Soviet Russia

After the monarchy

The following is a general overview of the history of Russia during the period of Soviet domination. For full coverage of the history of the Soviet Union, see the article Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The February Revolution of 1917 was spontaneous, leaderless, and fueled by deep resentment over the economic and social conditions that had prevailed in imperial Russia under Tsar Nicholas. The country, having been sucked into World War I, found the strains of fighting a modern war with a premodern political and economic system intolerable. The tsar was well-meaning but fell short as a war leader and was unable to cope with the burdens of being head of state. His wife, Alexandra, meddled in government and, while encouraging her husband to be a strong tsar, sought the advice of Rasputin on matters of state. The strain of the war, complicated by the intrigues and machinations within the royal house, caused a great gulf to develop between the monarchy and educated society and between the tsar and the rest of the population.

Hardly a hand was raised in support when the imperial order collapsed in February (March, New Style) 1917. The key factor had been the defection of the military. Without this instrument of coercion, the tsar could not survive. Most Russians rejoiced, but a political vacuum had been created that needed immediate attention. The Provisional Government that had been formed was to remain in office until a democratic parliament, the Constituent Assembly, was convened in January 1918. The new government was bourgeois, or middle-class, representing a tiny segment of the population. However, the soviets, which were proliferating rapidly, did not contest the right of the bourgeoisie to rule.

As Bolshevik domination grew in Petrograd, Moscow, and other major cities, the soviets accepted the idea that the revolution that would give them power would take place in two stages: the bourgeois and the socialist. How long this transition period would last was a debatable point. The Mensheviks, the moderate socialists, held that Russia had to pass through its capitalist phase before the socialist one could appear. The Bolsheviks, the radical socialists, wanted the transition period to be short. Their firebrand leader, Lenin, sensed that power could be seized rather easily. The government was weak, and it could not rely on the army. With its large complement of peasants and workers in uniform, it was this group that formed the natural constituency of the socialists. Like the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the main agrarian party, did not advocate a rush to power. More than 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside, a fact that made the Socialist Revolutionaries certain to be the leading party when the Constituent Assembly was elected.

The Provisional Government was undone by war, economic collapse, and its own incompetence. Being a temporary administration, it postponed all hard decisions—what should be done about land seizures by the peasants, for example—for the Constituent Assembly. A fatal mistake by the government was its continued prosecution of the war. Middle-class politicians believed wrongly that one of the reasons for the February Revolution was popular anger at the incompetence of the conduct of the war. Disgruntled peasant-soldiers wanted to quit the army. They did not perceive Germany to be a threat to Russian sovereignty, and they deserted in droves to claim their piece of the landlord’s estate. Industrial decline and rising inflation radicalized workers and cost the Provisional Government the needed support of the professional middle classes. The Bolshevik slogan of “All power to the soviets” was very attractive. Dual power prevailed. The government seemingly spoke for the country, but in reality it represented only the middle class; the soviets represented the workers and peasants. Moderate socialists—Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries—dominated the Petrograd and Moscow soviets after February, but the radical Bolsheviks began to win local elections and by September had a majority in the Petrograd Soviet.

The October (November) Revolution

One of the turning points in the struggle for power was the attempt by Gen. Lavr Kornilov, who had been appointed commander in chief, to take control of Petrograd in August 1917 and wipe out the soviet. Aleksandr Kerensky, the prime minister, had been negotiating with Kornilov but then turned away and labeled Kornilov a traitor, perceiving his attack as a possible attempt to overthrow the government. Kerensky agreed to the arming of the Petrograd soviet, but after the failed coup the weapons were retained. The Bolsheviks could now consider staging an armed uprising. Had the Constituent Assembly been called during the summer, it could have undercut Lenin and his close colleague Leon Trotsky. Probably a majority of the population favoured state power passing to the soviets in October. They envisaged a broadly based socialist coalition government taking over. The October Revolution was precipitated by Kerensky himself when, angered by claims that the Bolsheviks controlled the Petrograd garrison, he sent troops to close down two Bolshevik newspapers. The Bolsheviks, led by Trotsky, feared that Kerensky would attempt to disrupt the Second All-Russian Congress, scheduled to open on October 25 (November 7, New Style); they reacted by sending troops to take over key communications and transportation points of the city. Lenin, who had been in hiding, appeared on the scene to urge the Bolsheviks to press forward and overthrow the Provisional Government, which they did on the morning of October 26. After the almost bloodless siege, Lenin proclaimed that power had passed to the soviets.

(Read Leon Trotsky’s 1926 Britannica essay on Lenin.)

Lenin, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in October (November, New Style) 1917, managed to secure and head a solely Bolshevik government—the Council of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom. The Bolsheviks also had a majority in the Soviet Central Executive Committee, which was accepted as the supreme law-giving body. It was, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the Bolsheviks’ party, in which true power came to reside. This governmental structure was to last until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918. However, when it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not hold a majority, Lenin disbanded the assembly, setting the stage for civil war. If the October Revolution was accepted as democratic—supported by a majority of the population—then it ceased to be so soon after this event. In the immediate post-October days, a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee favoured a coalition government, and Lenin eventually had to give in. Some Socialist Revolutionaries were added in December 1917, but the first and last coalition government remained in office only until March 1918, when, making great land concessions, the Bolsheviks accepted the defeatist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in World War I. The Socialist Revolutionaries, disagreeing with the terms of the treaty, resigned. The Bolsheviks, through the refined skills of the party leader Yakov Sverdlov, had the Congress of Soviets under control by the summer of 1918. Local soviets continued to defy the Bolsheviks but to no avail. Democracy received little nurturing and was never institutionalized; politics remained personalized. The cult of the strong leader gradually emerged, with local “Lenins” cropping up throughout the land.