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The revolution has begun! What happiness. The cursed autocracy is finally destroyed. The soldiers have gone on to the streets. The officers are hiding. It’s all so unexpected, and everything is going at a gallop. We’ve all gone mad with joy. Yelena Brutsus, Petrograd housewife
In February 1917, the Russian workers and peasants rose again in another, even more furious revolution. The First World War had inflicted on them greater suffering than anywhere else in Europe. There seemed no end to the war, nor to the ruthless class policies of the Tsar and his advisers. In a trice, the February revolution overthrew forever the Tsarist tyranny. It was replaced by a provisional government which promised a parliament and continued the war. At the same time, workers, soldiers and peasants set up soviets on a far greater scale than in 1905.
In the ensuing tumultuous nine months, the two forms of power – the old state and the new soviets – operated side by side.
The provisional government, under its prime minister, Kerensky, staggered aimlessly under the huge burden of the war, which it was determined to continue. Kerensky was forced again and again into the policies which had been carried out by the Tsar. Quickly, the popularity of the provisional government started to disappear. The people, both in the cities and in the countryside, clamoured for more. This clamour was not often heard by the government. The anger and aspirations of the people, and especially of the working class, expressed itself in the political organisations which more closely represented them: the soviets.
When the soviets were first elected in February, they were dominated by the Social Revolutionaries, whose strength was in the countryside among the peasants, and the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party. The Mensheviks argued that the job of the soviets was to advise and pressurise the provisional government, not to replace it. They treated the soviets as sounding boards, glorified trade unions where people could express their opinions and pass them on to the real power: the provisional government. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch2
The Russian revolution was isolated. The working class which had made the revolution was almost entirely wiped out by war and famine. Of the three million adult workers in Russia, only 1.2 million remained in 1921, and many of those were driven out of the cities in search of food. Effectively the only revolutionary workers who were left were those who had taken over the reins of political power. The Bolsheviks still ruled, but there were no Bolshevik workers to maintain ‘control from below’ – the essence of the revolution. The inevitable happened quite quickly. The revolution perished. ibid.
This persecution of the revolutionaries went on throughout the 1930s. By the end of that decade there was only one member of the original central committee of the Communist Party still living: Stalin himself. Lenin had died of illness. Every other member had been executed, murdered or forced into suicide. Most of the Bolshevik leaders were executed after show trials, in which they were either tortured or persuaded to ‘confess’ to their opposition to the revolution they had led. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek – all confessed and were shot. Trotsky was pursued into exile and murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico. ibid.
Russia was not a socialist society at all. It was a state-capitalist society presided over by a tyranny every bit as savage as any stock exchange-based capitalist tyranny anywhere else in the world. ibid.
The Russian Revolution, Professor Pipes tells us in his very first sentence, was ‘arguably the most important event of the century’. He then spends 845 pages proving that it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, after that first flourish, he can hardly bring himself to call it a revolution at all. It was instead, he insists, a coup d’état, led by a bunch of psychopaths and fanatics, whose consequence has brought nothing but pain and despair to the people of the world. Paul Foot, article February 1992, ‘Saints & Devils’, review of Richard Pipe’s ‘The Russian Revolution’ 1899-1919
Miles of cornfield, and ballet in the evening. Alan Hackney, Private Life, 1958
But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
For a start we’ll do away with the three-year waiting list for a kipper tie. And I’ll legalise hoola-hoops. Spitting Image s2e6, Gorbachev’s party, ITV 1985
Let’s bomb Russia! ... Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away! Kenny Everett, Conservative Party rally
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty. P G Wodehouse, The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology
Russia can be an empire or a democracy but it cannot be both. Zbigniew Brzezinski
The course of Russian history has indeed been greatly affected by the operations of international bankers ... The Soviet government has been given United States’ treasury funds by the Federal Reserve Board ... acting through the Chase Bank. Louis McFadden
God of frostbite, God of famine,
beggars, cripples by the yard,
farms with no crops to examine –
that’s him, that’s your Russian God. Peter Vyazemsky, The Russian God, 1828
Plumes of thick tobacco smoke fill the room of an apartment in St Petersburg, Russia. A group of impassioned war veterans and intellectuals have secretly gathered to discuss the future of their country. Revolutions that Changed History VI: The Decembrist Revolt
‘This is the moment whre Russian society recognises that this system is totally antiquated.’ ibid. comment
‘The Decembrist revolt happened quickly. It was a race against the clock. The plotters seized an opportunity that they didn’t expect.’ ibid.
The unequal distribution of land between the rich and poor leaves little room for the emergency of a middle class. ibid.
As Napoleon nears the outskirts of Moscow, a thick haze of smoke falls upon the troops. ibid.
The retreat turns into a disastrous ordeal for the French army. ibid.
Intoxicated with a lust for liberty, the chant rings through the streets of St Petersburg, an unforeseen omen of the chaos to come. ibid.
The rebel army stomps across icy group in unison until they reach Senate Square. ibid.
A hail of grapeshot rains upon the rebel troops. ibid.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, ruler of a vast land steeped in tradition. Tradition he was determined to shatter as quickly as possible … He married a commoner and made her his empress … But there was a dark side to this Tsar. The complexities and contradictions of Peter’s character and the sheer scope and adventure of his life have fascinated generation after generation for nearly 300 years. History’s Most Hated s1e6: Peter the Great, 2017
An army that would eventually allow the adult Peter to wage aggressive wars of expansion. ibid.
‘Building St Petersburg meant more casualties, more deaths, more dead, than any battle.’ ibid. historian
The Renaissance had reached its greatest glory … Yet in a land known as Moscovy the dark ages lingered and a nation struggled daily to avoid economic and political collapse. The force that would save it was embodied in a man, a volatile mixture of piety and ruthless intrigue, whose cunning and cruelty would one day control the largest nation on Earth … Tsar Ivan the Terrible. History’s Most Hated s1e8: Ivan the Terrible
A tumultuous nearly bankrupt country Ivan had inherited: compared to Europe, Russia was primitive. It was a nation with no banks, no form of roads or essential infrastructure. ibid.
Terrible was meant as a term of respect for a leader who possessed awesome power … The irony would not be apparent for years. ibid.
The Tsar was a man teetering on sanity’s edge. ibid.
I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the Negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. I am at a loss to understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the Negro slave without tools to work out his salvation. In giving him personal liberty, you have him an obligation to perform to the state which he must be unable to fulfil. Without property of any kind he cannot educate himself and his children. I believe the time must come when many will question the manner of American emancipation of the Negro slaves in 1863 ...