The Russian Revolution

The Russian

Revolution

DUAL POWER: THE DYNAMICS OF RADICALIZATION

Initially, this division ran conveniently between Right and Left, pitting the moderate liberalism of the Provisional Government against the socialisms of the Soviet. The Government would organize elections and a constituent assembly, establish the rule of law, and generally implement the bourgeois revolution; the Soviet would handle practical administration and secure the strongest benefits for the working class in the parliamentary system now to be created. The two would march separately in the same direction.

Popular hopes, however, outpaced the limited goals the Soviets early leadership set for the revolution. The peasantry needed immediate land reform; workers wanted a say in the economy. Workers also expected so- viets to be institutionalized in the constitution, in a way hard to square with a parliamentary system. More important, the national defensism advocated by the Soviet Executive was out of step with the peoples mood. On the factory floor, in the streets, and among the soldiers, attitudes were cut and dried: end the war and bring the armies home.

Social polarization rapidly exploded the political framework of bour- geois revolution. Instead of responding to pressure from below, the Soviets leaders entrenched behind avowedly moderate goals. After the Miliukov crisis in April 1917, leading socialists joined the coalition to broaden its base, only to suffer the inevitable burden of its failures.³ In theory, the Lefts new portfoliosministries of labor, agriculture, food supply, posts and telegraphs, justice, and wargave ample scope for revolutionary initiative. But the new incumbents were hamstrung by limited readings of the revo- lutions potential, while even modest reforms remained blocked. Just as popular opinion turned against the Provisional Government, therefore, moderate socialists became inveigled into defending its policies, disastrously compromising their popular credentials. Herein lay the true key to the April crisis, the unresolved problem of dual authority, social polarization, and the revolutions future goals and direction.⁴

AprilOctober 1917 was a story of escalating contradictions. Popular expectations outgrew the governments intentions on every front; and as Russian society mobilized, the governments capacity dwindled. By simply seizing the lands, peasants indicted its dissembling over land reform. When the government failed to bring peace, it lost the loyalty of the troops. The June military offensive was a disaster. Morale collapsed. Popular demon- strations followed on 18 June, with massive disorders on 35 July, the July

Days. The Kornilov rising of 2528 August, a counterrevolutionary coup by the recently appointed commander-in-chief, was defeated by working- class resistance, with a resurgence of popular revolutionary hopes and fur- ther damage to government. Most of all, amid general economic collapse, the honeymoon of workers and employers expired. Organized workers in- creasingly assumed practical control through factory committees and the Soviets coordination. On all three frontsland, army, and industrypres- sure for resolving dual power in favor of the Soviet reached a crescendo. Following the April crisis, the group consistently urging that resolution was the Bolsheviks. Immediately after February, the Bolsheviks had joined other socialists in loose coalition around the Soviet. But with Lenins return from exile on 3 April, this abruptly changed. Next day, he read his April Theses to a mixed socialist audience and urged for the first time pushing the revolution into a socialist stage: The peculiarity of the current moment in Russia consists in the transition from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie as a result of the insufficient con- sciousness and organization of the proletariat, to its second stage, which should give the power into the hands of the proletariat and poorest strata of the peasantry. The present regime would never end the war, implement reform, and restore economic life. Anew state was needed: Not a parlia- mentary republica return to that from the Soviet of Workers Deputies would be a step backwardbut a republic of Soviets of Workers, Poor Peasants, and Peasants Deputies throughout the country, growing from below upwards. The economy would be reorganized by nationalizing land, converting large estates into model farms, creating a single national bank, and taking production and distribution into soviet control. This would ignite revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries of western Europe. Bolsheviks should campaign for this among the workers until a Soviet majority was secured. An insurrection to seize power could then be

launched.⁵

Lenins audience listened in disbelief. On 8 April, the partys Petrograd committee rejected his Theses by 13 votes to 2, with one abstention. It was only after intensive persuasion that majorities swung around: first in the Bolshevik Petrograd City Conference (1422 April) and then in the All- Russian Party Conference immediately following. Debates centered on dual power. For Lenin, this could only be transitional, inherently conflict ridden. Victory of one authority over another was unavoidable: There cannot be two powers in the state.⁶ The Bolsheviks should effect transfer of sover- eignty to the Soviet, which could then supervise the revolutions second stage. But for Lenins opponents, this was adventurist. The bourgeois rev- olution had not run its course. Russia was not ripe for immediate transition to socialism. The Soviet could exercise the most watchful control over the Provisional Government but certainly not overthrow it. The debate was settled decisively in Lenins favor. Henceforth, the slogan All Power to the Soviets sharply divided Bolsheviks from the other Left.

