The Russian revolution was nominally based onCommunist dogma; but its significant struggle was to find some instrument by which a vast backward country could be mauled intoindustrialization. Thecapitalist revolution in which theUnited States was the leader found apter, more efficient and more flexible means through collectivizingcapital incorporations.
Adolf A. Berle,The 20th century capitalist revolution. 1954. p. 23
TheCold War stemmed fromwar, from theviolence,fear andparanoia that conflict fostered, and from defeat and victory in two successive struggles,World War One and theRussian Civil War. Defeat at the hands ofGermany and, even more, the social and political strain of conflict on an unprecedented scale in World War One (1914–18) led, in March 1917, to the fall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia and its replacement by a provisional, republican government. Thedynasty had responded more successfully to the challenge of theThirteen Years’ War withPoland in 1654–67, to theGreat Northern War withSweden in 1700–21, to wars with theTurks, Sweden andFrance between 1806 and 1815, and even to the briefFrench occupation ofMoscow in 1812, than it was to do to war of a very different type with Germany.
Jeremy Black,The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
The same problems, of defeat at the hands of Germany, political division and social strain, weakened the Romanovs’republicanSocial Democratic replacement, and this weakness provided the opportunity for aBolshevik (SovietCommunist)coup in Russia later in 1917. The victory of the Bolsheviks over domestic foes and foreign intervention in the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918–21) ensured that their regime would not be short-lived, as for example was Communist rule inHungary in 1919. The victory also furthered the identification of theSoviet regime with struggle, as well as giving such struggle a specific character. The war provided the regime with a strong rationale for opposition to Western states, notably the leading European empires,Britain andFrance, as well as theUSA and, indeed,Japan.
Jeremy Black,The Cold War: A Military History (2015)
TheGreat Socialist October Revolution, carried out by theworkers andpeasants of Russia under the leadership of theCommunist Party, headed byV. I. Lenin, overturned the power of the capitalists and landowners, broke the chains of oppression, established thedictatorship of the proletariat, and created the Soviet state-a state of a new type, the basic instrument to defend the revolutionary achievements and to buildsocialism andcommunism. The worldwide historical turning-point of mankind fromcapitalism to socialism began. Having emerged victorious in the civil war and having repulsedimperialist intervention, Soviet power has wrought the most profound socio-economic transformations, forever put an end to theexploitation of man by man and toclass antagonisms and national hostility. The association of Soviet Republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics enhanced the forces and possibilities of the people of the country for the building of socialism. Public ownership of themeans of production and genuinedemocracy for theworking masses were consolidated. For the first time in the history of mankind, a socialist society was created.
The 1917 October Revolution was the first ever won by revolutionaries advocating asocialist society. By the beginning of 1917 the majority of theRussian people were extremely discontented with the czar’s regime. Various revolutionary groups sought to mobilize this popular frustration to transform Russian society. When the coercive power of the czarist state collapsed in early 1917, revolutionary leaders had an opportunity to seize control of their nation’s destiny.Soldiers and sailors refused orders to repress rebellious streetdemonstrations and instead went over to the revolutionaries. As the institutions of the czarist government deteriorated, workers, military personnel, andpeasants elected revolutionary administrative councils, or soviets, from among their own numbers, to exercise power. In fall 1917 soldiers, sailors, and workers loyal to theBolshevik-led citywide soviet of the capital,Petrograd (later Leningrad and after 1991, St. Petersburg), established a new national revolutionary government.
James DeFronzo,Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements (2018), p. 33
In the latter half of thenineteenth century, themonarchy was steadily undermined by government efforts to spurindustrialization andmodernization. Many young Russians schooled in the technology ofmore advanced societies learned of the relativelydemocratic political systems inWestern Europe. As increasing numbers of educated Russians rejectedautocracy in favor of a freer and more participatory government, the pre-revolutionary state was progressively weakened. Russia’s military defeat inWorld War I and the accompanying social unrest finally forced the czar’s abdication.Soldiers ordered to put down theprotests of their fellow workers refused or openly joined the demonstrators. Faced with massive popular opposition and mutinies in thearmy and navy, and deserted by middle- and upperclass elites, the czarist state collapsed, providing a historic opportunity for revolutionaries to establish new political, social, and economic institutions. A number of groups cooperated to overthrow the monarchy. Although the contending revolutionary movements and most members of the majorsocial classes were temporarily united in the effort to oust the czar, they were divided over other issues. Various political movements favored divergent programs, ranging from instituting moderate social reforms to abolishing private ownership of major industries. The Bolsheviks demanded the changes most people yearned for, including a quick end to the war, an immediateredistribution of land to the peasants, and workers’ control of industry. When the provisional government continued the war and delayedland redistribution, popular support swung to the Bolsheviks in the large urban areas, permitting them to seize control of thenational government in fall 1917.
