THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
A New History
Sean McMeekin
Basic Books
Illustrated; 445 pp; $30
On the afternoon of July 4, 1917, thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers converged on a former royal palace, a sprawling Palladian structure in the Russian capital, then called Petrograd. The palace was serving as the seat of the Petrograd Soviet — or council — of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, a group of mostly radical revolutionaries that was sharing power with the country’s provisional government. Four months had passed since the so-called February Revolution forced Czar Nicholas II from the throne, and the democratic socialists and liberals who had taken control were locked in a mounting power struggle marked by shifting alliances, palace intrigues and occasional street fighting. Denouncing them as bourgeois “minister-capitalists,” the mobs now demanded that the Soviet take full command of the country.
The protesters were acting on the orders of the small but militant Bolshevik wing of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party, which had been busy propagandising military units and factory workers. Although the Bolsheviks had called for a peaceful demonstration, their real plan was to seize power in a coup d’état. With gangs in armoured cars and trucks roaming the city, they were already in de facto control. Vladimir Lenin was inside the palace waiting to proclaim a new government. When a leading minister stepped outside to calm the crowd, a worker raised a fist to his face, shouting, “Take power, you S.O.B., when they give it to you!” Others seized him and dragged him into a car. But the Bolshevik plan soon fizzled. Whether due more to a loss of nerve than bad planning, the mobs dissipated and the Bolshevik leaders were arrested. With evidence that they were being lavishly financed by Russia’s wartime enemy Germany, the provisional government prepared to dispatch the traitorous radicals. “Now they are going to shoot us,” Lenin warned his co-conspirator Leon Trotsky before shaving his beard and fleeing to Finland. He would not be seen again in public until the Bolsheviks staged a second coup attempt nearly four months later, this time resulting in the cataclysmic October Revolution, which, according to Sean McMeekin’s estimates, ultimately caused 25 million deaths, radically transformed Russian society and polarised global politics for more than half a century.
Striking as the Bolshevik reversal was in July 1917, the provisional government’s response to the failed coup was even more stunning. Even with public and political sentiment turning against the Bolsheviks, Alexander Kerensky — the ambitious 36-year-old lawyer who had emerged as the government’s leader — dropped treason charges against them, freed their leaders and even allowed them to rearm. The next time they saw an opportunity, the Bolsheviks wouldn’t pass it up. During the successful coup of Oct. 25, the Red Guards arrested the ministers of Kerensky’s liberal government and seized control. What could Kerensky have been thinking?
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That’s one of the chief questions posed by McMeekin, the latest historian to tread the well-worn path of revolution scholarship in a new book published to coincide with the event’s centenary this year. A professor at Bard College, McMeekin argues that one of the seminal events of modern history was largely a matter of chance. Well-written, with new details from archival research used for vivid descriptions of key events, The Russian Revolution comes nearly three decades after Richard Pipes’s masterpiece of the same name.
For Pipes, the revolution reflected the gradual breakdown of Russia’s distinct autocracy, shaped by a centuries-old tradition of collectivism and patrimonial rule, but McMeekin disputes Pipes’s arguments, seeing virtually no difference between the Russian empire and its European rivals.
Far from the hopeless backwater depicted in most histories, McMeekin argues, Russia’s economy was surging before the war, with a growth rate of 10 percent a year — like China in the early 21st century. “The salient fact about Russia in 1917,” he writes, “is that it was a country at war,” yet he adds that the Russian military acquitted itself well on the battlefield after terrible setbacks in 1915, with morale high in early 1917.
Nicholas II — rightly characterised as an incompetent reactionary in most histories — is partly rehabilitated here. His fundamental mistake, McMeekin says, was to trust his liberal advisers, who urged him to go to war, then conspired to remove him from power after protests over bread rations led to a military mutiny.
Although McMeekin agrees the real villains are the ruthless Bolsheviks, he reserves most criticism for the hapless liberals. Leaving Kerensky’s motivations during the July events largely unexplained, he only hints at the common rationale for Kerensky’s refusal to prosecute the Bolsheviks: Deeply unpopular among the liberals, he needed the leftists on his side, believing the greater threat to his government came from right-wing leaders aiming to restore Nicholas to the throne.
Having taken power, the Bolsheviks turned on the unwitting soldiers and peasants who were among their most fervent supporters, unleashing a violent terror campaign that appropriated land and grain, and that turned into a permanent class war targeting ever-larger categories of “enemies of the people.” Unconcerned about Russia’s ultimate fate, they were pursuing their greater goal of world revolution.
McMeekin depends on a surprisingly narrow focus to make his overarching argument, eschewing analysis of the deeper social and political forces required for any comprehensive study of the revolution and its lessons for us today — when radical political groups are again relying on subterfuge and populism to force a fundamental change of the world order. Yes, Russia was rapidly reforming at the turn of the century while its economy was growing — and revolution was far from inevitable. But there were reasons the empire had so much catching up to do, which involved uniquely Russian characteristics like its sprawling landmass, terrible climate and poor soil. These made scratching out a living difficult, and governing unwieldy.
McMeekin leaves no doubt that chance certainly played a significant role in the Bolsheviks’ ascent, but it was no mere coincidence that following the revolution’s dramatic destruction of the ruling elite, the Bolsheviks’ extreme centralisation succeeded in re-establishing Russia’s traditional political culture by the 1930s.
A hundred years after the revolution, Vladimir Putin’s Russia still faces many of the same fundamental problems: rigid authoritarianism, widespread poverty and deeply rooted corruption. Little wonder the Kremlin has been at pains to play down celebration of the revolution’s centenary this year.
© 2017 The New York Times News Service