newly inaugurated government then proceeded to reject the authority of anyway.

So, for all the quite accurate accounts of the Bolsheviks using the Soviet to claim popular sovereignty they didn’t really deserve, it’s not like Kerensky, his government, or this Pre-Parliament were that much different. And this I think is something Lenin understood very well; that the contest of October 1917 should not be understood as a legitimate government being attacked by an illegitimate usurper, but instead, as two irreconcilable political factions making equally contrived claims to popular sovereignty locked in a death match that only one could emerge from. And moreover, this was a contest that could only be won by force. Later in the day on October 24th, Lenin hastily scrawled a note to his comrades saying, “The situation is critical in the extreme. To delay the uprising would be fatal. With all my might, I urge my comrades to realize that everything now hangs by a thread. That we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses, even congresses of soviets, but exclusively by the struggle of armed people. We must at all costs this very evening, this very night, arrest the government. We must not wait. We may lose everything. The government is tottering. It must be given the death blow at all costs.”

Kerensky certainly understood the contest in these terms. He absolutely believed he commanded a vastly superior force to the Bolsheviks, which is why he welcomed such a confrontation. After leaving the Pre-Parliament, he ordered his loyal forces to secure the four critical bridges across the Neva River linking the Bolshevik stronghold in the Viborg district in the north to the center of the city where all the key government buildings sat. At his immediate disposal were the Kadets from an officer’s school, a regiment of soldiers mounted on bicycles, a few Cossacks, and the Women’s Death Battalion, a unit of hyper-patriotic women formed at the outset of the June Offensive. They had been meant to simply be a showpiece of Kerensky’s new democratic army, but they had fought with notable commitment during his fail offensive. Even as the men mostly sat on their hands, got drunk, or deserted. Detachments from the Women’s Death Battalion set up pickets at the Winter Palace, and around key bridges in Petrograd.

But right from the outset, it became clear Kerensky had dramatically underestimated his strength. The great poet, playwright, and novelist Zinaida Gippius noted in her diary on October 24th, “Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.” The small number of forces loyal to the government could only secure two of the bridges across the Neva. Companies loyal to the MRC on the other hand, cheered on by angry crowds, won control of the other two. But mostly, most people were just neutral. The vast majority of soldiers, sailors, and civilians in Petrograd took no part whatsoever in the showdown between the government and the Bolsheviks. They merely observed events with detached curiosity and waited to find out who won.

To help turn curious onlookers into active supporters, the Bolsheviks did everything in their power to frame their actions as a defense of Petrograd and of the revolution. Everything they did was in the name of the Soviet, carried out by its military defense force, the Military Revolutionary Committee. Operating out of the Smolny Institute, home of the Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky drove this point home over and over again, telling everyone, This is defense, comrades. This is defense.”

Left SR members of the MRC issued a press release saying, “Contrary to all rumors and reports, this was not a proactive insurrection. All actions were instead exclusively for defense.”

The Bolshevik’s newspaper, now back up and running, flooded the streets with proclamations. “Soldiers! Workers! Citizens! A stroke of high treason is being contemplated against the Petrograd Soviet. The campaign of the counter-revolutionists is being directed against the All- Russian Congress of Soviets on the Eve of its opening, against the Constituent Assembly, against the people. The Petrograd Soviet is guarding the revolution. The Military Revolutionary Committee is directing the repulse of the conspirators’ attack.”

This was then followed by a further decree from the MRC telling everybody to be on high alert and follow orders. This defensive operation then moved to take key strategic locations in Petrograd. A unit under MRC orders took the main telegraph office. Later that evening, MRC units took over the main newswire of the city, allowing them to control information coming into and going out of the capital. The Bolsheviks also had lots of partisan comrades in the ranks of the Baltic Fleet stationed in Helsinki. Word came over the wire to launch ships to Petrograd to defend the Soviet and the revolution. These sailors began preparing at once.

There was not really any active fighting on October 24th, and the political leaders in Petrograd argued over how to resolve the crisis. At 8:30 that night, the Pre-Parliament reconvened for a turbulent session. SRs and Mensheviks managed to carry a motion to create a committee of public safety, composing leaders of all parties, to try to avert open war between the Bolsheviks and the government. But when two Mensheviks leaders hustled over to the Winter Palace to work out the details with Kerensky, they found him consumed in a rapid cycle manic depressive episode. He alternated rapidly between doom-laden fatalism and defiant optimism that he was about to achieve his most brilliant triumph. Kerensky’s boasting that he alone could save the revolution did not fill anyone else with a great deal of confidence.

At the Smolny Institute, all the socialist and revolutionary parties convened for a massive non-stop debate. The riotous assembly was frequently interrupted by catcalls. Heckling, cheering, booing, and sometimes they were so much noise speakers could not be heard over the din. These debates pitted Trotsky and the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and SR leaders who were still on the executive committee of the Soviet, who everyone knew would be replaced as soon as the Second Congress of Soviets formerly convened the following afternoon. The arguments of these right-leaning Mensheviks and SRs was that launching an insurrection was disastrously premature, and would invite fatal counterrevolution. “The masses are sick and exhausted,” one Mensheviks leader said. “They have no interest in the revolution. If the Bolsheviks start anything, that will be the end of the revolution. The counter-revolutionists are waiting for the Bolsheviks to begin riots and massacres.” Another invoke the Marxist theories that they were all ostensibly adherents of. Engels and Marx said the proletariat had no right to take power until it was ready for it,” he said. ” In a bourgeois revolution like this, the seizure of power by the masses means the tragic end of the Revolution. Trotsky, as a Social Democratic theorist, is himself opposed to what he is now advocating.”

But what we know is that Trotsky has by now a well-developed theory of permanent revolution and no longer has any truck with the kind of fastidiously pedantic readings of historical materialism the Mensheviks were now insisting on. “The Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries conquered the Kadets,” Trotsky replied, “and then when they got power, they gave it to the Kadets. They tell you that you have no right to make an insurrection. Insurrection the right of all revolutionists! When the downtrodden masses revolt, it is their right. “

Old Julius Martov, meanwhile, leading his handful of left-leaning Menshevik internationalists, was not explicitly hostile to Bolshevik goals, but instead to Bolshevik tactics. Martov rose and said, “The internationalists are not opposed to the transmission of power to the democracy” — and by that he meant the Soviets — “but they disapprove of the methods of the Bolsheviks. This is not the moment to seize power.”

As this rowdy and turbulent assembly unfolded, Lenin himself arrived at the Smolny Institute to make sure his comrades did not listen to his old friend Martov, or abandon the tactics that were going to see this thing through to the end. Arriving in disguise, because he was, after all, a state criminal and a wanted man, Lenin arrived to find a whirling cacophony of activity: soldiers, sailors, workers, onlookers, Red Guards and party delegates all running around shouting at each other. Out in front of the building, crowds gathered and various armed units attempted to maintain order on a very chilly night, lit and heated by perpetual bonfires. Lenin was briefly refused admittance to the Smolny Institute because he had no pass, but the general unmanageability of the growing crowd allowed him to slip his way in. Once inside the building, he made a beeline for Room 36, where the Bolsheviks made their party headquarters. Once inside the room, he pushed his comrades to stand firm. This was their moment. A failure to see this thing through would have far more fatal consequences than backing down.

Trotsky thoroughly agreed, and he, Lenin, and other members of the Central Committee made plans to move decisively from defense to offense. They poured over maps of the city, making plans to seize more strategic points, culminating with the capture of the Winter Palace and arrest of the provisional government. According to Lenin, this had to be done by noon, the following day, as the Second Congress of Soviets was set to convene at two o’clock. This congress needed to be presented with a fait accompli, not a possible course of action to be debated. They also drafted a list for a new government to take the place of the old provisional government — full of Bolsheviks, of course. As they got to work on this, they decided they didn’t want to call themselves ministers anymore, as it carried the taint of the old regime, the old ways, and the old world. Trotsky suggested they call themselves people’s commissars, and Lenin said, “Yes, that’s very good. It smells terribly of revolution.”

In the small hours of October 25th, 1917, MRC units fanned out across the city, easily capturing the Palace of Engineers, the central post office, several train stations, the telegraph exchange, and the electrical station, whereupon they cut power to all government buildings, but the Smolny Institute. They also took over the state bank. The regiment guarding the bank had previously voted to remain neutral in any political conflict, and so when the MRC showed up and said, why don’t you guys take off, those guys… just took off. When you tally up the raw numbers, it’s true that only a fraction of the Petrograd Garrison was committed to the Bolsheviks, but that fraction positively dwarfed those willing to fight and die for Kerensky’s government, and that was really all that mattered. Adding to this Bolshevik force — excuse me, MRC force — sailors at the Kronstadt Naval base received orders to depart for the city center at once. But even more dramatically, the battleship Aurora, crewed by radicals and docked at the Petrograd ship, sailed their ship up the Neva River to put it in position to fire on the Winter Palace.

With everyone and everything set to converge on the Winter Palace at noon, around mid-morning, the Bolsheviks flooded the street of Petrograd with an explosive and somewhat premature declaration addressed to the citizens of Russia. It announced in big bold letters:

“:The provisional government has been deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which heads the Petrograd proletariat and the garrison.

 The cause for which the people have fought, namely the immediate offer of a democratic peace, the abolition of landed proprietorship, workers’ control over production, and the establishment of Soviet power — this cause has been secured.

Long live the revolution of workers, soldiers, and peasants!”

By this point, Kerensky realized how badly he had overestimated his strength in Petrograd, and arranged to get the heck out of town. He remained undaunted, of course, and like Nicholas and Alexandra before him, remained convinced that while this handful of malcontents may have the upper hand in the capital, the Bolsheviks hardly commanded the entire army, navy, or resources of the Russian Empire. But further establishing his very thin base of support in Petrograd, Kerensky’s staff could not immediately deliver vehicles to get him out of town. They had to scrounge around and procure two automobiles, one of which they jacked from the American embassy. When Kerensky sped out of Petrograd around 11:00 AM, he was in a car waving the American flag and boasting diplomatic plates, blowing through checkpoints without even bothering to slow down. Most people didn’t even know Kerensky had left the capital, and they spent the whole day believing the looming showdown at the Winter Palace was going to end with his arrest.

But just as everything looked like it was going to be settled decisively in the next 60 to 90 minutes, a somewhat absurd comedy of errors unfolded that dragged out events for more than 12 hours. The commander of the Peter and Paul Fortress, situated just across the river from the Winter Palace, was supposed to issue an ultimatum to the provisional government inside the Winter Palace saying surrender or face artillery bombardment. But when the soldiers prepared this artillery bombardment, they discovered the guns on the side of the fortress facing the palace were in complete disrepair. So, the noon deadline came and went without ultimatum or incident. It took several hours for the garrison to haul up new guns, and it was only after these guns were put into position that the soldiers realized these guns took a different kind of ammunition; a kind of ammunition they did not have. This led to several more hours of delay. Meanwhile, the Battleship Aurora sat anchored menacingly, but it didn’t have any ammunition at all. The ship had been undergoing repairs, and all they had on hand were blanks. So hours just ticked by without anything. happening One Bolshevik in the Smolny Institute recalled, “Lenin was beside himself with agitated rage, and said he was like, a lion in a cage. He was ready to shoot us.”

The delays at the Winter Palace necessitated stalling the official opening of the Second Congress of Soviets, originally scheduled for 2:00 PM. Lenin was terrified that if the congress convened before the provisional government was arrested, the congress would start debating the issue, which would be fatal for his plans. So, with more than 650 delegates just kind of milling around the building, Trotsky preempted access to the main assembly room by calling an emergency session of the Petrograd Soviet. Once gaveled into session, Trotsky rose and declared, “On behalf of the Military Revolutionary Committee, I declare that the provisional government no longer exists.”

Someone in the audience shouted, “You are anticipating the will of the second Congress of Soviets!”

Trotsky retorted, “The will of the Second Congress of Soviets has already been predetermined by the fact of the workers’ and soldiers’ uprising. Now we have only to develop this triumph.”

Now, this is hardly what was going on out there in the streets. At that moment, the workers were mostly either at home or at work, while the vast majority of soldiers were standing around in consciously chosen neutrality. But then Lenin came out into the assembly to a mix of wild applause and angry cat calls. It was his first public appearance since that brief and unenthusiastic speech he had given in the midst of the July Days, Lenin announced the beginning of a new era for Russia, and ended by calling out, “Long live the world socialist revolution!”

The Mensheviks and the SRs in the hall were furious at the sheer audacity of the Bolsheviks making these wildly outrageous claims. They were nakedly stalling the opening of the Second Congress, a congress the Bolsheviks themselves had so relentlessly demanded. They were claiming the government was overthrown when in point of fact the government was sitting untouched in the Winter Palace. The Bolshevik coup on behalf of the Soviet was proclaimed, but it was not achieved, not by a long shot.

To the credit of the remaining ministers in the Winter Palace, they refused to just surrender. Even after they belatedly discovered Kerensky had ditched them, they understood his departure to be in the name of raising reinforcements to come save them. So despite the frequent demands that they surrender, each time they replied they would rather die than give in. But this was really not the case for their would-be defenders. At the outset of October 25th, there were perhaps 3000 armed guards in and around the Winter Palace — artillery school Kadets, some Cossack horsemen, the women of the Women’s Death Battalion — but over the course of the day, guards had been deserting left and right, some individually, some in whole groups. The ministers of the provisional government may have been ready to die, but there were very few people willing to die for them. By the end, there were maybe 300 armed guards left inside. Security at the palace was not tight. And famously, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and a handful of others just kinda walked through an open door, and during the long afternoon of waiting, they wandered around the palace, checking things out, interviewed people, tried to get an interview with Kerensky, but couldn’t, because Kerensky wasn’t there. After they left, they walked around the city center and witnessed the reality of the day: on this most auspicious of days, what would in the future be dubbed, the Great October Socialist Revolution, most of the population of Petrograd was just kind of going about its business. The restaurants weren’t closed, so they grabbed some dinner. The only notice taken of the Great October Socialist Revolution was the waiter moving them to an inner ballroom, away from the front windows, in case of gunfire. Other than that, dinner was fine.

When they got out, Reed and Bryant and the others wandered around. A few blocks away, reed said, “We could see the trams, the crowds, the lighted shop-windows, and the electric signs of the moving-picture shows — life going on as usual. We had tickets to the ballet at the Marinsky Theatre — all the theaters were open — but it was too exciting out of doors….”

But it’s not that people were ignorant of what was happening, just they weren’t really participating. “Up the Nevsky,” he reported, “the whole city seemed to be out promenading. On every corner, immense crowds were massed around a core of hot discussion. Pickets of a dozen soldiers with fixed bayonets lounged at street crossings, red-faced old men and fur coats shook their fists at them, smartly dressed women screamed epithets: the soldiers argued feebly with embarrassed grins….”

Meanwhile, at the Peter and Paul fortress, there was one final debacle. They were supposed to signal the final assault of the Winter Palace by raising a red lantern. The problem was, they couldn’t find a red lantern. The commander had to go digging around in the basement, and even when he found one, he and his men found it nearly impossible to fit it to the flagpole as instructed. But finally, at about 9:40 PM, one of the guns of the Aurora blasted a deafening roar. The entire city heard it, but almost nobody knew it was only a blank, least of all the ministers inside the Winter Palace, who dove for cover. After the blast from the Aurora, the guns from the Peter and Paul fortress opened up, firing maybe 30 to 35 shots. Most of these shots fell harmlessly in the river or exploded before impact. But it made for quite a show despite doing very little damage. With shelling now, finally audible at the Smolny Institute, signaling the imminent arrest of the provisional government, the Bolsheviks finally allowed the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets. There were 670 delegates assembled for this congress, 300 of them Bolsheviks, 193 SRs — with more than half of those being left SRs ready to caucus with the Bolsheviks — 68 Mensheviks, and 14 Menshevik internationalists like Julius Martov. The rest of the delegates were unaffiliated with any party.

Now it goes without saying that the Bolshevik proportion of delegates in the room that night was not a reflection of how much support they actually commanded throughout the Russian Empire. But even their outsized proportions only netted them a strong plurality, rather than an outright majority. And they still needed the left SRs to support them. The previous executive committee, which had been in place since June, now gave way to a new executive reflecting the number of delegates in the room that night. 14 Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Alexandra Kollontai, plus seven left SRs, including their leader, Maria Spiridonova. The Mensheviks were allotted seats, but refused them. They refused to cooperate with what they said was an illegitimate power grab. But though there was a lot of anger at Bolshevik tactics in the room, Bolshevik objectives were actually commanding quite a bit of support. Practically everyone in the room agreed the provisional government was not legitimate. They agreed the Soviet needed to claim power and use it as a base of an all-socialist government who would govern until the constituent assembly was called. The policies of that government would be immediate peace, immediate land transfers to the peasants, immediate worker control of the factories. This is basically just the Bolshevik program. The only subtle distinction is that most delegates, including most of the rank and file Bolshevik delegates, assumed that this government would be a unity coalition representing all the socialist parties — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs. Martov put forward a motion calling for exactly that, and despite some very vocal pushback from the Bolshevik leadership, this motion carried nearly unanimously. The sense of this Second Congress of Soviets was that the government needed to be a government of all the socialist parties, not just the Bolsheviks. But rather than go into coalition with the Bolsheviks, the right SRs and Mensheviks, still furious that their behavior,

and honestly believing that the Bolsheviks were leading the revolution to its destruction, announced their intention to leave the congress and march down to the Winter Palace, where they would intervene to save the provisional goverment.

But this walkout simply guaranteed ultimate Bolshevik victory. The Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, who wrote one of the vital Revolutionary memoirs, later lamented, “We completely untied the Bolsheviks’ hands, making them ministers of the whole situation and yielding to them, the whole arena of the revolution. A struggle at the congress for a united democratic front might have had some success, but by leaving the congress, we ourselves gave the Bolsheviks a monopoly of the soviet, of the masses, and of the revolution. By our own irrational decision, we assured the victory of Lenin’s whole line.”

And to add insult to injury, their dramatic demonstration at the Winter Palace never happened. The delegates who quit the congress joined representatives from the Petrograd municipal Duma, including the mayor of Petrograd, and formed a column of about 300 people heading towards the Winter Palace. John Reed, Louise Bryant, and their group happened to encounter this procession about a block away from the Smolny Institute. There, they ran into an MRC checkpoint manned by some armed sailors, and Reed recorded one of the most infamous incidents of October 25th. One of the soldiers yelled at these demonstrators, “I have orders not to let anybody go to the Winter Palace.”

Then the mayor of Petrograd stepped up and said, “We are unarmed, but we are going to the Winter Palace.” He dramatically said, “Shoot us if you want to, we’re ready to die.”

The soldier said, “No, I can’t allow you to pass.”

So another demonstrator said, “What will you do if we go forward? Will you shoot?”

The sailor said, “No, I’m not going to shoot people who haven’t any guns. We won’t shoot Russian people.”

So the mayor said,” We will go forward, and what can you do?”

At this point, another sailor, very irritated, took over negotiations. He said, “We will spank you. And then, if necessary, we will shoot you too. Go home now and leave us in peace.”

Flummoxed, but not willing to force the issue, this processional march to the Winter Palace was called off. All the demonstrators turned around and left.

Back in the Smolny Institute. Martov was still trying to effect a compromise. He put forward a motion criticizing the Bolsheviks for preempting the will of the congress before it had a chance to decide for itself what it wanted to do, but he still called for an inter-party negotiation to form a broadly inclusive socialist government. But after the walkout of the Mensheviks and the SRs, his call for compromise and coalition landed with far less enthusiasm than it had just a few hours earlier. In response to Martov’s motion, Trotsky mounted the tribune and eviscerated the compromise position.

“A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification. What has happened is an insurrection, not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petersburg workers and soldiers. We openly forged the will of the masses for an insurrection and not a conspiracy. The masses of the people followed our banner and our insurrection was victorious.”

Now, all of this is extremely debatable, but his last point really landed home:

“Now we are told renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask, with whom are we to compromise? With those wretched groups which have left us, or who are making this proposal? But after all, we had a full view of them. No one in Russia is with them any longer. A compromise is supposed to be made as between two equal sides. By the millions of workers and peasants represented in this congress, who may are ready, not for the first time or the last, to barter away as the bourgeoisie see fit. No. Here, no compromise is possible. To those who have left, and to those who tell us to do this, we must say you are miserable, bankrupts, your role is played out, go where you want to go: into the dustbin of history.”

At this, Martov stood up and said, “well, then I will leave.” A delegate blocked his way and said, “And we had thought that Martov at least would remain with us.” Martov said, “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”

And then he left.

Now this is a pretty heavy moment. Remember, Lenin and Martov go back more than 20 years, to when they were just baby revolutionaries together. They had stayed up all night talking on their last night before being exiled to Siberia in 1896. They had started Iskra together, to fight against the economists and revisionists and reformists who would turn revolutionary Marxism into mere trade unionism. Their feud, which was at the heart of the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split, was as much personal as it was ideological. Martov was initially more upset at Lenin’s callous personality than his political tactics, and even now. At this late hour on the moment of achieving what they had both been aiming for their whole lives — a socialist revolution in Russia — Martov ultimately could not abide Lenin’s personality, or his methods, or his tactics, and he quit. He walked out of the congress, and into the dustbin of history. Lenin made no effort to stop Martov, or turn him around or make him change his mind, but in the thick of the coming chaos, he would do everything he could to ensure Martov survived, and from his position as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Lenin made sure Martov’s medical bills were paid after Martov resigned himself to a life of bitter exile. In the summer of 1921, Lenin reflected on his regrets. The biggest: “It is a pity Martov is not with us. What an amazing comrade he was. Such a pure man.

At two o’clock in the morning on what was now technically October 26th, 1917, MRC forces stormed the Winter Palace. Well, stormed is a bit of an overstatement. A mix of Red Guards, regular soldiers, armed sailors, and some random angry bystanders, entered the palace while blasting away with their guns. Bullets ricocheted off walls and shattered the last remaining windows, but nobody was really fighting back, so there were very few casualties. To the extent that anything of note took place during the storming of the Winter Palace, it was simply that people started looting the palace, and were only stopped when officers of the MRC called out that this was the people’s palace now, stop looting from the people.

 Vlaidimir Antonov, secretary of the Bolshevik military organization, led a detachment of armed men into the room where the last remaining members of the provisional government sat waiting. When he entered, he said, “I inform all of you members of the provisional government, you are under arrest.” Whether they were actually willing to die or not is irrelevant; Antonov was not there to kill them. Then he led the ministers out of the palace and through an angry crowd who very nearly lynched them, but Antonov refused to let any harm come to them, and they were safely deposited in cells in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where they would wait for… what? No one knew.

By three o’clock in the morning word had come back to the Smolny Institute that the Winter Palace had fallen and the government was under arrest. This new set off absolute bedlam. Practically everyone who opposed the insurrection had long since departed. A few Menshevik internationalists tried to insist on a coalition of government of socialists, but what had been possible a few hours earlier, even unanimously supported, was now rejected out of hand. At 5:00 AM, they approved a proclamation Lenin drafted to the Russian people in the name of the Soviet, announcing grandiosely — and somewhat aspirationally:

“Backed by the will of the vast majority of the workers, soldiers, and peasants, backed by the victorious uprising of the workers and the garrison, which has taken place in Petrograd, the Congress takes power into its own hands. The provisional government has been overthrown. The majority of the members of the provisional government are already under arrest.”

They further announced the policies they hoped would give this narrow insurrectionary coup a broad base of support.

“The Soviet government will propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will secure the transfer of the land of the landed proprietors, the crown, and the monasteries to the peasant communities without compensation. It will protect the rights of the soldiers by introducing complete democracy in the army. It will establish workers’ control over production. It will ensure the convocation of the constituent assembly at the time appointed. It will see to it that bread is supplied to the cities and prime necessities to the villages. It will guarantee all the nations inhabiting Russia the genuine right to self-determination.”

This was the basis of the Bolshevik revolutionary program. The proclamation ended by calling on the people to remain ever vigilant against the forces of counter-revolution who were now surely gathering in strength. It said:

“The Kornilov men, Kerensky, and others are attempting to bring troops against Petrograd. Several detachments, whom Kerensky has moved by deceiving them, have come over to the side of the insurgent people. Soldiers, actively resist Kerensky the Kornilovite! Be on your guard. Railwaymen, hold up all troop trains dispatched by Kerensky against Petrograd. Soldiers, workers in factory and office, the fate of the revolution and the fate of the democratic peace is in your hands. Long live the revolution!”

Then the Congress of Soviets adjourned this session. Only time would tell if these tumultuous days in October 1917 were the epicenter of a historical earthquake or a flash in the pan. I think the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you about it, and you’re sitting there listening to me talk about it more than a hundred years later, is maybe all the answer we need.

It’s pretty well proof that whatever else it was, or was not, the October Revolution was quite a historical earthquake.

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.73: Zeno’s Revolution

Okay we’re back. All is well, just hit a crazy streak of busy times and some rotten luck. The event in LA went great though, and I can’t wait to do more of those in the future. And I must also plug that this Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021, I will be doing an online book talk with Dr. Faith Hillis, University of Chicago professor of Russian history. But this is not about my book, this time. I will be the interviewer. Dr. Hillis wrote a really great book called Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom, 1830s-1930s. If you have any interest at all in the Russian Revolution — and folks, if you’re listening to this, that’s you — please, by all means tune in. It’ll be a deep dive on the lives of everyone living in those Russian colonies scattered across Europe that served as embryos for the Russian Revolution. The event is in partnership with the New York Public Library, and I will drop a link to it in the show notes, but please do come out, Dr. Hillis is great, the book is great, and it’ll be a great night.

Now last time, we ended with the Bolshevik’s momentous decision on the night of October 10th, 1917, to stage an armed coup d’etat. What I want to talk about today is what happened in the two weeks after this decision was made, but before they actually went through with it. Because it would be very easy to just glide from one to the other, and skip over the fact that one of the most famous armed coups in history was by no means a forgone conclusion. These two weeks where a high wire act of tension, setbacks, and conflict, not just among the Bolsheviks and their various rivals, but among the Bolsheviks themselves.

Our loose guide for this week’s episode is an old friend, the American journalist John Reed. Reed has already made an appearance on the podcast because as you will recall, in 1913, he embedded himself with Pancho Villa, and wrote a series of newspaper dispatches from the Mexican Revolution collected and published as a book the following year called insurgent Mexico — which if you haven’t read Insurgent Mexico, by all means go read it.

 But Reed is far more famous for his other book about being in the chaotic thick of revolution, 10 Days That Shook the World, his eyewitness account of the October Revolution. Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant, a fellow journalist and political activist, came to Russia to report on the ongoing revolutionary upheavals, and they arrived in Petrograd just after the Kornilov Affair. Bryant wrote her own account of their experience called Six Months in Russia, but Reed’s is a real tour de force of political journalism. It’s crammed to the hilt with direct quotes and long excerpts from papers and pamphlets and speeches, making it one of the indispensable first person accounts of the October Revolution in any language. Reed also had access to the principle players, and was, for example, in the last small group of reporters to interview Alexander Kerensky before the fall of the Winter Palace. So I highly recommend everybody read 10 Days That Shook the World, and if you do read it, you’ll recognize where I’m pulling most of the direct quotes from this week’s episode. Now Reed and Bryant were there to just generally kick around and report on events in Russia. They did not know that those events were building towards the October Revolution.

Now, by the second week of October, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party at least knew that they were building towards a revolution. Now, in retrospect, their decision is often portrayed as merely a ruthless will to power from a tiny clique of revolutionaries who represented no one but themselves. But Lenin’s plan did not call for like a dozen people to slip into the Winter Palace and declare themselves the new government without any popular support at all. Lenin was always critical of such Blanquist methods, which in the Russian tradition was expressed by the old People’s Will-style vanguardism. Lenin always believed that the people should be behind them, and would be behind them once they got going. In an open letter to his vacillating comrades, Lenin said the masses were presently in a state of nervous tension, and if they were not necessarily calling for an immediate insurrection, the very active insurrection would snap them into focus, and cause them to enthusiastically coalesce around the Bolsheviks.

He wrote: “… a firm party line, its unyielding resolve, is also a mood creating factor, particularly at the sharpest revolutionary moments.”

