For the time being, though, from September 1917 onwards the country was not governed and looked ungovernable. Only a movement that supported the construction of a strong state could save it. But one candidate for the task – the democratic Left – was in decline. It had no armed forces at its disposal and took no initiatives. Having been certain that the country was ready for a liberal democracy, and nothing else, and having failed to realize that the liberals themselves did not believe in this prospect, it refused to acknowledge its error or pose an obvious question: What was Russia ready for? For their part, the liberals were very weak and saw no alternative to making common cause with the Whites, for only an iron fist could save the country.
My intention is not to denigrate these people, most of them honourable men caught in a historical cul-de-sac. Many of the future victors would also crack their heads (sometimes literally) on all these problems, starting with the same dilemma: What was Russia ready for?
The pre-parliament’s inability to come up with anything was chronic. It offered a foretaste of what would happen in the Constituent Assembly after its inaugural session on 19 January 1918, under the presidency of V. Chernov, who was completely discredited even in his own party (Socialist Revolutionaries), let alone outside it. The forces that had supported the Provisional Government were no more capable of producing a new leadership team in January 1918 than they had been in September 1917. By then, their political potential was completely exhausted and they had also lost any support among the military, especially after the disastrous results of the July 1917 offensive ordered by Kerensky. When they convened the following January in the Constituent Assembly elected in October, they were already a spent force. Yet such an assembly, which was something completely novel in Russia, was incapable of effecting a historical turn without the combined support of the popular masses and the troops. It did not enjoy the support of the soviets (including the military soviets), and those who had elected it in October had already forgotten all about it by January, so fast did the scenery change on the stage of history. The Bolsheviks were not the only ones who wanted to send this Constituent Assembly packing. Had they represented a unified force at the time, the Whites would have done the same. And the Cadets, the supposedly quintessential ‘bourgeois-democratic’ party, had no use for it either: they held only 17 of the some 800 seats and the divided Left that dominated the Assembly was of no interest to them.[7]
In January 1918, the central committee of the Cadet party adopted a resolution stating that it was ‘neither necessary nor advisable’ to demand the restoration of the dissolved Constituent Assembly, because it was incapable of discharging the duties assigned it and hence of restoring order in Russia.[8] Such was the logic of those who longed for a ‘strong hand’. The Cadets looked for such a figure among the right-wing military, because they did not believe in a democratic solution at this stage, at a time when Russia must continue to fight alongside her allies and in any event was not ready for real change. Thus their response to the actual needs of a country in danger of disintegrating was to set off in search of a promising general.
As has been indicated, the background to this analysis lay in Miliukov’s ideas about Russia’s structural weakness: its socially composite character made it prone to crisis, which threatened it with disintegration. But this analysis should have led its author to dwell on the causes of the fall of Tsarism and be more sceptical as to the potential of a right-wing military dictator. One of Miliukov’s reasons for trying to keep Nicholas II on his throne in 1917 was that ‘we cannot afford to change national symbols in times of turmoil’, but the Tsar had disappointed him. His subsequent decision to opt for a right-wing dictator was based on an incorrect socio-political analysis of what such a figure implied: dictators do not usually float above social reality for the duration of their restorative mission. The social forces behind each of the generals on whom Miliukov successively pinned his hopes were already basically spent. Miliukov later described the predicament his party found itself in when cooperating with the Whites: some of its members felt out of place, whereas others were perfectly at ease in this camp – an obvious reason for them to renounce their allegiances and split the party.
In September 1917, some Bolshevik leaders believed that the situation was desperate and that the Provisional Government was bankrupt. But the line of action to adopt was still a matter of debate. After some hesitation, in September 1917 Lenin adjudged that Russia was experiencing a ‘revolutionary situation’ which was not be missed. This concept – i.e. Lenin’s definition of this type of crisis – was crucial in his thinking. In the absence of visible symptoms of a revolutionary crisis, seeking to take power was sheer adventurism. Assessing such situations accurately is not easy, and Lenin had erred on several occasions: when the whole of Europe was tottering on its foundations, ‘revolutionary situations’ could be detected at will. But Lenin admitted his errors and sought to rectify them. In the autumn of 1917, things seemed clear in Russia: the formula for a revolutionary crisis – that is to say, a situation where the ruling classes can no longer rule and the popular classes will no longer tolerate their lot – obtained. The growing power vacuum could only be filled by a left-wing force or forces (a conclusion categorically rejected, as we have seen, by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries); otherwise, the monarchist Right might step in. A sizeable group of Bolshevik leaders, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, agreed with the characterization of the crisis, but was in favour of a coalition government containing the parties active in the soviets. For them, this was a sine qua non of any takeover of power by socialists. But they were no more successful in securing the cooperation of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries than the latter had been in their overtures to the elusive bourgeoisie.
Lenin and Trotsky did not believe that all they had to do to establish a post-capitalist regime was to proclaim a socialist revolution. The starting point of Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’ was the premise that Russia on its own was far from ripe for socialism. For Lenin too, the prospect of socialism could only be envisaged on a European scale. After October, he left open the issue of how to characterize the new regime and how it might – and should – evolve. At all events, what is certain is that following his initial disillusionment with the prospect of rapid capitalist development in Tsarist Russia, he switched to a much more sober thesis about Russia’s ‘combined development’ (Trotsky’s term), with the coexistence of ‘the most backward agriculture, the most uncouth countryside – and yet also the most advanced industrial and financial capitalism’.[9] Obviously, this was not a good starting point for any socialist project: even after the bastions of financial and industrial capitalism had been seized, the bulk of the population would remain historically too remote from the first steps leading to post-capitalism. Lenin’s second, more realistic assessment of Russia’s socio-economic system as ‘multi-layered’, which may have been inspired by Miliukov’s historiography, did not make the task any less complicated: the prospect of socialism remained just as remote.
7
O. N. Znamenskii,