Russia's Revolution in Focus

...Despite the so-called restorations, there was no return to the old regime in either England or France...

...And this took place during the most difficult war in which it had ever been engaged...

...it could rule only "by the consent of the governed...

...In the Allied countries, which enjoyed far greater political stability, the seriousness of the moment was fully appreciated: In England, a coalition government was formed...

...In the Duma, Alexander Kerensky appealed to the people to defer the cause of domestic liberation until the country had been liberated from the foreign menace...

...That is why it is far easier to prevent a revolution than to keep it within specified bounds once it has begun...

...They constituted an appeal to the nation to master its own destiny, to affirm human and civil dignity—and the appeal did not go unanswered...

...The Russian democratic forces in 1917 had no such guarantee...

...Nor was there cause to fear a right-wing counterrevolution—no effective forces to carry one out existed...

...Boris Souvarine, » biographer of Stalin, is editor of the BEIPI bulletin on Communism in Paris...

...Otherwise, the Russian people would not have resisted the lure of Bolshevism to the extent it did...

...The February Revolution was for Russia a period of many-sided, nationwide liberation —of removal of all the fetters which still bound the Russian people, of complete realization of political and civil liberty, of elimination of all inequality of rights...

...We are witnessing the unprecedented spectacle of a revolution from above, not from below...

...In 1917, the "voice of freedom" sounded in Russia with incomparably greater force and longer than a few hours...

...In the last months before the February Revolution, its inevitability was often discussed, but when it came it caught everyone unprepared: the people, the Government and the political parties...

...A revolution always weakens, and often destroys, the apparatus of compulsion and inevitably reduces popular submissiveness to nil...

...The Russian Revolution lacked the gradual development which characterized the English Revolution of the 17th century and the French Revolution of the 18th...

...The ministers included in the Government after the Galician debacle in order to appease the Duma and public opinion found themselves unable to alter the political course selected by the regime...

...Now, 40 years later, isn't it time to recall what it meant to the vast majority of the Russian people and to appraise its significance in history...

...Not surprisingly, oppositionist sentiments mounted steadily throughout the country after the fall of 1915...

...Decades of persistent, constant effort were needed in order to resolve these problems peaceably...

...In each case, the long-term historical consequences of the revolution proved to be much closer to its beginning than to its end...

...This, however, required not only the utmost exertion of will and intelligence by the Government, but also far greater solidarity among the democratic forces...

...The February Revolution was at once accidental and not accidental...

...The people does not want it, but the Government is taking all possible measures to create as many malcontents as possible, and in this it is completely succeeding...

...There was nothing revolutionary about its program, which amounted to a demand for a change in the Government's political course and the formation of a cabinet "enjoying public confidence...

...it acted as though nothing had happened...

...The conditions created by the Revolution gave 110 cause to fear the bourgeoisie...

...Only a prejudiced and historically shortsighted observer could deny the tremendous moral significance of the liberating actions of the Provisional Government...

...after the Revolution, he admitted that without the war it would not have occurred...

...The constitutional period which followed the Revolution of 1905 was one of relative social progress...

...This is, of course, true of all politicians...

...The next 10 pages analyze the events of 1917 in the light of the last four decades...

...There is no need to succumb to the hypnosis of the Soviet regime's 40-year-long existence and exaggerate its unique character...

...Thus, for the second time since the outbreak of war, the Tsarist regime missed a chance for at least a temporary truce with the opposition...

...The responsibility for this political crisis rested entirely with the shortsighted policy of the Tsarist regime...

...In the course of a few days, Russia, which had been fighting the Tsarist autocracy for only a decade, became (in Lenin's words) "the freest country in the world...

...But if they had acted as a united whole, if all the democratic parties had unconditionally rallied around the Provisional Government, if they had all decisively combated maximalist tendencies both in their own parties and among the masses, then the chances of overcoming the Bolshevik peril would unquestionably have been far greater...

...By virtue of its origin, its structure, and its limited effective authority, the Provisional Government could base itself only on public confidence...

...The shock of the great Galician retreat in 1915 brought some concessions, but even this proved temporary...

...It made no real attempt to defend itself, for it proved to have no supporters...

...Yet, anything resembling nationwide prosperity was far off: In Russia, with its overwhelming peasant majority and low level of agricultural technology, the difficulties and conflicts engendered by the initial phases of industrialization were especially severe...