By JuneJuly, popular frustration was turning into class anger. The July Days provided frenetic impetus: the first real crackdown against popular militancy also loosened upper-class inhibitions, exciting popular fears of a counterrevolutionan anxiety soon vindicated by Kornilovs abortive coup. The economy deteriorated to nearly systemic collapse. Workers ex- perienced this as inflation-driven pressure on real wages, factory shut- downs, shortages, and government ineffectualitywhich they increasingly attributed to bourgeois interests. Over the summer, economic crises be- came linked in the popular imagination to capitalist sabotage. Employ- ers impatience with revolutionary militancy gave grist to this mill. Ano- torious statement to the Trade and Industrial Society on 3 August by the leading Moscow financier and industrialist Pavel Riabushinskii brought class enmity to a head: It will take the bony hand of hunger and national destitution to grasp at the throat of these false friends of the people, these members of various committees and soviets, before they will come to their senses.⁷

For socialists advocating national unity, social polarization had disas- trous effects. But as the only group untainted by the Provisional Govern- ments drift, the Bolsheviks rode it into power. When the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets convened in early June, Bolsheviks were still weaker than Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (105 delegates, as against 248 and 245, in a total of 822). But JuneJuly worked compellingly in their favor. Kornilovs defeat was the final increment of radicalization. The Pe- trograd and Moscow Soviets voted the Bolshevik program, their executives passing quickly under Bolshevik control. The partys membership con- firmed this ascent: in February, it numbered only 2,000 in Petrograd and

600 in Moscow, but by October the figures were 60,000 and 70,000, in a national total of 350,000.⁸ With the government paralyzed, the other so- cialists compromised, the masses keyed for action, and the Soviet apparatus firmly under Bolshevik control, the seizure of power, on the night of 24

25 October 1917, proved relatively simple. MENSHEVISM IN 1917: REVOLUTION BY THE BOOK

Russian events exercised decisive influence on the Left elsewhere, stamping its image of what a socialist revolution should be, positively or negatively. One view saw the pathology of backwardness. Tsarism suffered beneath the contradictions of modernization and collapsed from the added strains of war. In the resulting chaos, power fell to the group ruthless enough to impose its will. In anti-Communist versions, centralism became the logical expression of Bolshevik ideology, with Lenin as villain-in-chief. It de- scended from the Jacobin dictatorship via the insurrectionary vanguardism of nineteenth-century conspiratorial traditions. That lineage, severed by

Western social democracy, had a second life under Russian conditions. The key to Bolshevik success, accordingly, was the model of the tightly disci- plined party of professional revolutionaries Lenin presented in What Is to Be Done (1902), allowing manipulation of the masses via superior orga- nization.⁹ Russian backwardness plus Bolshevik centralism fundamentally distinguished the situation from the West.¹⁰

In certain respects, Russian circumstances followed the West. Despite the unaltered repressiveness of tsarist rule, in 1914 social patriotism was certainly not missing from the Russian scene. Plekhanov called for national defense: unless German militarism was stopped, European freedoms would be extinguished, retarding socialisms chances by decades. This entailed all the compromises of right-wing socialists in Britain, France, and Germany, made all the nastier by imperial Russias reactionary character. It placed Plekhanov and his cothinkers against the very movement they had worked to create. Plekhanov embraced this contradiction with shocking enthusi- asm: If I were not old and sick I would join the army. To bayonet our German comrades would give me great pleasure.¹¹

The real test of the civil truce in imperial Russia would be the openings toward trade union recognition and parliamentary reform promised by the war. Early on, there was reason to hope.¹² Two-thirds of the Duma joined a group from the State Council in the Progressive Bloc, which in late August

1914 gave the tsar a program of national unity. This requested minimal liberalizing of the cabinet: clemency for political and religious offenders; relaxing of police measures; Jewish emancipation; concessions to Poles, Ukrainians, and Finns; equality of rights for peasants; geographical exten- sion and legal strengthening of the zemstvos. This would ground imperial government in what existed of Russian civil society, in a rudimentary step towards social consensus. The Petrograd War Industries Committee also had limited representation for labor: 10 workers out of 150 members, in- directly elected from factories of over 500 workers. This created the usual dilemmas of participation for the Left, compounded by the continued il- legality of trade unions, the vehicles of corporatism in the West. The Bol- sheviks boycotted. The Mensheviks, in contrast, were divided: the proboy- cott Secretariat in Exile was opposed by sections in Petrograd.

