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

Only a democracy that contained elements of this social revolution had any prospect of holding on to power in the conditions of 1917. The Soviet leaders, because of their own dogmatic preconceptions about the need for a 'bourgeois revolution', missed a unique chance to set up such a system by assuming power through the Soviets; and perhaps a chance to avert a full-scale civil war by combining the power of the Soviets with that of the other public bodies, such as the zemstvos and the city dumas, under the Constituent Assembly. This sort of resolution would have been acceptable to Bolshevik moderates such as Kamenev, to left-wing Mensheviks such as Martov and to any number of left-wing SRs. Undoubtedly, this would have been a precarious resolution: neither Lenin nor Kerensky would have accepted it; and there was bound to be armed opposition to it from the Right. Some sort of civil war was unavoidable. But such a democratic settlement — one which satisfied the social demands of the masses — was perhaps the only option that had any chance of minimizing the scale of that civil war. It alone could have stopped the Bolsheviks.

Bolshevism was a very Russian thing. Its belief in militant action, its insistence, contrary to the tenets of Hegel and Marx, that a revolution could 'jump over' the contingencies of history, placed it firmly in the Russian messianic tradition. Its call for All Power to the Soviets, which in the first months of Bolshevik rule entailed the direct self-rule of the peasantry, the soldiers and the workers, legitimized the anarchic tendencies of the Russian masses, and institutionalized a new pugachevshchina, a merciless rebellion against the state and its civilization which Gorky, like Pushkin a hundred years before, looked upon with horror as an expression of Russian barbarism. The Bolshevik Terror came up from the depths. It started as part of the social revolution, a means for the lower classes to exact their own bloody revenge on their former masters and class enemies. As Denikin noted, there was an almost 'boundless hatred' of ideas and of people higher than the crowd, of anything which bore the slightest trace of abundance, and this feeling expressed an envy and a hatred that had been accumulated by the lower classes not only over the past three years of war but also over the previous centuries. The Bolsheviks encouraged (but did not create) this hatred of the rich through their slogan 'Loot the looters!' They used it to destroy the old social system, to mobilize the lower classes against the Whites and the imperialists, and to build up their terror-based dictatorship. It in turn provided them with a powerful source of emotional support among all those downtrodden and war-brutalized people who gained satisfaction from the knowledge that the wealthy classes of the old regime were being destroyed and made to suffer, as they themselves had suffered, regardless of whether it brought any improvement in their own lot.

As a form of absolutist rule the Bolshevik regime was distinctly Russian. It was a mirror-image of the tsarist state. Lenin (later Stalin) occupied the place of the Tsar-God; his commissars and Cheka henchmen played the same roles as the provincial governors, the oprichniki, and the Tsar's other plenipotentiaries; while his party's comrades had the same power and privileged position as the aristocracy under the old regime. But there was a crucial difference between the two systems: whereas the elite of the tsarist regime was socially alien to the common people (and in the non-Russian borderlands was ethnically alien as well), the Soviet élite was made up for the most part of ordinary Russians (and by the natives in the non-Russian lands) who spoke, dressed and acted much like everybody else. This gave the Soviet system a decisive advantage over the Whites in the civil war: it enabled it to hold on to the emotive symbols of 'the Revolution', the Red Flag above all else, and thus to present itself as the champion of the people's cause. The 'old regime' image of the Whites, which was largely merited by their old regime mentality, and their obstinate refusal to endorse the peasant revolution on the land or to recognize the break-up of the Tsarist Empire, strengthened the Bolsheviks' propaganda claim. The emphatic rejection of the Whites by the peasantry and the non-Russians determined the outcome of the civil war.