And yet. Since 1917 Russia has seen what in many ways was another revolution. In 1991 the USSR collapsed, taking most of the Communist project with it. It is striking to compare the vainglorious speeches made in the Soviet Union in 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary ofwhat was then called the 'Great October Revolution', with the present Russian mood of uncertainty about what the whole experience has meant. Should the Dzerzhinsky statue be re-erected, or should Lenin's mausoleum be razed? Was Stalin indeed Russia's greatest man, or could it have been the leading dissident, Andrei Sakharov?
So what, if anything, does the 1917 revolution still have to teach us? In this afterword I approach this question first by asking whether we can indeed say anything sensible about what in the revolution was inevitable, and what was not. This leads, via consideration of the very particular role of Lenin, to a discussion of the impact of the revolution in history over the next seventy years - bringing us to 1991. While the two upheavals were of course very different there are also some telling points of comparison. And then, finally, after 1991 how much is left?
I: WHAT WAS INEVITABLE, AND WHAT WASN'T?
The chapters of this book have examined in detail a number of moments during the revolution when things might have gone differently. Some contributors have identified points where a small change of circumstances could have led to a large change in trajectory. Others have concluded that at the moment they are examining there was not much that was likely to shift. Against this background, is there anything sensible we can say about what was, and was not, inevitable in the overall course of the revolution?
Let me focus on two key questions. Could the tsarist regime in some form have survived? And, if not, how inevitable was the Leninist regime that succeeded it?
On the first of these questions it is useful, as Dominic Lieven points out, that we have international comparators. It was not just Russia. By about 1910 all three of the great European land empires - Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman - faced pressures that they were visibly ill- equipped to meet. The Ottomans, dubbed by an earlier Russian tsar the 'sick man of Europe', were seeing their empire erode as more vigorous powers and upstart local nationalisms were dismembering it piece by piece. The Habsburgs, similarly, were having increasing difficulty holding their ramshackle empire together in the face of growing demands for independence from a range of subject nationalities, notably Slavs. And, as we have seen, the Romanovs were struggling with the combined effects of military defeat in Japan, the destabilising impact of economic modernisation (as the others were too), and widespread economic discontent.
The crucible where all this came together was the Balkan peninsula. Here all three empires had vital, and competing, interests. And the moment was the start of the First World War. As Dominic Lieven says, far too much attention has been paid to the supposed conjuncturality of the First World War. What if Gavrilo Princip had missed? And so on. In fact, the final breakdown ofAugust 1914 was simply the culmination of a century of accelerating Balkan crises. There was near-war in 1909 between Russia and Austro-Hungary, and two actual Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913, into both of which the great powers were very nearly drawn. A couple of decades earlier, one of the most perceptive readers of European politics, Otto von Bismarck, had predicted that the next great European conflagration would be the result of 'some damned fool thing in the Balkans'. To the extent that anything in history is inevitable it is hard to avoid the conclusion that some final showdown in the Balkans involving Russia, Austro-Hungary and Turkey - with Germany almost certainly being pulled in - was it.
The war destroyed all three empires. These were pre-modern polities, enjoying limited loyalty from large swathes of their populations and grappling with the unprecedented economic and mass mobilisation challenges of modern war. It is possible to imagine the war coming in another form, but without some stroke of good luck (a much shorter war - unlikely given the technological superiority of defence over offence; or greater political good sense - made harder by the new phenomenon of aroused public opinion drowning out the subtle calculations of the diplomats) it is hard to see the political outcome being very different. At the risk of sounding deterministic (and to adapt Ian Fleming), the fall of one empire could have been happenstance, two could have been coincidence, but all three makes it look like a law of nature.
As for Russia itself, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that the signs of imperial morbidity were there in abundance. Educated and propertied Russians made clear through those they elected to the Duma their diminishing sympathy for incompetent, backward-looking tsarism. The supposedly more loyal 'dark people' voted when they could for expropriation of the rich, increasingly took the law into their own hands against landowners and capitalists, and served with less and less willingness and discipline in Russia's armed forces. Much of the urban proletariat was frankly revolutionary. And the revolutionary movement itself can only be compared in fanaticism and propensity to violence to today's extreme Islamists. The most able servants of the regime, Witte and Stolypin, were both driven by fears for its survival. The tsar himself was weak, petulant, mistakenly believed that he was loved by the Russian people, and was quite unrealistically attached to his own autocratic prerogatives. The weird and utterly Russian figure of Rasputin, embraced by the Romanov family in the face of the clearest need to get rid of him, finally says it all. Literary theorists would say that the final collapse was overdetermined. The First World War merely gave the last kick to a deeply rotten edifice.
But if the fall of the old regime was indeed overdetermined, it is hard to argue that that was also true of what succeeded it. Russia between the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 and the effective imposition of Bolshevik rule in early 1918 (with, even then, a civil war still to win) feels like a rudderless vessel pushed this way and that by the winds and the tides. The Provisional Government that notionally took over from the monarchy was able to exercise significant authority in some ways (it launched a serious military offensive against the Central Powers in June). But it lacked legitimacy, faced growing chaos in the countryside, a revolutionary working class in Petrograd and other cities, and an increasingly mutinous military. It operated in uneasy tandem with the Petrograd (and other) soviets, which were deeply hostile to the old order and controlled the streets and barracks of Petrograd. The traditional Soviet narrative of the period is of power ineluctably slipping into the hands of the soviets, and ultimately the Bolsheviks. In fact, while the Bolsheviks undoubtedly exploited the chaos of these months to extend their grip in any way they could, there were a whole series of moments, as described in a number of the chapters above, where their advance could have stopped. What if the Duma had successfully imposed its authority in February, as Kerensky subsequently suggested, and the rising power of the soviets had been contained at that point? What if the Constituent Assembly, to which everyone was looking to take authority, had succeeded in convening before the Bolshevik October coup, and had thus not been instantly snuffed out? What if Kerensky had avoided his catastrophic misunderstanding with Kornilov in August, and had thus retained the support of the army to confront the Bolsheviks in October? What if Lenin had been arrested on the way to the Smolny on 24 October, in which case the takeover of power would have been by all the socialists not just the Bolsheviks?
II: LENIN'S ROLE
We should pause for a moment over Lenin. It has become unfashionable in modern history to credit much to individual personalities. It is nevertheless quite impossible to understand the course of events in these few months in Petrograd (and afterwards) without acknowledging the formidable impact of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. This was the situation for which he was born. A driven revolutionary from his schooldays, his relationships with his wife, his family and all those around him were completely dominated by politics. And for him politics was Manichaean: he saw only acolytes or enemies - the latter to be brought down by whatever means came to hand. From very early on he dedicated himself to bringing an extreme version of Marxism first to Russia and then to the world. He saw clearly that this could not be done by popular consent; force and terror would be needed ('How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' he asked in 1917). His chosen instrument to gain power, devised by him in 1902, was a disciplined, tightly bound, 'vanguard' political party. Through intra-party intrigue he created exactly the faction he needed, the Bolsheviks, in 1903.