In this course, Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, explains the events of modern Russian history and introduces its most significant actors—from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin.
The October Revolution
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From the course by University of California, Santa Cruz
Russian History: from Lenin to Putin
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From the lesson
The 9th Century to the 1920s
Meet the Instructors
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
In order to appreciate what happened on November 7th, 1917,
we must examine who the Bolsheviks
were and what were they thinking and what did they have in mind.
In the Cold War,
the November Revolution was depicted as a coup d'etat in which tightly organized party,
the Bolsheviks, were able to overthrow a liberal government.
It seems to me that this is not the way to understand what happened.
It is essential to see how authority has
disintegrated on its own to which the Bolshevik contribution was actually very minor.
It was not Bolshevik agitation which brought down the government.
It was simply that the government,
the provisional government, was
incapable of administering the country at the time of war.
Well, who were the Bolsheviks?
Lenin is a crucial figure here.
It was his party,
it was his ideology,
which ultimately prevailed, which had to prevail.
It was so because of Lenin's abilities,
because of Lenin's charisma,
which was simply accepted by the major figures of the Bolshevik movement.
But what was Leninism?
Lenin, of course, regarded himself as a Marxist.
He did bring, however,
a new element into Marxism,
and that was a very significant line in a book which he wrote in 1902
and that line was that the workers left to
themselves are capable of developing only trade union consciousness.
The task of the revolutionaries is to
bring proper revolutionary consciousness to the people.
The task of the revolutionaries,
that is the Bolsheviks,
was to agitate, to explain the workers what their genuine interests were.
Now this is very significant for understanding of what he had in mind in 1917.
He believed that it was possible, indeed desirable,
of establishing a socialist regime
and then the workers will understand when the time comes.
Now, it was clear very soon that the majority
of the Russian people did not support the Bolshevik takeover.
It became clear very soon,
and indisputable, in as much as in the course of 1917,
there was a discussion that we must call together a constituent assembly,
which would resolve the proper organization of
the state and the Bolsheviks agitated for calling
together such an assembly and indeed they could not.
They did not want to stop it and elections were called,
the first genuinely democratic elections in the course of Russian history.
Then, not surprisingly, that demonstrated that a fundamentally peasant oriented party,
the Socialist Revolutionaries, had the largest number of votes.
The Liberals did very poorly,
that so-called the Kadet Party,
which was a Liberal Party and the Bolsheviks had
perhaps a quarter of the support of the population.
Now, this quarter however,
it was very significant because it was in
the major city among the working classes and among the soldiers,
interestingly, in the rear regiments rather than in the front line.
Well, the way the Bolsheviks dealt with the problem was the first day and the previous,
when the Constituent Assembly was called together,
Bolshevik soldiers simply dispersed them and that was the end of
the establishment of a democratic form of government for a long time to come.
Bolsheviks were disappointed.
It became clear that the Russian people, after all,
did not support the policies which they advocated.
The second disappointment,
the second problem is the Bolsheviks had to face
is that after all the country was at war.
Now, how do you stop this war?
In this issue, two points of view were presented among the Bolshevik leadership.
One was that it is our task to bring the revolution to the rest of Europe,
and by continuing the war we will agitate among the German soldiers,
and the German soldiers will not fire at us because they will see that we are fighting
for the coming of socialism in Europe and consequently,
they called for the continuation of the war.
They were genuine internationalists.
They took it for granted that the Russian Revolution
in a hostile sea of capitalist powers cannot succeed.
What we do, is our task,
is to bring about to be a spark of a world socialist revolution,
a European socialist revolution.
They understood that, after all,
Russia was economically socially backward as
compared to Europe and they had in mind that, specially Germany,
which was really significant in development of
international socialism and so they wanted to continue
the war in order to bring about European revolution.
Lenin, however, as a much more realistic statesman said,
"No, we cannot do that.
The Germans will simply come and we don't have the power
to resist and we have to conclude the separate peace."
Indeed such a peace was concluded at
the Brest-Litovsk in which Russia made major major concessions.
They lost the Ukraine,
they lost the Baltic states and however they were able to stay in power.
The civil war started almost immediately in a very small scale.
The people who had been,
the military leaders who had been jailed at the time of the Kornilov affair
simply escaped from their prison and escaped to the south in regions,
which were inhabited by Cossacks.