Unattainable under tsarism, democracy to strengthen working-class rights was the Menshevik goal for the revolution. The February Revolution conformed exactly to Menshevik theory: tsarism collapsing from its own immobility, via rising popular pressure and upper-class exasperation. So- cietypublic institutions, bureaucratic and capitalist modernizers, the forces of the Progressive Blochad invited the tsar to broaden the autoc- racys base; he refused; so prewar polarization of state and society resumed. Political revolution became essential to free the way for modernizing. For Mensheviks, this would liberate the potential for capitalism, with all the liberal reformsconstitutional, legal, social, economicconnoting capital- isms rise in the West. The Left would be the democratic watchdog in this

bourgeois revolution. It could not, in the minds of most Mensheviks, push forward to socialism.

This Menshevik reading was perfectly consistent with the Second Inter- nationals main traditions and indeed mirrored reactions to the February Revolution in the social democratic parties of northern Europe. Second International Marxism reflected powerfully deterministic readings of capi- talist accumulation and crisis, after all: capitalism would experience esca- lating structural crises via its own laws of development, reaching a final moment of revolutionary collapse. This encouraged social democrats into both fatalism and certainty. Their parties sought maximum democracy in the existing system, for both short-term reforms and the best positioning when capitalism fell. Like the evolutionist determinism, this parliamentary model implied a peaceful transition to socialism, not barricade revolutions like 1789 or 1848. The pre-1914 tradition stressed building the movement by national organization. Where capitalist societies acquired parliamentary and local government institutions, parties should use them for legal prop- aganda and practical work.

This was the politics Mensheviks pursued. If the 1917 revolution was a bourgeois revolution, then a broadly based legal labor movement was needed, with political and trade union arms, and the social and cultural resources to carry labors cause through the ensuing capitalist transforma- tions. Because of Russias backwardness, and the bourgeoisies pusillanim- ity, the working class would be thrust to the fore. But it could not force things prematurely toward socialism. This Menshevik view required what Kautsky called masterly limitationan activist politics, even leadership of revolutionary coalitions, but observing the limits history imposed: To how great an extent socialism can be introduced must depend upon the degree of ripeness which the country has reached. . . . [A ] backward coun- try can never become a pioneer in the development of socialist form.¹³

The Left should facilitate conditions for socialist possibilities to ripen uprooting backwardness and traditionalism, while preparing the ground for capitalism. When Russian capitalism had matured, perhaps several gen- erations later, the working class could seize its inheritance.

Principled and realistic as an assessment of Russias existing develop- mental resources, this strategy remained doctrinaire, abysmally fitted for the popular mobilization of 1917. The one, Menshevik sense of responsi- bility before History, militated directly against the other, Menshevik re- sponsiveness to popular radicalism. Mensheviks found themselves con- stantly trying to hold popular hopes back, within the bourgeois revolutions normative limits. This applied par excellence to the Soviet. In theory, dual power allowed socialists both to pursue immediate working-class interests and to toughen the bourgeoisies resolution, but without overstepping the revolutions structural limits. But in practice, the working-class movement could never confine itself to a watchdog role. It was drawn ineluctably into

ever greater responsibility for the government per se, not least because lib- eral failures were so dire.

This trapped Mensheviks into a debilitating logic of incorporation. Na- tional defensism was a disastrous policy, because the masses were demand- ing peace. The economy ensnared Mensheviks in the same way. In the factories, city administrations, and economy at large, working-class lead- erships in the soviets, unions, and factory committees were drawn ever further into managing the chaos. In 1917, strengthening the working class under capitalism meant taking responsibility for capitalisms problems, and this carried working-class hopes past the limits Mensheviks set for the rev- olution. The way out was a countervailing logic of popular democratic leadership, where the Left took full responsibility by ditching the liberals and forming an exclusively socialist government. But this was the leap most Mensheviks would never make. It was the soviets and factory councils an emergent infrastructure of working-class self-administrationthat were assuming the tasks of social organization and economic management in

