Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
business
tide was flowing leftwards with a vengeance but without the spontaneity of the pre-July movement - the Bolsheviks were firmly in control of the workers movement. Soon soviet after soviet began returning Bolshevik majorities. The soldiers who in February were fanatics for 'War for total victory had become bitter opponents of war.
Lenin wrote from hiding to the Bolshevik Central Committee telling them now was the time to take power. That's madness said the CC but Lenin persisted. Soon the prospect of a Bolshevik coup became an open secret and the Provisional Government decided to act. Scraping together its few remaining troops it occupied the Petrograd bridges and the Bolshevik printshops. From it's HQ in the Smolny institute the Petrograd Soviet under Trotsky ordered Red Guards and troops loyal to the Soviet into action. Soon with hardly a shot being fired the government troops were forced back on the Winter Palace. Then, as the second Congress of Soviets was opening, Red Guards and Kronstadt sailors broke into the Winter Palace and the Provisional government surrendered.
The government which took power through the revolution of October 1917 was of a kind the world has never seen before - a workers socialist republic.1
Two decades later Russia was, as the above writer would admit, a brutal dictatorship based on exploitation by a ruling class. How could such a transformation occur? Did events contrive to throw out the natural course of development or was Stalinism exactly the outcome that might have been expected.
Revolution is used in two very different senses. First there is a popular uprising, Society is turned on it's head and the masses, normally excluded from events take action for themselves while the elites look on helplessly. Then there is the total social change. Syme in his The Roman Revolution describes how this occurred in ancient Rome with the rise of Augustus. Yet here the masses were no more than a pawn in Augustus' game and the change was no more than the replacement of one ruling class by another. October certainly led to total social change but was it a genuine popular uprising?
Popular uprisings do tend to lead to demands for total social change. First because the masses often find that even limited demands are blocked within the old .order and second because the experience of revolution gives them the confidence to demand more. Tragically before this second wave can fully develop the revolution often loses it's way and receives a fatal defeat.
Is Russia 1917 an exception? Russia in 1917 was a land where the First World War had taken a desperate toll. At the front the soldiers fed up with defeat after defeat were deserting in droves. The economy was collapsing under the strain of war and food was short in the cities and even in many rural areas. In the villages the peasants were disillusioned with the Provisional Government under Kerensky that would not give them the right to expropriate the gentry's land. Certainly by October, then, [next page]