A people's tragedy

1917 was all about the shattering of misplaced ideals. Liberals like Lvov placed all their faith in the rule of law. They believed that all Russia’s problems could be resolved peacefully by parliamentary means. This was to hope against all hope — even for an optimist like Lvov. Russia’s brief experience of parliamentarism between 1906 and 1914 had done little to convince the common people that a national parliament could work for them. They were much more inclined to place their trust in their own local class organizations, such as the Soviets, as the SRs found out when the people failed to rally behind the defence of the Constituent Assembly after January 1918. The constitutional phase of the revolution had essentially been played out by 1914: the liberal Duma parties had failed to satisfy the demands of the workers and peasants for social reforms; their electoral base was in terminal decline; and the leftwing parties which based their appeal on a militant rejection of a Duma coalition with the bourgeoisie increased their support after 1912. As the reactionary but no less visionary minister Durnovo had warned the Tsar in 1914, conceding power to the Duma, which would be the cost of a defeat in the war, was almost bound to end up in a violent social revolution since the masses despised the liberal bourgeoisie and did not share their belief in political reforms. The social polarization of the war made this prophecy even more compelling. To the Okhrana it was obvious by the end of 1916 that the liberal Duma project was superfluous, and that the only two options left were repression or a social revolution. And yet, despite all the evidence, the liberal leaders of 1917 and the democratic socialists who forced them into power continued to believe that a Western constitutional settlement might be imposed upon Russia and, even more improbably, that it might be expected to hold firm and provide a viable structure for the resolution of the country’s problems in the middle of a total war and social breakdown. How naive can politicians be?

Lenin might justifiably have called this the ‘constitutional illusion’ of the liberals. It was to place an almost mystical faith — one held religiously by Prince Lvov — in Western ideals of democracy that were quite unsuited to revolutionary Russia. And liberal efforts to impose the disciplines of statehood upon the Russia of 1917, to make it fit the patterns of 1789, only accelerated the collapse of all authority, as the common people, in reaction, carried out their own local revolutions: the attempt to carry through a military offensive led to the disintegration of the army; the attempt to regulate property relations through national laws merely had the effect of speeding up peasant land seizures. This social revolution against a state that was increasingly seen to be ‘bourgeois’ was the main appeal of Soviet power, at least in its early stages before the Bolsheviks took over the local Soviets. It was the direct self-rule of the workers in their factories, of the soldiers in their regiments, and of the peasants in their villages; and it was the power which this in turn gave them to dominate their former masters and class enemies.

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 leftwing Mensheviks such as Martov and to any number of leftwing 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.