1917. Willy-nilly, the Mensheviks acknowledged this by accepting respon- sibility for government between April and October. But they never drew the further conclusions. They continued substituting for the social force the liberal bourgeoisiethey believed the rightful bearer of the revolution.¹⁴

BOLSHEVISM: MAKING THE REVOLUTION

For Bolshevism in 1917, social polarization was the key. This was a dual process: the autocracys political isolation was increasingly overburdened by a deepening social gap inside the antitsarist camp between privileged and unprivileged, the propertied and the people. Even as political society coalesced into an antitsarist opposition, the working class pulled away from the privileged sectors into generalized confrontation with re- spectable society. Moreover, the new militancys workerist mentalities threatened to maroon moderate socialists on the wrong pole of this devel- oping confrontation. This made 191214 very different from the buildup to the 1905 revolution, when a broad front of the intelligentsia embracing liberals, Marxists, and Populists alike had spoken for the people. By 1914, working-class militancy disordered the simplicity of that earlier antitsarist confrontation.¹⁵

Initially, workers seemed open to cooperation, in an exchange of reform for productivity, ratified by a 10 March accord introducing the eight-hour day, factory committees, and the Central Conciliation Board, drawn equally from Petrograd employers and the Soviet. Strikes slowed, while workers focused on the political arena and other forms of protest. Ritual

cartings-out from the workplace, petitions, demonstrations, and attacks on unpopular officials were aimed more at rectifying abuses and affirming

community values than at stopping production or questioning managerial prerogatives.¹⁶ It was the failure to end the war that prevented this modus vivendi, and by extension the politics of coalition, from stabilizing. Bitterly frustrated antiwar feelings undermined the prospects, not least through the mass presence of a vocal and discontented soldiery, numbering a quarter of a million in Petrograd alone.

In AprilOctober 1917, a graduated radicalization occurred in the scale, forms, and content of working-class unrest. The July Days marked the transition from the politics of revolutionary unity to a more class-divided discourse, in which the governments priorities lurched toward law and order, while employers and workers resumed their mutual suspicions. In the Trade-Industrialist conference of 3 August, its president Riabushinskii denounced the socialists in the government as a pack of charlatans hin- dering the politics of bourgeois stabilization; and by October, after the Kornilov fiasco, amidst ever-worsening economic disintegration, and with the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets now under militant control, workers responded in kind. In SeptemberOctober they struck in vast numbers with far more violence, arresting and abusing managers and owners, blocking the movement of materials and goods, forming Red Guards, and seizing factories. Street actions over food shortages escalated.¹⁷ The politics of so- cial polarization had resumed.

Bolshevism rose to power by organizing this popular radicalization. Bol- shevik success is often reduced to superior organizationin the model of the disciplined, monolithic, highly centralist party of professional revolu- tionaries ascribed to Lenins What Is to Be Done? of 1902. Yet from the moment of Lenins return to Petrograd, Bolshevik strategy evolved through disagreements, whether around Lenins April Theses, in the confusion of the July Days, or in Lev Kamenevs and Grigory Zinovievs opposition to the seizure of power.¹⁸ This atmosphere of debate belies the stereotypical image of the vanguard party. In any case, the conditions of political life in these months, the activist volatility of the masses, and the flooding of the Petrograd party by tens of thousands of workers and soldiers unaware of the esoteric debates of 190214 about organization, rendered the fantasy of a ruthlessly disciplined cadre party absurd. The Bolsheviks success de- rived from their consistent nonparticipation in the government, which gave them access to the revolutionary counterlegitimacy of the Soviet. Unlike their rivals, for whom popular turbulence threatened the revolutions or- derly progress, they wanted to drive the popular movement forward.

Lenins belief that workers would displace the bourgeoisie as the revo- lutions leading force came from the idea of combined and uneven devel- opment. Acrushingly backward society, Russia entered a Europe already dominated by advanced capitalist economies. This gave Russia access to foreign capital, new technologies, and the latest managerial expertise, cap- italist industrys most modern characteristics. But they were grafted onto the worst aspects of backwardness, from a reactionary political structure

to a hopelessly underdeveloped civil society and a vast peasant majority. Because Russian capitalism developed from state intervention and foreign capital, rather than organically from indigenous enterprise, Russias bourgeoisie remained weak. In contrast, because of its physical and eco- nomic concentration, the Russian proletariat was exceptionally strong. This enhanced working-class cohesion, boosted class consciousness, and gave workers central political importance.