Lenin’s position was that the Bolsheviks could not and should not wait until they became the most popular party in Russia before launching a coup, because the very fact of launching the coup is what was going to make them the most popular party in Russia. Lenin believed the people were desperate for clear and decisive leadership, and that’s what he planned to give them.

But to achieve this, a Bolshevik coup had to be for something. And indeed it was. In the fall of 1917, the party had a positive platform aimed at delivering what the people desired, as well as a negative program, aimed at preventing what the people feared. The Bolsheviks hammered both sides of this program in the lead up to the coup. The positive side was encapsulated in a party editorial from October 4th, 1917 that ended with a clear, direct, and uncompromising five point platform:

1. All power to the Soviets, both in the capital and in the provinces.
2. Immediate truce on all fronts, and honest peace between peoples.
3. Landlord estate to the peasants, without compensation.
4. Worker control of industrial production.
5. A faithfully and honestly elected constituent assembly.

So as the Bolsheviks drove towards power, this is what they were saying they were going to do with their power, and they were consciously ticking off each of the major constituencies they needed to win over. For the soldiers, peace. Now. Immediately. For the peasants land, now. Immediately. For the workers control of the factories, now, immediately. They promised no more delays hesitations or convoluted justifications. They promise to do away with the hypocritical and contradictory nonsense that had been floated by the liberals and the Mensheviks and the SRs since February. So for Lenin, it didn’t matter then in October 1917, the Bolsheviks didn’t technically have like any supporters among the peasantry who formed the mass majority of Russia. Who cares? When the Bolsheviks take power, we will transfer land from the large estates to the peasants, and voila, all the peasants will love us.

But if those were the desires to be fulfilled, what about the fears to be prevented? This was mostly aimed at the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, who the Bolsheviks needed to make their move. As we discussed last time, Kerensky gave the Bolsheviks a huge gift by floating the idea of evacuating Petrograd and letting the German sack it, and remember, the German to just a couple of hundred miles away at this point. The population of Petrograd understandably freaked out, and the Bolsheviks enthusiastically hammered the idea that the capitalists and the provisional government were basically in league with the kaiser. The Bolsheviks were also helped mightily by intemperate public remarks that confirmed the most exaggerated accusations. Mikhail Rodzianko, the old chairman of the state Duma, the first leader of the first provisional executive committee after the resignation of the tsar? He was quoted as saying, “Petrograd is in danger. I say to myself, let God take care of Petrograd. They fear that if Petrograd is lost, the central revolutionary organization will be destroyed. To that, I answer that I rejoice when all these organizations are destroyed, for they will bring nothing but disaster upon Russia.”

With quotes like this, floating around, it wasn’t hard to paint a picture that the liberals and capitalists and their agents in the provisional government were downright eager to toss the people of Petrograd to the Germans. The only thing that could save them was a self organized military apparatus by the people and for the people. Like, say, the recently formed military revolutionary committee.

The other fear of the Bolsheviks played on was that if the Germans didn’t sack Petrograd, then it would probably be some counterrevolutionary alliance of military officers, gangs of Black Hundreds, cossacks, and street thugs taking another shot at a Kornilov-style military coup. Rumors of such a coup swirled in the capital in the fall of 1917, and the Bolsheviks did everything they could to amplify and exaggerate the threat.

Trotsky said, “In essence, our strategy was offensive. We prepared to assault the government. But our agitation rested on the claim that the enemy was getting ready to disperse the Congress of Soviets, and it was necessary mercilessly to repulse them.”

Stalin later said, “The revolution — that is, the Bolshevik party — disguised its offensive actions behind a smoke screen of defenses in order to make it easier to attract into its orbit uncertain hesitating elements.”

Though the party had decided to go on offense, they knew it would only really work if it was sold as defense. And that’s exactly how they set about selling themselves: not as a self-interested clique making a power grab, but as the defenders of Petrograd and the revolution.

That the Bolsheviks were now plotting and insurrection was an open secret. People absolutely knew what was going on. On October 12th, one daily paper said, “There is definite evidence that the Bolsheviks are energetically preparing for a coming out on October 20th. That is, to coincide with the convening of the second All Russian Congress of Soviets, which the Bolsheviks themselves had called for. A right-wing paper prophesized, “The vile and bloody events of July three to five were only a rehearsal.” A Menshevik paper tried to derail the proposed coup by publishing a story allegedly revealing the details of the secret Bolshevik plan, including maps of their likely targets. Maxine Gorky, a former friend, ally, and sympathizer of Lenin, who had since drifted into a sort of intellectualized middle ground between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, urged the Bolshevik leaders to deny rumors of an insurrection, though he did agree that they were being pushed into this by the looming threat of counterrevolution. The military section of the SRs, on the other hand, thought the forces of counterrevolution would only be triggered if such an insurrection was launched. They issued a statement telling their members to stay home and not listen to dangerous hotheads. They said, “Counter-revolutionary plotters are planning to take advantage of this insurrection to destroy the revolution, open the front to Wilhelm, and wreck the constituent assembly. Stick stubbornly to your posts. Do not come out.” my point, though, is that in mid-October 1917, the Bolshevik coup was not flying under the radar. It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Now this raises the obvious question: why didn’t the government do anything about it? Well, here’s the thing. Far from being alarmed by the thought of a Bolshevik uprising, Kerensky and his fellow ministers were positively giddy at the idea, because they were sure they’d be able to put it down without breaking a sweat. One of Kerensky’s ministers said, “If the Bolsheviks act, we will carry out a surgical operation and the abscesses will be extracted once and for all.” Kerensky himself. Infamously said, “I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising. I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.” To the British ambassador George Buchanan, Kerensky said, “I only wish the Bolsheviks would come out, and I will put them down.” He didn’t want to stop Lenin — he was begging for Lenin to carry his feeble party out into the open, where Kerensky could destroy them.

Kerensky and his fellow ministers were not the only ones who thought that would be the end result of an attempted coup. Plenty of rank and file Bolsheviks believed it too, and I’m not just talking about dissenting central committee members like Zinoviev and Kamenev. On October 15, the executive committee of the Petrograd Bolsheviks met with representatives from the Bolshevik military organization, and they all shared extreme skepticism at the central committee’s plan. They nodded along with a memo drafted by Zinoviev and Kamenev saying immediate insurrection was far too risky a gambit. The prevailing mood of hesitancy inside the military organization thus makes October the reverse of July. Back in July, Lenin and the central committee said an uprising was premature, while the defiantly optimistic military organization marched out into the streets anyway. Now, here in October, it’s the military organization leaders trying to dissuade Lenin and the central committee from doing something rash. Their attitude was, we’re not ready and we’re not sure that the people will turn out. Yes, they’ll come out if the second Congress of Soviets calls them, but for the Bolsheviks alone? They won’t.

The dissent from party leaders who were just below the central committee on the Bolshevik org chart just goes to further show that, as we’ve seen many times, despite typical portrayals of the Bolshevik party as some kind of hyper disciplined dictatorial extension of Lenin’s will, that’s never how they worked in practice. Sure, Lenin exerted a great deal of influence on the party. He exerted more individual influence than any other individual leader of any other party. But that is hardly the same as everybody doing what Lenin said all the time. All through the revolution, the Bolsheviks were constantly at odds with each other over strategy, tactics, theory, timing, means, and ends. Different sections and committees disagreed with each other. The Moscow committee wasn’t on the same page as the Petrograd committee. Rank and file agents would just go off and do their own thing, often ignoring the central committee entirely. Orders going from the top down were not followed. Demands coming from the bottom up forced the leaders to alter their plans. Now maybe they were a more cohesive herd of cats than any other party, but they were still mostly a herd of cats, as is evidenced by Lenin being more or less on the verge of a stroke every waking moment of his life.

But though there was an awful lot of pushback, Lenin and the central committee refuse to change course. On October 16th, the Bolshevik central committee held another meeting to grapple with the fact that lots of party members were extremely skeptical. At this meeting. Lenin stood on one side, while Zinoviev and Kamenev stood on the other. These were the three longest tenured Bolsheviks in the room, and they couldn’t agree on what to do. Kamenev thought the whole thing was a bad idea. Not only was an insurrection too risky, it was pointless. Kamenev believed that the party was well on its way to winning majorities in both the second Congress of the Soviet and the constituent assembly. So why do something incredibly risky like stage an armed uprising when the party was just weeks away from peacefully winning majorities? Zinoviev put forward a compromise motion saying that, at a minimum, the party must delay any armed uprising until the second Congress of the Soviets convened. The almost uniform word coming up from the streets was that the people would turn out if this Soviet called them out, but not the Bolshevik party alone. This motion was defeated. Lenin then put forward a counter motion reaffirming the October 10 decision to stage an insurrection as soon as practicable, though it did not yet set a firm time or date. That motion carried almost unanimously. Kamenev promptly resigned from the central committee, freeing him from the rules that prohibited central committee members from airing their disagreements publicly, exactly what Lenin had threatened to do a few weeks earlier when the central committee seemed hell bent on not staging an insurrection.

The following day, the executive committee of the national Soviet organization, still dominated by Mensheviks and SRs, announced that the second Congress of the Soviets would be delayed until October 25th. They knew what the Bolsheviks were up to, and they were trying to stall long enough to allow more Mensheviks and SR delegates to get to Petrograd so they would not lose control of the Soviet organization to the Bolsheviks. But it also gave the Bolsheviks a vital few extra days to prepare. And as they prepared, again, they are not really concealing themselves. On October 17th, Lenin published an open letter to his comrades where he invoked the image of the Soviet being a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government. This was a common metaphor used to illustrate the Soviet role in the dual power system, that they didn’t need to wield power themselves, because they were a revolver pointed at the head of the provisional government, who would then do whatever they said. Lenin said, this revolver is useless if the leaders of the Soviet refuse to pull the trigger. He said:

If it is to be a revolver ‘with cartridges,’ this cannot mean anything but technical preparation for an uprising; the cartridges have to be procured, the revolver has to be loaded — and cartridges alone will not be enough.

Either…. openly renounce the slogan, ‘All Power to the Soviets,’ or start the uprising.

There is no middle course.

Lenin also debunked the notion that they should wait until the counter-revolution struck before making their own move. “What if the Kornilovites of the second draft will have learned a thing or two?” he asked. “What if they wait for hunger riots to begin, for the front to be broken through, for Petrograd to be surrendered, before they begin? What then?”

“… there is no objective way out and can be none except a dictatorship of the Kornilovites or a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

So Lenin wasn’t even bothering to hide his intentions here, and what’s more, he’s lifting the curtain on the whole anything we do will merely be defensive thing, because he’s quite openly saying, we can’t wait for them to strike first. We have to strike first. The best defense is a good offense. The only defense is a good offense.

Over the next few days, the Bolshevik coup was the talk of Petrograd, but people weren’t exactly eager to get involved. The military organization of the SRs in Petrograd voted to remain neutral in any coming Bolshevik insurrection. They would neither rise with the Bolsheviks nor help the government put them down. They would wait on the sidelines. But they did warn their members to be on the lookout for a full-on right-wing coup, which was also expected at practically any moment. They send out a circular to members warning them to be fully prepared for the merciless suppression, possible assaults by the Black Hundreds, pogromists, and counter-revolutionaries. On October 19th, the leaders of the garrison of the all-important Peter and Paul Fortress voted against joining any Bolshevik insurrection.

With reports like this in hand, Alexander Kerensky, his optimism was fully cemented. The intelligence coming into him indicated only a small number of soldiers were actually with the Bolsheviks. And he wasn’t wrong about that. There were something like 160,000 soldiers garrisoned in Petrograd, with another 85,000 in the general area. Of those, only a small fraction were actively participating in the coup. At most, the number was in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands. The vast majority of the soldiers clearly wanted no part of it. But here, kerensky made a fatal miscalculation. His brief time in the Winter Palace appears to have infected him with the same fatal case of blinkered myopia that took down Nicholas and Alexandra. Kerensky was convinced he was only threatened by a small group of malcontents, and that the vast majority of Russians were still with him. Kerensky took the small number of Bolshevik diehards to mean that those soldiers who declined to participate would defend his government. And boy, did he misread that. They didn’t plan to defend his government, they planned to sit on the sidelines and watch. They weren’t going to fight for Lenin, but they also sure as hell were not going to fight for Kerensky either.

More than anything, a mood of chaotic, noisy, bustling, and increasingly paranoid anticipation saturated Petrograd. And to set the scene, I’m just going to hand the reigns over to John Reed and let him describe what he saw in this final week: “Petrograd presented a curious spectacle in those days,” he wrote.

In the factories, the committee rooms were filled with stacks of rifles. Couriers came and went, and the Red Guard drilled. In all the barracks, meetings every day, and all night long, interminable hot arguments. On the streets, the crowds thickened towards a gloomy evening, pouring in slow voluble tides up and down the Nevsky, fighting for the newspapers. Holdups increased to such an extent that it was dangerous to walk down side streets… one afternoon, I saw a crowd of several hundred people beat and trampled to death a soldier caught stealing… Mysterious individuals circulated around the shivering women who waited in queue, long cold hours for bread and milk, whispering that the Jews had cornered the food supply — and that while the people starved, Soviet members lived luxuriously.

At Smoley, there were strict guards at the doors and the outer gates demanding everyone’s pass. The committee-rooms buzzed and hummed all day and all night, hundreds of soldiers and workmen slept on the floor, wherever they could find room. Upstairs in the great hall a thousand people crowded to the uproarious sessions of the Petrograd Soviet…

[…]

And in the rain, the bitter chill, the great throbbing city under gray skies rushing faster and faster towards — what?

On October 21st, the military revolutionary committee held a conference of representatives from the garrisons of Petrograd in order to coordinate what was ostensibly a municipal defense force, but which everyone well knew was a Bolshevik led military apparatus. The delegates in the room, many of them, members of the Bolshevik military organization, passed a resolution calling on the forthcoming Congress of Soviets to take power. Then, they set about ensuring that when the Congress of Soviets met, that the MRC would wield ultimate military authority in the capital. They sent a delegation to the ranking officer of the Petrograd military district, delivering a message that henceforth, soldiers in the garrison would only follow orders counter signed by the MRC, The officer scoffed, and said, I don’t recognize your delegation, your committee, or your orders. You have no authority here whatsoever.

This delegation then returned to MRC headquarters and announced that the regular chain of command military officers had rejected their authority. So they drafted a resolution and promulgated it on the morning of October 22nd. It read, “The headquarters of the Petrograd military district refuse to recognize the MRC. In doing so, the headquarters break with the revolutionary garrison of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies. The headquarters becomes a direct weapon of counter-revolutionary force.” Then, they staked a very bold claim to military power: “The protection of revolutionary order from counter-revolutionary attacks rests with the revolutionary soldiers directed by the MRC. No directives to the garrison not signed by the MRC should be considered valid.” They finished this by saying, “The revolution is in danger. Long live the revolutionary garrison.”

With this statement, they proclaimed their ultimate authority over all military decisions in Petrograd, and further said that any orders that contradicted the MRC was ipso facto an active counter revolution.

This declaration was issued early on October 22nd, and there was a plausible belief that there may be a major confrontation that very afternoon. October 22nd had been declared a day for celebrating the Petrograd Soviet, and there were lots of banquets and rallies and speeches planned. But it was also the anniversary of Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, which was itself an annual nationalistic celebration. Conservative elements in the army indicated they planned to observe this celebration with parades of their own.

But as the day progressed, the energy in Petrograd was predominantly left-wing, not right-wing. Trotsky gave an electrifying speech at an opera house reminding everyone of how great things would be once the Soviet took power for itself. Soviet power was destined not only to put an end to the sufferings in the trenches, he thundered, it would provide land and stop internal disorder.

“The Soviet government will give everything the country has to the poor and the soldiers at the front. You, bourgeois, own two coats? Give one to the soldier freezing in the trenches. You have warm boots? Stay at home. Your boots are needed by a worker.”

People applauded rapturously. Trotsky called, “We will defend the cause of the workers and the peasants to the last drop of blood. Who will join us?” Everyone cheered, and raised their hands.

There was no great confrontation on October 22nd, and the following day, the MRC finished appointing their commissars, nearly all of whom doubled as members of the Bolshevik military organization. The mood of the city now shifted decisively in the direction of hoping the second Congress of Soviets declared itself the seat of a new national government, backed by the arms of the MRC. As most of the members of the Bolshevik Party had hoped, they were succeeding at organizing their coup under the popular legitimising banner of Soviet authority. On the afternoon of October 23rd, a group of MRC commissars went to the Peter and Paul Fortress to convince them to join the MRC chain of command. The commander of the fortress relented to demands to hold a democratic assembly of his soldiers. Once gathered, the men were harangued by Mensheviks and SRs imploring them to stay in the regular chain of command and not join insurrectionary hotheads, whose hot headedness would lead them all to their doom. Meanwhile, the MRC commissars, most of them Bolsheviks, said join us or Petrograd will fall, either to the Germans or to the counterrevolution. Trotsky arrived and gave a speech urging the Garrison to join with the MRC and defend the revolution. At 8:00 PM, they voted. Everyone who wanted to join the MRC moved to the left, everyone who wanted to maintain the status quo moved to the right. Nearly every soldier moved left. The MRC. And by extension, the Bolshevik Party now controlled the Peter and Paul Fortress, along with its huge cache of weapons and ammunition, and its direct line of sight on the Winter Palace, where Alexander Kerensky lived, worked, and, apparently, prayed for the Bolsheviks to take their best shot.

That night, John Reed headed to the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet. He reported:

In the hall. I ran into some of the minor Bolshevik leaders. One showed me a revolver. “The game is on,” he said, and his face was pale. “Whether we move or not, the other side knows it must finish us or be finished.”

Reed then witnessed a speech by Trotsky.

“We are asked if we intend to come out,” Trotsky said. “I can give a clear answer to that question. The Petrograd Soviet feels that at last the moment has arrived when the power must fall into the hands of the Soviet. The transfer of government will be accomplished by the All Russian Congress. Whether an armed demonstration is necessary will depend on those who wish to interfere with the All Russian Congress. We feel that our government entrusted to the personnel of the provisional cabinet is a pitiless and helpless government, which only awaits the sweep of the broom of history to give way to a really popular government. But we are trying to avoid a conflict, Even now, today. We hope that the All Russian Congress will take into its hands that power and authority which rests upon the organized freedom of the people. If, however, the government wants to utilize the short period it is expected to live — twenty-four, forty eight, or seventy-two hours — to attack us, then we shall answer with counter-attacks, blow for blow, steel for iron!”

So this is pretty heavy stuff. But then, later that same night, with everything so clearly moving in a decisive direction, there was an unexpected flinch from the Bolsheviks and the MRC. The senior officer of the Petrograd military district invited them to engage in further talks over who had veto over what orders. Maybe an arrangement could be worked out. The Bolshevik leadership made a calculated decision to withdraw their unilateral claim to military authority, probably because they were not quite ready to make their move, and they didn’t want to spark something they couldn’t control. So they backed down. Or at least, they seemed to back down. Which was quite enough to convince Alexander Kerensky that he had the Bolsheviks right where he wanted them. This was a signal the Bolsheviks did not actually believe they were strong enough to back up their big talk. As soon as he heard the news, Kerensky issued orders to strike, giving the Bolsheviks exactly the attack they needed to claim that they were launching a counter attack. The revolution was in danger. Petrograd must be saved.

Next week, we will all wake up on the morning of October the 24th, 1917, and shake the world.

 

 

 

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.13: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality

Before we get started this week, I want to remind you, or maybe you just haven’t heard yet, but I will be at the Sound Education conference at Harvard, which runs from October the 9th to the 12th, so that takes place just about a month from now. If you produce an educational podcast or want to start an educational podcast or just like educational podcasts and you want to come hang out with us, it’s going to be a great deal of fun, with tons of sessions and talks and get togethers. I will be doing my talk, What is the Point of All This, as well as doing a joint session with the great Robin Pearson, who picked up the standard I dropped when I finished the history of Rome, and he kept going with the History of Byzantium. Registration is open and you can check it out at soundeducation.fm, and I will also put a link in the show notes and I, uh, hope to see you all there.

Now last time, we finally did our long overdue episode about the failed Decembrist Revolt of 1825, a supremely abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs that went about as badly as an abortive attempt to secure constitutional government and freedom for the serfs could have gone.

This week, we will continue to cover events that dovetail with material we covered in series six on the July Revolution, and then move on through to events that would fit alongside series seven, on the revolutions of 1848, revolutions which of course convulsed so much of western and central Europe, but did not convulse Russia. Instead, Russia would emerge as something of the gendarme of Europe, helping the Austrian smash the last redoubts of Hungarian national independence in the summer of 1849.

So the failure of the Decemberists meant that the new emperor of Russia was now 29-year-old Nicholas the First. Although Nicholas was technically the younger brother of the now deceased Alexander, he was of a different generation — I mean, he was practically young enough to have been Alexander’s son. Nicholas was born in 1796 when their grandmother Catherine was about to keel over dead, and Alexander was already 19 years old. So unlike Alexander, who was raised in a broadly Enlightenment intellectual and cultural milieu, Nicholas came of age in a very different time, in a time marked not by philosophy and rational progress, but by war and the titanic struggle against Napoleon.

Nicholas was inducted into the army early, and was completely stamped by military life. His formative years were spent in the great patriotic wars against the French. He was not yet 16 years old when Napoleon invaded Russia, not yet 20, for the battle of Waterloo. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Nicholas prepared to settle into a permanent career in the army. And there was almost no thought given to the unlikely chance that he might be emperor himself one day. Tsar Alexander was still young, and after him would come Konstantin, and both would surely have sons, who would push Nicholas even further back in the line of succession.

Accounts differ about what exactly Nicholas knew about his older brother Konstantin’s plan to pre-abdicate the throne. By some accounts, Nicholas was completely blindsided in 1825; others say that he knew everything; others that he knew some of the story, but maybe not all of the story. But his actions in 1825 certainly hint at a young man who seemed very confused and caught off guard by the shocking news of Alexander’s death, and he certainly contributed mightily to the situation when he swore his oath to Konstantin, rather than saying, right, I now am the emperor. But, we covered all that last time.

So now it’s January 1826 and Nicholas, 29 years old, is secure on the throne. So what kind of emperor is he going to be? Well, he was hardly prepared for the job in experience or training, which isn’t his fault — no one had prepared him to rule. He had not prepared himself to rule. It seemed like such a remote possibility. So he followed the path he knew best, and he resolved to do his duty as a soldier. And not to exaggerate things, but that’s about as far as he got.

 As I said, Nicholas was absolutely stamped by a military way of thinking. He was not much impressed with civilian politicians or ministers or bureaucrats. He did not trust his independent and possibly seditious nobility. He would run his government not through normal ministerial channels, but through a personal chancellery, composed almost entirely of high ranking military officers. And as the years went by, all future appointments at nearly every administrative bureau or department inside the normal ministerial channels went to a military officer, even if they weren’t qualified or knew anything about the department they were supposed to be running. Nicholas believed that military men were simply better able to make decisions quicker and more efficiently. He in fact tended to believe that the army was the perfect model for a well-run society. It emphasized service, duty, obedience, rational order, and a unified single purpose. These were virtues that Nicholas believed in, and at the top of any such society must be the commander in chief, the tsar, the emperor. His job was to be strong and decisive. Nicholas was not plagued by the intellectual vacillations of Alexander, which took him this way, and then that. And no description of Nicholas is complete without words like ‘iron will’ and ‘unbending resolve.’ He never doubted that his role as God’s chosen emperor was to be the stern and protective father of his children.

The other thing that marked Nicholas besides the military was the Decembrist Revolt that opened his reign — that had tried to prevent his reign. Even as the years and then decades passed, the memory of that revolt still haunted his imagination. Nicholas knew that there had to be more dissenters and seditious freethinkers lurking around out there. So to combat this ever-present menace to good order — and his life — in 1826, Nicholas created what was dubbed the Third Section of the chancellery. The Third Section was a political secret police, and the forerunner to the even more infamous Okhrana which, I promise you, we will be talking a lot more about. This special Third Section was answerable directly to the tsar, and run by the trusted Alexander von Benckendorff from 1826 until his death in 1844.

The job of the Third Section was to know whatever the regime needed to know in order to nip treason in the bud. And treason could come from anywhere: obviously secret political societies, like the Decemberists, but also heretical religious sects, students and professors at the universities, ambitious nobles, corrupt bureaucrats, all the way down to servants and staff and peasants.

The Third Section was never that big, starting with a small staff of just 16 permanent agents and about 300 gendarme officers at their disposal. But their psychological reach was immense. It was well known now that the walls had ears, informers were everywhere, that the person sitting next to you might be a spy. Loose talk around the proverbial water cooler might get back to agents of the dreaded Third Section, and the next thing you know, it’s a midnight arrest, and a one-way ticket to Siberia. Basically the creation of the Third Section in 1826 meant that the Russian Empire became infused with a vague omnipresent paranoia. But the reputation of the Third Section was always greater than its real size, or its record. In the mid 1830s, they had about 1600 individuals under regular surveillance, but mostly among the nobility and high level bureaucrats. They never had the resources to penetrate much deeper than that. So when the revolutionaries started coming out of the lower classes, the Third Section would prove to be mostly deaf and blind.

While the Third Section grappled with domestic enemies, Nicholas’s beloved army grappled with Russia’s foreign enemies, and right out of the gates, they faced about five years of continuous fighting down on the southern border. First, the Persians launched in attempt in 1826, to avenge their losses in the Caucasus, starting a war which lasted until 1828, and which resulted only in the Russians solidifying their position, and securing permanent hold on Georgia and Armenia.

Then there was the problem of the Ottoman Empire, and what is called in western histories of 19th century international diplomacy, the Eastern Question. But for the Russians, it was a southern question: basically, what to do with the increasingly dysfunctional and faltering Ottoman apparatus. Russia was under pressure from Christians and the Balkans and in Greece to help them throw off the Turkish yoke. But since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Russian policy had been to keep the Ottomans weak, but intact, and fighting a war with them might hasten their collapse. This would allow the British or the French to advance their own Mediterranean ambitions, which was a far worse proposition than dealing with the Ottomans. So under Alexander, the Russians had held off, for example, getting tangled up in the War of Greek Independence, but now things changed. Nicholas signed a protocol with the British where they pledged to mediate an end to the conflict and secure Greek autonomy. The Ottomans rejected this. So, in 1827, when a new Turkish fleet sailed for Greece, Russia’s navy joined with an allied fleet that successfully sent that Turkish fleet to the bottom of the sea. This act enraged the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia in 1828, leading the Russians to march south through the Balkans and practically to the gates of Istanbul. But the point here again was to maintain a weak but intact Ottoman empire, not like conquer them and annex their domains. And so a treaty in 1833 helped maintain the basic status quo, though Greece now secured its independence, and Russia claimed additional territory around the Danube, and rights to a sort of protectorate around Moldavia and Wallachia.

Of greater personal concern to Nicholas through these years, though, was the return of revolution to France, because in July of 1830, that’s right, the barricades went up and the Bourbons came down. Again. A true believer in conservative royalist legitimacy, Nicholas was shocked to discover that Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans had consented to be the benefactor of rabble rising up and tossing out a rightful king. This was especially shocking because Nicholas and Louis Philippe had been personal friends. Nicholas had stayed with the Orléans family in Paris in 1815, and he took the ascension of now King Louis Philippe as a personal betrayal.

When events in France then threatened to spread east, first into Belgium, and then later that summer creeping into Poland, Nicholas’s emissaries told the other crown heads of Europe, we stand at the ready to assist you. But the new July monarchy supported the Belgians breaking away, and the Prussians and British didn’t want to make a huge issue out of it, and so they didn’t. We covered all of this in Episode 6.8B by the way. But then the 1830 movements hit the kingdom of Poland over the winter, which was that constitutional monarchy set up by the treaty of Vienna, and where Nicholas now rained out of the King of Poland. Now he had never liked the constitutional scheme, had been working steadily since he became King of Poland to erode the liberties and rights of his Polish subjects. This was increasingly intolerable, and so partly inspired by events in Paris, the Poles went into revolt in January, 1831. The tsar needed no permission or allies to act in his own domains, the Russian army stormed in, crushed the uprising, and more or less abolished the constitution, and converted those Polish lands into little more than a mere province of the Russian Empire.

