The+Russian+Revolution

The First Marxist Revolution: Russia, 1917 One of the first casualties of "total war" was Russia. A country with a huge population, but limited industrial capacity, Russia was the ally of both Serbia and France, and was thus committed from the first to entering the war against Austria and Germany. In the first days of the war, France pushed, and Russia agreed, to Russian entry into the war as soon as possible so as to take the pressure off of France, and pinch Germany between two fronts. The Russians entered the war, as did every other European country, with a kind of war fever. The hawks in Russia believed it would be an excellent opportunity to gain the area around the Dardanelles and the Crimea that had been denied them in the 1908 fiasco with Austria. Liberals within Russia saw the opportunity of fighting alongside France and England as an opportunity for Russians to witness liberal political values and working national assemblies, and to bring such things back to Russia. Both sides thus supported war. That support began to erode after the first two battles Russia fought. The Russian Steamroller, the nickname for Russia’s army, which was notoriously slow to get started, and low tech to boot, but was mythologized as unstoppable once motion began, actually was partially mobilized nearly 3 weeks earlier than the Germans had expected. Although some commanders warned against it, the Russian army began its invasion of East Prussia nearly as soon as soldiers arrived at the staging areas, in keeping with its promise to France. By this point in the war, though the army was partially mobilized, it was in some disarray, and the limited industry of Russia had not yet been able to produce enough rifles for all of the soldiers who were already at the front. They were told to find one as they marched through Germany, and the invasion of East Prussia began in August of 1914. The Russian plan, which had failed in practice due to poor communications and coordination, was to create pincers, one to the north of the Masurian Lakes, and one to the South, and move into East Prussia to surround the German army there. After linking up, they would draw the bag closed, and, it was assumed, destroy the Eastern German Army. The plan was a reasonable one, given the massing of 2.5 to 3 million Russian troops against a minimal defensive force the Germans had left in East Prussia of roughly 350,000. Actualization of the plan was plagued from the start with misfortunes, poor communications, and mistakes that would lead to tragedy. The first problem was that the armies comprising the north and the south arms of the pincers began their march at different times. Their commanders were unable to be sure where the other was – in fact, they really did not even try to be certain that their movements were coordinated at all – throughout the entire operation. In addition, the Russian communcations system was so poor, and the availability of telegraph line so limited, that the armies were reduced to communicating with each other by unscrambled wireless, often without even an effort at encoding critical information on movements, troop strength and location, and daily movement objectives. The Germans were able to read most of the Russian radio traffic regularly, and with no difficulty. The Russian armies, vast as they were, and slow, quickly out marched their supply lines. The Russian railway guage, in order to slow a possible German invasion, had been built much wider than the German guage, and so as the Russian moved into East Prussia, they had to capture German rolling stock (none of which had been left for them by the retreating German army). With no transportation, supplies had to be brought up by horse cart, limiting access to the already short supplies of shells, powder, and food that could be supplied by Russian industry. The armies invading East Prussia regularly had to halt for days at a time in order for supply lines to catch up. In front of these slow moving behemoths, the German defensive armies were able to use rails and fast marches to maneuver at will. Some German units saw action against two separate Russian units on opposite sides of the front on the same day. Clearly, even in its first days, the Eastern Front was not the stalemate situation in the West, but a far more fluid site of battle. By the End of August, after transferring two divisions from the Western Front, the Germans were able to surround and destroy the Russian northern army near the village of Tannenberg in East Prussia. Nearly 250,000 Russians died in that battle, including the commander of the Northern Army, who took his own life rather than be captured by the Germans as he tried to escape back to Russia through the forest. In Early September, the Southern Army, nearly reaching its planned link point south of the Masurian Lakes region, was also caught and destroyed by the more mobile Germans, who also carried machine guns and other weapons that the Russians did not have available to them. In this battle, another 250,000 to 300,000 Russians were killed, and the Russian army was unable to continue prosecuting the war temporarily on the German front, thought it did have some success against the Austrians to the South. This initial defeat was devastating for