Almost immediately, Petrograd workers, having played so prominent a role in the overthrow of tsarism, staked out their claim to a numerically disproportionate role in determining the character and fate of the new order. Working in co-operation with radical intelligenty among the SD and SR party activists, they resurrected an updated version of the soviets of i905, but this time with the hot-blooded participation of soldiers from the local garrison, many of whom lived in fear of transfer to the fighting front. Similar soviets quickly mushroomed throughout the empire.
Over the next few months, with the Petrograd soviet sharing 'dual power' with the new, unstable, and insecure Provisional Government, worker militancy escalated rapidly, often following its own trajectory with scant attention to the desires of the left party leaders. Their militancy took many forms - strikes, riots, factory occupations, the creation of increasingly defiant factory committees and, along with soldiers, participation in the organisations and demonstrations of the revolutionary parties, though never in lockstep with those parties. All of this uncontrollable activity added enormously to the difficulties of the Provisional Government, which, even as its composition moved leftward as moderate socialists agreed to assume cabinet positions, was simply unable to satisfy unremitting worker demands under wartime conditions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government in October i9i7 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent Assembly the followingJanuary, they would do so with a great deal of working- class support, though not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a 'soviet' government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker democracy within the factory. For workers as for others, the ensuing Civil War of 1918-21 was a period of bloodshed, hunger and, eventually, draconian measures, including the militarisation of labour, the introduction of stringent one-man management and the ending of truly free elections to the workers' soviets, all inflicted upon what had been its own primary constituency by an embattled, often desperate Bolshevik regime. Though indispensable to the 'Reds' in their life-and-death struggle against the 'Whites' in these years of bloody warfare, workers emerged from the Civil War demoralised and, in many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry and the consequent shortage of industrial jobs, declassed. Despite flurries of activity and even occasional resistance, workers now ceased to be a major independent force in the country's political life.
Police and revolutionaries
JONATHAN W. DALY
Soon after officers of leading noble families rebelled in December 1825, Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery and a uniformed gendarmerie to conduct censorship, oversee the bureaucracy, keep track of the public mood and preserve state security. During the first two decades of its existence, Nicholas's security police were not unpopular. At the end of Nikolai Gogol's Inspector General (Revizor, 1836), for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspector appears as a symbol of justice. At any given moment during the second quarter of the century, one or two dozen people - mostly officials, society women, writers, journalists and well-connected nobles - provided sporadic, often gossipy information to the Third Section, sometimes quite
openly.[80]
Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830-1, the period from 1826 to 1840 witnessed almost no incidents of political opposition. The intelligentsia was largely preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues. The execution of five Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826 had surely diverted many from the path of active opposition. As the close association between government and educated public began to break down, in the 1840s, thanks to the expansion of education, increased European influences and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. The Third Section was beginning to inspire dread but still was not an efficient security police institution. It was generally well informed about the private social gatherings of social elites. It could also make incisive assessments of the public mood, as when in early 1855 it warned of war-weariness within the population and urged bringing the Crimean War to a close.[81]
In 1866 in the midst of the Great Reforms, which created an independent judiciary and institutions of local self-government, a terrorist attempt against Alexander II led to minor police reforms: the creation of a forty-man security force (okhrannaia strazha) to protect the emperor and of special bureaus for security policing (Okhrannoe otdelenie) and regular criminal investigation (Sys- knoe otdelenie). Although the government appears to have intended earnestly to combat both grave regular and political crime, the robust development of political crime over the next several decades caused the lion's share of resources available for policing to flow to the security bureau. Within a decade and a half, it became the cornerstone of the security police system. Later in the year, the Gendarme Corps was reorganised, its staff increased. Finally, in 1868 a network of twenty-eight 'observation posts' (nabliudatel'nye punkty) was created in fourteen provinces.[82]
In 1869, before the onset of anything like systematic government repression, Mikhail Bakunin and S. G. Nechaev, in their 'Revolutionary Catechism', urged gathering rebels and brigands into a violent revolutionary force. Nechaev's People's Revenge group, which advocated the systematic destruction of the established social and political order and the physical annihilation of government officials, attracted many young people, four of whom he persuaded in 1869 to murder a confederate.[83] The Nechaev conspirators were tried and mostly exonerated, promptingthe government in 1871 to empower gendarmes to investigate state-crime cases and the justice minister in consultation with the director of the Third Section to propose administrative punishments in these cases. Until 1904, therefore, the majority of state-crime cases were handled administratively.
The next opposition movement was non-violent. In spring and summer 1874, thousands of young idealists, dressed as peasants and some trained in rustic craft and skills, set out to the countryside to bring light to, and learn from, the peasantry. Russian educated youths had 'gone to the people'. Hundreds were arrested and eventually tried, but the defendants won public sympathy. Those who remained committed to political opposition either fled abroad or went 'underground'. Among the latter, some remained covertly in villages; others embraced political terrorism. The first of these terrorist-conspirators, calling themselves Land and Freedom, began in 1877 to carry out acts of violence against senior officials. When a jury acquitted Vera Zasulich, who freely confessed to attempting to murder a prominent official in 1878, the government deprived people accused of committing attacks on government officials of the right to a jury trial. The terrorists countered with more attacks and the government with more emergency measures.5
Yet the security police, using primitive methods of surveillance, were no match for the terrorists: only in the 1870s did the police begin to build up a registry of political suspects (the police in Vienna for a half-century had been registering the entire population of the Austrian Empire). Moreover, the terrorists formed a tightly organised, highly disciplined, though small, band of almost religiously devoted crusaders who launched attack after attack. In desperation the police arrested thousands of (mostly non-violent) young radicals, thus alienatingthe educated public who therefore occasionally abetted the terrorists. After several attempts, their organisation - now called People's Will - assassinated Tsar Alexander II in March 1881.
80
See Sidney Monas,
81
This chapter draws on my
82
See I. V Orzhekhovskii,
83
On all the radical movements of this era, see Franco Venturi,