So far, little separated this from Menshevism. Two factors allowed Leninand Trotsky, the arguments earlier pioneerto claim that workers themselves could seize power. First, the dynamics of working-class mobi- lization left the revolutionary party no choice; workers would always de- mand socialist measures, and any party seeking to hold them back would be swept aside. Second, the global process of uneven and combined devel- opment delivered the material conditions for this course. As Trotsky said:

it is possible for the workers to come to power in an economically back- ward country sooner than in an advanced country.¹⁹ The surrounding backwardness of Russian society and the bourgeoisies political weakness, plus Moscows and Petrograds disproportionate primacy as political, ad- ministrative, and cultural capitals where workers were also concentrated, gave the working class a political capacity beyond its numbers. Thus, the numbers, the concentration, the culture, and the political importance of the industrial proletariat determined its leading role. This was the theory of

permanent revolution.²⁰

Yet, however advanced in itself, the working class was still a minority in an overwhelmingly peasant country. For Lenin, revolution in the coun- tryside complemented workers mobilization in the towns. This meant not only commitment to land reform but also to its immediate implementation, which neither the Mensheviks nor Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) could accept. This was the worst failure of the non-Bolshevik Left. Under a decree of 21 April 1917, land committees were preparing agrarian reform, but government intransigently deferred action. Bolsheviks demanded transfer- ing the land immediately to the peasants, without compensation, and with- out waiting for the Constituent Assembly. Lenins commitment to the poor peasant, formulated after 1905, was prominently displayed in the April Theses. It was voiced consistently during 1917. In late August, he took the

model decree of the SRs (compiled from 242 demands from the All- Russian Peasants Congress in May) and stitched it to the Bolsheviks an- ticapitalist program. He endorsed peasant land seizures, and the Bolshevik governments first two acts on 26 Octoberthe decree on peace, the decree on landwere a ringing validation of the previous nine months frustrated peasant aspirations.²¹

This propeasant orientation shouldnt be overstated. Bolshevism had no members beyond the towns. It had no practical, visible presence in the countryside. Lenins own thinking on agrarian policy went through many turns, before and during 1917. However positive Bolshevik attitudes to the

peasantry were during the revolution, the later 1920s were a different story. Yet in 1917 itself, their record was singular. They alone took the peasants seriously.²² Even more, Lenin grasped the dynamics of radicalism in the countryside. In this, the Bolsheviks sharply departed from the socialist tra- dition. Second International socialists rarely troubled themselves with the peasantry. Even when social democrats were supported by the peasantry, as in Menshevik Georgia in 190521, they misrecognized this sociology.²³

Given this blind spot, Lenins opening of Bolshevik politics to the agrarian question was crucial for the partys popular legitimacy in 1917.

Bolsheviks also grasped the importance of soviets. Despite his critique of workers spontaneity in What Is to Be Done? Lenin saw immediately the Soviets significance in October 1905: on their own initiative, workers had fashioned a new revolutionary democracy. The soviet became the pri- mary arena for revolutionaries to intervene, and Lenins slogan of All Power to the Soviets identified Bolshevik strategy. Whatever Lenins per- sonal sincerity, it was in the sovietsand the factory councils, where Bol- sheviks won their earliest elections in 1917that Bolshevism secured its democratic credentials. Crucially, the Petrograd Soviets newly created Mil- itary Revolutionary Committee also organized the seizure of power in Oc- tober, rather than the Bolsheviks acting in their own name. Soviet democ- racy provided the legitimacy that carried the Bolsheviks into power.

Less appealing was Lenins belief in splittinghis drive for polemical clarification, brutally distancing his rivals. Accentuating differences typified his modus operandi, both in the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903 and the intense politicking of 190714.²⁴ It also described Zimmerwald, where he aimed to split the Second International and create an alternative revolutionary center. It was a well-honed strategy by 1917, stressing non- cooperation with Mensheviks and SRs from the start, freeing Bolshevisms revolutionary mandate in October from the government fiascos of the pre- vious six months. This was also Lenins willingness to exercise power given the chance, his absolute determination to seize the revolutionary moment. In contrast, Mensheviks made almost a virtue out of hesitancy. They held their imagination back, tethered to the limits of the bourgeois revolution. But when Tseretelli famously insisted at the All-Russian Soviet Congress in June 1917 that no party was willing to say: Give the power into our hands, go away, we will take your place, Lenin defiantly contradicted him from the hall.²⁵ This was a powerful unity of conviction and action, the certainty that revolution could be made to happen. It made the Bolshevik Partys accelerating popular momentum in JulyOctober a magnet for all the revolutions frustrated activism.

