Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution

First, some background:

Mykolaiv [from Wikipedia]

Mykolaiv[, also] known as...Nikolayev[,] a city in southern Ukraine, [is an] administrative [and] shipbuilding center of the Black Sea....

"Mykolaiv's orderly layout reflects the fact that its development has been well planned from the founding of the city. Its main streets, including the three main east–west Avenues, are very wide and tree-lined. Much of Mykolaiv's land area consists of beautiful parks....

"[The city] was f]ounded by Prince Grigory Potemkin [in] 1789[.] The shipyards were built first[.]

"The city's climate is moderately continental with mild winters and hot summers....

"Mykolaiv was a major Jewish cent[er] of [the] Russian Empire in the 19th century. [For example,] Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson...was born in Mykolaiv [i]n 1902....

"[The city's e]thnicity [in] 1897 [included] Russians 66.3% [and] Jews 19.5%[.]" – Wikipedia

Julius Martov [from Wikipedia]

"Julius Martov...born Yuliy Osipovich Tsederbaum (24 Nov 1873–4 Apr 1923) was a politician and revolutionary who became the leader of the Mensheviks in early 20th-century Russia. He was arguably the closest friend Vladimir Lenin ever had, and was a friend and mentor of Leon Trotsky[.]

"Martov was born to a middle-class, educated and politically aware Jewish family in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (modern day Istanbul)....In his teens, he admired the Narodniks, but the famine crisis made him a Marxist: 'It suddenly became clear to me how superficial and groundless the whole of my revolutionism had been until then, and how my subjective political romanticism was dwarfed before the philosophical and sociological heights of Marxism.'" – Wikipedia

Leon Trotsky [from Wikipedia]

"Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 Nov 1879–21 Aug 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Ukrainian-Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism which has become known as Trotskyism.

"Born into a wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish family in [southern] Ukraine[,] Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev [a.k.a. Mykolaiv] in 1896. In 1898 Tsarist authorities arrested him for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled him to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. In 1903 he sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks during the...Social Democratic Labour Party's initial organisational split. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of [all of] 1905, after which he was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. He once again escaped, and spent the following 10 years working in Britain, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the United States. After the...February...1917...Revolution brought an end to the Tsarist monarchy, Trotsky returned from New York [City] to Russia and became a leader in the Bolshevik faction. [H]e played a key role in the October Revolution of...1917 that overthrew the...Provisional Government." – Wikipedia

See also: 1905 Russian Revolution [from Wikipedia].

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, 1930, translated by Max Eastman, 2017 (1932):

A Note About the Author [by Max Eastman]

"[Trotsky] organized the defense of the new workers' republic, creating the Red Army and conducting a war against the counterrevolutionary forces, backed up with ammunition and supplies by all the great powers of the world[,] a war which was fought on fourteen different fronts with a battle line 7,000 miles long and which was carried to victory under his leadership....

"Trotsky came to New York, after being exiled from Switzerland, France and Spain as a dangerous agitator against the imperialist war, was welcomed by the Slavic laboring population here as the hero of their past revolution, an inevitable leader in the revolution to come. He addressed immense mass meetings, one of them that many Americans remember in the Hippodrome, and earned his living as an editor of the Russian revolutionary daily, Novy Mir....

"Lenin exclaimed [of Trotsky,] striking his fist on the table: 'Show me another man who could organize almost a model army in a single year!'

"[F]rom the study of Trotsky written by A.V. Lunacharsky...published...in 1923 in...Revolutionary Silhouettes[:]

"'For work in political groups Trotsky seemed little fitted, but in the ocean of historic events, where such personal features lose their importance, only his favorable side came to the front....

"'The chief external endowments of Trotsky are his oratorical gift and his talent as a writer....

"'As a political man of wisdom, Trotsky stands on the same height that he does as an orator. And how could it be otherwise? The most skillful orator whose speech is not illumined with thought is nothing but an idle virtuoso, and all his oratory is a tinkling cymbal.'" – pp. x–xiii

Preface [by Trotsky]

"The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. [A]t those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new regime....

"The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense, and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.

"The point is that society does not change its institutions as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once and for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure....Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties, are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the masses to insurrection.

"The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of man's mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of 'demagogues.'

"The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis—the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations. The different stages of a revolutionary process, certified by a change of parties in which the more extreme always supersedes the less, express the growing pressure to the left of the masses[.]

"[A] revolutionary party bases its tactics upon a calculation of the changes of mass consciousness." – pp. xv–xvii

Volume One: The Overthrow of Tsarism

Chapter 1: Peculiarities of Russia's Development

"The ancient civilizations of Egypt, India, and China had a character self-sufficient enough, and they had time enough at their disposal, to bring their social relations, in spite of low productive powers, almost to the same detailed completion to which their craftsmen brought the products of their craft....

"A backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it...reproduces all the stages of their past....Capitalism...prepares and...realizes the universality and permanence of man's development....Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order....

"[T]he introduction of certain elements of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial, under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom as the fundamental form of labor organization....

"Unevenness...reveals itself...in the destiny of the backward countries. Under the whip of external necessity, their backward culture is compelled to make leaps....

"The Byzantine autocratism, officially adopted by the Muscovite tsars at the beginning of the sixteenth century,...gained the subjection of the nobility by making the peasantry their slaves, and upon this foundation created the St. Petersburg imperial absolutism. [S]erfdom, born at the end of the sixteenth century, took form in the seventeenth, flowered in the eighteenth, and was juridically annulled only in 1861.