the Russian army, and eventually prompted the Czar, Nicholas II, to travel to the front to take personal command of his troops. Nicholas was a large man, who has been described as "slightly stupid" by those close to him. He had little experience with the military, and it is unclear what he thought he could accomplish by doing this. Furthermore, he left his wife, Czarina Alexandra, in charge of governing Russia. She was under the influence of one of the more corrupt Priests of the 20th century, a named Rasputin whose less devout activities included heavy drinking and regular visits to brothels. These two systematically removed the more effective administrators from the Russian government and military commands in order to secure their own positions and avoid argument or opposition. This created an incompetent and ineffective government which could not provide for the needs of the state. Russian peasants began to refuse to supply food to the government for distribution in the cities or to the military because of the anger at the war and the high taxes and inefficiency of the administration. By March 8, 1917, Petrograd, the capital at the time, was paralyzed by strikes in nearly every industry and service in protest of the government’s inefficiency and lack of concern for Russia’s people. Bread shortages in the cities, especially Petrograd, also brought out demonstrators who were not connected to unions. The streets were full of people who had been the engines of the economy, but were now providing only unrest and chaos. On March 11, the tsar required workers to end their strikes and return to work. He also dissolved the legislative assembly, which had really never been more than an advisory body in any case. To the tsar’s surprise, rather than create peace, these demands angered people so much that strikers refused to return to work despite threats of physical violence, and the legislative assembly, the Duma, remaind illegally in session. However, when the tsar ordered the police forces to intervene, they sided with the workers, creating great pressure on the tsar’s government. On March 12, 1917, the Duma voted to create a "provisional committee" with the task of creating a republican constitution for Russia. At the same time, a group of workers gathered to form the Petrograd Soviet – a kind of congress of workers’ (and eventually soldiers’) deputies. On March 15, the tsar abdicated in favor of his brother Michael. Late that night, and after much thought, Michael refused to accept the throne, and instead transferred his rights to rule to the Duma, which then became the provisional government of Russia. The Duma, however, was reluctant to rule on specific issues because it felt that was the proper duty only of a new Duma to be elected in October according to the new constitution. Thus rather than address the social problems of the war, taxes, land reform, and food supply, the Duma spent its time on political problems. Great reforms were achieved, including the creation of a constitutional right of all Russians to equality before the law, and universal suffrage. However, the refusal, on moral grounds, to deal with structural and social issues made the Duma look as if it was abdicating its authority in these matters. The government appeared to be refusing to govern. At the same time, the Petrograd Soviet, which took its legitimacy only from the fact that it represented more people in Petrograd than any other organization, had no such temerity. The Petrograd Soviet issued proclamation after proclamation, none of which had the force of law, but many of which had the backing of the people of Petrograd (though often not of the rest of Russia). Army Order #1, for example, was a resolution that absolved non-commissioned soldiers from responsibility to their officers and their posts. Soldiers left in droves, some after shooting their commanding officers. This occurred even though the order had no legal authority. This led, then to a situation in which the Provisional Government of the Duma was in constant competition for legitimacy and authority with the Petrograd Soviet – a situation your textbook calls "dual power." In effect, though, there was no real power – the competition only led to the question of who was in charge, and Russia was in political chaos. The Provisional Government could perhaps have regained the advantage when Alexander Kerensky, a socialist, became its prime minister in July of 1917. However, Kerensky was unable to address social problems either. His government continued plans to attack the Germans, and refused to redistribute land. This made Kerensky unable to gain the public support he would have needed to make the government work. To be fair, the Petrograd Soviet was unable – or more precisely, unwilling – to take the initiative as well. Its deputies were mostly members of the Menshevik party - a group who believed that Russia, because of its lack of an industrialized economy, was not yet at the proper stage for a marxist revolution. This meant that before the marxist revolution could occur, the middle class had to have its opportunity to build the economy and create the factories where the laboring class would be born and nurtured. This intermediate step would, they expected, be provided for by the provisional