Introduction
H
undreds of books have been written about the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Why should anyone want to produce still another? During the years since I began working on the present book, this question has been asked of me many times.
My interest in studying and writing about the October revolution stems partly from that event's inherent drama and monumental historical significance. In Russia in 1917 the ultraradical Bolshevik party emerged from obscurity to direct the overthrow of the Western-style Provisional Government and to establish the first national communist political system. These events occurred during the eight months that followed the collapse of the centuries-old tsarist regime, in the third year of Russia's catastrophic involvement in a devastating European war. Russia was then the third largest country in the world, with a population of more than 165 million occupying an area three times as large as the continental United States and bigger than China and India together. I have long felt that existing accounts of this seminal chapter in modern Russian and, indeed, in world history do not do it justice.
Further stimulating my attraction to 1917 Russia as a subject for research and writing is the failure of existing works to answer many key questions relating to the October revolution and, most importantly, to explain satisfactorily why things turned out as they did. Many books on the revolution are memoirs written by participants in the events described; these personal recollections, though often valuable and fascinating, inevitably present a one-sided view of the revolution, either passionately sympathetic or profoundly hostile, depending on which side of the political fence the author was on in 1917.
Historians in the Soviet Union have produced an avalanche of studies on 1917. Many of these works, particularly those written in the relatively free 1920s and during the Khrushchev period, contain a wealth of illuminating factual data from previously untapped archives. But the requirement that writers in the Soviet Union conform to officially prescribed interpretations of history, influenced strongly by contemporary political considerations, limits the overall value of their work.
Outside the Soviet Union several monographs on important aspects of the revolution have appeared in recent years; foremost among these are the works of Oliver H. Radkey, William G. Rosenberg, Ronald G. Suny, Marc Ferro, George Katkov, and Rex Wade.1 Nonetheless we still do not have a reliable history of the Provisional Government or of the Russian economy in the revolutionary period. We know little about the impact of millions of war-weary soldiers on Russian politics in 1917, or about the development of the revolution in provincial areas, or, for that matter, about the role of the peasantry or of the growing Russian working class in the revolution's course. In fact, the only broadly focused Western investigation of the October revolution based on intensive research in primary sources remains the first volume of William Henry Chamberlin's The Russian Revolution, 1911-1921.2 Pioneering in its time and still of great value, Chamberlin's study was written in the early 1930s, before a large body of source material germane to an understanding of the revolution became readily accessible to Western scholars.
In this book, I have elected to focus attention on the revolution in Petrograd3 for several related reasons. First, Petrograd was, after all, the capital. In the Russian empire, with its long tradition of strong, arbitrary rule from the center, the political situation in Petrograd, especially control of the institutions and symbols of national power, was of immense significance in determining the course of the revolution throughout the country. In addition to being the governmental hub, Petrograd, with a war-inflated population of 2.7 million in 1917, was the country's most important commercial and industrial center. For this reason and also because so much more information is available on Petrograd than on other major Russian cities in 1917, analysis of political, social, and economic developments there provide particularly worthwhile insights into the course of the revolution in urban Russia generally. Finally, because in 1917 the national headquarters of the Bolshevik Party and the center of Bolshevik activities were in Petrograd, it is there that one can best study both the party's operations from top to bottom and the way in which the Bolsheviks interacted with the masses.
But isn't Petrograd the one Russian city that has been treated extensively in Western literature on the revolution, one might fairly ask. True enough. Yet, despite all that has been written about 1917 in general and "Red Petrograd" in particular, we still do not have a full, reliable account of the revolution there. Two relatively recent studies, Sergei Melgunov's The Bolshevik Seizure of Power4' and Robert V. Daniels's Red October,5 while very useful, are limited in that both center chiefly on the period just before, during, and—in the case of Melgunov—right after the Provisional Government's overthrow; major developments in the summer and early fall of 1917, an appreciation of which is essential for an understanding of what happened in October, receive scant attention. Moreover, the political behavior of Petrograd workers, soldiers, and sailors, and its impact on the course of the revolution, are not taken into account, the events of October being presented largely as a disorganized struggle between two similarly indecisive and inept combatants—the Kerensky government and the Bolshevik leadership.
If the present book helps to fill this deficiency in Western historiography and, in so doing, stimulates readers to view the events of 1917 with new perspective, it will have accomplished its purpose. My primary aim has been to reconstruct, as fully and accurately as possible, the development of the "revolution from below" and the outlook, activity, and situation of the Bolshevik party organization in Petrograd at all levels between February and October 1917. In the process I have tried to clarify the vital relationship between these two central aspects of the revolution and the eventual Bolshevik success.
Extensive research along these lines has prompted me to question many of the basic assumptions of historians in both the Soviet Union and the West regarding the character and sources of strength of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 and, indeed, the very nature of the October revolution in Petrograd. Historians in the Soviet Union have stressed historical inevitability and the role of a tightly knit revolutionary party led by Lenin in accounting for the outcome of the October revolution, while many Western scholars have viewed this event either as an historical accident or, more frequently, as the result of a well-executed coup d etat without significant mass support; I find, however, that a full explanation of the Bolshevik seizure of power is much more complex than any of these interpretations suggest.
Studying the aspirations of factory workers, soldiers, and sailors as expressed in contemporary documents, I find that these concerns corresponded closely to the program of political, economic, and social reform put forth by the Bolsheviks at a time when all other major political parties were widely discredited because of their failure to press hard enough for meaningful internal changes and an immediate end to Russia's participation in the war. As a result, in October the goals of the Bolsheviks, as the masses understood them, had strong popular support.
In Petrograd in 1917 the Bolshevik Party bore little resemblance to the by-and-large united, authoritarian, conspiratorial organization effectively controlled by Lenin depicted in most existing accounts. To be sure, the party's course toward an early socialist revolution was strongly influenced by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Born in Simbirsk in 1870, the son of a school inspector of minor nobility, Lenin, a lawyer by profession, had entered the Russian social democratic movement in the 1890s and quickly committed himself to the goal of organizing the Russian working class into a political force capable of leading the struggle to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. In 1903, almost singlehandedly, he had precipitated the famous split of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party into its radical Bolshevik and moderate Menshevik factions, chiefly over the issue of the nature and objectives of a Marxist revolutionary party in Russia. In the repressive conditions then prevailing, Lenin had sought the creation of a tightly knit, centrally directed organization of disciplined, militant revolutionaries, rather than the more democratic mass workers' party envisioned by the Mensheviks.6 Only a highly professional party, Lenin then reasoned, would be capable of fulfilling revolutionary tasks and of protecting Russian social democracy from decimation by the authorities and from reformism.