James DeFronzo,Revolutions and Revolutionary Movements (2018), pp. 69-70
On December 16, 1916, the royal couple's charismatic andcorruptholy manRasputin was murdered by the Tsar's own cousin,Grand Duke Dmitry, aided and abetted by the effetePrince Felix Yusupov and aright-wing politician named V. M. Purishkevich, in the belief that themonk was exerting a malign influence on the Tsar and on Russianforeign policy. But things did not improve. Deserted by his own generals in what amounted to a mutiny in early March 1917,Nicholas agreed toabdicate, complaining bitterly of 'treachery,cowardice anddeceit'. Neither he nor his wife ever understood therevolution that was now unfolding. Indeed, Alexandra's comment on its outbreak deserves wider celebrity as one of the great mis-diagnoses of history: 'It's a hooligan movement, young boys & girls running about &c screaming that they have nobread, only to excite - . . . if it were cold they wld. probably stay in doors.'
Niall Ferguson,The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 142-143
TheProvisional Government that took the Tsar's place aimed to establish arepublic with aliberalconstitution andparliamentary institutions. Its prospects were far from bad. However, the determination of its leaders to keepthe war going and to postpone decisions on the burning question ofland reform until after aConstituent Assembly had been elected created a window of opportunity formore extreme elements. TheBolsheviks had in fact been taken by surprise by therevolution. 'It's staggering!' exclaimedLenin when he heard the news inZurich. 'Such a surprise! Just imagine! We must get home, but how?' TheGerman High Command answered that question, providing him not only with arailway ticket toPetrograd but also, through two shady intermediaries named Parvus and Ganetsky, with funds to subvert the newgovernment. Instead of having him and his associates arrested, as they richly deserved to be, the Provisional Government dithered. On August 27, egged on byconservative critics of the new regime, the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army, GeneralLavr Kornilov, launched an abortive military coup. The unintended effect was to boost support for the Bolsheviks within the soviets, which had sprung up as a kind of parallel government not only in Petrograd (as in 1905) but in other cities too. Two months later, on October 24, 1917, the Bolsheviks staged acoup d'état of their own. At the time, it did not seem like a world-shaking event. Indeed, more people were hurt inSergei Eisenstein's subsequent reenactment for his filmOctober. Hardly anyone expected the new regime to last.
Niall Ferguson,The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 142-143
The Revolution had been made in the name ofpeace,bread and Soviet power. It turned out to meancivil war,starvation and thedictatorship of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and its increasingly potent subcommittee, the Politburo.Workers who had supported the Bolsheviks in the expectation of adecentralized soviet regime found themselves being gunned down if they had the temerity tostrike at newlynationalizedfactories. Withinflation rampant, theirwages in real terms were just a fraction of what they had been before the war. 'War Communism' reduced hungry city dwellers to desperate bartering expeditions to the country and to burning everything from their neighbours' doors to their own books for heat. As the conscription system grew more effective, more and more young men found themselves drafted into theRed Army, which grew in number from less than a million in January 1919 to five million by October 1920, though desertion rates remained high, especially around harvest time. When the previously pro-Bolshevik sailors of Kronstadt mutinied in February 1921 , they denounced the regime for crushingfreedom of speech,press andassembly and fillingprisons andconcentration camps with theirpolitical rivals.
Niall Ferguson,The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 152-153
Each localCheka had its own speciality. InKharkov they went in for the ‘glove trick’ — burning the victim’s hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with ‘human gloves’. TheTsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. InVoronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. InArmavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. InKyiv they affixed a cage withrats to the victim’s torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape. InOdessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues. Many Chekas preferred psychological forms of torture. One had the victims led off to what they thought was their execution, only to find that a blank was fired at them. Another had the victims buried alive, or kept in a coffin with a corpse.