...Any sensible regime would have grasped at this last chance to save itself, but the Russian regime remained deaf to all warnings...

...The Provisional Government found itself in a position unlike that of any previous revolutionary government...

...Yet, it is my belief that neither Russia's military losses nor her vast economic troubles were fatal factors by themselves...

...There was something fantastic in the speed and ease with which it triumphed...

...For it was the Provisional Government that led the country toward a Constituent Assembly and popular rule, toward a drastic agrarian reform, toward the reconstruction of the old empire on federal principles...

...Its political life was characterized, even after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, by a rather sharp conflict between the regime and Russian society—not the revolutionary segment of that society, which at the time was virtually powerless, but the moderate opposition...

...All its efforts had to be directed at mobilizing this confidence and consent— and at organizing forces to defend the new democratic regime...

...The Government kept as its head the aged, ineffectual I. L. Goremykin...

...However, this illusory fear to some extent promoted a tendency to underestimate the one real danger—that of a Bolshevik counter-revolution...

...But, skeptics will object, it led the country toward these goals but never attained them...

...The moderate opposition in the Duma went even further in its willingness to conclude a truce with the regime...

...It might not have come to pass if the circumstances had been different...

...None of the belligerents in World War I was really prepared for "total war," Russia least of all...

...After the crushing of the December uprising of 1325, the Decembrist Batenkov wrote: "The voice of freedom rang out for no more than a few hours, but the fact alone that it did ring out was good...

...Michael Karpovich, for many years professor of Russian history at Harvard, is author of Imperial Russia 1801-1917 and other works...

...In the Cabinet, suspicion if not hostility toward the Duma and all social organizations continued to predominate...

...Before long, everything was worse than ever...

...Some of them resigned while others were dismissed and replaced by more "suitable" candidates...

...the project for universal elementary schooling was still in its first stage...

...On the eve of the October coup, Lenin, trying to convince his wavering comrades of the necessity of immediate action, pointed out that history never gives revolutionaries a "100-per-cent guarantee" of success...

...It completed the long and difficult process of Russian emancipation, which had begun with the liberation of the peasants and continued with the constitutional reforms of the early 20th century...

...In history, there are neither final victories nor final defeats...

...Serious efforts to improve public education and grant the peasantry its full rights did not start until the beginning of this century...

...At its end lies the historical vindication of Russia's democratic revolution...

...Even totalitarianism has not been able to change human nature—above all, it has been unable to root out man's longing for freedom and justice...

...In historical perspective, the victors in the revolution proved to be the vanquished and the vanquished proved victors...

...A few days of street disorders in St...

...These may be only the first steps on a long and difficult road, but there can be no doubt in which direction that road leads...

...At one of the most critical moments in Russian history, the administration of a vast empire depended upon the whim of the illiterate, irresponsible monk Rasputin...

...Yet the speed and ease with which the Revolution triumphed were dangerous...

...in the course of time, a victory can be transformed into a defeat and vice versa...

...There was nothing in the actual situation to justify these patterns of thinking...

...This week, the Kremlin celebrates the 40th anniversary of the coup which brought Communism to power, reversing the democratic Russian Revolution which had triumphed eight months earlier and causing ~ split in the world labor movement which persists to this day...

...In Russia, everything remained as before...

...The opposition moved from its proposal of "civil peace," which had been rejected by the Government, to an open indictment of the "dark forces" standing behind the regime...

...To be sure, this was a time of considerable economic progress, which was in some measure reflected in the state of the broad masses...

...Stolypin declared that, if Russia were guaranteed 25 years of peace, at the end of that time it would be "unrecognizable...

...If this unity was not achieved, the fault lay in certain failings in the Russian democratic psychology, anachronistic survivals from the underground struggle against Tsarism...

...in France, a cabinet of "sacred union...

...There was hardly any need for concern about "deepening the Revolution," since every revolution has a tendency to "deepen" anyway, and in the Russian Revolution the absence of restraining barriers was quite obvious...

...Two authoritative judgments, from diametrically opposing sources, show the impact which the war was to have on Russian history...

...The war with Germany and Austria produced a genuine wave of patriotic feeling in Russian socio-political circles, even in the revolutionary-socialist milieu...

