During the time that Stolypin was struggling to control the Duma, the formation of political blocs in Europe continued. Nicholas and the Kaiser repeatedly tried for a rapprochement, but the attempts came to nothing. In 1907 Russia and Britain signed a treaty dividing up spheres of influence in Iran, thus eliminating a major object of their imperial rivalry. The result was not exactly an alliance, but it did put an end to the decades old “Cold War,” and in the presence of an Anglo-French agreement, meant that Russia, with Britain and France, now faced Germany and Austria-Hungary. There were plenty of areas of conflict, the most important being the Balkans. Russia had allied with Serbia, which stood right in the path of any Austrian or German expansion in that area, and both had great ambitions focused on the Ottoman Empire. Germany hoped to make the Turks semi-allies and semi-dependents in their larger rivalry with Great Britain. In 1909 Austria, with German backing, humiliated Russia by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina, since 1878 an Austrian protectorate. A series of local wars in the Balkans added to the growing tension. Then in June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, made a tour of the new Bosnian province. As his motorcade proceeded along the narrow street by the river at Sarajevo, a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, stepped out from the crowd with a revolver and shot him dead. For Russia as for the rest of Europe, it was a fatal shot.
16 War and Revolution
The Russian revolution of 1917 was one of the many consequences of the First World War. The war placed strains on the Russian state and society that neither could withstand. The result was six years of war and upheaval that created the Soviet Union.
WAR
Russia’s participation in the First World War was not an accident. After the Russo-Japanese War Russia’s foreign policy turned west. In 1907 Russia concluded the treaty with its long time rival, Great Britain, to establish a condominium over Iran. The Russians took control of the northern part of the country down to Teheran, and the British the south. This compromise put an end to Anglo-Russian imperial competition in Asia, and meant that Russia was now effectively allied with Britain as well as France. The only imaginable enemies were Germany and Austria. The agreement over Persia set the stage for 1914, but it was imperial rivalries in the Balkans that provided the spark for the explosion. There, Russia faced a resurgent Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria and Bulgaria tagging along. At this point Russia’s only ally was tiny Serbia, which stood right in the way of Austro-German expansion in the south. A series of Balkan crises in these years repeatedly showed Russia’s weakness in the area: it had no formal allies other than Serbia and none of the informal power that came from business ties established by the Germans and Austrians as well as the French and British. When Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, Vienna issued an ultimatum to Serbia and Russia had to back up Serbian resistance. Russia’s basic credibility was at stake, and the result was war. It had not sought the war, but had drifted into the crisis as it was doing in so many other areas.
If the government of the Russian Empire after the death of Stolypin merely drifted on the current of events, neither Russian society nor the revolutionary movement demonstrated such passivity. The years just before the First World War were years of dynamic economic growth for the islands of modern industry in the sea of rural backwardness. Industrial development meant growth in the size and to some extent in the sophistication of the working class, and the revolutionary parties were poised to make use of it. In some places the workers turned to strikes again. In 1912 on the Lena River in Siberia, several hundred workers perished when soldiers and police suppressed a strike at the English-owned gold fields. About this time the revolutionary parties had recovered from defeat in 1905–1907. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs were all reasonably well organized, and the labor movement recovered. In the spring of 1914 a wave of strikes swept St. Petersburg, one where the Bolsheviks for the first time seemed to be in the lead, not the Mensheviks or SRs. The rest of the country was relatively quiet, however, and the news of war hit Russia like a thunderbolt. Russia had actually devoted much effort to rebuilding its army and navy since the war with Japan, and one of the many factors encouraging the German General Staff and the Kaiser to push for immediate war was the fear that Russia would be much harder to defeat in only a few years. That being said, both planning and equipment were still deficient. At the insistence of the tsar huge sums had gone to rebuilding the Baltic Fleet, which in the event was far too small to challenge the German navy and never left port. Russia’s armaments industry was still inadequate to supply a modern army and its transport network, adequate for peacetime, was too small for rapid mobilization and supply of the army on the western frontier. To make matters worse, the rapid advance of the German army through Belgium and France created a crisis at the front. Under heavy French pressure the Russians dealt with the crisis by sending an unprepared army into East Prussia, an expedition that ended in defeat at Tannenberg in August 1914. Thus, Russia began the war with a defeat.
At home the war produced an orgy of patriotism at first. To universal acclaim the government changed the German name St. Petersburg to Petrograd, a Russian translation, more or less, of the same. Liberals and reactionaries in the Duma united on a war platform and the intelligentsia, like their counterparts farther west, poured out a flood of anti-enemy propaganda and nationalist ravings. The workers as well were swept up in the fever and the strike movement in the capital evaporated. The police came down hard on the revolutionary parties, particularly on the Bolsheviks, and within days their leaders inside Russia disappeared into prison and Siberian exile. Stalin was among them. The Bolsheviks were the particular object of the government’s wrath because of their position on the war, a position that transformed an obscure Marxist group into a world movement that fundamentally reordered the twentieth century. For it was out of Lenin’s reaction to the war, not as a response to the later Russian Revolution, that Communism was born.
Before 1914 the European Socialist parties had repeatedly pledged at their international meetings to oppose all wars among the European states as inimical to the interests of the working class. These were large powerful parties with mass membership, control of major labor unions, and elaborate social and cultural services, utterly unlike Lenin’s little band of underground fighters. As the declarations of war came thundering out of the governments in July and August 1914, the expectation was that the socialists would likely oppose the war, and even go on strike, as they had threatened earlier, in order to stop it. Nothing of the kind happened. Instead, almost to a man the socialist leaders came out for the war, and joined the chorus of patriotism and hate in their respective countries. The few that dissented felt bound by party discipline to keep silent and follow the leadership. Among the Russians, the elderly founder of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov, came out in support of the war, and the Mensheviks adopted a compromise position, not calling for Russian victory but not opposing the war. Alone among the European Socialists, Lenin’s Bolsheviks and a handful of dissident Mensheviks like Trotsky opposed the war from the first day.
Lenin was no pacifist, and his program on the war was not just to oppose it. He proclaimed that the defeat of the Russian Empire would be the best outcome for Russia and called for all socialists, in Russia and elsewhere, to turn the international war into a civil war. In other words, he was calling for armed insurrection in wartime. This position seemed to him the only correct Marxist attitude, but why did so few of the European Socialists agree? They had, he thought, betrayed the working class they were supposed to lead, but why? In despair at the future, Lenin turned to Marxist theory to try to understand what had happened. He reread Aristotle’s Metaphysics (in Greek; he was a product of the Russian gymnasium) and Hegel’s Science of Logic to try to recapture the original sense of dialectics as Hegel and Marx understood it. He also made a long study of recent economic developments. His aim was to understand the support for the war by the European Socialists. His conclusion was that the answer lay in imperialism, in the superwealth generated by the European empires in Africa and Asia, fuelled by the ever-growing concentration of capital. Empire was the real aim of the warring powers, concealed under a deceptive jargon about freedom or national honor. Wealth from empire also produced a labor aristocracy, happy with the status quo and thus unwilling to cause trouble in wartime. In the short term, it would benefit from imperialism. Both conclusions would have enormous effects after the Russian Revolution, but for the moment the reading did little more than keep Lenin busy while the world slipped deeper into the bloody swamp of war.