Reflecting on the Russian Revolution
REG NAULTY reviews Antony Beevor’s book on the Russian Revolution.
The Russian writer Konstantin Paustovsky famously remarked that the great Russian humanist intelligentsia, who included Pushkin and Herzen, Tolstoy and Chekov, knew how to create high spiritual values.
But, with few exceptions, they proved helpless at creating the organisation of a state. The Russian intelligentsia may not have been helpful, but there was enough collective wisdom in Russia to know what to do.
As Antony Beevor has explored in his thoroughly researched and well-written book, Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921, after the collapse of the Tsarist state, Russia needed a Constituent Assembly. All the key decisions about laws, the political system and the ownership of land would be made by that gathering.
The Assembly’s membership was, in fact, determined by public vote. The Bolsheviks received only a quarter. Another party, the Social Revolutionary Party, received 38 per cent of the vote, although this party was split between the right-wing Social Revolutionaries and the left-wing members who voted with the Bolsheviks.
Early in the actual meeting of the Assembly, a Bolshevik delegate demanded that it recognise the All Russian Soviet as the Supreme Power.
Subsequent speakers studiously avoided the demand. The meeting dragged on. Lenin had stacked the visitors’ gallery with his supporters and instructed them to make their presence felt, which they loudly did.
Late in the proceedings, a Bolshevik delegate announced that, by refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the All Russian Soviet, the Constituent Assembly was a counter-revolutionary organisation.
All the Bolsheviks then left the hall, followed by the Social Revolutionaries. Sailors then surrounded the deputies with rifles raised. A deputy hurriedly proposed that they adjourn, which they did. The Assembly never met again.
What Lenin had contemptuously called “bourgeois democracy” had not lasted 12 hours, signifying the death of the liberal and socialist intelligentsia.
Lenin had believed from the outset that a civil war was needed to consolidate the power of the Communist Party. When it became clear that the Communists intended to persecute the class enemy, armed opposition began to form. Lenin would have his civil war.
Observers of the early Lenin did not paint a favourable picture. Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), a much-read writer in the revolutionary period, was struck by his low opinion of humanity in general and the way he saw individuals as completely expendable objects.
Maxim Gorky, who knew Lenin, wrote that he was “a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the life of the proletariat. He predicted that Lenin would lead the country into a protracted anarchy followed by a no-less-bloody reaction.” He was right.
The Whites were to have serious built-in problems, one of which was their political composition – social revolutionaries on the left, the Cadets, centre right and the monarchists.
Beevor believes the failure of the Whites was similar to that of the left in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, the fractious anti-fascist alliance could not hope to compete against Franco’s disciplined and militarised regime, and the Whites’ loose coalition had little hope against a single-minded communist dictatorship.
In some respects, the Whites were their own worst enemy. They had potential allies in the Finns, the Poles, the Estonians, the Latvians and the Lithuanians – all of whom were ready to fight for their independence, and did.
But the Whites would not join them, since they stood for the restoration of the old Tsarist empire in which all of these countries were parts.
The physical size of Russia presented its own problems. The different White armies of Kolchak in Siberia, Denikin in the south and Yudenich in the Baltic had never been able to co-ordinate operations. Communications were too poor and the railways insufficiently maintained.
A particularly disturbing feature of the Civil War was the Jewish persecutions. It is estimated that there were 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine in the Civil War, with some 50,000 to 60,000 Jews killed by both sides.
The Times correspondent in South Russia wrote to the Foreign Office and Churchill: “You can have no idea of the bitterness against the Jews right through Russia. Bolshevism is identified in everybody’s mind with Jewish rule”.
Up to about 12 million were killed in the Civil War. Episodes of appalling cruelty compare with those of the Holocaust. It is surprising that more voices were not raised in protest.
Reg Naulty is a philosopher.
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