Orlando Figes,A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, p. 646
The starting point for our study of the Cold War is the year 1917, when the Bolshevik leadership established a communist regime in Russia and defied the international order by preachingworld revolution and challenging conventional diplomatic practices. The Western powers (Britain,France, and theUnited States) responded withmilitary intervention and ostracism. During the next twenty-four years the estrangement between Russia and the West was overshadowed by the challenges ofItaly,Japan, andGermany, but thecapitalist world continued to regard the Soviet Union with fear, mistrust, and repugnance—sentiments that Moscow duly reciprocated.
Carole C. Fink,The Cold War: An International History (2017), p. 5
Eachcommunist party was the child of themarriage of two ill-assorted partners, a nationalleft and the October revolution. That marriage was based both on love and convenience. For anyone whose political memories go back no farther thanKhruschev's denunciation ofStalin, or theSino-Soviet split, it is almost impossible to conceive what the October revolution meant to those who are now middle-aged and old. It was the firstproletarian revolution, the first regime in history to set about the construction of the socialist order, the proof both of the profundity of the contradictions ofcapitalism, which producedwars and slumps, and of the possibility - the certainty - that socialist revolution would succeed. It was the beginning ofworld revolution. It was the beginning of the new world. Only the naive believed that Russia was the workers' paradise, but even among the sophisticated it enjoyed the general indulgence which theleft of the1960s now gives only to revolutionary regimes in some small countries, such asCuba andVietnam.
Eric Hobsbawm, "Problems of Communist History" (1969), published inRevolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (1973)
Looking back one perceives only a massive operation, struggle, and action. In reality there were no heroes or leaders. It was the people, the working people, in soldiers' uniform or in civilian attire, who controlled the situation and who recorded its will indelibly in thehistory of the country and mankind. It was a sultry summer, a crucial summer of the revolutionary flood-tide in 1917!
Then came the great days of theOctober Revolution.Smolny became historic. The sleepless nights, the permanent sessions. And, finally, the stirring declarations. "The Soviets take power!" "The Soviets address an appeal to the peoples of the world to put an end to the war." "The land is socialized and belongs to thepeasants!"
When one recalls the first months of the Workers' Government, months which were so rich in magnificent illusions, plans, ardent initiatives to improve life, to organize the world anew, months of the realromanticism of the Revolution, one would in fact like to write about all else save about one's self.
At Odessa, the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims’ hands to produce ‘gloves’; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death atDnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kyiv,Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim’s body in an effort to escape.
George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, pp 197-198
The Russian Revolution of 1917 may be said to have begun in November of the preceding year, when the government came under intense assault fromliberal andconservative Duma deputies for its conduct of the war. The leader of the liberals, Paul Miliukov, virtually accused the government oftreason. These attacks emanating from the highest political circles made the country ungovernable; the conviction spread that drastic change had to come. The tsar, a fatalist by nature, did nothing to reassert his authority. The spark that set off the revolution was a mutiny, in early March 1917, of thePetrograd garrison. It consisted of olderpeasant draftees who felt they should have been exempt from military duty and rioted when ordered to fire at unruly civilian crowds. The generals, afraid of the mutiny spreading to the front, persuadedNicholas to abdicate in order to save Russia from defeat. An ardent patriot, he followed their advice and on March 15 stepped down.
In sum, the advance ofeducation andindustrialization necessary to meet Russia’s global ambitions weakened tsarism’s hold on the country. Such factors help explain why theCommunist revolution that, according toMarx, was bound to break out in the industrialized West in fact broke out in theagrarianEast. Russia lacked the deterrents to socialrevolution present in the West:respect for law andproperty, along with a sense of allegiance to a state that protectedliberty and provided social services. The Russian radical intelligentsia, permeated withutopianidealism, on the one hand, and apeasantry bent on seizing privateland, on the other, created a state of permanent tension liable to explode any time the central government found itself in trouble. None of theeconomic imperatives posited by Marx andEngels played here any role.
In the elections to the soviets held the next month, the Bolsheviks scored impressive gains, which signaled to Lenin that the time had come for another and decisive blow. The resolution to seize power was taken at a clandestine meeting of the Bolshevik leaders held on the night of October 23–24, 1917. Lenin had to overcome a great deal of reluctance from his lieutenants, who feared a repetition of the July fiasco. Thecoup took place on November 7 when pro-Bolshevik units took over all the strategic points in the capital without firing a shot. There was some fighting inMoscow, but in the rest of the country the transition proceeded quite smoothly. Lenin later said that taking power in Russia was as easy as “lifting a feather.” The reason was that he had cleverly camouflaged the seizure of power by himself and his party as the transfer of “all power to the soviets,” which slogan promised grassroots democracy rather thandictatorship. Even Lenin’s socialist rivals, who suspected his intentions, were not terribly upset, convinced that a Bolshevikone-party dictatorship could not possibly last and would soon yield to a socialist coalition. They preferred to let him exercise power for a while rather than unleash a civil war that would only benefit the “counterrevolution.” As it turned out, the Bolsheviks would stay in power for seventy-four years.Communism thus did not come to Russia as the result of a popular uprising: it was imposed on her from above by a small minority hiding behind democratic slogans. This salient fact was to determine its course.