In Bolshevik internationalism, pragmatism met conviction. Lenins in- ternationalist imperative came from his analysis of capitalism in its mo- nopoly and imperialist phasehis belief that capitalism exhausted its pro- gressive potential by needing to expand on a world scale, with resulting exploitation of the underdeveloped world and sharpening of contradictions

in the metropolis. National liberation movements in underdeveloped coun- tries would upset the process of imperialist accumulation, he argued, un- dermine prosperity in the capitalist economies, and trigger renewed popular militancy. Capitalist concentration had meanwhile brought the productive forces to their fullest potential, leaving the economys commanding heights ripe for socialization. Finally, the war and the great powers intensified competition had accentuated all these conditions, with explosive conse- quences for any power that was defeated. As Lenin said, the war has given an impetus to history which is now moving with the speed of a locomo- tive.²⁶ As the weakest link in the imperialist chain, tsarist Russia was especially vulnerable to the destabilizing effects, particularly as imperial society buckled under the wars strain.

This internationalist perspective functioned in a particular way. It coun- tered Menshevik belief that Russian backwardness precluded the building of socialism. Such objections had long pedigrees among socialists, and when Lenins April Theses proposed moving directly to socialist revolution many Bolsheviks also balked. Socialism could not be built from scarcity, only from material abundance, once capitalism had released the forces of progress: Whence will arise the sun of the socialist revolution? I think that with all existing conditions, with our standard of living, the initiation of the socialist revolution does not belong to us. We have not the strength, nor the objective conditions, for it.²⁷

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky disputed this as such. Indeed, Trotsky added a further dimension: the real obstacle to the implementation of a socialist program . . . would not be economic so muchthat is, the backwardness of the technical and productive structures of the countryas political: the isolation of the working class and the inevitable rupture with its peasant and petty-bourgeois allies.²⁸ But here, internationalism supplied a solu- tion, via sympathetic revolution in the West. Problems would disappear in the larger context of a federated socialist Europe: the more advanced econ- omies delivered the missing developmental resources, compensating the proletariats Russian isolation with the international solidarity of broader- based workers states to the west. This was vitally enabling for the Bolshe- viks: if seizing power was to be justified before the court of history, revo- lution in the West had to occur. Lenin and Trotsky entered the October Revolution with this explicit realization. Otherwise, Menshevik taunts of adventurism were much harder to dispel.

These, then, were the main ingredients of Bolshevik success: a sharper grasp of specifically Russian conditions, embracing precocity as well as backwardness; advocacy for the peasantry; the Soviets institutional cen- trality; activist demarcation against the other Left parties; and a global analysis of the overall European situation, bringing confidence in the pros- pects of sympathetic revolution in the West. Other factors were important too, including the personalities of Lenin and Trotsky. But it was above all the combination of relentless activism and remarkable clarity of perspec-

tive, under conditions of soaring popular radicalism and extreme social polarization, that brought the Bolsheviks to power.

FROM DUAL POWER TO DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

After the October Revolution, political concentration was rapid and ex- treme. Once the Bolsheviks seized power, their relations with other left groupings became crucial. The Mensheviks and SRs seceded from the Sec- ond All-Russian Soviet Congress on 25 October. They formed the All- Russian Committee for the Salvation of the Country and the Revolution, preparing a rising to join the expected attack on the capital by General Petr Krasnov and his Cossacks. Krasnov was easily beaten on 2930 Oc- tober, but this gave the Bolsheviks grounds to sever talks and tighten dis- cipline in their own ranks. The Left SRs now broke decisively with their party, refused to join the walkout of 25 October, endorsed the Bolshevik seizure of power, and on 15 November joined the Bolsheviks in coalition. Conflicts hinged on the issue of legitimacy and the revolutions funda- mental definition, bourgeois-democratic or proletarian-socialist, now centering on the soviets. The Bolshevik rising was deliberately timed for the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and once the original soviet leaders had gone, nothing could stop popular militancy flow- ing through this framework. As the Bolsheviks desired, political choices were being polarized. On one side was the formal legitimacy conferred by the imminent Constituent Assembly and the parliamentary system advo- cated by the Provisional Government; on the other was the new revolu- tionary legitimacy of the soviets. In ostentatiously leaving the Soviet Con- gress, the Mensheviks and Right SRs left no doubt where their allegiance lay. This destroyed all chances for giving the new regime a nonpartisan socialist basis. The Bolshevik rising commanded powerful support, espe- cially with militants in the army and factories. But, equally, there were strong unity sentiments for a coalition of all socialists, providing it was antibourgeois. This was the potential the Mensheviks and Right SRs fatally squandered. As the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov later conceded, we com- pletely untied the Bolsheviks hands, making them masters of the entire

