21
BACKWARDNESS AND RELAPSE
We have established a link between the Russian revolution and the general European crisis unleashed by the First World War. Some have argued – even categorically so – that without the war, the Tsarist system would have survived. This line of argument is strengthened if we recall that the 1905 revolution seems to have been triggered by Russia’s defeat at Japanese hands. We do not know what would have happened in Russia had there been no world war, or had Russia been able to stay out of it. The latter scenario is of course utterly counter-factual, and the only thing that can be claimed with certainty is that wars, whilst not the only determinate causes, accelerate the collapse of regimes that prove incapable of winning them. The Tsarist regime had already lost wars in the nineteenth century and its defeat in 1905 by Japan – a seemingly much weaker power – was immediately followed by a revolution. Examination of the causes of these defeats leads to the conclusion that Russia was in a state of crisis that could only deepen before and during the major cataclysm of 1914–18. After 1905, nothing had been done to redress the situation and no adequate preparations were made for any subsequent war. Social problems were left to fester and the regime itself (its way of governing) was in an advanced state of decay and had lost contact with reality. If this diagnosis is correct, then it was not the war that toppled Tsarism. It was already undermined by a crisis, and it was this that led to its military defeats and subsequent decomposition. The fact that other, more modern parties and social groups, which should have been able to assume control, failed to prevent the regime’s collapse is further proof of the existence of a grave systemic crisis. This condemned to impotence the narrow Tsarist establishment, the elites who represented alternative middle-class and inter-class sympathies, and also the still embryonic multi-party system brought about by Russia’s development since the beginning of the century. In circumstances of military defeat and an ever more feeble government, the disgruntled soldiers and humiliated officers of a defeated army played a decisive role in the Civil War and the victory of the Reds. This was one of the key features of the whole upheaval of 1917–21 – not to mention the fact that those soldiers were overwhelmingly peasants.
It is important to stress the impact of the military factor in these years. The effects of the First World War and the Civil War were the subject of a roundtable discussion by scholars in Moscow in 1993, which unearthed new data in the archives. Its conclusions are of interest.
A first paradox is that the war, which was initially a unifying factor among considerable sections of society, was also something in whose absence February 1917 would not have occurred. At the outset, the war kept millions of soldiers in the trenches, but as it unfolded it increasingly fractured society. By creating 2 million deserters and arming the nation, it supplied the fuel without which the Civil War would have been impossible. In this respect, pointing the finger at the Bolsheviks makes no sense: they contributed to the downfall of the old regime, but the objective conditions of its collapse were not of their making. More than 15 million soldiers served on the eastern front, around 3 million of them in auxiliary duties – more than the French and British armies combined. They represented the bulk of the nation’s workforce, people aged between twenty and forty and hailing from all social groups – in a word, the country’s lifeblood. On the eve of February 1917 there were 10 million soldiers in the armed forces, 7.2 million of them in the regular army. This means that in two and a half years of war, about 5 million of those mobilized and active had died in combat or as a result of their wounds, or had been taken prisoner, fled, or been invalided out. Almost one in three! These were staggering losses – much higher than anything suffered by the other belligerents.
Russia’s soldiers paid with their blood for their country’s technological backwardness and lack of preparedness. They had to hump heavy loads; they had to toil hard; and they were poorly fed: amid a dramatic shortage of all kinds of supplies, the army received no more than between 30 and 60 per cent of its peacetime requirements. The enormous military losses profoundly altered the socio-political situation in the country. Masses of people now had access to arms and their psychology was that of front-line troops. A large number of regular army officers and category one reservists perished. They were replaced by second and third category reservists, and by men who were over the age for military service and who were not really fit to serve or ready to risk their lives. The highest losses were recorded in the elite units (Cossacks, imperial guard) and among regular officers and sergeants – the army’s backbone. Wartime ensigns and reserve officers had also been hard hit. This was how Tsarism lost its main prop: the army. The monumental mistake made by Kerensky in July 1917, when he threw the troops into a new offensive, contributed still further to the demoralization of this mass of armed peasants, who were soon going to disperse throughout the country with their weapons. They would swell the ranks of all kinds of bands, whether of ‘greens’ (neither red nor white) or mere bandits, while providing the peasantry with the weapons and leadership it needed to seize the land from the landowners and redistribute it. This was a major contribution to turning the crisis into a deepening catastrophe.[1]
These are important points. Nothing is more dangerous and devastating than a demoralized army collapsing into banditry, and it was on these masses of deserting soldiers that the two sides would draw to conduct the Civil War. If, as we have seen, the NCOs were workers and the soldiers predominantly peasants, the officers derived from the middle classes, the intelligentsia and the nobility. The Whites rallied to their cause officers, cadets, and what remained of the Cossack units; the Reds counted on party members, factory workers, a sizeable contingent of NCOs from the Tsarist army, and even – more surprisingly – many officers.
The fact that defeated soldiers played such an important role in the decomposition of the old regime and the creation of a new one is further evidence that the result of the war was attributable to the regime’s dilapidation, not to misfortune. It also confirms the plebeian character of the revolution. It is puzzling that the authors I have drawn on here refer to the ‘soldiery’ without mentioning that they were peasants. In the introduction to his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky describes it as a predominantly peasant phenomenon, involving the rural masses whether in or out of military uniform.
RUSSIA’S BACKWARDNESS AND LENINISM
The picture of post-revolutionary Russia we sketched in Part One (Marxist intellectuals, an enormous mass of semi-literate party members and even cadres, breakneck industrialization, and a leadership cult straight out of an old political repertoire) brings into focus the issue of Russian backwardness.
The key syndrome in this underdevelopment was the chasm (i.e. the historical gulf) between the elites and the bulk of a still rural population. In itself a cause of crises, this distance, which was deeply rooted in Russian history, could only exacerbate the socio-political crises that did occur. The tendency of a state to respond to problems with repression rather than flexibility and compromise is a familiar scenario, and it is not impossible that Stalin reasoned thus.
The other dimension of the same problem was the historical distance between an underdeveloped empire and the developed countries. In such a situation, the problems to be resolved are defined both by the ‘advanced’ countries and by those that have to catch up with them. The more powerful the imperative to quicken the pace, the more crucial the state’s role becomes – especially when this scenario has long been operative in the country’s history. In Russia, the problem was especially acute because of the lack of ‘cohesion’ (tseplenie – a term used by Miliukov) between the various social strata, who geographically inhabited the same territory, but who did not live in the same century economically, socially and culturally. Lenin had clearly identified this problem when he distinguished between five socio-economic strata (or structures), ranging from the landless peasant who still used a wooden plough to the ultra-modern financial and industrial groups in Moscow or Petrograd. These structures (uklady) were used in the USSR itself by critical historians to challenge the thesis defended by party conservatives in the 1960s – namely that the 1917 revolution was a socialist revolution and the system a bona fide developed socialism. These historians, who advanced a different interpretation of 1917, started out from Lenin’s ‘structures’ to show that the Russian revolution was not and could not have been socialist, implying that the ruling conservatives were making false claims. This debate occurred during a conference at Sverdlovsk, and readers will not be surprised to hear that the historians lost their jobs, under pressure from Trapeznikov, whom we have already encountered.
1
See ‘Grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii – kruglyi stol’, in