It is hard not to see the course of the Russian revolution as deeply tragic. A fitfully, but genuinely, developing country, confronted with forces inspired by the highest hopes for mankind, plunged to quite unprecedented levels of tyranny and mass murder. Even conventional Marxist historians (a vanishing breed) now admit that the road to Utopia went seriously astray. But how 'inevitable' was that tragedy?
Let me explain this book's approach to that question. There is something of a fracas going on in the historical profession on the issue of 'counterfactual history'. Partly in response to a well-received book of counterfactual historical essays edited by Professor Niall Ferguson, Professor Richard Evans has recently written a book dismissing coun- terfactuals as, mostly, right-wing wishful thinking, often fun, but with virtually nothing to contribute to any real understanding of the past. And indeed as I sought contributors for this book a couple of eminent names declined precisely because they did not wish to play the coun- terfactual game.
Which is all very well. But in pure logic I find it very hard to understand how the inevitability, or not, of a historical event can be assessed except on the basis of a close look at moments where the road might have taken another direction, and where it might then have led. Contributors to this volume have responded to the challenge in various ways. Some have taken us some way down a route very different from the course history actually did take. Some have focused on moments of extreme contingency when even a very slight change in circumstances might plausibly have led to a dramatically different historical outcome. Some have described the chapter of accidents and misunderstandings leading to a particular outcome, leaving the reader to reflect on how different that outcome might have been. And a significant number have looked at widely touted alternatives to the way things actually went, only to conclude that in fact none of those alternatives was likely. All of these approaches seem to me to be valid. And taken together they ask, from a range of points of view, how unavoidable Russia's tragic twentieth century really was - in a way that a conventional narrative history would find it much harder to do.
It was Hegel who said that 'the one thing we learn from history is that no one learns anything from history'. I hope he was wrong. As a working diplomat I often had no other guide in analysing a particular challenge or situation than whatever relevant history I could lay my hands on. For Russia in particular (a country where I spent a lot of my career), with its famously opaque style of governance, knowledge of Russian history was often a key source of insight into current developments. The Russians, too, rely heavily on history in trying to understand where the world is going. For the revolutionaries of 1917 the key historical precedent, both positive and negative, was the French Revolution. A central aim of all the Russian revolutionaries was to avoid the emergence, as happened in France, of a military dictator - a 'Napoleon'. They succeeded. But they got Stalin instead. Was that inevitable? I leave the reader to judge.
FOREIGN INTERVENTION: THE LONG VIEW
1900-1920
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the 1970s, among Anglo-American historians the field was dominated by the debate between so-called optimists and pessimists. The optimists believed that the constitutional regime established in 1906-14 heralded Russia's move towards Western liberal democracy, a move which would have ended in success had not the First World War intervened and provided Lenin with the opportunity to stage what these historians saw as the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. The pessimists, on the other hand, believed that tsarism was doomed and that Bolshevism was always the likeliest victor in Russia's inevitable revolutionary crisis.
hen I first became a historian of late imperial Russia in
I believed even then that this conception of Russia's fate in 1914 as lying either with democracy or communism reflected much more the Cold War context in which the debate occurred than it did Russian realities in the early twentieth century. The debate was in many ways less Russian history than a battle between rival ideological positions within the Western intelligentsia, which was being fought out on Russian soil. The terms of the debate also illustrated the very powerful hold that the present and its concerns have on historians' thinking, above all in so highly 'relevant' and politically explosive a field as Russian history in the Cold War era.
The idea that Russia could have made a peaceful transition to liberal democracy is very wishful thinking. Russia was a great multinational empire, one of many that dominated the globe in 1900. None have survived and none have disappeared without serious conflict. Russia was also a country on Europe's poorer and less developed periphery, where middle classes and states were weaker and property less secure than in the continent's core. Confronting the onset of mass politics was much more dangerous and frightening for elites on Europe's periphery than for those at its centre. I call this periphery the Second World. Most of the countries of this world lived under authoritarian regimes after 1918 from which some of them were freed in 1945 less by their own efforts than by Anglo-American victory in the Second World War. If Spain and Italy, where liberal institutions and values were much deeper rooted than in Russia, adopted authoritarian and even semi-totalitarian regimes in the 1920s, what chance did Russian democracy have?
A Bolshevik victory in early twentieth-century Russia was likelier than a liberal democratic one but nevertheless not the likeliest outcome. For this there are many reasons. Of these perhaps the most important is the international context: it seems to me a fantasy to imagine that in peacetime the European great powers would have allowed any Russian regime to secede from the international system, set itself up as the headquarters of international socialist revolution, and repudiate today's equivalent of trillions of dollars of foreign debt, most of it owed to citizens of these great powers.
Here immediately one comes to the core of this chapter, which stresses the crucial influence of the international context on the Russian Revolution and suggests a number of possible outcomes that would have been strongly influenced by the 'international factor'. To develop this theme we must begin our story in 1905-6.
In these years Russia was rocked by a revolution that came very close to bringing down the monarchy. If one looks at events from the perspective of revolutionaries or liberals this may seem an exaggeration. The regime appeared only too durable. But that is not the view you get when you study the higher reaches of the regime from the inside and through the eyes of many of its leading officials. In these circles deep fear existed that the regime would crumble. The worst months of crisis came between October 1905 when Nicholas II granted a constitution and July 1906 when he successfully dissolved the first Duma.
The promise of a constitution in the manifesto of 17 October in no way satisfied the majority of Russian liberals. Their party, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), continued to call for universal male suffrage, a government responsible to parliament, the expropriation of much gentry land and an amnesty for all political prisoners. The revolutionary socialist parties were totally irreconcilable from the regime's (correct) perspective and they enjoyed great support among urban workers. Meanwhile much of the countryside was in uproar as peasants burned manor houses, expropriated crops and terrorised landowners and their agents. Worst of all for Russia's rulers, its own forces were in disarray. After the October 1905 manifesto the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which guided and coordinated repression, was in a state of confusion with officials losing confidence and unclear how to act, and their agents and informants beginning to scurry for cover. Most of the navy and much of the army were unreliable as agents of repression. Even in the army, mutinies were frequent and units of the armed forces might easily become servants of the revolution rather than of the regime. Loyalty hung by a thread in many regiments, which were capable of suppressing riots one day and going on strike the next. The government knew what hopes the peasants, whose sons filled the army's ranks, placed in the first Duma: at the centre of these hopes was the expropriation of all gentry land. As the time to dissolve the Duma approached, fears mounted. On 11 June 1906 the First Battalion of the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior unit in the Russian army, mutinied. General Alexander Kireev, usually a great optimist, wrote in his diary, 'this is it'.1