52 The First Provisional Government in the Marinsky Palace
53 The burial of victims of the February Revolution
54 A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies
55 Waiters and waitresses of Petrograd on strike
56 The All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies
57 Fedor Linde leads an anti-war demonstration by the Finland Regiment during the April Crisis
58 Kerensky makes a speech to soldiers at the Front
59 Patriarch Nikon blesses the Women’s Battalion of Death
60 General Kornilov’s triumphant arrival in Moscow during the State Conference
61 Members of the Women’s Battalion of Death in the Winter Palace on 25 October
62 Some of Kerensky’s last defenders in the Winter Palace on 25 October
63 The Smolny Institute
64 The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory
The Civil War
65 General Alexeev
66 General Denikin
67 Admiral Kolchak
68 Baron Wrangel
69 Members of the Czech Legion in Vladivostok
70 A group of White officers during a military parade in Omsk
71 A strategic meeting of Red partisans
72 An armoured train
73 The Latvian Division passing through a village
74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break
75 Red Army soldiers reading propaganda leaflets
76 A Red Army mobile library in the village
77 Nestor Makhno
78 The execution of a peasant by the Whites
79 Jewish victims of a pogrom
80 Red Army soldiers torture a Polish officer
Everyday Life Under the Bolsheviks
81 Muscovites dismantle a house for firewood
82 A priest helps transport timber
83 Women of the ‘former classes’ sell their last possessions
84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhoois
85 Haggling over a fur scarf at the Smolensk market in Moscow
86 Traders at the Smolensk market
87 Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets
88 Cheka soldiers close down traders’ stalls in Moscow
89 Requisitioning the peasants’ grain
90 ‘Bagmen’ on the railways
91 The 1 May subbotnik on Red Square in Moscow, 1920
92 An open-air cafeteria at the Kiev Station in Moscow
93 Delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress
94 The Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern Region
95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup
The Revolutionary Inheritance
96 Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base
97 Peasant rebels attack a train of requisitioned grain
98 Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region
99 Unburied corpses from the famine crisis
100 Cannibals with their victims
101 Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip
102 The Secretary of the Tula Komsomol
103 A juvenile unit of the Red Army in Turkestan
104 Red Army soldiers confiscate valuables from the Semenov Monastery
105 A propaganda meeting in Bukhara
106 Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East
107 The dying Lenin in 1923
Photographic Credits
Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: 58; California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside: 20. Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: 82–4; Life on the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Cultural history, by Priscilla Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museum of the Revolution, Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; Photokhronika Tass, Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russian in Original Photographs 1860–1920, by Marvin Lyons (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924: La Révolution est là, (Baschet, Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century, The, by Brian Moynahan (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): 13, 28 (courtesy of Slava Katamidze Collection/Endeavour Group, London), 46 (Courtesy of the Endeavour Group, London); Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk: 18–19, 21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93, 98–106; Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow: 29; Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg: 12; State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; Tula District Museum: 33.
Note on Dates
Until February 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian (Old Style) calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style) calendar in use in Western Europe. The Soviet government switched to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next day was declared 14 February. Dates relating to domestic events are given in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New Style after that. Dates relating to international events (e.g. diplomatic negotiations and military battles in the First World War) are given in the New Style throughout the book.
NB The term ‘the Ukraine’ has been used throughout this book, rather than the currently correct but ahistorical ‘Ukraine’.
For Stephanie
Introduction to the 100th Anniversary Edition
It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly than the Russian Revolution of 1917. A generation after the establishment of the Soviet system, one-third of the human race was living under regimes modelled, more or less, upon it. The fear of Bolshevism was a major factor in the rise of fascist movements, leading to the outbreak of the Second World War. From 1945, the export of the Leninist model to Eastern Europe, China, South-East Asia, Africa and Central America engulfed the world in a long Cold War, which came to an uncertain end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its shadow,’ I wrote in the Preface to the first edition of A People’s Tragedy in 1996. Today, in 2017, that shadow still hangs darkly over Russia and the fragile new democracies that emerged from the Soviet Union. Its presence can be felt in the revolutionary and terrorist movements of our age. As I warned in the final sentence of A People’s Tragedy, ‘The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’
That was not how it appeared to many in the years immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a widespread feeling, in the West at least, that the Russian Revolution was over, its false gods toppled by democracy. In that moment of democratic triumph and triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote his influential book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he announced the ultimate victory of liberal capitalism in its great ideological battle against communism. ‘What we are witnessing,’ Fukuyama wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
When I was working on A People’s Tragedy, between 1989 and 1996, there was, for sure, a liberating sense for me, as a historian, that my subject need no longer be defined by Cold War ideological battles. The Russian Revolution was becoming ‘history’ in a new way: with the collapse of the Soviet system, it could at last be seen to have a complete historical trajectory – a beginning and a middle and, now, an end – which could be studied more permissively, without the pressures of contemporary politics or the limiting agendas of Sovietology, the political-science framework in which most Western studies of the Revolution had been written when the Soviet Union was alive.
Meanwhile the opening of the Soviet archives enabled new approaches to the Revolution’s history. Mine was to use the personal stories of ordinary individuals whose voices had been lost in the Cold War-era histories (both Soviet and Western), which had focused on the abstract ‘masses’, social classes, political parties and ideologies. Having worked in the Soviet archives since 1984, I was sceptical that startling revelations about Lenin, Trotsky or even Stalin were yet to be found, which is what the new arrivals in the reading rooms were mostly looking for. But I was excited by the opportunity to work with the personal archives of the Revolution’s minor figures – secondary leaders, workers, soldiers, officers, intellectuals and even peasants – in much larger quantities than had previously been allowed. The biographical approach I ended up adopting in A People’s Tragedy was intended to do more than add ‘human interest’ to my narrative. By weaving the stories of these individuals through my history, I wanted to present the Revolution as a dramatic series of events, uncontrolled by the people taking part in them. The figures I chose had one feature in common: setting out to influence the course of history, they all fell victim to the law of unintended consequences. By focusing on them, my aim was to convey the Revolution’s tragic chaos, which engulfed so many lives and destroyed so many dreams.