government. So while they were noisy and opinionated, their interest was not to destroy the provisional government, but to keep the pressure on so that the bourgeois stage would be quickly formed, and the preparation for revolution quickly realized. They thus had no interest in taking power for themselves in 1917. Only months before his arrival in Petrograd in April, 1917, Vladimir Ilich Lenin was agreeing with the Menshevik line. Russia, he thought, was the last place in the western world that would be ready for a socialist revolution. He did not expect to see one, he said, within his own lifetime. The problem for Lenin was the same as that mentioned above. According to Marx in //Capital// the revolution of the proletariat (the working class) could not occur until there was a critical mass of workers all aware of their plight, and their similarity to each other. Such a critical mass could not occur until a society reached a relatively high degree of industrialization – most people had to be workers before a revolution could occur. In Russia, Lenin knew, a population of more than 170 million people included only about 50,000 actual factory workers. This tiny proletarian class found itself opposed to an even tinier group of upper-middle-class factory owners and entrepreneurs. The situation was not the stuff to create sufficient interest in social change by the majority of the population. Russia, Lenin thought, was just not ready for revolution. Yet. However, by April 16, 1917, as his secret train, provided by the Germans, stopped in Petrograd, Lenin had changed his mind. He believed now that in fact a revolution could be created, and be successful. The key was to skip the Bourgeois step in Marx’s plan. To do this, Lenin realized, he would need a party (the Bolsheviks) that was not a popular party of workers, but a vanguard party of teachers. The assignment Lenin gave the Bolsheviks was to teach the peasants, farmers, workers, and urban poor of Russia how to create a revolution – to teach them to have class consciousness. This could best be done by a secret organization, not a popular one – and often the most effective media for the message was violence. Peasants who could not read, and had never heard political theory in their life could easily get the message that the upper class was the enemy if members of the upper class were killed in front of them. Widespread, systemic violence thus became one of the Bolsheviks’ most important voices. In this way, Lenin used the technique of solidifying a population by taking it to war – in this case, though, not against the Germans, but against the upper classes. By sheer accident, Lenin also began to talk about two things that were extremely popular among the Russian common people. Those were ending the war, and reforming land ownership. In this, he proved to be prescient. Already in 1917, in a bottom-up sort of way, peasants were creating the land reform that the governments had refused to act on for so long. Peasants took large farms, and redistributed the land among themselves. Workers violently seized factories for themselves. Various peoples who had been conquered by the Russians during the past 300 years of expansion began to assert their differences and their independence. Government had no control over this civil unrest. At the same time, in mid-1917, a Russian General sent troops to help the provisional government defend itself against the urban mob. The move was misinterpreted by Kerensky as an attempt at a coup and restoration of the monarchy, and he marched out an army to meet it. This fiasco caused the Russian political divisions within the provisional government to move farther apart, as they began to perceive each other as untrustworthy. On November 6, 1917, Lenin’s close aid Leon Trotsky led a contingent of the crew of the battleship Aurora, now known as the Red Army, into the old Winter Palace of the tsar in Petrograd and placed Lenin in power. The police stood aside and let them in with no shots fired. The first thing Lenin did was to get rid of the provisional government - he had most of them arrested and put in jail by the notorious CHEKA – the state security organization that would eventually become the KGB. The CHEKA was also used to create terror. It would arrest or execute anyone that might be considered to be a threat to the state, in the name of making the world safe for communism. Thus the Bolsheviks, only 200,000 people in 1917, with Lenin as their absolute director, became the rulers of 170,000,000 Russians. When the Bolsheviks received only 25% of the votes in December elections, Lenin assumed that the Russian people had no idea what was good for them, and rather than accept the election results, Lenin shut down the Duma with military force, and arrested any who tried to enter the Duma building in January, 1918. In March,1918, in order to allow himself and his new government to consolidate their control, and stabilize the country, Lenin signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. This treaty handed over large chunks of land to the Germans, including the Caucasian oil fields, and territory that included all of the Ukraine, Russia's most productive agricultural region, and areas that included a full 1/3 of all of the Russian population.