...The war of 1914 was especially inopportune for Russia...

...The Provisional Government was neither willing nor able to carry out an anti-popular policy...

...These included drawing a sharp line of contrast between "revolutionary" and "bourgeois" democracy, an ingrained distrust of state authority, preoccupation with "deepening the Revolution," and exaggerated fear of the possibility of counter-revolution from the Right...

...Though historical analogies must be employed with great caution, in both the English and French Revolutions we find a moderate phase giving way to a radical one, libertarian aspirations to revolutionary despotism, a national program to a sectarian ideology...

...A political regime which has been in existence for many years has one inestimable advantage: It possesses a more or less smoothly functioning apparatus of administrative compulsion, and it can count on the submissiveness of the population under its control...

...The catastrophe was not averted, and in the minds of most people today the Russian democracy of 1917 is linked only with failure and defeat...

...If the instability of the prewar Russian state and social system made a revolution possible and the war turned this possibility into a probability, only the acute political crisis that arose during the war made it inevitable...

...The atmosphere in which Russia went to war in 1914 was very different from that prevailing at the time of the Russo-Japanese War...

...And yet, in spite of all these highly complex, difficult problems, evolutionary progress was still possible in pre-Revolutionary Russia...

...A definite and expanding prospect existed in pre-Revolutionary Russia for solving the country's internal problems by peaceful evolutionary development...

...What was needed above all was time—and peace...

...Neither the overthrow of the democratic regime nor all that followed can nullify its historical significance...

...Russia's Revolution in Focus By Michael Karpovich I AM NOT one of those who maintain that any of the phases of the Russian Revolution of 1917 was inevitable...

...Even the old privileged classes represented in the last two Dumas could not accept the shortsighted policies of the Government, which was unable to adapt itself to the radically changed conditions of Russian life...

...By the third Duma (1908), a break had occurred between the conservative Octobrist party and Prime Minister Stolypin, and this was followed by an increasing leftward movement of the moderate majority—a process which gained momentum right up to the outbreak of war in 1914...

...The Government did not make so much as a gesture of reply...

...Nevertheless, most of the opposition not only did not want a revolution but was concerned with preventing it...

...In another psychological atmosphere, these problems could have been resolved...

...Petersburg, and the refusal of the soldiers of the city garrison to put them down, were enough to topple the Tsarist regime...

...On the eve of the Revolution and half a century after their emancipation from serfdom, the Russian peasants, as far as their civil rights, living conditions and cultural level were concerned, were in effect "second-class citizens," isolated from the rest of the nation...

...Lenin, in 1912, openly longed for a European or at least a Russian-Austrian war but feared that the rulers of Russia and Austria would not grant him this "gift...

...In 1914, the constitutional regime had been in existence only eight years...

...Until they were, the basis for mass discontent continued to exist...

...the Stolypin land reform had actually been functioning only a few years...

...At the same time, it was the culmination of the entire Russian liberation movement and the embodiment of the Russian people's longing for freedom and social justice...

...Things were no better in the socio-economic realm...

...This happened because the goals for which the original revolutionaries were unsuccessfully striving met the essential requirements of the people and, in that sense, had history on their side...

...In both cases, the basic "conquests of the revolution" were ultimately consolidated in national life, though England did not remain a Crom-wellian "society of saints," nor France a Robespierrean "republic of philanthropists...

...This is especially true of major revolutions...

...Outside the Duma, in more democratic social milieux, this conflict was even more acute...

...But though the Leninists won this battle against democratic socialist ideals (and other battles in Eastern Europe after 1945), the evidence of recent years suggests that they have already lost the war...

...We have new proof of this in the Hungarian and Polish uprisings, and in what is now happening in the Soviet Union itself...

...Its replacement by the Provisional Government was immediately accepted by the country and the Army with no noticeable signs of resistance from any quarter...

...On February 4, 1917, less than a month before the Revolution, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich sent a letter to the Tsar which described the situation in the following terms: "Strange though it may seem, the Government is today the organ which is preparing a revolution...

...This is not as convincing as it sounds...

...Russia was on the way to solving its basic problems, though it had a long way to go...

...The Government was unwilling to cooperate even with the Progressive bloc formed by the centrist groups in the Duma...