We must say something about who the Cossacks were.
The Cossacks were ethnically Ukrainians or Russians.
They represented a military state,
they represented in a state which for performing additional military service
received various concessions in landholding and in taxation,
so we can regard them as beneficiaries of the Tsar's state and they acted in,
time and again, in defense of the Tsar's authority.
It is only in these Cossack regions that the white movement,
the anti Bolshevik movement,
could come into existence.
What is striking about them,
about the beginning of the Civil War,
how small scale that conflict was,
how difficult it was for the Generals to call together followers.
For some months in the course of the spring of 1918,
they managed to put together an army perhaps 3000.
That is what we have in mind when we talk about the Russian Revolution,
that neither the Bolsheviks nor the anti Bolsheviks
we were able to come up with major forces behind them.
It was their task to organize.
It was really two sets of leaders believing in two sets of different principles,
which fought against one another in the hope of organizing a functioning government,
which can administer the country.
The Civil War started out slowly.
The Bolsheviks also did not have the means to disperse a small force of 3000.
But, gradually, they put more and more soldiers and ultimately the size of the conflict
grew and before the civil war that lasted
for almost three years with great bitterness.
And each side were able to fear larger armies.
The Red Army, the army the Bolsheviks put together,
was ultimately a much larger army.
On the other hand,
the White Army is led by professional soldiers,
were superior in their organization and in their ability to fight.
The Bolsheviks had the problem of finding competent officers.
They simply drafted ex-Tsarist officers,
but they constantly had to be concerned about the loyalty of these officers.
And, indeed, time and again,
officers from the Tsarist army went over to the sides of the enemy.
So each side has its advantages and disadvantages as the civil war developed,
ultimately encompassing the entire large area of the country.
Why did it develop the way it did.?
The majority Russian people would have
supported the platform on the socialist revolutionaries.
And what is striking is that how quickly the socialist revolution, it became irrelevant.
And the reason for that because in the principles in which they believed in,
it was not possible to form a functioning army.
White leaders believed that it was possible to form an arm,
but the Bolsheviks believed in also was possible to form a functioning army.
Civil war took place
for almost three years.
And the crucial question was the attitude of the peasantry.
I mean, after all, the vast majority of the Russian people were
living in the villages were peasants, mostly illiterate.
What attitude would they take?
Whose side would they support?
Because neither side, views,
principles were really congruent with the peasant view of what was happening.
Ultimately, it turned out that the peasants opposed
the Bolsheviks less strongly than they opposed the Whites.
But the peasantry saw that regions,
which the Whites managed to occupy,
the old politicians, the old landlords
returned and re-established the Tsarist form of government.
Consequently, it is fair to say that the Bolsheviks who carried out the land reform,
that is in a fact,
that they did not really carry out the land reform,
they simply legitimized peasant taking of land.
It seems that the peasantry was basically not pro-Bolshevik,
nonetheless, opposed of Bolsheviks less,
and this had great significance in the course of the Civil War.
The peasants did form some armies under anarchist principles,
and anarchism became a significant military force in the course of the Civil War.
And these anarchists stood closest to their understanding of the world of the peasants,
and what we can see from the course of the fighting was that these anarchist bands,
these anarchist armies fought the Whites rather than the Reds,
and only once Whites were defeated,
they did on against the Bolsheviks.
And ultimately, of course,
the Bolsheviks were able and managed to disperse them.
Ultimately, the Bolsheviks emerged victorious.
Why did they succeed?
They succeed because they were able to mobilize to a greater extent because they were,
as modern politicians, were more aware of the significance of
propaganda because the revolutionaries always
regarded themselves primarily as propagandists.
They were better able to organize.
They had some disadvantages.
What was on the white side was that
the Whites managed to win over the support of the Orthodox Church,
which was significant because the church still had authority,
the moral authority among the peasants.
And the significant force was antisemitism.
That is why whites managed to defeat to depict the Bolsheviks as
fighting for the interests of the Jews and point out that Jews were represented,
in the Bolshevik leadership,
way out of proportion to their size of the population.
So each side had advantages and disadvantages,
but ultimately, of course,
the Bolsheviks managed to prevail and create a new form of state and new authority and
the kind of world which they created in the course of the
1920's is something very interesting
and significant about which I would talk about next time.
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