But though he was a military autocrat with a fairly unimaginative belief in traditional legitimacy, nicholas was not totally insensible to the fact that he was living in a world very different from his medieval forebears, and educated Russians might need something more than obey your father if revolution was going to be avoided in the future. So Nicholas was open to listening to his enlightened and worldly minister of education, Sergey Uvarov. In 1833, Uvarov sent a circular memo to staff of the education ministry outlining the principles that should guide the further development of the state education system. And here, he introduced a triad that became official imperial ideology basically until 1917: orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. Or, what is called the policy of Official Nationality.

To take them in order, orthodoxy means the Orthodox Church, which had going all the way back to the princes of Moscow, been politically subservient to the monarchy, and mostly there to prop up the ruler, that was their political role. This new official policy of orthodoxy, though, was meant further to roll back a lot of the innovations that had been introduced into the church during the reigns of Peter and then Catherine. They wanted to take Orthodox Christianity back to its traditional roots, beliefs, and practices, untainted by western ideas.

The second part of the triad was the most important: autocracy. The emperor was the tsar, the father of his children. They obeyed him and he protected them. That was the relationship. This relationship was consecrated by God and could have no intermediary go-between like a constitution.

Then finally, there is nationality, which is a little bit trickier. This is not the same as the nationalism we’ve been talking about in other series in the show, this is about firmly rooting orthodoxy and autocracy in its Russian character, history, and traditions, rather than, say, whatever Catherine had been up to while she stayed up late reading Montesquieu. Official Nationality also tended to exalt an idealized Russian peasant as the simple, good, and loyal foundation of society. And in fact, part of the educational policy of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality was to not educate the peasants, in order to keep them pure and unspoiled by the atheistic and egotistical heresies coming out of the West.

This Official Nationality was not in itself a threat to the tsar, as nationalism was about to become a threat to the dynastic rulers in Germany and Italy and Hungary, because the tsar became the living embodiment of the nation. It was instead a kind of way to capture that nascent national spirit and redirect it, not down towards the people, but up towards the tsar. Official Nationality also recognized the special role of the Russians as the founder of the now multi-ethnic Russian Empire. So Russian language and culture and character would naturally dominate, even if ethnic minority groups would all enjoy equal civil rights — except for the two and a half million jews. Of course. It’s always except for the jews.

So orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality became the ruling ideology for the rest of the century. This also comes around as one tsar, one church, one language — faith, tsar, and fatherland — and it sought to place the tsar, the emperor, at the top and center of Russian life. And deviations from this could lead to a knock on the door from the Third Section.

But despite all this creeping conservative repression and the spread of orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality, fresh new ideas couldn’t be stamped out entirely. And while overt politics became increasingly off limits, if you had any kind of sense of self preservation, there were other outlets: for example, literature and philosophy. And this is the era when German philosophy, for example, really starts getting gobbled up by the students of Moscow. One group especially gathered around a young poet philosopher named Nikolai Stankevich in the early 1830s, and among other things, the Stankevich circle started studying and discussing Kant and Schiller, Ficte and Hegel. Now they were under Third Section surveillance practically the whole time, but they kept their activity strictly intellectual. Stankevich himself tragically died of tuberculosis in 1840 at the age of just 26, but the circle he founded had a long lasting impact. Young Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin were in that mix by the mid 1830s, but by then this small cadre of Russian intellectuals were already drifting into two competing camps: the westernizers, and the slavophiles.

The debates between the westernizers and the slavophiles, which would define this generation of Russian intellectual life, recapitulated in modern language the debates that have been going on since Peter the Great. Basically, should Russia’s future be defined by looking outward towards Europe, or inward towards itself? As their name suggests, the westernizers were the heirs of Peter and Catherine and the Decemberists. They continued to hammer the theme that Russia was backward, Russia was behind. They ridiculed the ignorant superstitions of the Orthodox Church. They chafed under the tyrannical paternalism of the emperor. Russia needed to fully embrace reason, science, liberal politics, and economic progress in order to keep pace with their neighbors in the west. The leading light of the westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s was a guy named Vissarion Belinsky, and he spread his message from his place as the preeminent Russian literary critic of the day. Going all in on Hegel, Belinsky believed that Hegel’s conclusion that existence was attempting to resolve towards a great idea, and that idea was freedom, and that freedom had already arrived in the west, Belinsky concluded that Russia must be on a similar track, they were just further back and they needed to catch up. Progress had to be made, it was almost a cosmic imperative.

Now, on the other side was a group who thought this whole westernizer obsession was an exercise in unnecessary self-loathing, and these guys were the slavophiles. Russia was not European. Russia should not try to be European. Sitting astride Europe in the West and Asia in the East, Russia was its own unique and great thing, and if they wanted progress — if such a thing was even desirable — they needed to build from their own history and traditions. And in this, at least, they fit in with Official Nationality. They had nothing but criticism for the west. Western Christianity was terrible, protestantism was greedy and egotistical, Catholicism was greedy and power hungry. Neither was concerned with true religion or the soul. As for these so-called progressive ideas that had come out of the west, look at what they had wrought: nothing but revolution, war, and chaos. One day, people start reading Voltaire and Diderot in Paris, and the next thing you know, Moscow is burning to the ground.

And what really chafed them was the sheer egotism of Europe, its obsessive narcissistic focus on the individual. The slavophiles believed that the greatness of Russian and Slavic culture was the emphasis on communal society, and they themselves emphasize this concept of Sobornost, a spiritual community of many people living together, jointly. That when people got together, they should not rush to identify what traits make them different from each other, but what traits they share in common: that was the basis of a real harmonious and healthy community, rather than the destructive conflict of all against all that, yes, may turn out a few more linen shirts, but does nothing for the spiritual wellbeing of a society. Many of the slavophiles were romantic conservatives, but they were not slavishly into despotism or anything, many of them wanted some kind of representative assembly. They just wanted it rooted in ancient Russian tradition, not like Montesquieu in the Houses of Parliament.

Now, I’m not going to render judgment on this debate, most sides make pretty good points, but if you look at the technological capacity of the Russian Empire during this period, one must conclude that something was happening in the west that was not happening in the east. This was a material fact, whatever one moral and philosophical conditions. The UK was well on its way towards an industrial society, fueled by coal and transported by railroad. So were in the Netherlands and Belgium in the Rhineland; France would soon follow. Something was happening that you could not just wave away and say, that’s not for us. And even Nicholas did not want to wave it all away. He commissioned the first 16 miles of railroad track connecting downtown St. Petersburg to the suburbs, and that was finished in 1837. Then, the emperor took a personal interest in building the rail line that would link St. Petersburg to Moscow, and he overcame conservative resistance to complete the project between 1842 and 1851. But in an empire that was literally millions of square miles, by the end of Nicholas ‘s reign, only hundreds of miles of railroad track existed. And we are now heading into that chapter of the world civ textbook where economic capacity is practically synonymous with number of miles of railroad track. In this, Russia objectively lacked behind.

In terms of manufacturing, there was some move towards using serf workers and managers to start some kind of industrial production, but this was all very small, and starting fitfully, and it was still inhibited by both a lack of investment capital and a workforce that was legally unable to leave their homes. The problem of serfdom was ever present. And Nicholas himself personally disliked serfdom, and he would have abolished it by fiat if he thought he could, but he was convinced that it would lead to one of the two types of rebellion that Russian history was so familiar with: the peasant revolt and the palace coup. If not managed right, emancipation could get out of hand and lead to a peasant uprising like Pugachev’s Rebellion or angry nobles would be pissed that they had just lost all their serfs, and they would engineer the overthrow of Nicholas; it had happened to his father, it had happened to his grandfather. And so he left the serfs in their bondage, and the Russian economy stagnated.

This brings up to within shouting distance of 1848. Like western and central Europe, Russia was not doing so hot in the mid 1840s, though the symptoms were not exactly the same. The Russians were dealing with a cholera outbreak and unseasonably dry weather that caused fires and bad harvests, but they were a geographic and economic step removed from the sharp economic downturn of the hungry forties. They were not so dependent on the potato to feed themselves and they were not so shaken by the problem of urban unemployment when the business recession hit. As for their literate and potentially revolutionary intellectual liberals, those guys were entirely nascent and not at all primed for a revolution.

When the shocking news of the February Revolution in Paris reached St. Petersburg, the tsar wasted no time. And if you remember from our episode on the Spectre of the French Revolution, Nicholas was among those for whom a new French Republic could only mean one thing: war in Europe. He immediately ordered full mobilization of the army and navy, and he now envisioned himself repeating the great deeds of his brother from 1812 to 1815, and he sent word to Vienna and Berlin and London, we must move quickly to surround and isolate revolutionary France. But then more shocking news came in: London was going to go along with the second Republic and they would provide no money for a new anti French coalition. Then more shocking news: Vienna was captured by barricade building radicals. In Berlin, the King of Prussia crawled away on his belly and promised a constitution. Budapest was falling into the hands of student nationalists. Nicholas couldn’t believe it. Instead of surrounding and isolating France with the powers of legitimate autocracy, Russia was the one now surrounded and isolated by revolutionary liberalism, they were now practically the last bastion of legitimate autocracy. The tsar then personally composed and circulated a manifesto, declaring Russia’s intention to fight all of this to the death.

Internally, there was much less immediate threat in St. Petersburg and Moscow that they would go the way of Vienna and Berlin and Paris, though the Third Section was working overtime. Censorship kept almost all news out of the west away from casual eyes, and those who did know what was happening were afraid of making any sudden moves. Certainly there was no organized group to prepare a revolution against the tsar, and so it did not happen. The closest thing the Third Section found to a revolutionary society was a literary group organized around Mikhail Petrashevsky. Most of these guys were younger and lower born than previous free thinkers and intellectual distance of the Stankevich circle. But they had been subversively reading the latest in political and economic thought, and when they discovered Charles Fourier, they were like, right, I guess what we’re called is: socialists.

Among them was a young writer of some promise named Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Third Section planted spies among the Petrashevsky group, and though there was some loose talk of fomenting some kind of rebellion, in the end, they were mostly busted for simply reading material that had been banned by the censors. In April, 1849, they were all rounded up and subjected to months of interrogation and then military trials. Forty men were eventually sentenced to death, but this death sentence was calculated trauma. After being taken to the place of execution and lined up as if they were going to be shot, the tsar delivered eight last minute stay of execution. The death sentences were planned, and the execution staged to traumatize the men and get them in the mood for a little love for the tsar to spring forth from their grateful hearts. Dostoevsky was among this forty, and he spent the next four years in exile.

Now out in western and central Europe, we know how the revolutions of 1848 progressed. With the springtime of the peoples giving way to a summer of feverish confusion, followed by the darkening autumn of reaction. And despite Nicholas’s bellicose hostility to the revolutions, Russia itself did not attempt to force it to will upon the other great powers. And it was suspected in some corners of the Kremlin that the Russian army was actually in no shape to force its will upon the other great powers. So Nicholas mostly watched from the sideline with approval as Prague and Berlin and Vienna and Milan slowly came back under the hands of their rightful rulers.

But if you remember from the very end of series seven, episodes 7.31 and 7.32, the kingdom of Hungary, what some were now calling the republic of Hungary, remained a revolutionary Inferno of nationalism and liberalism. And it was here that Russia could finally play a role. After the abdication of Emperor Ferdinand and the ascension of a new teenage Austrian emperor Franz Joseph in December of 1848, the new Austrian emperor secretly traveled to Warsaw for a personal meeting with Tsar Nicholas in May of 1849, where he frankly admitted in person what had been discussed in correspondence between the two powers: Austria could not reconquer Hungary alone. They needed Russian help.

Now Russia had already been sucked into the conflict on the eastern edges of Hungary but now they poured in by the hundreds of thousands, and that last pocket of revolutionary lava that had poured east from the initial eruption in Paris the year before finally hit a wall that was the Russian army. Within weeks, the job was finished and Tsar Nicholas could take satisfying credit for helping end of the great revolutionary menace. And so that menace had been held off, for at least one more day.

But Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and the future leaders of the First International are now out there. They were dealt a depressing setback, but they would never admit a final defeat. And next week, Russia will grapple with the aftermath of 1848. And even more importantly, the aftermath of the disastrous Crimean War, which exposed the technological backwardness of the so recently triumphant Russian army, there would be no holding back the modern world. It was coming, whether the leaders of the Russian Empire wanted it to or not, and they were going to have to deal with it.

And one issue, one massive issue that had been put off for so long, now finally had to be dealt with: the serfs were going to have to be freed.

 

 

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Episode 10.72: The Decision

I want to begin this week by thanking everybody for coming out to the little midwest tour. It was a great week, I had tons of fun meeting everybody and signing books. Hope to do it again in the future. Hope to do many more of these in the future. And speaking of, if you’re down in southern California, remember I will be in Pasadena on Wednesday, October 27th for a full book talk event. Not just signing, but actually getting up on stage and giving a presentation. This will be the first time I will address a live audience in more than two years, so I am really looking forward to that, and I hope to see everybody there.

We ended last time with the democratic conference of mid-September 1917. This improvised assembly was supposed to legitimize a new coalition government of socialists and liberals under Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky in the wake of the Kornilov Affair. But instead, the conference wrapped up having simultaneously endorsed and rejected the idea of a coalition. Given this utterly incoherent result, the leading organizers of the democratic conference improvised again. On September 20th, they announced the formation of what they called the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic, but which everybody else calls the Pre-Parliament. This Pre-Parliament was initially composed of 313 members, with each faction represented at the democratic conference receiving a similar share of delegates at this new assembly, which they were just making up out of thin air on the spot.

As I mentioned at the end of last week’s episode, Kerensky’s new government was meant to answer to this new assembly until the convening of the constituent assembly in November. Hence it being dubbed the Pre-Parliament. But in the subsequent inter-party negotiations to format government, the liberals refused to join unless this Pre-Parliament was recast as merely an advisory council with no genuine authority at all. The right SRs and Mensheviks leaders acquiesced.

So on September 25th, Alexander Kerensky inaugurated a new, new government answerable basically to no one but Kerensky himself. Kerensky now continued to enjoy a fantasy version of reality, where he was in the final stages of consolidating power, like a Russian Bonaparte. He had bested Kornilov. He had evicted the Soviet from the Tauride Palace and banished them to the Smolny Institute. And then he treated the right-leaning socialists as if they needed him more than he needed them. One of the first things his new government did was unilaterally augment the Pre-Parliament, adding 150 more delegates, all of them from the land owning and business owning bourgeoisie. This humiliated Kerensky’s socialist partners and discredited them further in the eyes of the workers, the peasants, the soldiers, and the sailors, whom they allegedly represented. Now Kerensky was in just enough of a bubble at this point that he really believed he was on the verge of, like, winning the Russian Revolution. All he had to do was hold on with this new government for about six weeks until the constituent assembly convened.

He would not even make it four.

Kerensky had gone into the same imperial bubble that captured and destroyed Nicholas and Alexandra. Because things were not going well out there. In September 1917, the Russian Empire was collapsing into chaos. Incredibly, the scarcity and inflation crisis that had gotten all of this going back in February was now even worse. The various provisional governments simply continued to print paper money, 400 million rubles in April, 700 million in June, over a billion in July. Prices quadrupled even above the highs that drove the Romanovs out of power in February. 500 factories had shut down during the summer months, leaving close to a hundred thousand out of work. Scarcity of necessary goods was still endemic in all urban areas, as the political and economic system remained utterly dysfunctional. Inflation, scarcity, and unemployment created a crisis atmosphere. Workers organized and staged strikes regularly. In the major urban centers, crime and lawlessness were indisputably on the rise as criminals and gangs just roamed free. Kerensky’s government had basically no dependable forces willing to impose order on its behalf.

It was just as bad out in the countryside. Peasants who had been waiting with growing frustration and impatience for the provisional government to endorse the transfer of landed estates to peasant ownership now lost their cool completely. Even when the arch SR Victor Chernov was serving as minister of agriculture, it had been nothing but foot dragging, empty promises and delays. Then Chernov had been ousted from the government during the Kornilov Affair, and there seemed no hope at all that the government would do the one thing the peasants had been demanding all along:,give us the land. For them, that was the only part of the revolution that really mattered. Completely fed up, they just started taking it. Around September, there was a wave of violent attacks in rural areas as peasants mobbed, manor houses, looted the premises, and then burn the place to the ground. The villages, many now boasting their own little local soviets, unilaterally claimed ownership over the estates, carrying not one whit what the authorities said. Kerensky’s government issued stern prohibitions on the seizures, but just like in the cities, his government had no force capable of backing up the stern pronouncements. In any given local area, the preponderance of force was held by the villagers themselves, thanks in large part to all those hundreds of thousands of deserting soldiers who were returning to their home villages armed and radicalized.

The increasingly nonexistent power and legitimacy of Kerensky and the provisional government fueled the fortunes most especially of the Bolshevik party. The positions that had hurt them in February — stiff opposition to the war, constant denunciations of the provisional government, and demands for all power to the Soviet — now propelled them forward towards October. As the Mensheviks and SR leadership compromised and discredited themselves, rank and file party members defected in droves to the ranks of the Bolsheviks, who offered clear and simple slogans, offering a welcome alternative to the feeble dithering of the right-leaning socialist leaders. In the countryside, the message was peace, land and freedom. In the cities, it was peace, bread, and freedom. On September 19, the Bolshevik party secured a majority inside the Moscow Soviet. Then on September 25th, the same day Kerensky announced his new government, the Bolsheviks cemented a voting majority inside the Petrograd Soviet. The vote to create a new executive leadership council for the capital Soviet resulted in one Menshevik, two SRs, and four Bolsheviks. This executive committee, with an outright Bolshevik majority, promptly voted to make Leon Trotsky president of the Petrograd Soviet. He was now able to speak not just as a charismatic Bolshevik party leader, but as president of the Petrograd Soviet, with all the implied legitimacy authority, and power that came with it.

So heading into October 1917, the central committee of the Bolsheviks were riding high, especially after they believed that their party might have been destroyed back in July. Their fortunes had now reversed completely, and they believed that both time and history were on their side. All they needed to do now is keep striding forward, and they would surely emerge as the majority party in Russia in no time at all.

But during these same weeks, the head of their party, Lenin, still in hiding in Finland after the July Days, was slowly going out of his mind, because while he believed history was on their side, time was not. In fact, time was running out. Fast.

The central committee had established a stable courier service to and from the chief, and Lenin was able to read newspapers from Petrograd the same day they were printed, and then send back letters, essays, and editorials commenting on events. From about the second week of September, 1917, Lenin hammered the point that if they did not act before the constituent assembly convened, it would be too late. That while the Bolshevik ranks were growing, they would almost certainly wind up a marginal minority faction in the coming constituent assembly, undercutting any claim to represent the voice and the will of the people of Russia. He was furious with the central committee for participating in the democratic conference, granting recognition to a manipulated farce organized by their enemies and rivals. Lenin believed passionately and bluntly that given the circumstances — the growing chaos, the non-existent legitimacy of the government, plus the looming possibility that the bourgeoisie and the philistine right-leaning socialists might reconsolidate their hold on power at the coming constituent assembly — the Bolshevik party needed to seize power. By force. Immediately. Without hesitation or scruples.

In Lenin’s mind, the Bolshevik party represented the only true path to socialist revolution. This was something at least abstractly all of his comrades in the central committee agreed with. It’s why they believed the Bolshevik party was superior to all the other parties. Lenin said they must not miss this opportunity. If they were weak or passive, then all would be lost. On September 12th, he wrote a scathing essay titled the Bolsheviks Must Take Power. Two days later, he penned an article called Marxism and Insurrection, which was a defense of armed uprisings, not as a betrayal of Marx’s principles, but action Marx and Engels themselves believed to be a vital and unavoidable component of socialist revolution. When the democratic conference wrapped up, Lenin wrote a piece called Heroes of Fraud and Mistakes of the Bolsheviks. He attacked his comrades on the central committee for their plodding, peaceful, and passive conduct. He meant for it to be published in the party newspaper. And Lenin was absolutely volcanic with rage when the central committee took a pair of scissors to Lenin’s editorial, publishing it under the truncated headline, Heroes of of Fraud, and cutting out his attacks on the Bolshevik leadership. Now convinced that his comrades in the central committee would blow this opportunity if Lenin was not there to personally lead them, he made plans to quit Finland and return to Petrograd.

But all that said, it’s not like Lenin’s comrades were entirely idle or passive, nor that they were especially burdened with constitutional scruples, nor that they even opposed the idea of an armed coup d’etat. It was mostly about the when and the how, not the can we or should we .The day after Trotsky became president of the Petrograd Soviet, he started advocating for a second all Russian Congress of Soviets. The first such Congress of Soviets had been held back in June, and we talked about it briefly in episode 10.68. This is when the Mensheviks and SRs formed an overwhelming majority of both delegates and leaders, and when they rejected the idea of the Soviets taking power from the provisional government and declared that no party out there thought we should take power right now, Lenin called out from the floor, “There is one party.” Remember that? Well, now that party is in charge of the Petrograd Soviet, and very much still wants to seize power.

So you’re going to have to stick with me for a sec, because we do need to untangle something so that all of this makes sense. The first Congress of Soviets in June had elected a standing executive committee to permanently represent all the Soviets. This executive committee was of course packed with Mensheviks and SRs, and it was now the last bastion of their waning influence. This executive committee stood as a major obstacle to the rising power of the Bolsheviks. So when I say that the Bolsheviks now controlled the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, that is true, but that is different from this still standing executive committee of the Soviets writ large, who remained the same Mensheviks and SRs who had been elected back in June.

Got it? Cool.

The Bolsheviks, now able to speak with the voice of the Petrograd Soviet, demanded this larger executive committee call for a second congress. The stated reason for this was that with the constituent assembly on the way, all the Soviets needed to come together to hammer out a legislative and constitutional platform that they could all agree on and then take to the constituent assembly. The unstated reason was it the Bolsheviks plan to dominate this second Congress and get all of their guys elected to a new central executive council, turning the Soviets into an operational wing of the Bolshevik party so that the abstract slogan all power to the Soviets would now mean, in concrete terms, all power to the Bolsheviks. The leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs knew exactly what the Bolsheviks were up to, but Trotsky said if they didn’t start sending out invitations for a second congress, that the Petrograd Soviet would use their prestige and moral authority to just do it themselves. The Bolsheviks got their way. Invitation started going out for a second all Russian Congress of Soviets to be held on October 20th, 1917.

Meanwhile, Lenin moved from his remote hideout in Finland to a district much closer to the border, and very close to Petrograd. This way, he would be able to wield more decisive influence over his comrades. He was incensed that the central committee was centering his view that they should no longer wait for anything, that the party now, right now, should launch an armed coup d’etat. From this space, he sent an essay to the central committee, headlined The Crisis Has Matured. It laid out a case that with the Bolshevik standing for peace, land, and freedom, that if they seize power right now, neither the army, nor the navy, nor the peasants would make a move against them.

In a confidential sixth section of this essay, he blasted his colleagues for hesitation. He ended by saying, “In view of the fact that the central committee has even left unanswered the persistent demands I had been making for such a policy ever since the beginning of the democratic conference, in view of the fact that the central organ is deleting from my articles all references to such glaring errors on the part of the Bolsheviks as the shameful decision to participate in the Pre-Parliament, the admission of Mensheviks to the presidium of the Soviet, etc., etc. — I am compelled to regard this as a ‘subtle’ hint at the unwillingness of the Central Committee even to consider this question, a subtle hint that I should keep my mouth shut, and as a proposal for me to retire.

“I am compelled to tender my resignation from the Central Committee, which I hear by do, reserving for myself freedom to campaign among the rank and file of the Party and at the Party Congress,”

This resignation, however, was simply a threat to demonstrate how serious he was. Mostly, he made preparations to move back to Petrograd and convince everyone not to blow it.

Lenin’s case that all the pieces were falling into place, thanks to fortuitous events on the war front, which resulted in a gift wrapped package delivered right to the Bolsheviks’ doorstep. Now, even though the war against the Austrians in the southwest, and against the Turks in the south, had both settled into a mutual pacivity as all sides presently stood on the brink of total collapse, the Germans in the northwest still posed a major threat. They had captured Riga at the end of August and forced the Russian army to fall back. Then on September 28th, the Germans launched a naval operation into the Gulf of Riga aimed at capturing three strategic islands, which, if captured, would allow the Germans to ferry their armies around behind the newly dugout Russian defensive line, in effect, giving them an unobstructed straight road to Petrograd.

The government responded by making plans to evacuate the city. On October 4th, Kerensky and his government unanimously agreed to abandon Petrograd and withdraw to the safety of Moscow. All government ministries, departments, and personnel would evacuate the capital. They also made plans to relocate as much of the city’s heavy industrial capacity deeper into the interior. During these meetings, it was also decided that the Soviets would be treated as merely private institutions, not covered by any state of evacuation plan. The Soviet’s decision to stay or leave Petrograd would be entirely their own, but they would be entirely on their own.

On October six, all these plans were leaked to the press and the leaders of the Soviet — all of them — Mensheviks, Bolshevik, and SRs — flipped their lids. There was by now a growing consensus among Socialist of all stripes that Kerensky was actively preparing to sacrifice red Petrograd to the Germans. That while the provisional government may lack the force to bring left wing radicals to heel, the German army did not. In this scenario, Kerensky abandoning Petrograd to a German sack was not a painful but necessary strategy in the face of dire wartime emergency, but a welcome opportunity to have the Kaiser crush the radical left and the Soviets, allowing Kerensky to safely consolidate a new base of power in Moscow. The leaders of the Soviet announced that the Soviet did not endorse an evacuation, and anyone who participated would be doing so in direct opposition to the Soviet. And as their voice carried far more weight than the provisional government did with the rank and file soldiers and the workers in the city, Kerensky and his fellow ministers now had to reckon with going through with an evacuation no one would help them carry out, and in fact might result in them all getting lynched if they tried to go through with it.

In a session of the Pre-Parliament held on October 7th, which was scheduled to talk about the evacuation, Trotsky gave a fiery speech hammering on these themes. Trotsky issued a blistering denunciation of the government, which mostly fell on deaf ears in a hall packed with moderates and liberals and members of the bourgeoisie, but which he knew would resonate in the streets. He declared, “The idea of surrendering the revolutionary capital to German troops was a natural link in a general policy designed to promote counter-revolutionary conspiracy.” He went on to say, “With this government of treason to the people and with this council of counter-revolutionary connivance we have nothing in common. In withdrawing from the council, we summon the workers, soldiers, and peasants of all Russia to be on their guard and to be courageous. Petrograd is in danger. The revolution is in danger. The people are in danger.” Then, he led the small Bolshevik delegation out of the hall and into the streets.

And that brings us directly to the gift-wrapped package delivered right to the Bolsheviks doorstep. With all components of the Soviet leadership, as well as the workers and soldiers and sailors in the city, deeply concerned that the provisional government was about to abandon them to the slaughter, the Petrograd Soviet convened on October 9th, and voted to take the defensive Petrograd into their own hands. They created what was soon dubbed the Military revolutionary Committee, or the MRC. The MRC functioned just like the committee of struggle against counter-revolution had functioned during the last days of the Kornilov Affair. The committee would organize, lead, and coordinate armed soldiers and workers. Now, nothing had changed organization remained the largest and most disciplined armed force in the city. And all those tens of thousands of workers who had been armed and led by the Bolsheviks back in August? Well, they now simply returned to a state of ready alert. These forces were of course all co-opted by the MRC, and became the main pillar of their operations. So, the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party is now operating, for all intents and purposes, as the officially sanctioned armed forces of Petrograd, charged with complete authority over the security and defense of the capital. In a final deft maneuver, Trotsky had language inserted into the motion creating the MRC that they were to defend Petrograd both against the external threat of the Germans, but also the internal threat of counterrevolution, which will of course be defined however the Bolshevik see fit. Trotsky later called the creation of the Soviet MRC the dry revolution or the silent revolution, and he said that when it was done, the Bolsheviks were already three quarters if not nine tenths of the way to victory.

