A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

had one, and indeed it was a part of Menshevik ideology to deny the need for one. Only slowly and reluctantly were the Mensheviks dragged towards the type of formal party structure which their rivals had from the start. Their spirit remained that of the friendly and informal circles (kruzhkt) of the 1890s, what Lenin mocked as 'the loose Oblomov gowns and slippers' of the movement's salad days. But the Mensheviks were genuinely more democratic, both in their policies and in their composition, than the Bolsheviks. They tended to attract a broader range of people — more non-Russians, especially Jews and Georgians, more diverse types of workers, petty merchants and members of the intelligentsia — whereas the followers of the Bolsheviks tended to come from a narrower range (the vast majority were Great Russian workers and uprooted peasants). This broader social base may partly explain the Mensheviks' inclination towards compromise and conciliation with the liberal bourgeoisie. This was certainly the main distinction between them and the Bolsheviks, who, under Lenin's guidance, became increasingly intransigent in their opposition to democracy. Yet this demarcation — much as it may have been linked with social differences — was essentially an ethical one. The Mensheviks were democrats by instinct, and their actions as revolutionaries were always held back by the moral scruples which this entailed. This was not true of the Bolsheviks. They were simpler and younger men, militant peasant-workers like Kanatchikov; doers rather than thinkers. They were attracted by Lenin's discipline and firm leadership of the party, by his simple slogans, and by his belief in immediate action to bring down the tsarist regime rather than waiting, as the Mensheviks advised, for it to be eroded by the development of capitalism. This, above all, was what Lenin offered them: the idea that something could be done.

Part Two

THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY (1891-1917)

5 First Blood

i Patriots and Liberators

After a year of meteorological disasters the peasants of the Volga region found themselves facing starvation in the summer of 1891. As they surveyed their ruined crops, they might have been forgiven for believing that God had singled them out for particular punishment. The seeds they had planted the previous autumn barely had time to germinate before the frosts arrived. There had been precious little snow to protect the young plants in the winter, when the temperature averaged 30 degrees below zero. Spring brought with it dusty winds that blew away the topsoil and then, as early as April, the long dry summer began. In Tsaritsyn there had been no rain for 96 consecutive days, in Saratov none for 88, and in Orenburg none for more than 100. Wells and ponds dried up, the scorched earth cracked, forests went prematurely brown, and cattle died by the roadsides. The peasants pinned their last hopes on the harvest. But the crops that survived turned out to be small and burned by the sun. In Voronezh the harvest of rye was less than 0.1 pud (1.6 kg) per inhabitant, compared with a normal yield of 15 pud. 'Here we are getting ready to go hungry,' wrote Count Vorontsov-Dashkov to the Tsar from Tambov province on 3 July. 'The peasants' winter crops have failed completely and the situation demands immediate aid.'

By the autumn the area threatened by famine had spread to seventeen provinces, from the Ural mountains to the Black Sea, an area double the size of France with a population of thirty-six million people. Travellers in the region painted a picture of growing despair, as the peasants weakened and took to their huts. Those who had the strength packed up their meagre belongings and fled wherever they could, jamming the roads with their carts. Those who remained lived on 'famine bread' made from rye husks mixed with the weed goosefoot, moss and tree bark, which made the loaves turn yellow and bitter. The peasants stripped the thatch from the roofs of their huts and used it to feed their horses: people may go hungry for a long time but unfed horses simply die, and if this happened there would be no harvest the next year. And then, almost inevitably, cholera and typhus struck, killing half a million people by the end of 1892.

The government struggled to deal with the crisis as best as it could.