The October (November) Revolution (Russian Revolution of 1917)
One of the turning points in the struggle for power was the attempt by Gen. Lavr Kornilov (Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich), who had been appointed commander in chief, to take control of Petrograd in August 1917 and wipe out the soviet. Aleksandr Kerensky (Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich), 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 (Trotsky, Leon). 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.
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 (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), 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 (Brest-Litovsk, treaties of), 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.
The Civil War and War Communism (1918–21)
The Civil War (Russian Civil War)
One side can start a war, but it takes two to end one. The Bolsheviks found that this principle applied to themselves after October, when they expected to disengage quickly from World War I. Of the three points of their effective slogan—“Peace, land, and bread”—the first proved to be the most difficult to realize. Trotsky, the silver-tongued Bolshevik negotiator, had lectured the Germans and Austrians on Georg Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich)'s philosophy and other abstruse subjects at Brest-Litovsk. He thought that he had time on his side. He was waiting for news of revolution in Berlin and Vienna. It never came, and the Bolsheviks found themselves at the Germans' mercy. The issue of peace or war tore the Bolsheviks apart. Lenin favoured peace at any price, believing that it was purely an interim settlement before inevitable revolution. Nikolay Bukharin (Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich), a left-wing Bolshevik in the early Soviet period, wanted revolutionary war, while Trotsky wanted neither war nor peace. Trotsky believed the Germans did not have the military muscle to advance, but they did, and eventually the very harsh peace of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was imposed on Russia. The Socialist Revolutionaries left the coalition, and some resorted to terrorism, the target being the Bolshevik leadership. Ukraine slipped under German influence, and the Mensheviks held sway in the Caucasus. Only part of Russia—Moscow, Petrograd, and much of the industrial heartland—was under Bolshevik control. The countryside belonged to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Given the Bolshevik desire to dominate the whole of Russia and the rest of the former tsarist empire, civil war was inevitable.
The Red Army was formed in February 1918, and Trotsky became its leader. He was to reveal great leadership and military skill, fashioning a rabble into a formidable fighting force. The Reds were opposed by the “Whites,” anticommunists led by former imperial officers. There were also the “Greens” and the anarchists, who fought the Reds and were strongest in Ukraine; the anarchists' most talented leader was Nestor Makhno. The Allies (Britain, the United States, Italy, and a host of other states) intervened on the White side and provided much matériel and finance. The Bolsheviks controlled the industrial heartland of Russia, and their lines of communication were short. Those of the Whites, who were dispersed all the way to the Pacific, were long. The Reds recruited many ex-tsarist officers but also produced many of their own. By mid-1920 the Reds had consolidated their hold on the country.
The feat of winning the Civil War and the organizational methods adopted to do so made a deep impact on Bolshevik thinking. Joseph Stalin, a party leader, talked about the party in terms of an army. There were political fronts, economic struggles, campaigns, and so on. The Bolsheviks were ruthless in their pursuit of victory. The Cheka (a forerunner of the notorious KGB), or political police, was formed in December 1917 to protect communist power. By the end of the Civil War the Cheka had become a powerful force. Among the targets of the Cheka were Russian nationalists who objected strongly to the bolshevization of Russia. They regarded bolshevism as alien and based on western European and not Russian norms. Lenin was always mindful of “Great Russian” chauvinism, which was one reason he never permitted the formation of a separate Russian Communist Party apart from that of the Soviet Union. Russia, alone of the U.S.S.R.'s 15 republics, did not have its own communist party. It was belatedly founded in 1990.