situation and yielding to them the whole arena of the revolution.²⁹

Thus the Constituent Assembly was already delegitimized even before the elections of 12 November 1917. In those elections, returns were good for the SRs410 seats out of 707, as against the Bolsheviks 175. But the Bolsheviks other rivals were erased. Bolsheviks carried the towns, with 36 percent of the vote in provincial capitals, as against 23 percent for Kadets, the sole surviving bourgeois party, and 14 percent for SRs. The political alignment, with urban allegiances concentrated around Bolsheviks and Ka- dets, now directly registered the social polarization. While SRs held some

ground, it was paltry compared with the summer, and the Mensheviks were completely wiped out.³⁰

As the Lefts dominant party in the cities, the Bolsheviks throve on the still evolving urban radicalization. The gap between Bolshevik leadership in the soviets and their weaker standing in the Constituent Assembly left them undismayed. When the Assembly convened on 5 January 1918, they corrected the imbalance by dissolving it. This was consistent with the slo- gan All Power to the Soviets and the logic of urban popular loyalties. To legitimize the closing of the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks called not only a third All-Russian Congress of Soviets (after those in June and October 1917) but also an All-Russian Congress of Peasants Deputies, for mid-January 1918. The founding document was its Declaration of Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples, drafted on 3 January, adopted by the All-Russian Soviet Congress on 15 January, and inscribed in the new Constitution in July. The worker-peasant axis was central here, but the self-presentation of the Bolsheviks themselvesthe revolutionary elan of Bolshevik political culturewas unambiguously proletarian. Adapting this self-understanding to the needs of a worker-peasant alliance became a cru- cial issue in the further course of the revolution.

Other problems were looming. How to institutionalize the direct de- mocracy of the Soviets and factory committees was one. Pluralismhow to deal with organized oppositionwas another. The question of nation- alities, flagged in the Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples, was still another. Each goes to the heart of the relationship of socialism and democracy. The salient theme was the turn from parliamen- tary to soviet democracy, a decisive break, whose only forerunner in the social democratic tradition of the first two Internationals was the Paris Commune. To the previous ideal of the democratically elected parliamen- tary majority, Bolshevism counterposed the ominous-sounding formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Something important had clearly changed. The All-Russian Soviet Congress greeted the suppression of the Constituent Assembly by singing the Marseillaise (the anthem of the French Revolution) as well as the Internationale (the anthem of the workers in- ternational), so that the transition from the epoch of the bourgeois to that of the proletarian revolution would be marked.³¹

r ussian extremes created chances for the Left that werent available elsewhere in Europe. Some wartime circumstances were genericnotably, the labor movements incor- poration via patriotism, bringing gains for lead- ers but hardships for the rank and file. But in other ways, Russian circumstances were least like the others, because the thinness of civil so- ciety left Russia exceptionally vulnerable to generalized breakdown, which the Wests more developed institutional resources forestalled. This left a vacuum during 1917, which the highly mobilized working class of Moscow and Petrograd acted to fill. Seizing such chances re- quired a revolutionary imagination, which Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks supplied. Bolshevism broke the mold of the socialist tradition, jolting European Marxists from their fatalism. Socialism was no longer the necessary exit from inevitable capitalist crisis; instead, revolutions could now be made. Not simply the objective result of historys laws, they required a creative political act. For the radicals of European socialist parties, for working-class militants of 191718, and for many younger intellectuals fresh to the Left, the Russian Revolution enlarged a sense of political possibility. It created a new horizon. It incited a general sense of movement and opportunity, of pushing on the frontiers of political imagination. For Antonio Gramsci, Lenin was the master of life, the stirrer of consciences, the awakener of sleeping souls. The Bolsheviks had made man the dominant factor in history, not raw economic facts men in societies, men in relation to one an- other, reaching agreements with one another, developing through these contacts a collecti