All of these pieces fell into place just in time for Lenin to return to Petrograd, to meet with his comrades for one of the most consequential committee meetings in world history. On October 10th, 1917, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party met to hash out some major strategic and tactical questions. There were 21 total members of the Bolshevik Central Committee, but on this evening, only 12 were able to attend. Among those in the room were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev Stalin, and Alexandra Kollontai. Also, a funny looking dude dressed up to look like an old Lutheran priest, who was wearing an ill fitting wig atop his head: Lenin.

This meeting was ironically held in the home of a prominent Menshevik leader named Nikolai Tsukanov. The reason they were able to meet there was that the apartment also happened to be the home of a long time Bolshevik loyalist named Galina Flakserman, who just so happened to be Tsukanov’s wife, revealing with domestic simplicity just how gray the party differences were among all these socialists. Flakserman encouraged her husband to just go ahead and sleep at his office that night, which was a perfectly normal thing for him to do, and which he very much insisted he do on this particular evening. This allowed the parlor of a leading Menshevik to be used to plot Bolshevik revolution. This incredibly important meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee lasted for eight hours. It was the first time Lenin had seen most of his comrades in person since the July Days, and he gave an impassioned defense for the idea that the time for an insurrectionary coup d’etat was now. Among other things, he believed that the Bolsheviks would only have to hold their ground for a matter of months, because Lenin was convinced that European-wide proletarian revolution was on the verge of breaking out, so the Bolsheviks would not have to stand alone for long. Pretty soon every major power in Europe would be run by proletarian comrades.

Trotsky and five others in the room were mostly in agreement with Lenin that the time for interaction was at hand, and that the pieces were in place to do it, and that they would probably be successful. But against Lenin, Trotsky insisted that they wait until the convening of the second congress of the Soviet, which was set for October 20th. People were not going to support a straight up Bolshevik coup. It absolutely had to be done while speaking with the voice of the Soviet. But this was not a difference over whether to do it at all, it was just a matter of, do we do it now, or like, a week from now?

Two members of the central committee, however, disagreed entirely with the plan. These were two of Lenin’s longstanding lieutenants, Kamenev and Zinoviev. Kamenev In particular had been pushing for a peaceful reconciliation with the other socialist parties. He did not believe the Bolsheviks were strong enough at the moment to do things on their own. But he also simultaneously believed that in the coming constituent assembly elections that the Bolsheviks would probably actually win something like a third of the seats. This, combined with their expected domination of the congress of Soviets, would give the Bolsheviks a clear trajectory to power without risking everything on an armed coup. Both of them also believed that Lenin’s opinion, which had been seconded by Trotsky, that European-wide revolution was on the verge of breaking out was altogether too optimistic. Kamenev finally said, “Comrade Lenin’s plan means to stake on one card the fate not only of our party, but the fate of Russia and world revolution. The whole thing would ultimately be disastrously counterproductive, and even foolish given how well things were going for the party. Zinoviev agreed with all of this, and further added that if they tried and failed, this time, it wouldn’t be like the July days. This time, we will all be shot.

And the thing is neither of them were wrong about any of this. Lenin was asking them to stake everything on one card. When they described the risks and potential consequences, they were absolutely correct. Lenin’s rejoinder was simple: yes, I’m asking you to stake everything on one card. Yes, the risks are enormous. But guess what? I think we can win. And in fact, not playing this card right now would be the riskiest gambit of all, because we may never get another window like this ever again.

After eight hours of debate, the 12 members took a vote. They voted 10 to 2 to begin immediate preparations for an armed coup d’etat. Kamenev and Zinoviev obviously, being the two “no” votes.

Lenin then scribbled an informal resolution inside of an exercise book for a child, because no other paper was readily at hand. This resolution states:

The central committee recognizes the international position of the Russian revolution ( the revolt in the German navy, which is an extreme manifestation of the growth throughout Europe of a world socialist revolution; the threat of peace by the imperialists; with the object of strangling the revolution in Russia) as well as the military situation, the inducible decision of the Russian bourgeoisie and Kerensky and company to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, and the fact that the proletarian party has gained a majority in the Soviets — all this, taken in conjunction with the peasant revolt in the swing of popular confidence towards our Party (the elections in Moscow) and, finally, the obvious preparations being made for a second Kornilov revolt (the withdraw the troops in Petrograd, the dispatches of Cossacks to Petrograd the circling of Minsky the Cossacks, etc.) — all of this places the armed uprising on the order of the day.

Considering therefore that an armed uprising is inevitable, and that the time for it is fully ripe, the central committee instructs all Party organizations to be guided accordingly, and to dismiss and decide all practical questions (the Congress of Soviets of the Northern region (the withdrawal of troops from Petrograd, the action of our people in Moscow and Minsk, etc.) from this point of view.

This resolution was the beginning of the Bolshevik coup. They departed each other’s company on the morning of October 11th, having resolved to stake everything on Lenin’s one card. And as was noted in literally every single book I read about this meeting, this is one of those moments in history where the will and choices of a single man really do change the course of history. Absent Lenin’s impassioned, angry, manipulative, persuasive, domineering, clear-eyed, and somewhat harebrained case that the Bolsheviks could stage a coup, it is entirely likely that the party would have let the moment slip by.

But they did not. And next week, they will launch their coup to alter the course of history, turning the dial from February to October.

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Episode 10.12: The Decemberists

So we get to start this week by doing a little roundup of errors. It’s never easy to quickly race through a thousand years of history, and I have stumbled in a few places over the last few episodes. Like last week, for example, as many of you pointed out, I said that Moscow was the capital of Russia, which of course it was not the capital of Russia. We know that the capital of Russia was St Petersburg. Second, I said that tsarevitch was the title for the heir to the throne, and this is also not true; the proper title for the air to the throne was tsesarevich.

And while we’re here, I also want to make clear that Peter the Great changed the official title of the ruler of the Russian Empire from tsar to a more modernized adaptation of the word emperor. So calling the rulers of the Russian empire tsars is technically an informal designation, but the usage is so widespread that I am just going to roll with it and often use tsar and emperor interchangeably. Meanwhile, a few people have told me that two episodes back, I fell too credulously for some of Empress Catherine’s own debunked propaganda. The historical consensus is that her son Paul, the future Tsar Paul the First, was indeed the son of her husband Peter the Third, not one of her lovers. She strongly implied in her memoirs that the father was one of her lovers, rather than her long since overthrown and dead husband, but that was just Katherine being Katherine. So I’m going to go back and rerecord those bits and then people will come along later and say, why are you starting the episode like this? You never made those mistakes. Well, yes I did.

And then finally pronunciation is always going to be a work in progress. It’s always a work in progress. So if you come around to correct my pronunciation, I am listening, it will get better. I usually go from, ugh, to, eh, over the course of a series.

And while we’re here not yet getting started, and because this is the first episode where actual specific dates are important, we do need to talk about the calendar problem. As a part of his modernization/westernization efforts, Peter the Great ditched Russia’s old calendar and decreed that starting January, the first 1700 Russia would adopt the Julian calendar. But of course by then, western Europe was switching over to the Gregorian calendar, creating a running date discrepancy for the next 200 years or so. Now the Russian calendar is going to change again over the course of this very series, because the Bolsheviks would adopt the recording calendar beginning in 1918. So this means that when we talk about Russian history between 1700 and 1918, there is a difference between the contemporaneous Russian date of an event and the date as it lands on the Gregorian calendar. Russian dates tend to arrive about 12 days earlier than their European counterparts. So in the history books, you will see dates marked as either OS or NS meaning old style and new style so that is clear what date is being referred to. This means that everyone working in the era gets to decide for themselves which dating system they would like to use. And I am going to follow along from the notion that I would like to mark the date as the actors themselves understood them. If Lenin is looking at a calendar, I want to talk about the calendar Lenin is looking at, not some retconned revised calendar. So I will be using the old style dates until the big switch comes in 1918 and thereafter use the new style. Now there are pros and cons both ways, but the big thing this gets us is that the February Revolution will still take place in February, rather than March, and the October revolution will take place in October, rather than November, and most importantly, we will be talking about the dates as the Russian participants themselves understood them. Now, either way, the Decemberists, who we’re going to talk about today, would still be the Decemberists, but this is the first episode we’ve come to where a play-by-play of events require specific dating, and I just want to let you know that from here on out, we are on the old style Julian calendar.

Okay, with all that said, let’s finally get to it.

Now, events from last week’s episode, coincided with events from the end of series three on the French Revolution. Well today’s episode would fit alongside events that we covered in series five, on Spanish American independence, series six on the July monarchy, and now that I look at it, some of the early episodes of series seven on 1848, because today’s events fit right in with the run of liberal revolutions that erupted around 1820. And if you listen to all that, talk about revolts and mutinies and revolutions in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and said to yourself, you know, when that jerk Duncan gets to Russia, we better get a whole damn episode about the Decemberists, well, here we are: a whole damn episode about the Decemberists.

So, the origin of the Decemberist revolt of 1825 lies in the great patriotic war to expel Napoleon from Russia in 1812, and the subsequent campaigns that carried the Russian army all the way to the Champs-Élysées. Young officers from the cream of the Russian nobility, well-educated and fluent in French and often German, experienced the rest of Europe, some of them for the first time. They mingled and drank with fellow allied officers. They saw how other people lived. They literally dined in the cafes of Paris. And by the time they were dining in the cafes of Paris, they were pretty fired up with victorious pride. It was the Russians who had broken Napoleon where everyone else had failed. Considering themselves, the liberators of Europe, they expected to bring a sense of political liberation and economic progress with them back to Russia, I mean, how could they not?And when they returned home full of pride, new ideas, and grand expectations, they found that Russia was still just the same. And they were frankly ashamed by what they saw. As one future Decembrist put it, why did we free Europe to put chains on ourselves?

One of the biggest points of shame was the realization that Russia was really two Russias. There was one Russia that these young noble officers were a part of: wealthy and educated Russia. Based in St. Petersburg, facing Europe, speaking French to each other. The other Russia was the mass of common peasants: backwards. Illiterate, most of them serfs bound to the land, and considered little better than slaves. The officers who would form the core of the Decemberists were appalled by this division. The patriotic war of 1812 and the March to Paris would not have been possible without the sacrifice, suffering, and bravery of the common Russian peasant. They had all been brothers, sisters, and comrades in this great struggle, and here they were, being sent home to a life of enslavement, and here we are, being encouraged to go back to treating them like dogs rather than fellow Russians. They thought this cruel, inhumane, and not a little bit ungrateful. So the emancipation of the serfs became one of the two most important goals for our future Decemberists.

 But emancipation was not strictly a humanitarian project. Our young liberal officers saw the economic and material progress in the Rhineland and in France, and recognized that Russia would never be able to follow their lead if they still clung to the institution of serfdom. serfdom prevented the population from moving away from mere subsistence agriculture. The budding modern industry our young Russian officers had seen in the west was possible because new manufacturing businesses were able to draw in free peasants to be workers. But this simple ability to physically move from one place to another was legally impossible in Russia. And then beyond all that, there was the fact that the two Russias were divided between a wealthy aristocracy and a dirt poor peasantry, there practically was no middle-class to speak of. No one to be the productive engine of a new economy, nobody to be the consumer class for the products of such a new economy. So in the minds of our liberal officers, the emancipated serfs, free to move and to grow and to pursue their own lives, would become the core of a future Russian middle class. And thus, freed from ancient bondage, would help propel the Russian economy into the modern age.

Now, all of this was then married to a belief that political liberalism was the great motivating spirit of the times. Because they did not want to just liberate the serfs, they wanted to make everyone equal, and that meant abolishing not just serfdom, but aristocracy. To make the two Russias one Russia, free and equal in rights. So on the political front, this brings us to the other most important demand of the Decemberists: constitutional government. An end to the humiliation of absolutism, where life was governed by the whims of an emperor, not the rights of free people who deserve dignity and respect. And if you remember from our episodes on 1848, that was one of the big political questions: constitution. Do you have one or not? In Russia, they did not.

Now early on, there was no reason to doubt that a constitution would eventually arrive in Russia. Tsar Alexander’s liberal sympathies were well-known: he ruled the Finns as a constitutional monarch; he insisted that the defeated French get a constitution — or at least a charter of government — and after the Treaty of Vienna, he signed on to rule the new kingdom of Poland as a constitutional monarch, so surely Russia itself would be next. But what will wind up driving the Decembrists more than anything else as the years went by was a sense of dashed hopes, unfulfilled expectations, and bitter disappointment that it did not go that way.

It started to not go that way, right away. As we’ve previously discussed, in September of 1815 Tsar Alexander led the other great powers of Europe into signing the Holy Alliance, wherein they agreed to rule Europe on the basis of justice, love, and peace, with Chancellor Metternich, who would soon enough have Tsar Alexander’s ear, making sure that the opposite of justice, love, and peace was understood to be liberalism, secularism, and constitutions.

But still. Our young liberal officers came back to Russia in 1815 and 1816 full of hope and energy. Many of them joined Masonic lodges, where social equality and enlightened progress were the order of the day. But for a smaller group, Masonry was not enough, and in early 1816, six of these young comrades got together and founded something they dubbed the Union of Salvation, and later the Society of True and Faithful Sons of the Fatherland. Now, I am intentionally avoiding, overwhelming you with a bunch of random names that you’re just going to forget anyway, so let’s not worry about the random list of names you’re just going to forget anyway.

Now the concrete platform of these guys is a bit murky, but for sure we know that they want a constitutional government and the abolition of serfdom, that’s what they believe they were organizing to achieve. Now to keep their discussion secret and to give this all an air of romance and mystery, they borrowed oaths and rituals and practices from the Freemasons, from the German League of Virtue and from the Italian Carbonari. The Union of Salvation eventually grew to just over 30 members, with the most important recruit being a guy whose name I am going to give you, that is Pavel Pestel, who would prove to be one of the most radical and influential of the Decemberists.

After kind of floundering around and not achieving much, they decided in 1818 to fold the Union of Salvation, and rebrand themselves the Union of Welfare, or Union of Prosperity, depending on which translation you prefer. This new society was meant to be more out in the open, and it pretended to have no political agenda at all. It was just a club encouraging social improvement and four relatively innocuous spheres: philanthropy, education, justice, and economic progress. And plenty of the members who joined the Union of Welfare only ever heard about that outer program. But there was an inner political program that still aimed to force through some kind of constitutional government, emancipate the serfs, and Institute a bunch of political, economic, and social reforms. Among the inner members who did know the score, there were always arguments about whether a constitutional monarchy was good enough, or whether they were going to have to go the full republic. Were they’re going to be able to work with the Romanovs? Could they trust them, or would the Imperial family have to be, uh, liquidated?

But as conspiratorial and secretive as they were, there were still a general sense among these guys that they were the future, that the tsar was likely sympathetic to at least their more modest aims, and what they were really preparing themselves for was to be the future leaders of a reborn Russia.

But around 1820, they started becoming very disillusioned. It had now been five years since they had all defeated Napoleon together and things were not just stuck in the mud, they seem to be going backwards. The tsar’s personal liberalism was nowhere evident, a constitution, nowhere on the horizon. Then, when the liberal revolutions in Spain and Italy broke out, Tsar Alexander was firmly in Metternich’s camp saying we need to crush them, how can I help? The tsar was soon pledging a hundred thousand Russian troops to back up the Austrians in Italy, he offered to send 150,000 more tramping across Europe to suppress the Spanish liberals. And even when their Orthodox co-religionists in Greece rose up against their old enemy the Ottoman Empire, the tsar was persuaded by Metternich not to get involved. It was starting to feel like the tsar was maybe not their secret friend so much as a major obstacle in their way.

This conservative turn started to be felt at home as well, and a reactionary grip seemed to be tightening around Russia. Universities fell under conservative control, students and professors were watched, censorship of journals and books increased. In the army and this growing reactionary attitude turned its attention on the elite Semenovsky Regiment in 1820. Many of the leaders of the union Of Salvation and the successor Union of Welfare were in this regiment, and in addition to its reputation for bravery and valor, it was also known for embracing the alleged liberal spirit of the times. The government now viewed them with suspicion. So in 1820, the well liked commander was replaced with a hard nosed German who brought back draconian discipline and previously abolished corporal punishment. A company inside the regiment protested the new rules, and they were arrested as a group. So, then the whole regiment protested, which led to even more arrests. Soon enough, the suspect officers of the regiment were dispersed to other garrisons, with many of the key actors in the coming Decembrist revolt winding up down South in Ukraine.

After the Semenovsky Regiment incident, the inner circle leaders of the Union of Welfare got together for a conference in Moscow in 1821 and voted to disband. But this was purely for show. In the increasingly reactionary climate, they wanted to first, throw the government off their trail; and second, ditch all the members of the Union of Welfare they considered to be unreliable, either because they were suspected of being government spies, or because they were not actually committed to the real program. But those who were actually committed to the real program regrouped into two camps that were soon dubbed the Southern Society and the Northern Society. And you will sometimes see them called the Southern Society of the Decemberists, but remember: the December part hasn’t happened yet. They have no idea that in the future, we are going to call them all the Decemberists.

After this split, the two societies developed on parallel but still distinct tracks. The Southern Society was based in the Ukrainian garrison town of Tulchyn, and as I said, some of the Semenovsky officers wound up down there and they were joined by Pavel Pestel, now the leading light of the whole operation. The men in the South tended to be more radical; they were avowedly Republican, they were more open to the idea of regicide as a necessity. Meanwhile, the Northern Society was based in St. Petersburg, and those guys were of a standard liberal, noble variety. They were more into reform, and insisting that constitutional monarchism was a necessity that Russia wasn’t ready for a republic, that they could work with the tsar, they didn’t have to just put a bullet in his brain. Now, I don’t want to overstate this distinction between North and South, because every one of the Decemberists had their own version of the program. There were regicide inclined republicans in the North, and cautious reformers in the South. But in general, there was this split. Radical republicans in the Southern Society, moderate constitutional monarchists in the Northern Society.

So the Northern and Southern Societies stayed in touch and debated tactics and strategy, and were trying to iron out their differences, because they were starting to look at the summer of 1826 as a good time to make a move, do something. But then in the late fall of 1825, they were hit, along with the rest of Russia, with the shocking news that Tsar Alexander was dead.

Now Alexander was by no means an old man. He was still in his late forties. But his personality had gone a bit sour and peculiar of late. In the mid 1820s, he was more withdrawn, he was suspicious of things and people, he was turning inward towards his personal piety. He was maybe getting over the hassle of being tsar. In the fall of 1825, his wife, the Empress Elizabeth, got very sick and needed to take a trip down south for her health, and Alexander resolved to join her. But after spending some time together on the Sea of Azov, Alexander headed for a solo tour of the Crimea, and there became very sick with a sudden onset of typhus. After suffering for a number of days, Tsar Alexander the First succumbed on November the 19th, 1825. He was not yet 50 years old, and had been tsar for 24 years. The sudden death of the relatively young tsar gave birth to a persistent legend that he actually faked his own death and went off to become a pious hermit in Siberia named Feodor Kuzmich, attempting to atone for the death of his father, which, according to this legend, he was racked with guilt over.

Now, that’s of course crazy, but even crazier is what happened next for real. Alexander and Elizabeth had no legitimate children of their own, so by the law of succession, Alexander’s brother Konstantin was next in line. Konstantin, at that moment, was in Warsaw serving as viceroy of the kingdom of Poland. But unbeknownst to practically everyone, Konstantin had already renounced his right to succeed the throne. By 1823, there were letters signed by the tsar sealed in cathedral vaults attesting to this, but very few people knew about it, and it’s still an open question to this day who knew what when. Alexander’s sudden death left no time for a proper handling of this delicate pre-abdication by Konstantin, and the trouble really started when the next oldest brother, Nicholas, who was in St. Petersburg and now meant to be tsar, swore an oath to Emperor Konstantin and had other officers and state ministers do the same. So this created two weeks of confusion as Konstantin adamantly swore that he would not rule, and Nicholas saying everybody sworn an oath and I’m not going to take power unless I get assurances I won’t be stabbed in the back because somebody thinks I’m trying to usurp the throne. This two week interregnum is absolutely run through with factional maneuvering and hidden motives at court, but the upshot is that we have these two possible heirs, neither of whom seem to want to be tsar, and both of them are trying to swear an oath of allegiance to the other. In the midst of this confused interregnum, the members of the Northern Society, who were all high ranking officers of the guard and very well-informed about what was going on, decided, this is it. We may not be totally ready, but this is our chance, we have to take our shot. When word went round that Nicholas had finally decided to step up to the plate and he had resolved to get everyone to swear a new oath to him on December the 14th, our guys decided they needed to step up to the plate too.

One of the leaders, a poet, publisher, and former soldier named Kondraty Ryleyev, did not think they had much of a chance, but he was fired up by the idea of romantic martyrdom, that in their heroic deaths they would inspire future generations. He wrote, “An upheaval is essential. The tactics of revolution may be summed up in two words: to dare. If we come to grief, our failure will serve as a lesson to those who come after us.”

And so it would.

On December the 14th, 1825, the as of this moment rebel officers led 3000 men out into Senate Square in St. Petersburg. The stated reason was a refusal to swear the new oath to Nicholas, but the deeper aim was to use this moment of political confusion to force the state to accept constitutional government, legal equality, and in time, the abolition of serfdom, dreams they had dreamed for the last 10 years.

But this was an aborted revolt from the get-go. The officers had elected a stalwart and dependable comrade named Prince Troubetzkoy to be their leader. He had been around since the founding of the Union of Salvation all the way back in 1816. But Troubetzkoy straight up chickened out, he lost his nerve and didn’t show up. So the rebels out in Senate Square were a bit rudderless. Then the other army regiments that they expected to follow in their daring lead just never showed up. So as it turned out, the 3000 rebels in Senate Square were not the crest of a swelling wave so much as an isolated puddle, standing cold and alone and quickly freezing into ice. Soon enough, 9,000 loyal troops lined up against them, but neither side took any action. Then as the day progressed, civilians crammed in to get a look at what was going on as civilians so often do, and all that was going on so far was some chants of “Konstantin” and “constitution” from the rebel ranks.

Around noon, the new Emperor Nicholas, now ready to be emperor, personally came down to try to work things out peacefully. And he sent out the well like General Miloradovich out to address the rebels and convince them to lay down their arms. But in the midst of his speech, one of the more radical Decembrist officers shot him dead, which changed the mood quite a bit. The tsar ordered a cavalry charge to clear the square, but the horses slipped in the icy cobblestone and they had to retreat in disarray. Then around 4:00 PM with the last sunrise already disappearing, the tsar, frustrated, ordered artillery to fire grapeshot. Firing grapeshot into the packed square scattered the rebels, but it also killed a lot of soldiers and civilians pretty indiscriminately. Some of the soldiers and officers regrouped on the frozen Neva River, but further artillery bombarded the river, breaking the ice, killing a few men instantly, and drowning the rest. By nightfall, it was all over. Somewhere around 1200 people, civilians and soldiers, laid dead. The Decemberists of the Northern Society had taken their shot, and they had missed.

But wait, you say, there is still a Southern Society, right? And indeed there is, but it’s not going to go much better for them. Pavel Pestel had been arrested as a precautionary measure on December the 13th, and then it took almost two weeks for the men in the south to even learn about events in St. Petersburg. This news came in the midst of a flurry of arrest warrants, and so everyone realized their days as secret conspirators was over. It was now either insurrection or bust. On December the 29th, they were able to turn out about a thousand men, but they never got any bigger than that. And the next few days played out a lot like Hecker’s uprising played out in southern Germany in 1848 if you remember all that. The southern Decembrists were cut off from any other support, and with the authorities moving in fast, the southern rebels hesitated, then marched this way, and then that way, and after a few days had little to show for all this but increasing demoralization and a bunch of desertions. On January the third, 1826, they ran into a patrol loyal to the government who happened to have some artillery, and after a few artillery blasts, the rebel Decembrists were scattered, they were wounded, or they laid dead. In short order, 869 rebels surrendered, and a few scattered suicides added to the death toll. And that was the end — the real end, the final end — of the Decembrist revolt.

Once order was restored, tsar Nicholas convened an inquiry to get to the bottom of all this. Arrests and interrogations led to more arrests and more interrogations. Papers were seized and studied. They cast a wide net, bringing in intellectuals and sympathetic friends who themselves had nothing to do with the actual attempted military coup of December 1825, including the great Russian poet Pushkin, who had contact with, and whose work was enthusiastically read by, many of the conspirators.

But this was not necessarily kangaroo court justice and then just mass indiscriminate executions. Evidence and testimony were heard. Degrees of complicity were established. The common soldiers who were involved in all this were either sent off to fight in the Caucasus, or they were exiled to Siberia depending on the enthusiasm with which they had participated in the insurrection. Many of them were flogged, some of them flogged to death. Of the officers, 121 men were finally tried and convicted. Of those, 85 were sentenced to exile and hard labor in Siberia. 36 were sentenced to death. But the new emperor, wanting to start his reign with some clemency, commuted almost all the death sentences to hard labor and exile in Siberia and ordered the actual hanging of only five men, including the aforementioned Pavel Pestel, and Kondraty Ryleyev. And here even Ryleyev’s romantic death wish was on full display, and he begged to be the only man to die for the cause, a noble romantic martyr. But the tsar did not take him up on the offer.

When the five men were hanged on July the 13th, 1826, the first time they were dropped through the scaffold, three of the ropes broke, and Ryleyev allegedly barked, “Unhappy country, where they don’t even know how to hang you.”

He was properly hanged just a few minutes later.

Everyone else was then shipped off to Siberia and official discussion of the revolt of December 1825 ceased. The Decemberists soon turned into half forgotten legends. As I said at the beginning of the show, in terms of wider European history, the Russian Decemberists fit right into the mix of the liberal revolutionaries in Spain and Portugal, Italy, and Greece. They all represent a certain spirit of the times, and any discussion of this epoch must include the Decemberists. In terms of specifically Russian history, they act as a bridge between the two types of rebellion that Russian history is already well acquainted with: the palace coup on the one hand and the peasant revolt on the other. The Decemberists married the goals of a peasant revolt with the methods of a military palace coup. They absolutely wanted more than to just place their man on the throne, but they also never dreamed of inviting the people to join them. So it was somehow neither a palace coup nor a peasant revolt, but it was also both. And then finally, in terms of our purpose here of trying to explain the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and before that 1905, well, those guys knew all about what it happened with the Decemberists, despite official suppression of information, and those guys had their theory about why the Decembers had failed. About how maybe the Decembers had erred in trying to lead a people’s revolution without inviting the people to join them.

So we will pick up the story next time and finish our survey of Russian history with the imperial regime trying to figure out how to square the two Russias without inviting a revolution, especially given the great revolution of 1848, which swept right up to their doorstep and which the imperial regime helped decisively crush. But we will tell that story in two weeks, because even though I accidentally just took an unscheduled week off, my scheduled week off is still coming up, I’m flying back to France from the United States in a few days. So when we come back, we will catch up Russian history to the point where Marx and Engels and Bakunin and the rest of that first generation of hardcore social revolutionaries are running around, and we’ll get our first glimpse of what the tsars will try to do to forever and ever, at least for one more day, keep them at bay.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Episode 10.11: War And Peace

So first of all, a thousand apologies for not getting an episode out last week. We are back in the United States for all of August, and I got the first episode out no problem, but in that second week, we were in Seattle and Portland, and I just didn’t have as much time to work as I was planning. I have, however, now settled on a farm in east central Illinois, so I’ll be good to go from here on out. No more interruptions, no more delays, and I really do apologize.

Our extended background coverage of Russian history that we’ve been doing over the past few episodes has in part been about setting up the Russian Revolution, obviously, but it has also been about filling in some of the gaps in the Revolutions podcast. Russia has been lurking in the background of many of our previous series. They were there at the end of our series on the French Revolution. They were a big part of the conservative reaction to the liberal and national revolutions of the 1820s and 1830s that we talked about in our episodes on the July Revolution. They played a huge role in stamping out the Revolutions of 1848. But I have just sort of kept them lurking in the background. So part of what I’m up to over here is filling in some gaps, explaining the Russian angle on events that we’ve already covered. And if I had some file on my computer called, say, The Great Revolution where I cut and paste all the material I have written for the podcast into a single document arranged in strict chronological order, the material from these next three episodes would be inserted back amidst stuff that I wrote years ago. So this week’s episode would find a home back with blocks of text from late series three, next week’s episode would go along with events I talked about in series six, and the episode after that with events I talked about in series seven. Meanwhile, episodes 10.9 and 10.10 would be pasted back under a chapter heading called something like Pre Seven Years War. I mean, if such a file existed, I mean.