The factors that made Russia prone to erupt in revolution also determined the shape of itsCommunist regime. As it turned out,socialism introduced into a country lacking the traditions that would make for the ideally self-fulfilling life that Marx had envisioned in no time and quite spontaneously assumed the worst features of the defunct tsarist regime. Socialist slogans, which in the West would be steadily watered down until they became indistinguishable fromliberal ones, in Russia and other non-Western countries were reinterpreted in accustomed terms to mean the unlimitedpower of thestate overcitizens and their assets. Soviettotalitarianism thus grew out ofMarxist seeds planted on the soil of tsarist patrimonialism.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was patently a continuation of theFrench Revolution of 1789 in its eastern advance. It smashed autocracy, gave land to thepeasants, liberated oppressednationalities, and in addition promised to rid theindustrial system of the blemishes ofexploitation. In its heroic age, Soviet socialism was given selfless support by thewriters andartists of the West. They steeled their muscles in an epic defence offreedom,democracy, andsocialism against thepagan upsurge of Teutonicfascism.Hitler’s persecution ofBolsheviks and Jews was in the last resort directed againstChristianuniversalism and its derivatives in the industrial present. His onslaught on traditional values, root and branch, created the modern West.
THE Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events of the world s history. It is natural to compare it to theFrench Revolution, but it is in fact something of even more importance. It does more to change daily life and the structure of society : it also does more to change men s beliefs. The difference is exemplified by the difference betweenMarx andRousseau : the latter sentimental and soft, appealing to emotion, obliterating sharp out lines ; the former systematic likeHegel, full of hard intellectual content, appealing to historic necessity and the technicaldevelopment of industry, suggesting a view of human beings aspuppets in the grip of omnipotent material forces. Bolshevism combines the characteristics of theFrench Revolution with those of the rise ofIslam ; and the result is something radically new, which can only be understood by a patient and passionate effort ofimagination.
Bertrand Russell, "The practice and theory of bolshevism" ,1919.
By disrupting the capitalist order and weakening the greatempires, theFirst World War brought an obvious opportunity torevolutionaries. MostMarxists, however, had by then grown accustomed to working within national political systems, and chose to support theirgovernments in time of war. Not soVladimir Lenin, a subject of theRussian Empire and a leader of theBolsheviks. Hisvoluntarist understanding of Marxism, the belief thathistory could be pushed onto the proper track, led him to see the war as a great chance. For a voluntarist such as Lenin, assenting to the verdict of history gave Marxists a license to issue it themselves. Marx did not see history as fixed in advance but as the work of individuals aware of its principles. Lenin hailed from largely peasant country, which lacked, from a Marxist perspective, the economic conditions for revolution. Once again, he had a revolutionary theory to justify his revolutionary impulse. He believed thatcolonial empires had granted the capitalist system an extended lease on life, but that a war among empires could bring general revolution. The Russian Empire rumbled first, and Lenin made his move. The sufferingsoldiers and impovershedpeasants of the Russian Empire were in revolt in early 1917. After a popular uprising brought down the Russianmonarchy that February, a newliberal regime sought to win the war by one moremilitary offensive against its enemies, theGerman Empire and theHapsburg monarchy. At this point Lenin became the secret weapon ofGermany. The Germans dispatched Lenin fromSwiss exile to the Russian capitalPetrograd that April, to make a revolution that would take Russia from the war. With the help of his charismatic allyLeon Trotsky and his disciplined Bolsheviks, Lenin achieved acoup d'état with some popular support in November. In early 1918, Lenin's new government signed a peace treaty with Germany that leftBelarus,Ukraine, theBaltics, andPoland under German control. Thanks in part to Lenin, Germany won the war on theeastern front, and had a brief taste of eastern empire.
Timothy D. Snyder,Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 20104
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgottenGod; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds ofbooks, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
In 1917European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin andWoodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia,Heaven onEarth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.
