Dreaming of the Big Fight
85 years is too short an historical period to heal the burning scars in the people’s memories by the October 1917 Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, and make it a topic of purely academic discussion. Without doubt, the Bolshevik coming to power changed the destinies of several generations in our recent Soviet Fatherland, meaning millions of lives. This is why we and our remote descendants will return to those events, beginning November 7 (New Style) in Petrograd — if not at the analytical, then at a subconscious, emotional level.
Be it now or sometime in the future, there is only one way to analyze the motive forces, enigmas, and consequences of the victory scored by Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades. It is not through historical incantation (be it on the part of the Right extremists, some of whom mention those events the way Russian Old Believers would refer to the devil, or of the 2000-model “unbending” Bolsheviks who seem totally oblivious of tens of millions of victims thrown on the altar of that “better world”), but through studying precise facts contained in authentic documents of that epoch. Here one must not vent one’s emotions but think things over, forgetting nothing. The more so that the 1917 revolutionary peripeteias have much in common with other distant epochs. And they leave one wondering about some of the current realities. Let us face it: can we be sure that a situation will never develop in which political extremism will be harbored by most of society, rather than by individual radicals (for was this not was the defining trait of the Russian crisis in 1917?).
Talking of documents and their analysis, there is a priceless witness to those events, whose observations remain a practically inexhaustible source for all researches studying the ten days that shook the world. Yes, I have in mind John Reed (1887-1920), Harvard graduate who wrote for a socialist newspaper, The Masses, then produced his famous Ten Days That Shook the World (currently seldom mentioned anywhere), and eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Fond as he was of Bolshevism, John Reed tried to build a panoramic view of those events, so one could understand the shape and meaning of the whole thing. Apart from everything else, he was a spectacular, talented person. Hence the only conclusion is that if you want to understand why the Bolsheviks won 85 years ago, read his book.
First, one can only marvel at Reed’s ability to combine portrayals of singular scenes at the time, so realistic you can almost see them with your own eyes, with the texts of original masterfully selected documents and political generalizations. Here is one such scene:
“WEDNESDAY, November 7th, I rose very late. The noon cannon boomed from Peter-Paul as I went down the Nevsky. It was a raw, chill day. In front of the State Bank some soldiers with fixed bayonets were standing at the closed gates.
“‘What side do you belong to?’ I asked. ‘The Government?’
“‘No more Government,’ one answered with a grin, ‘Slava Bogu! — Glory to God!’ That was all I could get out of him....
“The street-cars were running on the Nevsky, men, women and small boys hanging on every projection. Shops were open, and there seemed even less uneasiness among the street crowds than there had been the day before.”
Now about the generalizations.
John Reed believed that Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders won mostly because the “property-owning classes were becoming more conservative, the masses of the people more radical... There was a feeling among business men and the intelligentsia generally that the Revolution had gone quite far enough, and lasted too long; that things should settle down.” On the other hand, he notes that people in St. Petersburg streets — workers, peasants, sailors — were disappointed to realize that the government’s beautiful promises (peace, placing the factories under the working people’s control, mottoes used by the Bolsheviks most effectively) remained on paper. This is what drove them all to the “final big fight” (they thought it would be final because they would score the final victory and there would be no battles to fight. Lenin, skillfully putting forth and pulling out political slogans such as “All Power to the Soviets!” and “Long Live the Constituent Assembly!”, was keenly aware of the moods of the masses). John Reed describes the situation with a splendid laconic brevity: “In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt...”
One other aspect. Of late, it has become fashionable to discuss “German subsidies” to the Bolsheviks and Lenin’s marked adventurism, rating them as major (if not the only) reasons for the collapse of old Russia. Here is John Reed’s opinion: “In considering the rise of the Bolsheviki it is necessary to understand that Russian economic life and the Russian army were not disorganised on November 7th, 1917, but many months before, as the logical result of a process which began as far back as 1915.” We might add that the process began much earlier than that, when the powers that be and their enemies had adopted that severe class approach which Prof. Serhiy Krymsky, a great Ukrainian philosopher, described as an approach “allowing the constructiveness of the forces of evil.”
A few words about Russian economic life. There are appendices in his book with interesting official statistics. Thus, in a relatively well-to-do Moscow, from August 1914 to August 1917, “On an average, food increased in price 556 per cent, or 51 per cent more than wages.” The costs of other necessities (footwear, soap, matches, kerosene, etc.) rose by 1109%, or twice the amount of wages. The government hoped that in wartime the people would tolerate these and even worse hardships. We all know the outcome.
One last scene from Reed’s book, perhaps the most descriptive, showing just how legal nihilism, cynical disrespect for the law, is punished by history. On the eve of the 2nd Congress of Soviets (it would actually allow Lenin’s government to take over state power) “The Credentials Committee... was challenging delegate after delegate, on the ground that they had been illegally elected. Karakhan, member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, simply grinned. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘When the time comes we’ll see that you get your seats....’”