So really getting back to it now, we wrapped up two weeks ago with the advent of the French Revolution. Now for the leaders of the Russian Empire, the French Revolution was a troubling development and led to a turn away from the long-standing embrace of the French Enlightenment that had been fostered by Catherine the Great. Now we know that Catherine hated the revolution and opened up her court to homeless French émigrés. But in real politic terms, France was a long ways off, and the concrete upshot of all the upheavals out west was the partitions of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia. But aside from Poland, Catherine was not really looking to get embroiled in affairs off in the west. She tended to still direct Russian ambition south, where they could pry territory away from the Ottomans around the Black Sea or from the Persians in the Caucasus. Now what Catherine would have done through the tumultuous next few years, as revolutionary France became Napoleonic France, is an interesting alternative history question, but it will remain an alternative history question, because just as an obscure French general named Napoleon Bonaparte was waging the first Italian campaign that would turn him from obscure French general into name an entire era of European history after me, Catherine the Great died in November of 1796. And that puts us right around episode 3.4 45.

The death of Catherine brought to the throne, her 42 year old son, Paul. Now in Paul’s estimation, his ascension was long overdue. Really, he felt like he should have already celebrated his 20th anniversary as emperor. Paul was eight years old when his mother conspired to overthrow his father, and it was understood at the time that Catherine would be officially serving in some regency capacity until the heir to the throne, that is Paul, came of age. But after 10 years on the throne, Catherine decided she disliked her son just about as much as she liked wielding power, and so she stalled and delayed and made no move to step aside. And she had done such an excellent job building up a base of political support for herself that nobody challenged this. She just stayed empress, even after Paul became old enough to receive his rightful inheritance. And as Catherine’s personal favor was powerful, very powerful, anyone who thought about drifting into Paul’s orbit was assured that they would be committing political suicide. So Paul spent the next 20 years mostly estranged from his mother and the imperial court in St. Petersburg. He was just off living on his own personal estate, unhappy about his marginalization, but unable to do anything about it.

Paul’s first wife Natalia died in childbirth in 1776, but his second wife, a German princess rechristened Maria Feodorovna, gave birth to 10 children over the next 20 years. The eldest was a boy named Alexander who was born in 1777. Alexander and his younger brother Konstantin, who was born two years later, had their upbringing and education monitored closely by their grandmother, Catherine, who wanted them raised in the progressive and modern manner of the European Enlightenment, and also maybe keep them away from Paul, and see if they didn’t turn out a little bit better than he did. So both boys were tutored by a Swiss French man named César de La Harpe who formerly oversaw their educations until 1795, and who then became a trusted friend and advisor to Alexander as the years went on. The thoroughly marginalized Paul, now rightly worried that his mother Catherine wanted his son Alexander to succeed her, skipping Paul entirely. And though Alexander found both his grandmother and his father to be suffocating each in their own way, whatever plans Catherine was laying to skip Paul, Alexander himself wanted no part of it. When the old empress died in November of 1796, there was no succession struggle. Paul became Tsar Paul the First, Alexander became the tsarevich, the heir to the throne.

Finally out from under his mother’s shadow, Paul was able to have it his own way, for all the good it would wind up doing him. Catherine had been very expansionist in her foreign policy, especially towards the Ottomans and Persians in the south, but Paul was critical of all that, and he actually halted plans for a further campaign south. But though early on he insisted on a less expansionist foreign policy, he also became more personally invested in what revolutionary France was up to. Specifically, it was the Egyptian expedition of the now very famous General Bonaparte that caught the tsar’s attention. Now on a personal level, Tsar Paul was angry at Bonaparte’s capture of Malta in June, 1798. Temperamentally inclined towards a kind of romantic medieval chivalry, Paul took offense at the expulsion of the Knights of Malta, and he stepped in to be their patron and benefactor after the French capture of their island. This, we talked about in episode 3.48. On the national interest level, Russia could not help but be alarmed by France, thrusting its power across the Mediterranean and directly threatening Russia’s underbelly. So as we discussed in episode 3.49 the Egyptian expedition had the nearly unthinkable effect of putting the Russians and Ottomans on the same side as they face this shared French threat. Britain made great diplomatic hay of all this, and in late 1798, Paul agreed to bring Russia into what was becoming the second coalition. We then talked about how this went in episode 3.51 in 3.52 with the legendary general Suvarov fighting one last valiant campaign in Switzerland, which was stymied by bad logistical planning and the ultimately irreconcilable cross-purposes of Austria and Russia. The way the Russian thought, Russia was concerned about defeating France, Austria was concerned about picking up more territory in Italy. Then up north, a joint British Russia invasion of the Netherlands stalled out due to weather and stiffer than expected resistance, so by early 1800, Paul decided to pull Russia out of the second coalition in a huff, and instead formed the League of Armed Neutrality with Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Prussia to patrol the Baltic Sea and protect neutral shipping from the British Navy.

So this is all leading Paul in this slow hundred and 80 degree turn that was probably bringing him into alliance with France, because France was now led by First Consul Bonaparte, whose autocratic tendencies Paul felt much more comfortable with, as opposed to all the Republicans and Jacobins who haunted the nightmares of absolute monarchists everywhere.

But Paul’s real enemies were not Republicans and Jacobins, but rather unhappy French nobles. As I said, Paul’s personal worldview seemed to idealize out of date medieval chivalry, and many at court and in the army had trouble getting on board. The frustration of members of the Russian army was ratcheted up because Paul was also very much into Prussian military methods of drilling parade, dress and punishment, and he dismissed anyone from his service who went against this trend while clinging to a small clique of favorites, so a lot of very capable officers were being fired. And in short, every day he was in power. Paul seemed to have fewer friends and more enemies. There were also plenty of holdovers from Catherine’s circle who didn’t think Paul was up to the job of being tsar at all, and this reason turned towards working with the hated French Republic was very troubling. So in early 1801, the grumbling turned into active planning, but 24 year old Tsarevich Alexander was told something was up, and he indicated that he wasn’t opposed to something being up as long as his father was simply removed and not killed. That was the plan anyway.

So in March of 1801, a group of officers drank up some courage and then stormed their way into Paul’s chamber intent on forcing him to abdicate in favor of Alexander. When the tsar refused, things got rough. He was pushed, then beaten, then strangled, then trampled. After waiting a lifetime, Tsar Paul was dead after less than five years on the throne.

Alexander was mortified when he found out that his father had been killed and it would haunt him off and on for the rest of his life, but there was nothing to be done, but accept that what was done was done. Alexander became Tsar Alexander the first and he would rule Russia for the next 24 transformative years. In terms of Russia’s role in European affairs, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great may have both imported the west into Russia, but Alexander was about to export the power of Russia back into the west. And in short order, he would become convinced that he actually was the personal savior of Europe. And while Alexander and meshed Europe deeper and deeper into western affairs, Alexander himself proved to be the living embodiment of mercurial. Over the years he would shift from liberal to conservative, back to liberal, and back to conservative again. Sometimes he favored enlightened idealism, other times, a devout Christianity. Sometimes he liked strict absolutism, other times he favored constitutional government, it depended on the time and the place. Sometimes he was expansionist, sometimes he was closed up and defensive. Alexander led Russia through an age where the empire itself faced a constant identity crisis, switching friends and enemies every few years. This was a formidable and traumatic period for Russia when they were at times devastated victims, and other times the masters of Europe. These were the years of war and peace.

When Alexander came to power, he brought with him a kind of personal liberalism coupled with a reformist instinct. Initially working through a small state council of younger men that Alexander liked and trusted this younger clique of leaders took the system of departmental colleges run by committee that had been set up by Peter the Great, and converted it into a system of ministries with a single minister in charge. And those ministers could then get together and discuss empire-wide problems. This was in keeping with more modern methods of government, and Alexander was far more open to borrowing French advancements and administration than his father had ever been. Alexander’s minister reforms here in the early 19th century would prove to be the at least indirect beginning of most of the government departments that govern Russia to this very day, most of which continued to function even after the Bolsheviks hung an under new management sign on the door in 1917.

In foreign affairs, Alexander watched with a carefully neutral eyes, the War of the Second Coalition, which his father had already pulled Russia out of, gave way to the Year of Peace, and then as the Year of Peace ended with the British re-declaring war on the French in March of 1803. But Britain’s insistence of war on France now and forever did not yet move their old allies back into the fighting. This took a series of provocations by First Consul Bonaparte. The most scandalous of these was the shocking secret execution of the Duke Don d’Enghien in March of 1804. This execution is where we get Fouche’s famous quote, “that it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” The execution of the Duke really seems to have outrage the Russian aristocracy, outrage which was exacerbated a few months later when the monstrous upstart Bonaparte had the temerity to declare himself Emperor Napoleon just a few months later, I mean, who did he think he was?

After months of negotiation, the British finally convinced Alexander to bring Russia into what was becoming the third coalition in April of 1805. And then Napoleon proceeded to crown himself King of Italy in May of 1805, which I will remind you from episode 5.5 young Simone Bolivar just so happened to be in Milan at that same moment.

Anyway, all of this spooked the Austrians into joining the British and Russians and the War of the Third Coalition could really get going in earnest. But the War of the Third Coalition was a very short war, because this is just as the Grande Armée is taking its place in the annals of military history, and everything that follows will fit in alongside stuff we talked about in episode 3.54. Napoleon routed the Austrians in the Ulm campaign in the fall of 1805, and total victory was only temporarily put off by the arrival of Russian reinforcements led personally buys Tsar Alexander. Now the head of the Russian army, General Kutuzov, was wary of fighting, but Alexander insisted on bringing Napoleon to a decisive battle. And so the combined Austrian and Russian armies agreed to take advantage of what they perceived to be France’s dangerously weakened right flank, and here comes the Battle of Austerlitz. Having fallen into Napoleon’s carefully laid trap, the French crushed the Austrians and Russians. Rather than defeating the upstart Napoleon, Tsar Alexander had helped hand him his greatest victory.

The Austrians were forced to sign a punitive peace treaty in December of 1805, which paved the way for the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire. Alexander and the Russians, meanwhile, were allowed to pull backwards in unmolested retreat, partly because Napoleon was hoping to eventually turn Alexander to his side.

The surrender of Austria and collapse of the Holy Roman Empire then spooked the Prussians out of their decade of neutrality, and they hopped into what became known as the Fourth Coalition a few months later, the Fourth Coalition just being the Third Coalition but swap Prussia for Austria. The resulting War of the Fourth Coalition was also very quick. The Prussians dove in too hard, too fast, and too unsupported, and they got their asses kicked in October of 1806, knocking them out of the war immediately, oopsie daisy. Tsar Alexander and the Russians then braced as Napoleon charged across Poland to the Russian frontier. The Russians managed to check the French at Eylau in February of 1807, but then they too fell to the apparently invincible might of Napoleon. In June of 1807, the Russians lost the Great battle of Friedland. Defeated, Alexander and the Russians sued for peace.

Now the thing is, Napoleon never really wanted to be fighting the Russians. I mean, hell yes, stomp up and down on the Prussians and the Austrians, but Napoleon did not see Russia as just another potential carcass for France to gorge itself upon. And so for the past several years, Napoleon had tried to break Alexander away from the allied coalition. His basic pitch was that France and Russia were simply too geographically distant to have any real conflict of interest. And so when the two emperors met for a post-war settlement at Tilsit in July of 1807, Napoleon was incredibly generous and he laid it on Alexander very thick. There’s our was quite taken with all this, he liked what Napoleon was saying about the possibility of joining forces to combat all the enemies of Christendom out in the East. And so unlike the punitive treaties Napoleon forced on Prussia and Austria, it was a treaty of mutually beneficial friendship that he offered Russia. And Alexander took him up on his offer.

Alexander agreed to basically switch sides and joined Napoleon’s continental system blockading the British. Alexander was also happy to make further war against Britain’s ally Sweden, with Finland being the reward for Russia’s efforts. France, meanwhile, agreed to give aid to Russia in her ongoing wars in the south, more on that in a minute, but despite all this friendly friendship, the seeds of future trouble were laid as Napoleon’s creation of the Duchy of Warsaw out of Polish territories really did seem to put France right on Russia’s front doorstep, and they were not so geographically distant anymore.

Now, as we also discussed in episode 3.54, Tilsit was kind of the high water mark for Napoleon. And the breakdown of his friendship with Russia would be the principle cause of his downfall. But before we get into all that, we do need to peel off and talk about the two other whole wars that Russia was fighting at the same time. As I mentioned earlier, the territorial ambitions of Russia had long looked south towards the Black Sea and the Caspian sea and 1802. In fact, just after Alexander came to power and before he ever joined the Third Coalition, the Russian army drove south into the Caucasus to snatch territory away from Persian hegemony. And at this point, we’re talking about the Qajar Empire, who had self dubbed themselves the Sublime State of Persia. The Persians naturally fought back against Russian encroachment on their northwestern border, beginning the Russo-Persian War which would last from 1802 to 1813, and which would remain an ongoing conflict all through these years, where so much of the attention was supposed to be on the Napoleonic Empire.

Then in the wake of the French victories at Austerlitz, Napoleon encouraged the Ottomans to make aggressive moves into Wallachia and Moldavia in 1806 that would bog the Russians down as Napoleon marched the War of the Fourth Coalition to its conclusion at Friedland. But after the treaty of Tilsit, the French abandoned their support for the Ottomans, so the Russo-Turkish War that began there in 1806 would just kind of continue in sporadic bursts until 1812. So in our western European-centric realm of history, we tend to think that the Napoleonic Empire must have been the sole focus of everyone’s attention, but all through these years, the tsar, his diplomats, and his soldiers were simultaneously dealing with wars down around the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, both of which, I should add, would wind up very favorable for Russia.

So while all these wars continued, Napoleon was worried that his ties with Alexander were not as tight as he wanted them to be. And both emperors were kind of not living up to the promises they had made at Tilsit. So they arranged a second conference, this one in the German principality of Erfurt in September and October 1808. But this time old Tallyrand went in for his classic double dealing behind the back cross-purposes diplomacy. Now wary of Napoleon’s expansionism and the punitive settlements in central Europe, Tallyrand had resigned as foreign minister, but he was invited to Erfurt to act as a special advisor and special advise he did. Meeting secretly with Alexander, Tallyrand counseled the tsar to remain aloof to Napoleon’s overtures. Tallyrand’s hope was that without a strong Russian alliance that Napoleon would be forced to dial back his ambitions and fall into a stable balance of European power, which Tallyrand thought essential for the longterm survival of France. This special advising worked: Tallyrand successfully derailed Napoleon’s attempt to woo Alexander. And though both emperors left Erfurt with a 14 point pledge of alliance and friendship, things were getting awfully lip service-y.

Now one domestic consequence of Erfurt is another round of domestic political reform. Since coming to the throne seven years earlier, Alexander had come to rely on the son of a priest who had risen through sheer force of intellect to become first a professor of math and science, then a secretary in the foreign office, and then a close personal advisor to the tsar. And this is Mikhail Speransky.

Speransky is sometimes called the father of Russian liberalism, though it was a very autocratic brand of liberalism that he pursued. At Erfurt, he met personally with Napoleon to discuss the latest methods of French administration and Speransky left with a bunch of ideas to fit into a plan of empire-wide constitutional reform that he had been working on for years. And his big reform idea is that he wanted to introduce some kind of elective participatory government. Now what he wanted to do was create a system of dumas, or legislative assemblies. These would start at the local level, then move up to a district duma and then a provisional duma, and then an imperial duma. With the delegates to each duma electing the members who would go on to the next highest order. At the Imperial level, they would then be the lower legislative house, who would join with a reformed state council made up of about 35 highly trusted men who would act as an upper chamber for discussion and analysis of proposed laws before they reached the tsar’s desk.

Now, this all has the appearance of constitutional government, but these dumas and state council would not have any real authority of their own, they were purely advisory. But they would open up a participatory system that might be a good way to invite discussion and proposals that the tsar could accept or deny as he saw fit. Now, despite the fact that Speransky was prime minister and in many ways, practically the only minister of importance from 1809 to 1812, he was only partially successful with his reforms. The upper state council was successfully created and went into operation, but the dumas would remain an unfulfilled platform of Russian liberals for decades to come.

On the foreign front, the Russian army successfully beat the Swedish in what is called the Finnish War, and they took Finland over, and Speransky was successful in setting up post-war Finland on a constitutional basis, because it seemed wise to not try to impose tsarist absolutism on the Finns. And they were granted a constitution where the tsar would reign as a constitutional monarch. And though none of this was as of yet being imported into Russia itself, Alexander seemed fine with it, which gave heartburn to conservative Russians. They feared the tsar was getting too French, too modern, and too liberal.

Further trouble with Napoleon though changed Alexander’s posture once again. By 1810, relations between Alexander and Napoleon had devolved into a series of very cordial threats that led Alexander to decide to open Russia to neutral shipping again, opening up a huge hole in Napoleon’s continental system that was supposed to be blockading the British. With his Spanish ulcer simultaneously bleeding, Napoleon decided he still had the might to go march on Moscow and force Alexander and the Russians to submit to his will. With the looming war against France now the sole object of the tsar’s attention, Russia sought to wrap up their ongoing wars against the Turks and the Persians. In consecutive treaties in 1812 and 1813, the Russians walked away with ownership of western Moldavia and all of the Caucasus, as well as securing from the Persians exclusive rights to operate a navy in the Caspian sea, which is a major concession that often gets lost in the story of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat from Russia. But the Russians taking control of the Caspian Sea is like, a pretty big deal.

With Napoleon now massing close to half a million men on the Russian frontier, Alexander made the decision to dismiss his prime minister Speransky in an effort to consolidate the Russian nobility behind him. But the campaign strategy of Alexander’s minister of war Barclay de Tolly was not exactly designed to appeal to the ego of the Russian nobility. They were to avoid an open battle and instead just withdraw east, deeper and deeper into the heart of Russia. After Napoleon crossed the frontier in June of 1812, they allowed his army to advance at will, but at each step necessarily extending French lines of supply and communication. The strategy was so unpopular though that eventually the tsar had to sack Barclay de Tolly and appoint General Kutuzov to be the new commander in chief, but Kutuzov simply stuck with that same strategy. It was hard. It was brutal. At times it was humiliating, but it worked. Napoleon led about 450,000 men into Russia in June of 1812. They advanced and they advanced, but they did not draw the Russians into a fight until September of 1812, the battle of Borodino, just a hundred miles west of Moscow.

This was the single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. And at the end, it turned out to be a tactical draw. Which was a strategic disaster for the French. Although the Russians abandoned their capital with Moscow when the French army entered an occupied it for a month, Tsar Alexander refused to surrender. The Russian army then moved south, and stood ready to block any attempt by the French to go off and find food or fodder. Finally recognizing his position was hopeless, Napoleon had to retreat along the same line he had advanced. As the French departed, Moscow caught fire and was engulfed in flames. The Russians then harassed the retreating Napoleonic army along a line devoid of food and fodder through a hard early winter.

Finally, in December of 1812, the last French troops departed. Over the course of these catastrophic six months, something like 2 million soldiers and civilians died, but the Russian army had not been conquered. Napoleon had not bent them to his will. Instead Russia became the springboard from which the final campaigns to defeat Napoleon sprang.

Thanks to Russia’s great achievement of endurance, Alexander was now one of the principle pillars of the anti-Napoleon coalition. And just as Napoleon had once dragged a mass of people from west to east Alexander now dragged that same mass of people from east to west. Soon enough, they were liberating the Germans from the French yolk and the Austrians and the Prussians rejoined the war. They all kept pushing all the way back to France, crossing into French territory in January of 1814, and fighting battles on French soil for the first time in like 20 years. When Napoleon showed real signs of life in the Six Days Campaign, the Emperor Francis of Austria and King Friedrich Wilheim the Third of Prussia wanted to break off the advance, but Alexander was now convinced that he was the divine savior of Europe and it was his mission to defeat the antichrist Napoleon. Alexander’s personal Christian piety had now advanced into a kind of deep cosmic theology. Helped along by the arrival of a German baroness turned mystical evangelical named Barbara von Krüdener, who the tsar had met in Basel in the fall of 1813, and who had told him straight up, yes, that is your mission. You are the divine savior. You must defeat the antichrist. So she now traveled with the tsar and he took counsel and prayed with her frequently. This was now a holy war, at least for Alexander.

In late March 1814, the allies advanced on Paris and leading French politicians, including Tallyrand and Fouche and a recently out of retirement Marquis de Lafayette, engineered the surrender of the French capital, and demanded the abdication of Emperor Napoleon. Tallyrand handed the key of the city to Tsar Alexander.

Alexander was probably now the single most important leader in Europe. The tsar of Russia held the future of Europe in his hands. And he was lobbied from all sides to settle post-Napoleonic France and post-Napoleonic Europe this way and that. Now Alexander personally preferred to put the Duke d’Orléans, the future King Louis Philippe, onto the French throne, but he was persuaded by the British’s desire to restore the Bourbons. Now through all of this, Alexander preached peace and understanding and reconciliation, that the allies had made their war on Napoleon, not on France. He was thus mighty vexxed when Napoleon escaped from Elba and launched the Hundred Days. ‘Cause those Hundred Days saw many supposedly peace seeking and chastened French leaders hop back into a war of French aggression. It was a very different and a much harder Alexander who thus arrived back in Paris after Waterloo. And though his views would not shift overnight, he was now beginning his long turn away from enlightened liberalism and towards a reactionary conservatism.

And next week, we will see Alexander forge the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Austria, and begin to turn Russia into the power that would always seek to destroy liberalism and nationalism wherever they reared their dangerous, chaotic, and revolutionary head.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Express VPN. We’ve all had times we don’t necessarily want the things we searched for online to be tracked. In order to write a show about revolutions, I’ve spent a lot of my time looking for things online that will probably land me on a watchlist. What are the five best ways to overthrow a government? What kind of materials to use to build a barricade? That sort of thing.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.71: The Democratic Conference

Before we get going this week, I want to reiterate the special book tour announcement I dropped a couple of days ago, which I hope everybody listened to. In fact, by the time you’re listening to this, I will probably be on my way to Minneapolis to start a little signing tour through the upper Midwest. On Monday, October 11, from 4 to 6:00 PM. I will be in Minneapolis at Magers and Quinn. On Tuesday, October 12th, from 6 to 8:00 PM, I will be with Anderson’s Bookshop at Community Christian Church for a driveby signing event in Naperville. That again is Naperville, which in my regional ignorance, I casually implied was a Chicago event, but then absolutely got roasted on Twitter for implying that Naperville was Chicago — Naperville is not Chicago, lesson learned — but anyway, on Tuesday, October 12th, I will be in Naperville. Then on Wednesday, October 13, from 2 to 4:00 PM, I will be at Kismet Books in Verona, Wisconsin, which is an awesome little bookstore just south of Madison. Finally, Thursday, October 14, from 4 to 6:00 PM, I will be back at Boswell’s in Milwaukee. I look forward to this being the first of many more live events as everybody gets vaccinated and we get to move back towards a new normal. Links to info about all of these events are included in the show notes and at the website revolutionspodcast.com, or you can follow me on Twitter. There are some RSVP and ticket requirements for some of these events so please do go to the event page and do what they tell you you need to do in order to attend.

Now, speaking of these being the first of many more live events, I can actually now officially plug what the next live event is going to be: I will be doing a one-off event in Pasadena, California with Romans and book Soup on October 27th, so if you are in the LA area, you are officially notified that I will be doing a book event in Pasadena on October 27. This one will be a full book talk and signing, so it’ll be a full evening of Mike Duncan. The space itself will be socially distanced, masks will be worn, and proof of vaccination will be required to attend. I am really looking forward to that, I really do love doing these things, and I very much look forward to getting to do many more of them in the future. So, see you in Minneapolis, Naperville, Verona, or Milwaukee this week, or October 27 in Pasadena, or in the future, all the other places I hope to come to.

But getting back to it, last time we covered the Kornilov Affair, one of the great turning points of 1917. And it was a great turning point for incredibly ironic reasons. General Kornilov’s principle motivation for declaring a military dictatorship was fear of a Bolshevik insurrection, and more than anything else, his own attempt to impose that military dictatorship is what made the Bolshevik seizure of power possible. Alexander Kerensky, who was absolutely up to his eyeballs in blame for the Kornilov Affair, said later, August 27 is what made October 27 possible.

The Bolsheviks certainly recognized the massive gift they had been given, and they made the most of it, as we will spend a great deal of today discussing. But I don’t want to lose sight of Kornilov’s other stated objective, which he explicitly laid out in his declaration on August 20. He said: “I General Kornilov, the son of a Cossack peasant, declare to each and all that I personally desire nothing but to save great Russia. I swear to lead the people through victory over the enemy to the constituent assembly, where it will decide its own destiny and choose its new political system.”

Because we cannot forget that the constituent assembly is still a thing. Now, given the ultimate result of the Revolution of 1917, it is hard to remember that from the moment Tsar Nicholas abdicated the throne in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail, the constituent assembly was meant to be the great political result of the revolution. As everyone no doubt remembers, when Grand Duke Mikhail declined the throne, he didn’t just decline the throne for all time, he said, I will become tsar only if and when a constituent assembly meets and offers me the throne. Then, he signed over power to the self-appointed provisional government on the understanding that one of their principle tasks was organizing and convening that constituent assembly. It’s why they were the provisional government. They were provisional. They were meant to be a temporary placeholder who derive their legitimacy from two directions; one running from the past to the present — that is, the chain of sovereign custody passing from Nicholas to Mikhail, and then immediately from Mihail to the provisional government — but also another source of legitimacy running backwards from the future to the present — which is to say, that one of the main sources of their legitimacy was looking forward to the fact that they would be the ones to convene a constituent assembly.

But that was all back in the first week of March, and here we are heading into September and the constituent assembly has still not been convened. And as we have seen over the past few episodes, the chain of sovereign custody has been run through multiple political blenders. The first government Mihail passed power to collapsed after eight weeks, the second government — the first coalition government of socialists and liberals — was created after negotiations with the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet, who had no legal, constitutional authority to speak of. That second government then collapsed leading into and out of the July days and everything had to get reshuffled again, producing a third government, the third government since February, and more than ever, a government that was simply the improvised result of negotiations with non constitutional actors: heads of political parties, the essentially self appointed leaders of the Soviet. Decisions were being made by an incredibly small group of leading Kadets, SRs and Mensheviks. And in fact, one of the main driving thrusts of the July Days was that by now the provisional government no longer had anything resembling political legitimacy, and the Soviet, which at least kind of did, just needed to take over. In terms of connecting the dots between February and October, the failure of the various provisional governments to move quickly towards a nationally elected constituent assembly is usually overshadowed by other factors, and not without good reason, but it is a major factor.

This mistake though, brings us back to the impact of the June Offensive, which also continues to loom very large as a dot connecting February to October. Because even though the failure to move quickly towards a constituent assembly was to a certain degree just not acting with any kind of urgency in getting bogged down in trifling minutia, but there was also an unstated assumption that the constituent assembly would meet after the war was over… or at least after Russia’s military position was so unassailable and secure that it would be safe to do something as momentously unprecedented as convening a national assembly, to write a new constitution for Russia. The expectation among the ministers and functionaries of these various provisional government was that the war had been a rolling debacle due entirely to the incompetence of Nicholas and Alexandra. Now that they were out of the way, the tide would surely turn.

So all through March, April, May, and June, none of them felt any great rush to hold the constituent assembly because they assumed it would be held after victory on the battlefield. And they also assumed that said victory was probably right around the corner. But then the June Offensive turned into the June and July Retreat, and the military situation went from bad to worse. So now the provisional government was caught out in no man’s land. They couldn’t keep putting off the constituent assembly until victory or peace because victory and peace were not going to be coming anytime soon. But they also were now very worried about going ahead with it because the resulting political crisis caused by the failure of the June Offensive might not be full of moderate liberal statesmen writing an orderly constitution, but angry radicals looking to turn the world upside down. But they also couldn’t put off the constituent assembly much longer because as I said, the last remaining shreds of the government’s legitimacy was still tied to the expectation that they would convene a constituent assembly. So after very, nearly being overthrown in the July Days, the provisional government started making announcements. On July 20th, they announced the electoral procedures and rules for suffrage, including the right of women both to vote and stand for election to the constituent assembly, a major victory for the feminist groups who had been so instrumental in launching the February Revolution in the first place. Then, in the second week of August, the government announced that elections would be held November 12th, and the first session of the constituent assembly would meet November 28th.

