Pursuing an Elusive Freedom
ULAM, ADAM B.
Pursuing an Elusive Freedom The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd By Alexander Rabinowitch Norton. 393 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government...
...there was a great deal of internal debate and dissension...
...author, "Ideologies and Illusions: Revolutionary Thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn" Alexander Rabinowitch tells us his reason for adding to an already vast literature on the Revolution of 1917 is, "that existing accounts of this seminal chapter in modern Russian and, indeed in world history, do not do it justice...
...So convincingly, in fact, that Rabinowitch is constrained to repeat their conclusions: The Bolsheviks won power because of "the magnetic attraction of the party's platform as embodied in the slogans 'Peace, Land and Bread' and 'All Power to the Soviets' . . . Only the Bolsheviks seem to have perceived the necessarily crucial significance of the armed forces in the struggle for power . . ." To be sure, Rabinowitch does single out what he believes to be one important cause of the Bolsheviks' success that has been overlooked by fellow historians of the Revolution...
...It requires a rare writer, one who combines the evocative powers of a great novelist with the learning and analytic ability of a superior historian, to do full justice to the decisive moments of history...
...For although it is seldom noticed in books on the Revolution, the very law voted by the Congress of the Soviets that set up the first (Bolshevik) Council of Commissars also specified that it was to be merely a provisional regime "until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly...
...Nevertheless, Bolshevik politics were hardly "tolerant" and "decentralized...
...But disagreement is not democracy, as the Chinese Communists are once more making clear today...
...In 1917 Lenin was still the party's leader, not its dictator...
...and many of the members would have been scandalized at the thought that they were on the way to establishing an oppressive one-party state...
...And how many on the Central Committee itself knew the party was receiving funds from the German Imperial Government...
...Yet assuming we grant, as we should, that in October the Bolsheviks remained far from totalitarianism, it does not then automatically follow that a large share of their success is attributable to the residues of democracy in their make-up...
...This was the "party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralized structure and the method of operation" in its early years...
...Only someone of Lenin's personal magnetism and strength could have overcome both the social-democratic superstitions of some of his colleagues and the anarchist impulses of so many rank-and-file members...
...Reviewed by Adam B. Ulam Professor of Government and Director of the Russian Research Center, Harvard...
...When the Assembly was convened two and a half months later, it was unceremoniously chased out by armed sailors, and no Bolshevik raised his voice in protest...
...He is quite right to remind us that the Bolshevik of 1917 was not the Communist of 1921, much less the Stalinist of 1937...
...Rabinowitch would agree that the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries were more imbued by the democratic spirit, and we know how far that spirit got them...
...the non-Bolshevik Left's indecisiveness, its strange fear of power...
...If anything, his very persuasive argument that the 1917 Bolsheviks did not constitute a disciplined and monolithic organization serves to underline the role one man played...
...As for "the open and mass character" of the party, it is true that by October the party had grown beyond Lenin's original model of a small nucleus of professional revolutionaries...
...it clearly could not be maintained in a time when Russia was, in Lenin's own words, "the freest country in the world...
...If he means that momentous events such as the French and Russian revolutions tend to defy the talents of even the most erudite and conscientious scholars, he is on safe ground...
...The erosion of what was left of the democratic urge among Lenin's followers must have been very rapid...
...That model was devised for the period when the party was an illegal conspiracy...
...the ineffectivenes of the Provisional Government...
...Still, it is useful to have recalled how in 1917 many of Lenin's most zealous followers, including some his closest collaborators, had little notion of where he was leading them...
...The main value of The Bolsheviks Come to Power is its demonstration of how much dissension, tactical and ideological disagreements, and sheer improvisation informed Bolshevik behavior during the hectic months between February and October...
...But were the new members consulted on crucial matters, like the October uprising...
...When Rabinowitch goes on to assert, however, that previous works on the October Revolution "fail to explain satisfactorily why things turned out as they did," thereby implying that his alone does, he is on much flimsier footing...
...The Bolsheviks' skillful exploitation of the war-weary mood of the masses, and their appropriation of the most tantalizing revolutionary slogans...
...Lenin's audacity—these and other key answers to the question of "why things turned out as they did" have been put forward, often convincingly, by numerous writers...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 3
