History of the Soviet Union. Geoffrey Hosking
retreated into an ex-aggeratedly rigid defence of their recently acquired authority. Among the senior officers were rather more survivors from pre-1914, but they were mostly men who had been taught to regard politics as subversive, an affair of which they were properly ignorant. It is not surprising, therefore, that at all levels of the officer corps there was support for a return to the unquestioning discipline of pre-February.
Evidence suggests that the soldiers, especially at the front line, remained patriotic in outlook even after February, and determined at least to prevent the Germans advancing any further into Russia. The revolution did, however, induce in the men a feeling that they no longer had to obey all orders unquestioningly. The soviets’ peace programme circulated among them, and led to a widespread conviction that only a defensive war was still justified: the formula ‘without annexations or indemnities’ was very popular. The peace offensive also aroused expectations that the war would be over soon and that they could return home. These expectations were further sharpened by intensive propaganda from the Bolsheviks, who sent agitators, newspapers and broadsheets to popularize the idea of a separate peace to be concluded without reference to the Allies.
These expectations were rudely jolted by Minister of Defence Kerensky, who in June ordered an offensive on the south-western front. This was timed partly in order to aid the Allies (the mutinies in the French army looked at that stage more serious than the Russian ones), but partly because the officers hoped it would restore a sense of purpose and discipline among their men. The opposite turned out to be the case. Soldiers’ committees discussed the order to advance at great length: some refused, some went ahead initially and then pulled back when they saw the casualty rate. At any rate, the offensive soon turned into a rout in which the Russian army lost territory. Far more serious than that was the effect on morale. Whole units abandoned their positions, and some of them murdered officers who tried to restore order. Then the mutinous soldiers seized freight wagons, or even whole trains, and held them at gunpoint until they were transported deep into the rear. From there they could return home, rifles at the ready, to take a decisive part, as we have seen, in the share-out of land.
The mood of the garrison troops was, if anything, even more radical than that of those at the front. Many of them were recently mobilized peasants or workers, undergoing their training, and still identifying strongly with the class from which they came. The Provisional Government’s initial agreement with the Petrograd Soviet stipulated that these troops would not be sent to the front, but would stay in the capital to ‘defend the revolution’. And in fact the refusal of a machine-gun regiment to be sent to the front sparked off the July Days in Petrograd, when an undisciplined armed mob caused havoc on the streets.
Even at this stage, however, the army did not disintegrate altogether. Some units remained loyal, particularly Cossack ones, with their special traditions, or specialist units, like those from the artillery, cavalry or engineers. Nowhere was the collapse so complete that the Germans felt they could advance without risk. Indeed, the German High Command deliberately held back, fearing that a major advance might be the one factor which could yet restore morale in the Russian army.
At the time of the February revolution the Bolsheviks numbered, at the highest estimate, no more than 20,000, and their leaders were scattered in exile, at home and abroad. For that reason they had even more difficulty than the other parties in adjusting to the sudden changes. They were seriously divided about what to do, but the dominant figures inside Russia, notably Kamenev and Stalin, inclined towards cooperation with the other socialist parties in the soviets in exercising ‘vigilant supervision’ over the Provisional Government. Some even talked of a rapprochement with the Mensheviks.
Lenin had quite different ideas. He was still in Switzerland in February. He returned to Russia with the help of the German High Command, taking a specially provided ‘sealed train’ through Germany to Sweden. The Germans were anxious to facilitate his return, so that he could begin fomenting unrest inside Russia and spread his idea of a separate peace. They also provided the Bolsheviks with considerable funds thereafter, which helped to pay for the newspapers and political agitators who proved so effective among the soldiers and workers.
As soon as he arrived back in Petrograd, Lenin poured scorn on the notion of ‘revolutionary defencism’, conditional support for the Provisional Government, or cooperation with the other socialist parties. The ‘bourgeois’ stage of the revolution, he maintained, was already over, and it was time for the workers to take power, which they could do through the soviets. Russia should unilaterally pull out of the war, calling on the workers of all the combatant nations to convert it into an international civil war by rising against their rulers. Landed estates should be expropriated forthwith, and all other land nationalized and put at the disposal of ‘Soviets of Agricultural Labourers and Peasant Deputies’.
Lenin’s new programme should not have been a complete surprise to those who had read his writings since 1905, but all the same it did represent something of a shift in his thinking. His study of imperialism had led him to the view that the socialist revolution would take place on an international scale, with the colonized nations of the world rising against their exploiters. In this perspective, Russia, as the weakest of the imperialist powers, but also the strongest of the colonies (in the sense that it was exploited by French, German and other capital), was the natural setting for the initial spark of the revolution–though it would need swift support from within economically stronger nations if it was not to die away. Lenin, in fact, had moved close to the position of Trotsky, who since 1905 had been preaching ‘permanent revolution’ on an international scale. Trotsky acknowledged this rapprochement by joining the Bolsheviks in the course of the summer.
Another new facet of Lenin’s thinking was his view that imperialism created the economic prerequisites of socialism–trusts and syndicates, large banks, railways, telegraph and postal services–and that when the imperialist state was smashed, these structures would survive and be taken over by the new proletarian government. Since they were sophisticated and self-regulating, all that would be needed was to ensure that they were used in the interests of the people as a whole, not of a small class of exploiters, and this would be essentially a matter of ‘book-keeping and monitoring’ (uchet i kontrol). ‘Capitalism’, he asserted, ‘has simplified the work of book-keeping and monitoring, has reduced it to a comparatively simple system of accounting, which any literate person can do.’
This vision was the real source of Lenin’s confidence in 1917. He seems to have really believed that, through the soviets, ordinary working people could take power into their own hands, and administer complex economic systems. He called his vision the ‘commune state’, taking as his model the Paris Commune of 1871. This introduced a certain contradiction into his ideas, since of course the Paris Commune had originated in precisely the kind of ‘revolutionary defencism’ which Lenin rejected. But the image was to prove useful to him and to confuse some of his opponents. At any rate there proved to be a good deal of support among Bolsheviks for Lenin’s heightened radicalism, and by May most of his programme had been accepted as party policy.
Initially, the Bolsheviks’ position in the new popular institutions was very weak. With the disappointments of the summer and autumn, however, some existing delegates swung over towards the Bolsheviks, while new ones were elected on a Bolshevik mandate. The appeal of the Bolsheviks lay in their programme of ‘peace, land and bread’. Facing a Provisional Government which could not end the war, and which was therefore incapable of carrying out land reform or ensuring food supplies either, the Bolsheviks were able to offer something which nearly all workers, peasants and soldiers wanted. Bearing these promises in their hands, Bolshevik speakers were often able to win over audiences and gradually the new grass-roots popular insitutions as well. This was the case first of all in the factory committees, then in the soviets of workers’ deputies, then in the soldiers’ committees and in some of the trade unions. The failure of the July uprising and the public revelations about German backing for Lenin reduced this support for a time, but it revived and redoubled with the Kornilov affair at the end of August.
This affair has been the subject of much historical controversy, and it cannot be said that it is clear even now exactly what happened. In the last week of August General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, sent troops from the front to Petrograd,