Now, this was still three very long months away, but it was officially on the calendar. And the fact that the constituent assembly was slated to meet in November was part of the reason Kornilov and Kerensky conspired to declare martial law in August. They both believed that a period of military rule might be necessary to allow the constituent assembly to meet in peace. Then once the assembly met and drafted a new constitution for Russia, military rule could be dialed back, and a new civilian government enjoying the sovereign legitimacy granted to it by this constituent assembly could come to power.

But if this is what they were trying to accomplish, the Kornilov Affair was a debacle. It was a complete failure. It left the government with almost no legitimacy to speak of. Alexander Kerensky successfully double-crossed Kornilov and induce the mass resignation of the ministry and the transfer of all executive authority into his hands, but it left him exactly nowhere. And I’m not sure I’ve actually seen a dictatorship held with such a narrow base of power. The only person I’ve written about who immediately springs to mind is Didius Julianus from the old History of Rome days. He’s the senator who was proclaimed emperor by the Praetorian Guard after winning a literal bidding war for their services after they had assassinated Emperor Pertinax. Didius Julianus was of course immediately overthrown by Septimius Severus who commanded the support of, y’know, armies and entire provinces.

In the first days of September, 1917, Kerensky was all powerful, at least on paper. He appointed a handful of ministers to lead the key ministries of state, and then they spent the next several weeks ruling by executive fiat. He spent these weeks attempting to find something, anything, anyone who would give his government even the veneer of legitimacy, but the Kornilov Affair simultaneously left Kerensky as an all-powerful dictator, but also a friendless non-entity. Each for their own reasons, neither the left nor the right, now trusted him. The officer corps of the army hated Kerensky for betraying Kornilov. The rank and file of the military hated him for conspiring with Kornilov. The question at this point was whether Kerensky, who almost nobody liked trusted or listened to anymore, could survive until the constituent assembly in November. And the answer was: no, he could not.

As we discussed last week, the main beneficiaries of the Kornilov Affair were. Ironically the very Bolshevik Party Kornilov had been trying to crush. The Bolsheviks, as we also discussed last week, had managed to escape through July and August without being completely crushed because the Mensheviks and the SRs who led the Soviet, as well as prime minister, Kerensky himself, were so worried about the threat of a counter-revolutionary coup from the right that they did not want to have any enemies to their left, especially an enemy as militant and well-armed and aggressive as the Bolsheviks were. The Kornilov Affair completed the political rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, who were now seen as the most ardent and clear-eyed defenders of the revolution. In the scramble to defend Petrograd from the forces of counterrevolution everyone had turned to the Bolsheviks to provide both generals and foot soldiers, and they delivered. Even if no fighting actually took place, the Bolsheviks were now considered the saviors of Petrograd.

Now from the very beginning, going all the way back to the original split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and then all through the Revolution of 1905, the Bolsheviks had always been the minority party. In February 1917, they probably counted no more than a few hundred active party members. But from that small nucleus, they had been growing. As we talked about in the episode on the July Days, they did very well among the sailors of the Kronstadt Naval Base, the workers in the Vyborg District, and major parts of the Petrograd Garrison, particularly those machine gunners. By the summer of 1917, the Bolsheviks counted as many as 200,000 members across Russia. They were still not as big as the SRs, but this was absolutely nothing to sneeze at. And the Bolsheviks, as we’ve also discussed, now also benefited from the very things that had once made them such a minority party: they were the party associated with being opposed to the war. Now this had made them unpopular during periods when the war was popular, but now that the war was unpopular, it made them very, very popular. They were also the party who were most clearly and consistently in favor of the slogan, all power to the Soviets, because as the legitimacy of the provisional government just disappeared into nothingness, the Soviet as an institution and as an idea still had a lot of legitimacy in the minds of workers and sailors and soldiers, and the Bolsheviks had been the ones running around out there saying, the provisional government is illegitimate, the Soviet is legitimate, so let’s transfer all power to the Soviet. As the months went by, disillusionment with the Mensheviks and SR leadership of the Soviets drove many former supporters into the waiting ranks of the Bolsheviks. The Kornilov Affair rapidly accelerated those defections as the ongoing support from the Soviet leadership for Kerensky, his government, and the liberals was increasingly incomprehensible to people in the streets and factories and garrisons of Russia. The Bolshevik started to really gain electoral ground in municipal elections, culminating with their surprise victory in the local Moscow elections. In September of 1917. They also gained major ground in local Soviets out in the provinces, especially in industrial areas, and by September 1917, there were close to a dozen major provincial Soviets whose executive councils were dominated by Bolshevik Party members.

Now more than anything else, however, the story of politics by the fall of 1917 was less a story of rising democratic support for the Bolsheviks — which wasn’t really the case — but rather the mass proliferation of disillusionment and apathy. The huge initial burst of enthusiasm and energy in February 1917 had ultimately produced meager results. Not only did the war continue, but it continued to be defined by bloodshed and defeat. Workers were encouraged to cooperate with their bosses in the interests of keeping industry going rather than taking over industry for themselves. Out in the rural areas, peasants were seizing land, and instead of being encouraged and validated, the government was handing down proclamations telling them to knock it off. The Mensheviks and SR leaders of the Soviet continued to insist on supporting coalition government with capitalists and landowners, like, at all costs. The once raucus and excited general assemblies of the Petrograd Soviet had long since ceased meeting with any regularity. They gave way to insulated and semi-secretive committees and bureaucratic directories who were happy to speak for the people, but no longer really interested in speaking with the people. And so the people simply stopped showing up. And people stopped voting. People kind of stopped caring. It was becoming very much meet the new boss, same as the old boss, so like in those municipal elections I just talked about, yes, the Bolsheviks grew their share of the vote, but it was a larger share of a much smaller pie. Local Petrograd elections held in August, saw voter turnout decrease 30% from the spring. In Moscow, the election where the Bolsheviks finally won a majority, turnout had dropped by 50%. So a growing block of people out there were not voting for any one party or another, they were voting for apathetic disillusionment.

The Bolsheviks were well poised to take advantage of this apathetic disillusionment first and foremost because they were the one thing on the menu standing against the forces that had caused all the apathetic disillusion. For example, they did excellent work organizing on shop floors of factories because the Menshevik led factory committees that had been set up around February all continued to advocate compromise and cooperation with the bosses and the liberals and the capitalists if for no other reason than we have to win the war, which they considered to be of paramount importance. But the workers on the shop floor did not agree with those priorities. They were very interested in what the Bolsheviks had to say, which was down with the bosses, down with the liberals, down with the capitalists and down with the war. And these were in fact the very workers that the Bolsheviks successfully armed during the Kornilov Affair: workers whose patience with Mensheviks, SRs, liberals, and the provisional government was completely exhausted.

The central figure in the Bolshevik transitionq from a militant minority faction to something like a popular political party was Leon Trotsky. More than anyone else, Trotsky was the public face of Bolshevism in the fall of 1917. Which is something of a surprise, given that he had broken with Lenin and the Bolsheviks way back during the original Bolshevik/Mensheviks split in 1903, and then the two sides had spent the last 15 years lobbing potshots at each other in various émigré newspapers. But Trotsky’s alienation from Lenin had always been far more personal than political. In terms of tactics, strategy, and objectives, Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution neatly aligned with just about everything Lenin was saying. The reason he had fallen out with Lenin in the first place was because Lenin had been such a huge asshole to all of Trotsky’s friends back in 1903, and then a huge asshole to Trotsky himself in the wake of the Bolshevik/Menshevik split — though, to be sure, Trotsky gave absolutely as good as he got in these disputes, and painted his own portraits of Lenin with a brush dipped in poison.

But when everyone returned to Russia in 1917, both Trotsky and Lenin saw their interests align and they buried the hatchet. Both of them ultimately putting the political ahead of the personal. This was in marked contrast to another one of our old friends, Julius Martov. Ever since the beginning of World War I, Martov had led a leftwing Menshevik faction that was also very close to the Bolshevik position. And, here in 1917, these leftwing Mensheviks were absolutely defecting to the Bolsheviks in droves. But Martov himself couldn’t go there. He simply could not forgive Lenin’s naked opportunism, immorality, hypocrisy, and fundamental lack of political decency. Trotsky was ready to bury the hatchet; Martov was not, and he never would be.

But getting back to Trotsky, he was not even technically a member of the Bolshevik party when the July Days hit. When arrest warrants went out for the various Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky was not on the list. He had to actually write open letters to the authorities saying, hey, if you’re arresting Bolsheviks, you have to arrest me too, which, then they did. Having proven his loyalty, the Bolshevik central committee elected to bring Trotsky into the leadership while he was in prison, though it was hardly a unanimous vote. Trotsky was an arrogant egghead who had spent 15 years using his eggheaded arrogance against the Bolsheviks. Those old resentments were never going to disappear. Ever. But his talents were undeniable. And when he was released from jail shortly after the Kornilov Affair in the midst of the general rehabilitation of the Bolsheviks, he put all his undeniable talents at the service of the party. Because, as it turned out, Trotsky was not just a gifted writer, thinker, and polemicist, he was also a naturally magnetic orator. In September 1917 he absolutely became the face and voice of Bolshevism. Most people had frankly never seen or heard Lenin, who had been an anonymous émigré most of his life, and who excelled at dominating backroom committee meetings but not public rallies. Trotsky could dominate those public moments. It’s hard to gauge exactly how different things would have been in October 1917 had Trotsky remained aloof from the Bolsheviks, but it is worth always keeping in mind that when many, many, many of these workers and soldiers and sailors in Petrograd thought about the Bolsheviks, they pictured Trotsky, not Lenin.

With Trotsky now taking the public lead for the Bolsheviks even inside the Soviet, which he had been invited to join after returning to Russia, the right-leaning leadership really began to feel some heat. The Bolsheviks put forward a motion opposing any coalition government with bourgeois elements. And for the first time ever, a Bolshevik motion passed the Soviet. And this was not just thanks to Bolshevik votes alone, but also left SRs and left Mensheviks defecting from their former leaders and allies. The right leaning leadership who composed the executive council threatened to resign on September 9th if the motion was not rescinded — they, after all supported coalition government — but instead of falling into line, the general assembly simply confirmed the previous vote. The Soviet would not endorse coalition government. This led to the resignation of the leadership that had been in place since February, and a new slate of men stood poised to take over. Which is exactly what the Bolsheviks were aiming for.

Realizing the Soviets were moving decisively to the left, the right SRs and right Mensheviks, increasingly divorced from the left wings of their party, scrambled a response. They still believed in a rather literal and pedantic reading of historical materialism, which clearly required the bourgeois capitalist class to take the lead in the first democratic political revolution, which would pave the way for the second socialist revolution. What this meant is even though they were all socialists, they were ideologically committed to the idea of keeping bourgeois capitalists in the government. With Kerensky meanwhile looking for something, anything, to root his own political legitimacy in, they all hit on an idea. These leaders use the last gasp of their authority inside the Soviet to convene what was called the All Russian Democratic Conference. They invited representatives not just from the Soviets that had sprouted up throughout Russia, but also from various municipal Dumas, army committees, peasant co-op groups, and an institution we have not really heard much of since February, but which is still very much in existence, the zemstvos. By broadening the number of institutions represented, the right leaning socialists hoped to create a new kind of democratic consensus which was not exclusively rooted in the Soviet who would endorse coalition government between socialists and liberals.

This hastily convened meeting took place just two weeks after the Kornilov Affair, taking place in Petrograd between September 12th and September 14th. And it was, honestly, every bit the farce at the Kornilov Affair was. The right wing of the conference — and we’re talking here business leaders and industrialists liberals, and their allies — wanted to re-endorse a coalition government of socialists and Kadets. A center bloc wanted a mix of liberals and socialists, but they wanted to exclude the Kadets, many of whom had been implicated in the Kornilov Affair. And then there was a left bloc which included of course the Bolsheviks, who wanted an all socialist government which excluded the Kadets, excluded the liberals, excluded the capitalist classes, and rooted its legitimacy entirely in the Soviet. After a great deal of arguing and speechmaking, the left wound up finding itself in the minority, and the democratic conference approved the principle of a coalition government.

But then things got absurd as they narrowed down the specifics. An amendment was passed nearly unanimously that excluded from the government anyone associated with the Kornilov Affair. Okay, so far, so good. But then there was a second amendment on whether or not to exclude the Kadet Party in its entirety. When the vote was taken, the amendment passed. No member of the Kadet Party could be invited into the coalition government. This triggered howls of anger from the right, and so then, the whole package got voted on: the initial principle of a coalition plus the specific amendments. The left and right got together and voted the whole thing down. The left, because they were opposed to any coalition with the liberals, and the right, because they were angry at the exclusion of the Kadets. So, in the end, the democratic conference wrapped up having failed miserably. It simultaneously endorsed and rejected the idea of coalition government and broke apart having achieved exactly nothing.

As the democratic conference was flailing its way to nowhere, the presiding leadership of the right SRs and right Mensheviks got together with liberals and Kadets to just ignore the votes being taken in the conference. They formed their own extraordinary committee who created what came to be called the pre-parliament. The pre-parliament was a body that was supposed to provide a kind of temporary public assembly that could assert just enough sovereignty that Kerensky could say, well, until the constituent assembly meets, my government will be rooted in this institution called the pre-parliament — which again, they’re just making up on the fly right here. But even this utterly contrived formula collapsed. The Kadet Party now placed their own terms on coalition with the right leaning socialists. They said, the pre-parliament can certainly form, and can advise the government, but in no way will the government be answerable to it. And the right-leaning socialists were so desperate to get the liberals and Kadets to join with them that they agreed to these terms. And so, Alexander Kerensky began forming a coalition government that would reign until the constituent assembly, basically approved by no one and rooted in nothing.

This is the political context we need to keep in mind as we head into Red October. And the reason we spent so much time today talking about the nature of legitimacy and sovereignty is that clearly, by October 1917, there was just none of it to speak of. As we will discuss next week, Lenin, who is still off in Finland is now absolutely going out of his mind yelling at his comrades in the central committee that now is the time to strike, now, now, now, right now, we cannot wait. If we do it now, we’re going to win. All that we will be doing is overthrowing an illegitimate government that no one supports anyway. His comrades in the central committee were incredibly skeptical, but you know what?

Lenin wasn’t wrong.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

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Episode 10.70: the Kornilov Affair

The July days were a very close call for the provisional government and for the Soviet. The armed demonstration in Petrograd had been aiming at ending the unsustainable dynamic of dual power by overthrowing the government and vesting all power in the Soviet. What better way to solve the problem of dual power than eliminating one of the two powers. But when the moment of truth came on the evening of July 4th, 1917, however, the leaders of the Soviet refuse to bow to these demands. And though both the Soviet and the provisional government weathered this particular storm, the prestige of both was badly damaged. The provisional government was still intact, but remain just as unpopular and ineffectual as ever. The Soviet, until this moment the universal darling of the streets, now generated growing contempt for its refusal to become the avatar the streets demanded. Forces on both the left and the right rightly saw a golden opportunity to take advantage of the staggering stumbles of a center that could not hold.

But though we ultimately know where this is all headed, in July of 1917 the staggering and stumbling center tried to hold. But to hold, it would need new leadership. The prime minister, Prince Lvov, who had done everything in his power since February to unify a coalition of liberals and socialists admitted he could not do the job. Exhausted and demoralized, he admitted defeat, and resigned as prime minister on July the seventh. And when he resigned, he retired from public life entirely, retiring to a monastery where he hoped he would be left alone until he died in peace. There was only one man who had the influence, prestige, and energy necessary to succeed him, and that was Alexander Kerensky. Without setting down his portfolio as minister of the army and navy Kerensky became prime minister of Russia. It was quite the ascent to power for the son of state bureaucrats who had made a name for himself as a radical lawyer and journalist, and who had previously spent time in prison for his unsavory political connections. That Alexander Kerensky was now considered the only man who could lead Russia was, if nothing else, proof that a political revolution had in fact occurred.

In the months since February, Kerensky appears to have undergone something of a transformation. Little by little, event by event, he replaced his radical idealism with a kind of egotistical resolve. From a belief that a free and democratic Russia was sure to flourish after the fall of Bloody Nicholas to the belief that he alone could save the Russians from themselves. In the wake of the April crisis, he was already lamenting he had not died on the barricades back in February, and further lamenting the fact that the Russian people could probably not be led without whips and chains. But rather than becoming so disillusioned that he quit politics and retired to a monastery like Lvov, Kerensky convinced himself that he was the one who was going to save Russia and save the revolution. He had begun his career believing that he was something of a Russian Mirabeau. Now, he believed he was destined to be a Russian Napoleon Bonaparte, rescuing it from military defeat and political chaos. After becoming prime minister in the first week of July, 1917, Kerensky let all the power he now wielded go straight to his head. Almost immediately, he moved into the Winter Palace, ancient residents of the tsars. He set up his offices behind a giant desk of Tsar Alexander the Third, and slept in the bed of the Romanovs. He surrounded himself in imperial trappings, and even ordered the flag raised and lowered from the Winter Palace as he came and went, copying the old system of alerting Petrograd when the tsars were physically in residence. Fully believing now that he alone could unify and save the revolution, and sensing that the Soviet’s hesitation to seize power in the July days was proof that the moral authority they held over Russian politics, that they were actually the real power in Russian politics, was a spell that was on the verge of being broken, Kerensky ordered them to vacate the Tauride Palace and find a new home. The pretext for this move was that the government was planning on reconvening the Duma, and the Soviet had only been allowed to meet in the Tauride Palace because the Duma was not in session. The order itself was a clear signal. Kerensky was going to try to alpha dog the Soviet into a place of submissiveness. That they complied with the order and moved their assemblies, meetings, and offices to the Smolny Institute, a former finishing school for the nobility, further indicated that after the July Days, it was possible to turn the tables on the Soviet. They had been pushing the government around since February, and having failed to seize power when it was offered to them, Kerensky and his government realized they could start pushing the Soviet around for a change.

There was one small hangup, to Kerensky’s vision of himself as a Russian Napoleon Bonaparte: he was a lawyer and a journalist, not a soldier. In his role as minister of war he had taken to wearing military uniforms, but that was mere theatricality. But if he was envisioning a Bonapartist model for post-revolutionary Russia, that was obviously going to require the military as a major pillar of support. Kerensky needed a military figure who was popular with the troops, popular with the public generally, but also willing to do what might be necessary to impose order on a now perpetually chaotic homefront. Kerensky believed he found his man in General Lavr Kornilov.

Kornilov was a 47 year old career army officer. He had been born on the periphery of the empire among the Siberian Cossacks. His father was a peasant who had served as a soldier; his mother was a housekeeper. Kornilov himself served all over the empire, including stints in central Asia and the far east. In the Russo Japanese War he had risen through the ranks on a combination of courage and talent. When World War I broke out he commanded the division on the southwestern front and was promoted to major general in 1915. But shortly thereafter, he was captured by the Austrians after refusing an order from General Brusilov to retreat. Already popular in the press and amongst his troops for a kind of salt of the earth heroism, Kornilov won further fame by escaping Austrian confinement in 1916 and successfully making it back to Russia. The leaders of the February Revolution had considered Kornilov politically reliable enough he was given control of the Petrograd military district in March 1917, but then he became something of an uncomfortable liability in the midst of the April Crisis. Kornilov demanded full authority to use the military to indiscriminately restore order. When the provisional government refused, he requested to be transferred back to the front, a request that was quickly granted. Returning to his old stomping grounds on the southwestern front, Kornilov led an initially successful wing of the June Offensive, which was then stalled and forced to retreat, much to his angry disgust.

 In Kornilov’s estimation, the failure of the offensive was obviously caused by the infamous Order Number One. Order Number One had disastrously replaced military discipline with disobedient committees of soldiers who could not be ordered to do anything they didn’t want to do, nor punished for their refusal to obey. Kerensky, who had very recently believed the democratization of the army would propel it to ultimate victory, now agreed with the assessment of the senior staff that Order Number One needed to be tossed out if Russia was going to with stand the German offensive now rolling them backwards. This was going to be dicey politically, and somebody like Kornilov seemed to be the perfect vehicle for it. He was popular with the rank and file, as well as enjoying a positive reputation in the press as a national war hero. Nobody took him to be an aristocratic reactionary of the old school, and so his clear determination to restore order and discipline in the ranks would be taken for what it was: a determination to restore order and discipline in the ranks and nothing more.

So in mid-July, Kerensky fire General Brusilov, who had been recently elevated to the post of commander in chief, effectively dumping on him, the failure of the June Offensive, and then he turned around and offered the commander and chief spot to Kornilov. But Kornilov did not accept straight away. He had conditions, which he transmitted to Kerensky on July 19th. He wanted a completely free hand to run the military as he saw fit. The most controversial specific demand was the restoration of the right to execute soldiers for mutiny and desertion, including the garrisons in the rear, who were presently protected from such punishment by Order Number One and the soldier’s declaration of rights. His most controversial general demand was a statement that he would consider himself responsible only to the nation and his conscience.

Now these were somewhat provocative demands — after all, there are other authorities he needed to consider himself responsible to — but after some careful clarifications brokered by deputy minister of War, a guy named Boris Savinkov, a former member of the SR combat organization turned militant nationalist, the two sides came to an agreement. On July 24th, General Kornilov became commander in chief of the Russian army. Kornilov’s elevation was cheered by everyone to Alexander Kerensky’s right. The General’s demand for the right to impose discipline and authority were leaked to the press and he was hailed as the savior of Russia. There were those, after all, who had supported the February Revolution because of the gross incompetence of Nicholas and Alexandra. In the five months since their abdication — and by the way, it’s only been five months — things only went from bad to worse. But while Kornilov absolutely believed Russia probably needed a full-blown military dictatorship to see it through the present crisis, we should be clear again, that he was not an outright political reactionary. He in fact said, and I’m quoting here, “I am not a counter revolutionary. I despise the old regime, which badly mistreated my family. There is no return to the past and there cannot be any. But we need an authority that can truly save Russia, which will make it possible honorably to end the war, and lead her to the constituent assembly.”

So far as I can tell, this is what Kornilov was always trying to do. He was thinking the thing that generals sometimes think, which is that a period of temporary military rule might be required to allow space for a democratic government to form. Whether he had any deeper thoughts on the implication of unilaterally imposing military role on Russia we do not know, but General Alexeyev once commented about Kornilov that he had “a lion’s heart and a sheep’s brain.”

For the time being however, General Kornilov publicly acknowledged the proper authority of the provisional government now reorganized under Prime Minister Kerensky. And this was the third government since the February Revolution, which again, it’s only been five months. But privately, he neither like nor trusted the ministers. When he met with them for the first time on August third, Kerensky warned him not to be too frank or open about anything, because some of the ministers were happy to make strategic leaks to the press — in particular, this side eye was directed at Minister of Agriculture Viktor Chernov. Kornilov left this meeting and returned to military headquarters convinced the provisional government as presently constituted was hardly worthy of leading Russia. He had his doubts about Kerensky too, but concluded even in private that Kerensky was at least a sincere patriot doing his best to save Russia.

Kerensky, meanwhile, was becoming very concerned with the response from the right to the elevation of Kornilov. He was detecting an awful lot of outright open salivating for Kornilov to ride in on a white horse and save Russia from the menace of the Bolsheviks who were obviously German agents trying to destroy the country. In a further meeting between Kerensky and Kornilov on August 10th, the general told his prime minister that what he really wanted and what he probably needed was something like the power General Ludendorff now enjoyed in Germany: supreme authority over all private and civilian affairs connected to the war. This would include railroad, communications, and industry. Kerensky was incredibly non-committal about this, and started to worry that maybe he had promoted a man with his own dictatorial ambitions.

In an attempt to prevent a right-wing coup, and reforge something of the revolutionary consensus that had existed in February, Kerensky convened, what is dubbed the Moscow State Conference on August 12th. It brought together a whole array of people who had driven support for the February Revolution in the first place: industrialists, businessmen, military officers and conservative liberals who had made up the old progressive bloc., but also invited were moderate socialists, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, leaders of the trade unions, and lower ranking officers. They had all stood together in February, and Kerensky hoped to bring them back together here in August.

But the state conference only proved that the unity of February was over. Meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre, the delegates divided themselves physically between left and right in the hall, which is to say that the left sat on the left, and the right sat on the right. Over the next several days worth of speeches, if the left liked what they heard and applauded, the right sat in stony silence. And if the right, like what they heard and applauded, the left sat in stony silence.

General Kornilov arrived in Moscow for the conference and was given a hero’s welcome at the station, flanked by red robed Turkmen bodyguards looking an awful lot like a personal Praetorian guard, flanking him wherever he went. Kornilov’s speech was simple, and honestly, pretty milk toast, but the right applauded him rapturously, feeding Kerensky’s perception that Kornilov was possibly the spear point of counter-revolution.

Kerensky’s closing address, in contrast, was a disaster. He had clearly lost his touch, and gave a rambling and at times nearly incoherent speech. One delegate, sympathetic to Kerensky, was forced to admit, “One could hear not only the agony of his power, but also of his personality.”

If the Moscow state conference was meant to reunify the center, it failed spectacularly. But this was not actually the death of Kerensky’s fortunes, nor the fortunes of the provisional government. It was not even the cause of a major breach between the prime minister and his commander in chief. And, in fact, as we are about to see, they were basically still on the same page.

Now, one thing that cannot get lost in all of this is the context of the war. The June Offensive had failed, and Russia’s armies were falling back in disarray. The Central Powers had paused to catch their breath for most of July, but in August, the Germans stood poised to launch an offensive into Latvia, putting Petrograd itself in danger of being captured. With this grave emergency looming out on the front, and the politics in the rear still a confused, fractured, and dangerous mess, both Kerensky and Kornilov moved towards the conclusion that martial law was going to have to be declared. The subtle distinction between them though, was that Kerensky believed that martial law would prevent a coup from the right and Kornilov believed it would prevent a coup from the left.

The Germans finally launched their expected offensive into Latvia on August 19th, after a temporarily stiff but ultimately failed resistance, the Russian armies retreated and the Latvian capital of Riga fell to the Germans, putting the Germans on a perilously direct line to Petrograd. The only good news was that the Russian army withdrew in good order, and was able to reestablish a defensive line preventing any further advances. For now.

The fall of Riga was the immediate context for the dramatic political events that are about to unfold, events which give us the title for today’s episode, the Kornilov affair. But in an era of drama, peril, danger, violence, and desperation, the Kornilov affair resembles nothing so much as an episode of a bad sitcom. Seriously. You know, those plot lines that hinge entirely on character saying lines of dialogue to each other that lead them to take away different understandings of something even though the misunderstanding between them only exists because the script demands it, and to even remotely normal people would realize immediately there was a misunderstanding and just resolve whatever the issue was? Well, that’s the Kornilov affair. It is not a political plot, it is a sit-com plot.

At the center of this sit-com plot is a guest star named Vladimir Lvov, no relation at all to Prince Lvov. This Lvov was a Moscow industrialist, Octobrist delegate to the pre-revolutionary Dumas, and someone who was heavily involved in the progressive bloc. Lvov was among those who believed discipline and order were now what Russia needed, and he decided to insert himself into the picture with the alleged goal of keeping Prime Minister Kerensky and Commander in Chief Kornilov on the same side. But, through his bungling, misrepresentations and miscommunications, he almost single-handedly drove them apart.

On August 22nd, Lvov went to meet Kerensky. He told the prime minister vaguely that he represented certain right-leaning groups ready to take drastic action to save the country. Kerensky was skeptical, but told Lvov basically, okay, go sound them out and report back to me. Kerensky later said he just did this because he wanted more information from Lvov, but Lvov left believing he was now like Kerensky’s emissary in a plot to stage a top-down military coup. Lvov then got on a train and headed to military headquarters to meet General Kornilov. Meanwhile, out at headquarters, Kerensky’s actual emissary, Deputy Minister of War Savinkov, was having his own meeting with the commander in chief, where the two agreed that Kornilov should take steps to neutralize ultra conservative plotters in his officer corp, but also to send the Third Cavalry Corps to Petrograd to act as protectors of the provisional government. Kornilov said he wanted direct military control of Petrograd, but Savinkov told him that was impossible politically. Kornilov acquiesced, and agreed to send the third cavalry Corps, and they would be put at Kerensky’s disposal in the increasingly likely event that the government had to declare martial law. There were rumors swirling the capital that the Bolsheviks were planning to stage another major demonstration on October 27th, which was the six month anniversary of the Petrograd garrison’s mutiny. Even if it wasn’t armed or violent, this demonstration might prove the perfect pretext for declaring martial law. The only hangup was that the Bolsheviks were absolutely not planning any demonstrations on October 27th, they were barely keeping their heads above water at this point. But, oh boy, are they about to come roaring back to life.

Now just as Savinkov was departing back to Petrograd on August 24th, Lvov showed up that same day at army headquarters and requested a meeting with Kornilov. Lvov claimed to be Kerensky’s agent, and Kornilov assumed that this was a follow-up to the discussions he had just had with Savinkov, and he never bothered to check with Kerensky whether Lvov was legit, which he very much was not. Lvov then floated three potential scenarios on how to administer martial law. The first option was Kerensky declares himself dictator, with Kornilov supporting him militarily. The second was forming a directory style government, essentially a small executive committee with seats for both Kerensky and Kornilov. Or then finally, the third option, was Kornilov being appointed dictator with Kerensky supporting him politically. Lvov asked the general which he preferred, and Kornilov said, well, if I had my choice, it’d be option three. The cleanest and easiest solution was for a general to run a military dictatorship. But he also said, this is just his preference and he’d support whichever. But whatever they decided to do, Kornilov said Kerensky and Savinkov should come out to army headquarters where they could all work out a new government safe from the mobs of Petrograd.

But as he was boarding the train back to the capital, Lvov apparently had a brief talk with one of Kornilov’s aides, who said in an off-hand way that it didn’t really matter which plan was put into place to start, because Kerensky would only be needed for 10 days, and then he could be dispensed with.

Now, my read on this though, is that the officer in question was far more of an intriguer than his boss, and he was speaking only for himself here, this is not something Kornilov was secretly planning. Lvov then returned to Petrograd and met with Kerensky on August 26th bearing incredible and not even remotely accurate news. He told Kerensky that Kornilov demanded full dictatorial authority, mis-characterizing completely what Kornilov had said that, the third option was merely his preference, and hardly a deal breaker. Kerensky was at first incredulous and didn’t believe it — this was quite an about turn for Kornilov. But then he seemed struck by two ideas simultaneously: first, maybe without Kerensky knowing it, Kornilov had entered into a battle of wills with him and was about to attempt to overthrow him in the provisional government and stage the very right-wing coup Kerensky himself feared; and second, that even if none of that was true, he now had a really great way to rehabilitate his standing with the left, to expose and destroy an alleged right-wing plot and emerge as the unrivaled defender of the revolution against agents of reaction. Now, I think up to this point, August 26th, 1917, Kerensky saw Kornilov as an ally working towards a shared goal. But from this point on, I do think it becomes clear Kerensky did everything in his power to set Kornilov up to take a fall.

After their meeting, Kerensky invited Lvov to come back to the Winter Palace at eight that evening to engage in a series of cables with Kornilov. When Lvov didn’t show up on time, Kerensky went ahead and initiated communications at 8:30. But remember, this is a sit-com plot, not a political plot. So what Kerensky does, and I am not making this up, is he simply pretended Lvov was in the room w and further pretended to be Lvov in the ensuing back and forth of messages. Kerensky opened by saying, do you want to proceed as you indicated to Lvov?

Kornilov, believing he was talking to both Kerensky and Lvov at the same time, and believing the three options were still on the table replied, yes, but we do need to come to a decision quickly. Kerensky then impersonated Lvov, and said, the prime minister wants to know if you want to do what you indicated to me privately you want to do.

Kornilov said yes, Kerensky and Savinkov should come to headquarters at once.

They then exchanged a few more lines before the communication line dropped. Kornilov walked away believing the Third Cavalry Corps would proceed to Petrograd, Kerensky and Savinkov would depart Petrograd, and within a few days they would collectively declare martial law from army headquarters. Kerensky walked away believing Kornilov was demanding he be made dictator, and demanding Kerensky come to army headquarters where he would be made hostage and then later possibly shot. Or, what is also just as likely, Kerensky kept this entire farce of a conversation just vague enough that he could now run off and claim that’s what Kornilov plan to do.

Kerensky immediately convened all his ministers and informed them of what had just transpired, in his own words. He told them Kornilov was preparing to stage a military coup d’etat and he had proof. Kerensky then told them the only way to see this through was for the government to resign and vest all power in Kerensky himself. After a great deal of heated discussion that went on overnight, the ministers ultimately agreed. At 4:00 AM on August 27th, they vested Kerensky with supreme executive authority, and then collectively resi Kerensky promptly sent a cable to military headquarters relieving Kornilov of his command effective immediately. He ordered another general to take over and place Kornilov in custody.

When Kornilov received this cable at about seven or eight o’clock in the morning, he understandably blew his stack. But he moved very quickly from believing Kerensky had out and out double crossed him and considered it far more likely that the rumor of another Bolshevik insurrection scheduled for August 27th had been true. That overnight something momentous had happened in Petrograd and Kerensky had probably been taken hostage by armed Bolsheviks who were now forcing him to issue orders under duress. So Kornilov ignored the cable, sent orders to the Third Cavalry Corps for them to advance on Petrograd as fast as possible, and then prepared, at least in his own mind, to rescue the provisional government from the clutches of what was surely another Bolshevik insurrection.

But of course there was no Bolshevik insurrection. There was nothing even close to a Bolshevik insurrection. The Kornilov affair is a farcical miscommunication full of unfounded assumptions all the way down. And the great historical irony is that by ignoring Kerensky and ordering the Third Cavalry Corps to proceed with all haste to Petrograd, Kornilov did more to single-handedly rehabilitate the Bolsheviks than anyone. After the July days, something like 800 Bolsheviks had been arrested, and it kind of looked like they were done for. Lenin even said, they’re going to shoot us. I mean, now is the time to do it.

But with many socialists, including Kerensky, increasingly worried about a right wing coup over the summer of 1917, instead of grinding the Bolsheviks to dust, they let their foot up. And though the leaders were still in custody, many party members had been released, and the backlash everyone had feared after the July Days turned out to not be the catastrophic crackdown they feared. In fact, just a few weeks later, here we are with word ripping through Petrograd that a right-wing coup was upon them. Kornilov has sent troops to overthrow the provisional government, the Soviet, and the revolution. Suddenly, the Bolsheviks went from potential threat to potential saviors. Because they were, if nothing else, the most heavily armed and militant defenders of the revolution in Petrograd.

Scrambling a defense, the Soviet called all the socialist parties and Petrograd together, and they hastily formed what was called the Committee for the Struggle Against the Counterrevolution. Bolshevik representatives were not only invited to participate in this committee but asked to take the lead. In addition to mobilizing their own armed cadres, the Bolsheviks demanded 40,000 workers be armed at once, significantly augmenting the ranks of what were called the Red Guards, militia units of workers under arms. The first Red Guard units had been formed back in March and April, but they now jumped in size, and more importantly for future events, they were being organized by the Bolsheviks, who almost overnight went from being considered armed activists causing trouble for everyone to being the most uncompromising and clear-eyed defenders of the revolution.

In the end, though, the Bolsheviks did not have to lead Petrograd in street fighting against Kornilov’s forces. railroad workers successfully tore up all the tracks leading into the capital, and the Third Cavalry division’s transports were temporarily halted in their tracks on August 29th. While they sat idle, representatives from Petrograd went out to meet and mingle and agitate among the troops. Party leaders, garrison soldiers, workers, deputies, all went out to implore them to please stop. There were no disturbances in Petrograd. The people were merely rising in defense of the provisional government, who you are posing a threat to. And this completed the farce of the Kornilov affair. Only a few of the cavalry men had any idea why they were even being ordered to Petrograd in the first place, and those who did have some idea believed they were the ones being sent to defend the provisional government. So they’re like standing around looking at each other with one side saying, I’ve come to protect the provisional government and the other side saying, no, I’ve come to protect the provisional government. The two sides engaged in discussions through the night, and by the morning of August 30th, the whole thing was over. Now fully briefed that the only emergency threat to the provisional government was the Third Cavalry Corps itself, the men now refused to move until they received more official clarification. And this loss of momentum alone effectively ended the threat.

The commander of the Third Cavalry Corps was escorted to meet with Kerensky. Now we have no account of their meeting, but it was probably a supreme dressing down from the prime minister, which the commander no doubt received with angry contem knowing as he did, and this is true, that Kerensky had been the one who ordered the corps to Petrograd in the first place. Kerensky was now heavily amping up the accusation that Kornilov had done everything of his own sinister initiative, but the historical record more than confirms the transfer of the Third Cavalry Corps to Petrograd was done at Kerensky’s initiative and probably with the intention of declaring martial law. It was only after he did this that Kerensky changed his mind, and decided to pin all the blame for any attempt to declare martial law on Kornilov and Kornilov alone. After all, Alexander Kerensky is no military dictator! He is the defender of democracy against the right wing counter-revolutionaries. Despairing for himself and for Russia after having received this absurd dressing down, the commander of the Cavalry Corps left his meeting with Kerensky, went to a private apartment at Petrograd and shot himself in the heart.

With the Kornilov affair now abruptly ended. Anyone who might have supported him loudly disowned him. He was peacefully relieved of command on September 1st and placed under house arrest, and he would remain in custody until November. When the Bolshevik revolt Kornilov had long predicted and tried to avert finally happened, Kornilov and other loyal officers in custody with him escaped their jail cells and went off to form the core of the volunteer arm one of the main pillars of the White Army in the coming civil war.

Having successfully thwarted a right-wing coup that was probably never a right-wing coup, and having rehabilitated and rearmed the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky now stood as the effective dictator of Russia. And next week we will head into September 1917, and see him make his final fumbling attempts to be the great leader russia needed him to be. The great leader he believed it was his destiny to become. But of course we know what Alexander Kerensky’s destiny really was: the man known to history as the leader overthrown in the October Revolution. .

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Episode 10.69: The July Days

We ended last time with the great June Offensive, which was supposed to be the great panacea. Victory on the front lines would cement the legitimacy of the provisional government and simultaneously solve the problem of dual power, because it would prove that a coalition of socialists and liberals inside the government could work. It would also give them all some breathing space to hold the now increasingly overdue constituent assembly, which was supposed to settle all post-revolutionary constitutional questions. Military victory would also permanently discredit antiwar and anti-government critics, and it would create a feeling of triumphant national unity rather than the demoralized strife which had been the prevailing mood for several years now. And as if that was not enough, Russian victories on the eastern front in the war would probably pave the way for a general European peace. These were all the things that could have happened as a result of Russian victory in the June Offensive, but instead, as we saw at the end of last episode, within a matter of days, that offensive ground to an ignoble halt, and was then rolled back in a bloody confused mess of desertion and surrender. If victory promised to solve all political problems, defeat made them all ten times worse.

The political parties poised to take advantage of these military defeats were the very antiwar and antigovernment voices people like Alexander Kerensky hoped would be permanently silenced by military victory. But defeat only made those voices louder and more persuasive. Among the parties active in Petrograd in the early summer of 1917, it was a boon in particular to the fortunes of two groups: the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. Now, we have not talked much about the anarchists yet because they’re still a very nascent force, really no more than a couple hundred organizers and activists. They did not really boast a large stable party apparatus like the SRs or the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists had only recently formed the Petrograd Federation of Anarchists to tie their very loose knit cells together. But from the February Revolution forward, this small group of anarchists had been the most hardline voices calling for the overthrow of the provisional government, the overthrow of capitalism, and an end to the bloody imperialist war. They called for the immediate destruction of the parasitic central state, and the reorganization of cities — particularly Petrograd — into decentralized autonomous communes, explicitly modeled on the memory of the Paris Commune. The anarchists were not afraid to advocate violence to achieve their ends, and by June they were able to make the very effective case to the people that ever since the glory days of February, all the other so-called revolutionary parties like the SRs or the Mensheviks had been working to prop up the bourgeois capitalist bosses, not overthrow them. They had been working to continue the imperialist war not end it immediately. I mean, how revolutionary are they, really?

In the context of June 1917, the anarchists and the Bolsheviks wind up sounding a lot alike. Lenin’s April Theses were in fact criticized by other Social-Democrats as being a downright anarchist program. One Marxist critic of Lenin said, “Lenin has now made himself the candidate for the one European throne that has been vacant for 30 years: the throne of Bakunin.”

Now, Lenin is obviously not an anarchist, but the Bolsheviks hard line opposition to the provisional government and their call to vest all power in the Soviet as the truly legitimate democratic assembly of the people made them virtually indistinguishable from anarchist organizers who were basically saying the same thing. And together, this same thing that they were saying was boiling down to the simple slogan: all power to the Soviets. If you were a worker or a soldier or a sailor who couldn’t understand the contradictory nuances of the Mensheviks and the SRs — capitalism is bad, but we must let the capitalist rule; the war is bad, but we must continue the war — then the alternative offered by the Bolsheviks and the anarchists made a lot of sense. Down with the provisional government. All power to the Soviet.

Now to be clear, the Bolsheviks and the anarchist groups were still a minority faction out there, both in terms of their voting strength inside the Soviet, and in terms of raw rank and file numbers. But they were a strong and growing minority, and between February and June 1917, they had both done extremely well among three key groups in Petrograd.

First was the First Machine Gun Regiment. Composed of more than 11,000 soldiers and 300 officers, the First Machine Gun Regiment was the most radical regiment in the Petrograd Garrison. In February, they had abandoned the overcrowded barracks and set up an improvised bivouac in the Vyborg district, the most radical working class neighborhood in Petrograd. The Bolshevik military organization, the section of the party who recruited and organized inside the military, had made the First Machine Gunners the most heavily bolshevised regiment in Petrograd, and it made all the other parties in Petrograd — the SRs, the Mensheviks, the Kadets — very nervous.

The second major group was those workers in the Vyborg districts, who were now mingling daily with the machine gunners. They had all helped overthrow the tsar in February, and stood perplexed and agitated as the Soviet continued to prop up their class enemies inside the provisional government. These workers wanted to end dual power by just doing away with the provisional government and letting the workers and the soldiers rule through the Soviet. Down with the capitalists, right? Right. Well aware that they had toppled the tsar in February with a great demonstration of courageous strength out in the streets, they were all talking themselves into the idea that another armed show strength would be necessary to force the Soviet to take the power that they did not seem to want to take. So between the machine gunners and the workers, the Vyborg district was the heart of both the Bolshevik Party and these looseknit anarchist cells.

Then finally, we have the sailors out at the Kronstadt Naval Base. These sailors had overthrown their officers during the February Revolution, and now existed as an autonomous island run by a self-organized Soviet. Among these sailors, the anarchist message resonated stronger than anywhere else, and they more or less shared equal influence with the Bolsheviks, to the excluded detriment of the SRs and the Mensheviks, who regarded the sailors of Kronstadt along with the workers and machine gunners in the Vyborg District with extreme uneasiness.

Now, though, in the grand scheme of things, the machine gunners in the Vyborg workers and the sailors in Kronstadt were not a huge force, they were strategically positioned to have an outsized influence on political affairs if they decided to, I don’t know, stage a coordinated armed uprising. These three groups were the most restive groups in the capital, and even their own alleged political leaders were having difficulty keeping them restrained. But with the launch of the June Offensive, the moorings began to snap one by one.

On June 20th, the military ordered the First Machine Gun Regiment to send 500 guns and crews to the front lines. This enraged them, as they had been promised back in February that nobody in the Petrograd Garrison would ever be sent to the front lines. It was only with difficulty that the Soviet convinced them to just follow the orders they were given. But within days, news was coming back that the offensive had turned into a bloody retreat. On June 26, a regiment who had refused to fight on the front anymore just packed things up and return to Petrograd where they spread the news of what was really happening out there. They had seen officers turn machine guns on their own men to force them to fight. This news was circulating on June 30th when fully two thirds of the First Machine Gun Regiment were then called up to the front. They howled with protest, not unjustly suspecting that these call-ups were as much about removing them from the capital for political reasons as political necessity. Besides, what were they going to do out there? Turn these machine guns on other Russian soldiers to force them to march out and die? Instead of complying, the machine gunners held near round the clock meetings where they agree that they would not go to the front, nor be disbanded, nor be disarmed.

The hostile disobedience of the machine gunners put the Bolsheviks in particular in an awkward position. Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders had no principled objection to an armed insurrection, but they were not at all convinced the time was ripe, especially if such an insurrection was aimed at defying the will of the Soviet, whose legitimacy the Bolsheviks were trying to protect so it could be used as the sovereign successor of the provisional government. This caution put them at odds with many rank and file Bolsheviks who were clearly spoiling for a final confrontation with the provisional government. They believed they had the muscle and the machine guns to overthrow that government.

With a crisis atmosphere brewing, the Bolsheviks had to walk a careful line between encouraging resistance and hostility to the government without wrecking their relationship with the Soviet or accidentally triggering some kind of reactionary backlash. The mixed messaging of the Bolsheviks was on full display on July the second, when they organized a farewell assembly and concert for soldiers bound for the front lines, with 5,000 people in attendance, leading Bolsheviks gave fiery speeches denouncing the war, denouncing the government, and demanding all power to the Soviet, but also, stopped short of calling for an immediate armed insurrection. Among the most popular speakers that night was Trotsky, who was not yet quite officially a Bolshevik, but who was with them in spirit and in action, and would very soon be an official party member, returning to his alliance with Lenin that had been broken back in the original Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. Now Lenin himself was not there; he had just departed Petrograd for Finland a few days earlier, ostensibly for his health, but just as likely because the provisional government was probably about to arrest him on charges of being a German spy.

Now, while this concert was going on on the evening of July the second, the very shaky provisional government was taking a major tumble. The issue at hand was the seemingly unrelated matter of Ukraine’s position inside a post-revolutionary Russian Empire. The Kadet ministers believed that such matters needed to wait until the coming constituent assembly. But Kerensky convinced a majority of the ministers to grant Ukrainians a degree of political autonomy. When the vote for this was taken on the evening of July 2nd, four of the Kadet ministers immediately resigned in protest. And while technically they resigned over the matter of Ukraine, one gets the feeling that maybe this was just a pretext. The provisional government had staked its legitimacy to the June Offensive, and the June Offensive was turning out to be a catastrophic failure. The Kadet ministers were probably getting out while they’re getting was good. Their resignation reopened the question that had been dogging the revolution since February: was the provisional government really an institution worth saving, or did the Soviet just need to step up and claim all power for themselves?

As the Kadets were resigning from the coalition government, leaving the future of that government very much in doubt, the machine gunners in the Vyborg District were holding all night meetings. They had returned from the Bolshevik thrown concert fired up, and they spent the whole evening arguing and convincing each other that what they needed to do was force the Soviet to overthrow the provisional government and seize all power. Now they were not in total agreement with each other, and many companies said we’re not going to participate in any armed demonstration if it’s in defiance of the Soviet ban on armed demonstrations. This was essentially the position of the Bolshevik leadership, who were now trying to communicate back to their agents in the military organization, we’re not ready for an armed insurrection, don’t do it. But plenty of Bolshevik organizers simply defied those instructions. Standing alongside them in these meetings of soldiers were anarchists who had zero doubts or hesitation, and they were calling for an immediate armed uprising to overthrow the government, convinced that they had the strength and the will to do it. After meeting all night, a majority of the companies of the First Machine Gun Regiment voted on July 3rd to hold an armed demonstration that very day. They planned to force the executive committee of the Soviet to claim its rightful power… or else.

When word got back to the Bolshevik leadership, there was a great deal of hesitation and confusion and resistance. Yes, they had been at the forefront of the movement of all power to the Soviet, and just the night before they had been stoking the flames of seditious radicalism, but while they fanned those flames, they did not yet think they had amassed enough political TNT to blast their way into power. They were acutely aware of the consequences of moving too soon. If they lit the fuse and set off a bomb and the provisional government withstood the blast, it would be very bad for the Bolshevik party, maybe even the end of them entirely. So the central committee of the party — absent Lenin, who was still off in Finland — voted that conditions were not yet ripe. To strike prematurely would probably be suicide. With word spreading that the machine gunners were going to take to the streets, the Bolshevik central committee concluded the best play was to publicly call for peaceful restraint. So two of the principal Bolshevik leaders, Zinoviev and Kamenev, started drafting an official party editorial to run in Pravda the next day urging calm forbearance.

Now all that said, there’s also plenty of evidence that the Bolshevik leaders were simultaneously positioning themselves to take advantage of an armed uprising should it succeed. On that same afternoon of July 3rd, Bolsheviks induced the Soviet to announce an emergency session of the worker section of the Soviet, and when that call went out, a suspiciously large number of Bolshevik delegates showed up immediately while the Menshevik and SR delegates who typically commanded a majority scrambled to get down there. It was almost as if the Bolshevik delegates had been told to get ready for such an emergency call. When the SRs and Mensheviks, now temporarily finding themselves in the minority, implored the Bolsheviks to denounce all armed demonstrations, the Bolsheviks refused. The SRs and Mensheviks promptly walked out in protest. This left the Bolshevik delegates able to claim the authority of speaking for the worker section of the Soviet, which was a very convenient position to find themselves. They were suspiciously well-placed to force the executive committee of the Soviet to bow to armed public pressure to overthrow the provisional government… as if that was exactly the plan.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, the machine gunners had mounted their guns on automobiles and fanned out across the city to get other military units to join them. Now, some of those units joined up, and other stayed out of it, but almost nobody said, we are going to oppose you. By late afternoon, tens of thousands of armed protesters were out in force, including civilian workers. Street fighting led to general violent chaos as groups opposing the demonstrators now came out to fight, and one Bolshevik described the scene: “Black Hundreds, hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists, and desperate people introduce a large amount of chaos and absurdity to the demonstration.” inside the Tauride Palace, the executive committee of the Soviet met in panicked emergency session as a large armed crowd approached, and then surrounded the building. But even as this crowd shouted for the leaders of the Soviet to take power… or else, the leaders of the Soviet did not comply. And herein lies the rub of the July Days: to the extent that there was a plan, it was simply to mass a huge angry crowd of armed demonstrators shouting basically take power or else, and when the leaders of the Soviet did not comply, the demonstrators didn’t really have a clear idea of what to do about the or else part. They seem to have simply taken it for granted that the Soviet would buckle under pressure. They didn’t have a clear plan for who to arrest, what to take charge of, who to elevate to replace the ousted leaders or any of that normal coup d’état stuff. So when the leaders of the Soviet were not in fact intimidated into simply capitulating and overthrowing the government, the crowd out front simply melted away as darkness fell.

But that was not the end of it. It is after all the July Days, not the July Day.

The machine gunners had made contact with the Kronstadt sailors who agreed to turn out as reinforcements on the morning of July 4th. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik leaders belatedly decided to endorse the armed demonstrations, calculating now they couldn’t stop what was happening, and if they didn’t join it, they would lose all their credibility with the people they purported to lead. Early in the morning, they sent somebody to fetch Lenin from Finland and get him back to Petrograd. And then they had to grapple with the physical symbol of their previous hesitations. The morning edition of Pravda was all set to go to the printer with a column front and center written by Zinoviev and Kamenev urging restraint, because that had been the party line like six hours earlier. They needed now to pull that editorial, but did not have time to reset the layout to account for the sudden editorial 180. So they simply remove the offending paragraph. The July 4th, 1917 edition of Pramata has a big white blank spot at the center of the front page. And all I can say is that big white blank spot seems proof of vacillating improvisation from the Bolsheviks, not the execution of a carefully thought out coup d’etat. Because obviously the addition doesn’t say, all power to the Soviet, everybody turn out! it was just a big white blank spot.

In the late morning of July 4th, a boisterous flotilla of Kronstadt sailors made their way across the water from their island naval base to Petrograd. Representatives of the Soviet came out and told them the Soviet does not endorse their presence, please go back to your base, but the sailors ignored them. When they landed, they were greeted by other political leaders ready to join this all power to the Soviet insurrection. As I said, the anarchists were as influential among these sailors as the Bolsheviks were, and now even left-wing SRs were coming out; in particular, a woman named Maria Spiridonova had arrived to address the sailors. Spiridonova was a legendary revolutionary who had assassinated a security chief in 1905 and then been arrested, tortured, and exiled to Siberia in 1906. In the process of her ordeal, she became a near mythical martyr. Her exile only ended with the amnesties after the February Revolution, and since her return Spiridonova had made herself an implacable foe of the provisional government and Alexander Kerensky in particular. She is about to become the leading light of what becomes the Left SRs.

But the sailors were being led by a Bolshevik, and rather than let the leader of another party address the sailors, even the famous Maria Spiridonova, he denied her the chance to speak and ordered the men to head to Bolshevik party headquarters. This helped fracture the demonstration, as many of the anarchists and SRs quit the column and said, hey, we’re doing this for the revolution, not just to, like, put the Bolsheviks in power. When the sailors got to Bolshevik party headquarters, they found the leadership there still hesitant and nervous, not entirely sure that even they wanted the demonstration to put the Bolsheviks in power. They were not convinced any of this was actually a good idea.

Lenin had by now been rushed back from Finland, and didn’t want to come out to address the assembled demonstrators who were quite literally awaiting his marching orders. Now, some of Lenin hesitation was simply that he was not a great public speaker. He was good with a pen. He was good in a committee room. He was pretty okay in a medium sized assembly. But as the size of the audience grew, Lenin was less effective. And this is for example where Trotsky is going to become so essential to the rest of the revolution. Lenin’s speech was brief and full of mixed confusing messages. He said he was happy everybody was rising up on behalf of the slogan all power to the Soviet, it’s very good to demonstrate how much everybody wants this to happen, but please, don’t forget to be careful about how you go about it. And then he went back inside. And that was it. He was in and out in just a couple of minutes. And I gotta say, this is not exactly the rousing set of detailed instructions issued forth from a man executing a well thought out plot to seize power. Lenin was nervous, and he kept saying over and over again all through July 4th when people asked him what we should do, he said, simply, we’re going to have to wait and see how things go. And just a little foreshadowing about how things went, this brief public speech at Bolshevik party headquarters on July the fourth would be Lenin’s last public appearance until the end of October.

As the day progressed, tens of thousands of people were now marching hither and yon through the streets of Petrograd, probably somewhere around 60,000 in total. And it was incredibly chaotic. One of the main columns marching towards the Tauride Palace was fired at from the rooftops, causing stampeding and crossfire that left several people dead. When they all finally reassembled at the palace, the leaders of the Soviet dispatched no less a credentialed revolutionary than Victor Chernov to talk them down. Chernov, now minister of agriculture, went out there to try to give a speech defending the accomplishments of the coalition government, but the people just yelled at him and heckled him and manhandled him and said, just take power, man! And in one of the most famous quotes from the July Days, somebody shouted at Chernov, and I’m quoting here, ” Take power you son of a bitch when it is given!”

Chernov tried to keep speaking, but a group of sailors in the front grabbed him and threw him in a car and planned to keep him as a hostage until the Soviet claimed all power for itself. Now, even before Chernov got shoved in the car, the leaders of the Soviet realized he was not managing the crowd very well, and so they sent out a bunch of other revolutionary leaders to try to calm them, including Martov and Kamenev and some others. But the most important of them was Trotsky. Trotsky pushed his way through the car where Chernov was held, and showed that unlike Lenin, he was actually an insanely effective public speaker. He hopped up on the roof of the car and gave a speech where he cried,” Comrade Kronstadters! Pride and glory of the revolution! You’ve come to declare your will and show the Soviet that the working class no longer wants to see the bourgeoisie in power. But why hurt your own cause by petty acts of violence against casual individuals? Individuals are not worthy of your attention.” After this harangue, he called for everyone who favored committing violence to raise their hand. When no one in the now uncertain crowd immediately raised their hands, Trotsky hopped off the car, opened the door, and let Chernov out.

As I said, this is the rub of the July days: everyone seemed to be hoping that the mere threat of violence would induce the leaders of the Soviet to take power, and when they resisted, even the most radical of them, the Kronstadt sailors and the machine gunners, were not ready to take the next step. Not just threaten force, but use it. And certainly the leaders, I mean, we’re talking about inner circle, Bolsheviks, like Trotsky, were not saying, yeah, put a machine gun to Chernov’s head and blow his brains out if the Soviet doesn’t take power, because that’s not actually what they wanted to do.

Meanwhile, at that very moment, the provisional government’s minister of justice, a Trudovik named Pavel Pereverzev, played a major card he’d been holding in his back pocket. He called together delegates from 80 different military units of the Petrograd Garrison and showed them alleged proof that Lenin was a paid agent of the German government. That the real motivation for this demonstration was not about domestic politics, but about sewing as much chaos as possible inside Russia while the Germans counterattacked against the Russian army out on the front lines.

Now the main outlines of the accusation are basically true: Lenin and the Bolsheviks did take money from the Germans. And obviously they had come back to Russia under German auspices. When the story spread back to many of the companies and regiments who had previously been neutral about these armed demonstrations, they went from neutral to hostile. But though the main outline of the charge was true, we should be clear that Lenin was in no sense a German agent working for the German government. Yes, he caught a ride home from them, and he took money when they offered it, but that was because he was advancing his own agenda, not because he was, like, doing the Kaiser’s bidding.

The revelations about the Bolshevik connection to the Germans were the final security blanket for the provisional government. But even before the story spread, the attempted coup was already turning into an aborted coup. Heavy rains had started to fall, driving many of the less committed demonstrators away, and then inside the Tauride Palace, the executive committee of the Soviet still refuse to simply capitulate to the demands of the crowd. When a group of soldiers got sick of waiting and they stomped inside the palace and then burst into the room where the executive committee was meeting, the Mensheviks chairman of the committee sized them up, then handed them a proclamation ordering everybody to disperse. He told these soldiers, “study this proclamation carefully, and then don’t bother us again.” He ordered them to leave. The confused soldiers, caught off guard, did as they were instructed.

At midnight, the executive committee of the Soviet formally voted to not claim all power and instead reinforce the legitimacy of the provisional government. Then at one o’clock in the morning, there were more heavy footsteps out in the hallway. This indicated a fresh batch of soldiers were on the way. Many terrified delegates thought this might be them, but it turned out to be the nail in the coffin of the July Days. Three regiments of troops, incensed to discover that the Bolsheviks were German agents, had arrived to protect the Soviet and the legitimacy of the provisional government from those who would try to overthrow it,

The July days turned out to be exactly what Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders feared that it would be: a premature failure. In the final analysis, the fatal flaw was that it was all bark and no bite. Intimidation alone was expected to force the Soviet leaders to accept power. When intimidation didn’t work, nobody was ready to use brute force. The massed soldiers didn’t arrest anybody or shoot anybody, Bolshevik leaders were not standing ready to step in and declare themselves the new, like, emergency provisional executive of the Soviet or whatever. There were no proclamations printed and ready to say, the government is overthrown, the Soviet now reigns supreme.

Now it wasn’t absent violence, and in fact, the July Days were the most aggressively violent days of the revolution since February, but in the end it was all a big puffed up nothing. And it evaporated on the evening of July the fourth with a whimper, because nobody was ready, or willing, or able to go for the bang. But even though the July Days, uprising failed for lack of nerve at the moment of truth, it was still very clearly an attempt to overthrow the government by armed force, and for the Bolshevik leaders who belatedly endorsed the project, that failure was particularly bitter and aggravating. Their hesitation to endorse the demonstration in the first place had been entirely wrapped up in the fact that they didn’t think it would work, and that the consequences of failure would be catastrophic. And over the next few days, they reaped the very backlash that they had never wanted to sew in the first place. News now spread far and wide that the Bolsheviks were in league with the Germans. Warrants were issued for their arrest. The authorities smashed up the offices of Pravda and closed it down. Bolshevik leaders burned as many papers as they could before an army detachment surrounded their headquarters on the morning of July 7th and took over 500 party members into custody. Lenin himself shaved his mustache and headed back into hiding. After a few days bouncing between safe houses, he booked it back across the border to Finland. It was not unreasonable for any of them to conclude that having taken this shot and missed, it was now all over. The Bolshevik Party would be destroyed, and its leaders would probably wind up dead.

Lenin himself certainly consider this a very likely scenario. It seemed unlikely he would be able to return to Russia any time soon. And in the end, Lenin seemed destined to die in exile, living as an emigre just like he had for most of his life, now a failure and a hasbeen. He’d probably wind up muttering in cafes about the treachery of philistines while Swiss waiters nodded along with condescending pity for the sad old man who had ultimately amounted to nothing.

But even though Lenin and the Bolsheviks were now safely dead and buried, that did not really resolve the crisis for the provisional government who were still reeling from the failure of the June Offensive. And next week, they will emerge from the crisis of the July Days intact, but still being tossed by the incredibly treacherous waters of the Russian Revolution. And in the summer of 1917, it was not at all clear that the provisional government would ultimately survive, or frankly, that the revolution itself would survive.

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Episode 10.10: Russian Empire

Last week we did a big sweep through about 700 years of early Russian history, from the founding of Kiev Rus to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. This week, we are going to blast through another 200 odd years of Russian history, and just as last week, we saw the principality of Moscow become the tsardom of Russia.

This week, we are going to see the tsardom of Russia transform into the Russian empire. And we will focus specifically on two of the greatest leaders in Russian history, Peter the Great and Catherine the great. They would help transform the Russian state from an old style, personal despotism into a new style absolutist monarchy, and along the way, dramatically expand the power and prestige of Russia on the world stage.

So we ended last time with the election of 16-year-old Mihail Romanov as tsar of Russia in 1613. This was at the tail end of the Time of Troubles, and within a few years the rebellions, civil wars, marauding bandits, foreign invaders, and general chaos subsided. To drastically oversimplify things in the interest of keeping things moving, the rest of the 1600 saw a stabilization of the tsardom of Russia. The nobility was interested in working with the new Romanov dynasty to avoid the catastrophic conflicts that had characterized the Time of Troubles. The government in Moscow was thus able to centralize its power under a permanent bureaucracy paving the way for future political reforms, and in 1649, the first big written law code was published. On the other end of the political spectrum during these years enserfment of the peasants permanently entrenched itself, and the economy remained based on the agricultural work done by the serfs who were bound to their land and occupations in perpetuity. The burdens and repression of the lower classes was not taken lying down, and Moscow itself was hit by the salt riot in 1648, copper riot in 1662, and the great Moscow uprising of 1682. This is to say nothing of a major revolt by Cossacks and runaway serfs in 1670 and 1671 orchestrated by a rebel leader named Stenka Razin. But none of these were serious challenges and Russia continued to expand its size and power. Russians moved East across the Ural mountains into Siberia where they pretty easily subdued the local tribes, and then they just kept pushing east until they hit the Pacific Ocean, bringing Siberia permanently under Russian hegemony. In the West meanwhile, Poland was sinking just as Russia was rising, and during these years, the Russians advanced back to Smolensk and Kiev.

As the 1600s drew to a close, the Romanovs were hit by some convoluted dynastic inheritance problems that I could spend all day trying to explain, but instead I’m going to not. The upshot is that after ousting his regent of an older half sister in 1689, 17 year old, Peter Romanoff started wielding power as tsar in his own right. Now it would be nearly impossible for his contemporaries to predict that in the future, we would be calling him Peter the Great, and the reason this would have struck contemporaries as so surprising and unpredictable is that young Peter showed almost no interest in court life. He was an odd duck who didn’t quite fit in. Physically, he grew to be nearly seven feet tall, and mentally he was gifted with a mathematical mind that was particularly interested in sailing and shipbuilding, so he had no interest in the boring formalities and petty backbiting of court life. He wanted to spend his day sailing, thinking about sailing, and drinking with his friends. So his powerful mother managed to maintain something resembling a normal court routine until she died in 1694, at which point Peter just stopped showing up altogether. 200 years of traditional court routine that had begun under Ivan the Great simply perished of neglect. A new day was dawning for Russia, due simply to the force of Peter’s personality. He would not be molded by anyone or anything. He would do the molding.

Ruling now through a few trusted favorites rather than the established court apparatus that had defined the years since the Time of Troubles, Peter set out on a bold new path. His personal obsession with all things maritime would dominate his foreign policy outlook as he saw landlocked Russia as being held back from true greatness until it stopped being landlocked. To satisfy his ambitions, Peter turned his attention south towards the Sea of Azov, which sits perched, atop the Black Sea, and which at that time was dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Peter sent his army and a newly built up navy manned by Italian, French, and dutch officer south down the Don River. In 1696, the Russians successfully captured the port city of Azov, and while this was a great victory for Peter, he did not yet have the strength to push out any further than that. The Ottomans were able to block any further access to the larger Black Sea and prevent the Russians from putting into port with their merchant vessels. So Peter had his port, but he couldn’t go anywhere.

After his first expansion south. Peter’s attention then turned to the west. Far to the West. Peter was supremely dissatisfied with what he considered to be the backwardness of Russian science culture and society. This was the age of Newton and Leibniz and Baroque rationalism, and Peter himself was always drawn to this world of new discoveries.

So as the first conflict with the Ottomans was wrapping up, Peter packed his bags and headed west in 1697. But as was his style, Peter did not want to travel around as the tzar of Russia, which would bog him down in endless protocol. Instead, he went incognito as simply a member of a diplomatic mission, ostensibly touring Europe to drum up support for further Russian advances against the Ottomans. This embassy went from Riga to Berlin, and then onto the intended destination of Amsterdam. And while drumming up diplomatic support for Russia was all for the good, this was really in the service of getting Peter into personal contact with, and getting training and tutelage from, the great Dutch engineers and ship builders of the day. And then from this base in the Netherlands, Peter also popped up to England to visit and tour facilities and talk to leaders and experts, and it included a trip to the famous Greenwich observatory. While in the west, Peter’s mind was filled with visions of turning Russia towards this future that now lay before him.

Peter’s absence from Russia and disdain for the old beliefs did not go unnoticed by the nobility back in Russia. And in 1698, Peter had to return home to handle the fallout from an aborted noble revolt that got going while he was away. Now more determined than ever to have his way, Peter forged ahead with a kind of personal rule. He did not call any formal council of nobles or use any of the old provincial institutions of power. Instead, he had a small group of friends and favorites who dealt with the government on a very improvised and ad hoc basis. And as if it wasn’t bad enough that the old nobility was basically being cut out of power, Peter also decided that the Russian nobility needed to get with the times and adopt western looks and clothing, or they were going to look hopelessly backwards anytime anybody laid eyes on them. So he decreed that nobleman had to shave their beards, and women had to wear western style dresses, which most of them hated. Peter also wanted to break the independent power of the Orthodox Church. And when the patriarch of the church died in 1700 — that’s just the leader of the Russian Orthodox church — Peter reclined to nominate a successor, He then annexed vast monastic estates, bringing under his control extensive land and serf holdings.

He also then turned his attention to the army and navy and began reforming them along European lines: command structure, strategy, tactics, armory, drilling, training, all of it. He imported European officers and engineers to bring the Russian army and navy Into the modern age. He wanted to make the Russian military a true modern power to be reckoned with, so kind of across the board, Peter is just changing everything.

Now a lot of these domestic reforms were initiated simultaneously, with an in service to, what would become Peter’s greatest foreign entanglement, the Great Northern War. In 1699, the King of Poland invited the Russians and the Danes into a secret alliance against the Swedes. Now everyone had their own reasons for joining this anti Swedish coalition, but Peter had one single burning obsessive reason: the singular goal of his reign, which was to win a window to the seas. Specifically, he wanted a port on the gulf of Finland that would give Russia access to the Baltic Sea, and from there, access to the whole world. Unfortunately, there was a lot of gross miscalculating going on inside this anti Swedish alliance. The King of Poland, for example, thought he was far stronger than he actually was, and then it turned out none of them were much of a match for Charles the 12th of Sweden, who was one of the great military commanders of his age, or really any age.

So instead of a quick and decisive offensive by Poland, Denmark, and Russia to push Sweden out of some territory that they all coveted, it became a 20 year long seesaw conflict called the Great Northern War. The first eight years of this war were defined by Sweden hammering Poland into submission, and then forcing the King of Poland’s abdication and getting a Swedish puppet placed on the Polish throne. After the success, Charles the 12th turned to Russia in the hopes of doing the same thing, and he just assumed that noble grumbling about Peter and peasant grumbling about, y’know, everything would make it very easy to induce Peter’s overthrow. Instead, Charles the 12th found the Russians unwilling to dance to Swedish numbers and discovered Peter’s reformed and retrained military was a much better fighting force than he expected. An attempted invasion of Russia in 1708 and 1709 ended indecisive failure. And though the war would keep going until 1721, by 1710, the resulting post-war dynamic was already settling into place: that Russia was now a power to be reckoned with, maybe the great power of Northeastern Europe.

In the early days of this war, Peter resolved to move quickly in order to secure his window to the sea. Now, technically Russia already had one window to the sea, the far northern port of Archangel, which was built at the mouth of the northern Dniper River on the coast of the White Sea. A passage through the White Sea had been mapped and opened by the English and Dutch way back in 1555, but Archangel was iced up nine months out of the year. Peter had visited the port twice and found it ultimately unsatisfying for his greater vision of the future. So in 1702, he marched the Russian Army down the Niva River and they captured a Swedish town and fortification at the mouth. And here, Peter ordered a fortress built, which would become the St. Peter and St. Paul fortress, which was meant to be the initial defender of his grand vision of the future. By 1703, not even waiting for the war to end in peace settlements to make Russian claims official, Peter ordered construction of what would become the great legacy of his reign: the city of St. Petersburg, which was naturally named after his own namesake.

St. Petersburg was meant to be a naval base, a shipyard and a center of commerce and shipping to integrate Russia better into European markets. But Peter wanted even more. He was going to make his new city the new capital of Russia. He himself relocated there and built the first winter and summer palaces, though these initial palaces were quite modest affairs. And then he ordered the nobility to relocate as well, forcing them to leave their ancestral mansions in Moscow and build new ones in this kind of swampy boom town on the Gulf of Finland. They were not very happy about it, and a lot of this smacks of Louis the 14th, making the French nobility come attend to him at Versailles. This relocation meant they had to spend a fortune building up residences in Peter’s city and live there on his home turf rather than on their home turf back in Moscow. It also forced them to look towards Europe rather than revel in the aloof insularity of inner Russia. With this forced infusion of wealth and residence St. Petersburg was on its way to becoming one of the great capitals of the world.

So with the Great Northern War turning in his favor, Peter instituted another new slate of reforms. To get going on this project, in 1715, in the midst of still fighting with Sweden, Peter sent a spy into Sweden to study their administration and state apparatus. And when that spy returned, Peter transformed Russian administration along Swedish lines, with various departmental colleges staffed by both Russian and foreign experts running their individual departments. Then in 1722, he introduced the table of ranks, which spelled out the ranks and positions and titles of the nobility, and which would be in place right up to the moment of the 1917 revolution. He also put the church under even more from state control by creating a government senate to run it, all of the members of which would be appointed by the tsar. And he also made up for something that had been conspicuously lacking from Russian cultural life, and that was secular philosophy and scientific expertise, so he created an academy of science in St. Petersburg to open up Russian intellectual life to science and natural philosophy. It was not quite a full university, but it was a step in the right direction.

Now in 1721, the great Northern war finally ended after twenty years, with an exhausted Sweden suing for peace. The result was that the Baltic territories Peter had seized were confirmed, along with new lands in Livonia and Ukraine, and those Livonian territories brought German Lutherans under the sovereignty of the tsar for the first time. To celebrate all this. Peter made the grand proclamation that transformed the state officially from the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire.

Now, Peter the Great is remembered today as one of the great leaders in Russian history, and certainly in Europe, he is considered the ideal tsar. But partly this is because he flattered European egos by always following their lead. But there has always been a healthy group in Russia at the time and now who resented this quote unquote modernizer and westernizer, who’s so brazenly attacked traditional Slavic culture and old ways of life in the Orthodox Church. Peter wanted them to be European, but they were not European and they did not want to be European, but almost by sheer force of personal will, Peter linked Russia permanently to European affairs, and the Russian empire would forever loom large in all future international calculations. His reforms also transformed the lives and cultural pursuits of the Russian aristocracy, but it is worth noting that they really only affected the upper classes. The peasants were all but untouched, most of them were still just serfs, toiling away for the benefit of the lords, generation after forgotten generation.

So Peter the Great died in 1725 and his death opened up another convoluted succession crisis inside the Romanov family that I am also not going to explain. In fact, I just want to move very quickly through the 37 year period between the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. There was some attempt to undo much of what Peter had done in the years after his death, which is understandable, but a lot of it just kind of stuck in place. Peter’s niece Anna wound up reigning as Empress from 1730 to 1740, and then after her another convoluted succession crisis that I’m not going to tell you about left Peter’s daughter Elizabeth reigning as Empress from 1741 to 1762. She reinstated most of her father’s program and then shepherded Russia from the age of Baroque rationalism into the age of Enlightenment. This is the point at which educated Russians started getting really into the French philosophes and enlightenment era thinkers like Voltaire. It’s also when the Russian nobility started using French as the standard language amongst themselves. This early Russian enlightenment was embodied by a Renaissance man polymath named Mihail Lomonosov, who on top of many scientific and artistic accomplishments spearheaded the compilation, regularization, and formalization of the Russian language as we know it today. And he also founded the first university in Russia, the University of Moscow, in 1755.

Now neither Empress Anna nor Empress Elizabeth had children of their own, and so the Romanovs had to go looking outside the immediate family for an heir. So in 1742, Elizabeth selected the son of her sister who had been married to a German Duke of Holstine, and yes, I am talking about that Holstine. The boy was brought over to Russia, formerly rechristened Peter, and he converted to Orthodox Christianity. Now the selection of Peter was a part of Elizabeth’s policy of trying to keep Prussia happy, and then she kept going in this vein when it was time to select a bride for Peter. She went out and found a German princess from a small principality in the Prussian orbit named Sophia. 15 year old, Sophia came to Russia in 1744, where she too formally converted to Orthodox Christianity and was rechristened… Catherine.

Peter and Catherine were a terrible match. Peter turned out to be immature and dull and had no interest in his future responsibilities. Catherine, meanwhile, was endlessly curious and intelligent bordering on brilliant. From the outset, the two lived totally separate lives, and when Catherine gave birth to an heir named Paul in 1754, it was the son of her lover, not Peter, though that was a closely held secret at court. Catherine had plenty of ambition and she recognized pretty early on that she better study up because she was very likely going to be spending her husband’s reign covering up for his idiotic childlessness. So she studied the latest in enlightened political and economic theory come out of the West, she read everyone and everything she could and especially liked Montesquieu. And though she was a German princess, Catherine embraced Russia, wanted what was best for Russia, and when she got the chance, she planned to rule with the interest of Russia always foremost in her mind.

Peter was not like that, and when the Empress Elizabeth died in 1762, and Peter became tsar, he immediately made peace with his Prussian cousins and then induced them to attack Denmark on behalf of Peter’s interest in Holstine, which was very far removed from Russian interests. This and other changes at court, and Peter’s reputation for being a worthless dilettante, led a large chunk of the military and the nobility to wonder about his wife who had a pretty sterling reputation. Catherine had completely written her husband off as being even remotely capable of the job of running Russia, and she signaled to these nobles and members of the military that she was fine with, you know, whatever.

So evidence of a plot to overthrow Peter started to seep out in June of 1762, and Catherine was told if you want to do this, we have to act now today. So Catherine wrote into St. Petersburg where a regiment of elite guard swore to support her. Then after requiring further support from more elite guards, she dramatically donned to soldier’s uniform and rode off to find and capture her husband, who had gone into hiding. But the hunt did not last very long, as Peter surrendered. He was arrested by Catherine’s loyalists and taken off to an estate, where he turned up dead just a few days later. The verdict of history is that Catherine did not actively order this assassination, it was just the initiative of the guy who happened to be holding Peter, but it’s all very won’t someone please rid me of this troublesome priest territory. So Catherine was crowned Empress of Russia, though there was kind of an unspoken understanding that she would be reigning as a regent in place of her eight year old son, Paul.

So Catherine came to power at the age of 33, and she would rule Russia for the next 34 years. During this time she would establish herself as the prototypical enlightened despot, the living embodiment of the age of enlightenment. And remember when we talked all about this in the early episodes of the French Revolution, democracy and civil rights were not what many of the early enlightenment philosophes had in mind when they talked about making political reforms. They wanted wise platonic philosopher-kings patrons of the arts and sciences, and with the power and wisdom to reign for the good of humanity without all the troublesome politics. And that’s what Catherine wanted for Russia. And so she took up a regular correspondence with the great minds of the day, she wrote regularly to Voltaire and to Diderot, and like Peter the Great, she saw Russian empire as needing reform on all fronts to bring it to its full potential. So in 1767, she called together an assembly to digest the contents of a volume of excerpts of political theory she had compiled, and then they would make commendations for how best to reform and modernize the administration and law of the Russian Empire.

But these early domestic reforms were interrupted by foreign affairs. The year after Catherine took power, the King of Poland died, and Catherine managed through bribery and coercion to get one of her old lovers on the throne. And through him, she pushed Russia’s interests and pushed especially for religious tolerance inside Poland, which rankled the mostly Catholic nobility. In 1768 these Catholic lords revolted against Catherine’s influence over their affairs. When Russia intervened in Poland, the French induced the Ottomans to attack Russia’s underbelly to take heat off of their ally Poland. This opened up the Russo Turkish war that would last from 1768 to 1774. But at this point, the once mighty Ottomans are fading and Russia is steadily rising, and the upshot of this war is that Russia proved that it was rising while the Ottomans were fading. As this war started to wind down, Frederick the Great proposed a solution to the Polish question. Prussia, Austria, and Russia should simply annex a bunch of Polish territory for themselves. Catherine agreed to this reluctantly, but was mollified because her man did stay King of Poland.

So in 1772, we get the first partition of Poland, and the Russian Empire grew some more, and as it so happened, brought the first Jewish subjects into the Russian Empire. Then down south, the Ottomans capitulated on Catherine’s terms in 1774, and Catherine’s terms were a completion of fulfillment of Peter the Great’s dream. This meant breaking off a large chunk of territory in Crimea and along the Black Sea coast, and technically these lands would be independent, but they would be under Russian hegemony. And then Catherine forced through Russian rights to trade and commerce in the Black Sea. So now they could build a Black Sea fleet and have Black Sea merchants, which is what Peter had always dreamed of.

But just as this foreign war was wrapping up in Russia’s favor, they were rocked by a massive domestic revolt. Out beyond the Volga River towards the Ural mountains, a charismatic deserter from the Russian army named Yemelyan Pugachev started riding around in 1773, claiming that he was the dead tsar Peter who had returned to be the true, just, and honest tsar who would defend his people against the horrible tyranny of Catherine and the prevailing aristocracy. Pugachev opened up a huge revolt of Cossacks and peasants and serfs, and for the rest of 1773 and 1774, the whole of the Volga basin was in let’s lynch the landlord rebellion, and wherever serfs were liberated, they joined in the fight enthusiastically and with bloody-minded wrath.

But in 1775 Pugachev was captured and executed, and the revolt was brutally suppressed by the Russian army. But Pugachev’s rebellion, and that earlier peasant revolt I mentioned, the one that was led by Stenka Razin, would both be name-checked in the future by Bakunin as proof of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry.

With Poland settled for now, peace with the Ottomans, and the end of the rebellion, there entered a period of about a decade where Catherine could go back to advancing her enlightened despotism. In 1783, she outright annexed the Crimean lands acquired from the Ottomans and they dubbed it new Russia. And Catherine wanted to make it a showcase for what enlightened rural could do. She put her lover and brilliant advisor Grigori Potemkin in charge of a political and economic development project that was meant to push out the old nomadic inhabitants and replace them with Prussian settlers, who would be promised freedom without serfdom. And she wanted them to implement more advanced agricultural techniques and then build up trade and commerce on the Black Sea.

Meanwhile, back in old Russia, Catherine restarted the project of political reform that had stalled out back in 1768. But again, all of these reforms hardly reached below the middle class. The peasants and serfs in their villages remained a distant concern. As long as they paid their taxes, their rent, and they did not revolt, they hardly counted at all. Catherine also continued as a great patron of the arts and culture, theater, academic journals, literature, drama, poetry, music, all of which befit herself image as an enlightened despot. And cultural life in St. Petersburg and Moscow flourished. Catherine’s reputation also spread across Europe as she continued her personal correspondence with, and patronage of, great philosophers and thinkers and artists. She also played host to many admirers, including as we know the Spanish American adventurer Francisco de Miranda, who came round in 1787, and ever after never corrected anyone when it was said that the two had a brief affair.

Now down south in 1787, Catherine toured her territory in new Russia to show it off to foreign ambassadors, to show off how great things were, and this gave rise to what is probably a mythical account of the Potemkin villages, which were allegedly constructed mobile facades, which would race ahead of the Imperial entourage to make the region look far more prosperous than it actually was, but unfortunately for a good story, this all seems pretty exaggerated and overblown, and what deception may have existed was aimed at the foreign ambassadors, not the Empress. Now unhappy with Russian conduct in Crimea, and suspecting further encroachment was calming the Turks once again declared war later in 1787. And this war would have a far reaching impact. When an embassy of Polish nobles was called to support the Russian war effort, those nobles went rogue and revolutionary, with cynical support from the Prussians. But Catherine’s Russia was undaunted by all these challenges. The hero of the Russo-Turkish War was undoubtedly the great Russian general Suvorov who won a series of great victories. In 1791, the Turks again capitulated and Russia advanced yet further, this time to the Dniester River, where they acquired the port of Odessa.

The polish question though, was still very troublesome indeed. But by now European attention was turning towards France where some kind of reform effort had turned into a revolt that was getting way out of hand. But as we discussed in the early episodes on the French Revolution, the other great powers of Europe at first saw the collapsing Bourbon monarchy as a blessing, not a curse. But as her war with the Turks was winding up, Catherine started getting news out of France that was darker and more troubling, and though Russia itself was not directly affected by the conflict now erupting out of France, Prussia and Austria were both drawn into war in 1792. And then came the shocking news that Louis the 16th had gotten his head chopped off.

The effect of all this in Russia was a severe cooling of its Enlightenment period. French culture and ideas had been all the rage through most of Catherine’s reign, and now suddenly access to ideas and literature and philosophy coming out of France was under severe restriction. All of that high minded age of reason stuff had turned the people against their king, and we can’t have that, now can we? But that said, every crisis is an opportunity, and Catherine agreed to take advantage of a weak France by joining Prussia and Austria for a second partition of Poland in 1793. This partition led the great revolutionary patriot Kościuszko to revolt in 1794, which started out well enough for the Poles, but then ended with General Suvarov capturing Warsaw, and letting it be looted and burned, which resulted in 20,000 dead.

The upshot for Russia was the third and final partition of Poland in 1795, and with it, the final death of the power that had been Russian’s most regular rival for centuries. This final partition brought in five and a half million new subjects and territory in Western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. And with these final acquisitions, almost all of old Kiev Rus was now a part of the Russian Empire.

And that empire had seen its population explode over the last few years. In 1720, the population had been 15 and a half million, it was now 37 million and the Russian Empire was also further confirmed as a multi-ethnic empire, with 70% of the population being ethnically Russian and 30%, some kind of national minority. They were also no longer a landlocked principality. Russia now had ports and fleets on the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the White Sea and the Pacific Ocean. The Russian Empire was a great power.

Now the arrival of the French Revolution marked the dawning of a new age of revolution for Europe. This would be an age during which Russia was destined to play a large role, but as we will start to see next week, Russia’s large role would not be as a revolutionary vanguard, but rather as the great backstop of conservatism. Because for Russia, the age of revolution was the age of reaction. .