"The clergy, following after the nobility, played no small role in the formation of the tsarist autocracy, but nevertheless a servile role. The church never rose in Russia to that commanding height that it attained in the Catholic West; it was satisfied with the role of spiritual servant of the autocracy, and counted this a recompense for its humility....In the Petersburg period, the dependence of the church upon the state became still more servile. Two hundred thousand priests and monks were in all essentials a part of the bureaucracy, a sort of police of the gospel. In return for this, the monopoly of the orthodox clergy in matters of faith, land, and income was defended by a more regular kind of police....

"The meagerness...of all the old Russian history...finds its most depressing expression in the absence of real medieval cities as centers of commerce and craft. Handicraft did not succeed in Russia in separating itself from agriculture, but preserved its character of home industry. The old Russian cities were commercial, administrative, military, and manorial—centers of consumption, consequently, not of production. [N]omad traders could not possibly occupy that place in social life which belonged in the West to the craft-guild and merchant-industrial petty and middle bourgeoisie....The chief roads of Russian trade, moreover, led across the border, thus from time immemorial giving the leadership to foreign commercial capital, and imparting a semi-colonial character to the whole process, in which the Russian trader was a mediator between the Western cities and the Russian villages. This kind of economic relation developed further during the epoch of Russian capitalism and found its extreme expression in the imperialist war.

"The insignificance of the Russian cities...also made impossible a Reformation—that is, a replacement of the feudal-bureaucratic orthodoxy by some sort of modernized kind of Christianity adapted to the demands of a bourgeois society. The struggle against the state church did not go further than the creation of peasant sects[.]

"Without the industrial democracy of the cities, a peasant war could not develop into a revolution, just as the peasant sects could not rise to the height of a Reformation....

"The landlords who owned factories were the first among their caste to favor replacing serfdom by wage labor....In 1861 the noble bureaucracy, relying upon the liberal landlords, carried out its peasant reform....

"[T]he separate branches of industry made a series of special leaps over technical productive stages that had been measured in the West by decades....Between the first revolution [in 1905] and the [Great] war [in 1914], industrial production in Russia approximately doubled. [T]he possibility of this swift growth was determined by [Russia's] very backwardness[.]

"Russian industry in its technique and capitalist structure stood at the level of the advanced countries, and in certain respects even outstripped them. [T]he giant enterprises, above 1000 workers each, employed in the United States 17.8 percent of the workers and in Russia 41.4 percent!...

"[I]n Russia the proletariat did not arise gradually through the ages, carrying with itself the burden of the past as in England, but in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past. It is just this fact—combined with the concentrated oppressions of tsarism—that made the Russian workers hospitable to the boldest conclusions of revolutionary thought—just as the backward industries were hospitable to the last word in capitalist organization....

"A yearly inflow of fresh labor forces from the country in all the industrial districts kept renewing the bonds of the proletariat with its fundamental social reservoir.

"The incapacity of the bourgeoisie for political action was immediately caused by its relation to the proletariat and the peasantry. It could not lead after it workers who stood hostile in their everyday life, and had so early learned to generalize their problems. But it was likewise incapable of leading after it the peasantry, because it...dreaded a shake-up of property relations in any form....

"The Russo-Japanese war had made tsarism totter. Against the background of a mass movement the liberal bourgeoisie had frightened the monarchy with its opposition. The workers had organized independently of the bourgeoisie, and in opposition to it, in soviets, a form of organization then first called into being....The liberals demonstratively backed away from the revolution exactly at the moment when it became clear that to shake tsarism would not be enough, it must be overthrown. [T]sarism came out of the experience of 1905 alive and strong enough....

"The revolution of 1917 still had as its immediate task the overthrow of the bureaucratic monarchy, but in distinction from the older bourgeois revolutions, the decisive force now was a new class formed on the basis of a concentrated industry, and armed with new organizations, new methods of struggle. [S]tarting with the overthrow of a decayed medieval structure, the revolution in the course of a few months placed the proletariat and the Communist Party in power....

"While the workers were covering the whole country with soviets, including in them the soldiers and part of the peasantry, the bourgeoisie still continued to dicker[.]

"In the middle of the seventeenth century, the bourgeois revolution in England developed under the guise of a religious reformation. A struggle for the right to pray according to one's own prayer book was identified with the struggle against the king, the aristocracy, the princes of the church, and Rome. The Presbyterians and Puritans were deeply convinced that they were placing their earthly interests under the unshakable protection of the divine Providence. The goals for which the new classes were struggling commingled inseparably in their consciousness with texts from the Bible and the forms of churchly ritual....

"In France,...the revolution...found its expression and justification for the tasks of the bourgeois society, not in texts from the Bible, but in the abstractions of democracy....

"Each of the great revolutions marked off a new stage of the bourgeois society, and new forms of consciousness for its classes. Just as France stepped over the Reformation, so Russia stepped over the formal democracy." – pp. 3–11

Chapter 2: Tsarist Russia in the War

"Russia, as one of the great powers, could not help participating in the scramble of the advanced capitalist countries [during the war. I]n the preceding epoch she could not help introducing shops, factories, railroads, rapid-fire guns, and airplanes....

"The Chinese compradors are the classic type of the national bourgeoisie, a kind of mediating agency between foreign finance capital and the economy of their own country....

The semi-annulment of serfdom and the introduction of universal military service had modernized the army only as far as it had the country. [T]he tsar's army was constructed and armed upon Western models, but this was more form than essence. There was no correspondence between the cultural level of the peasant-soldier and modern military technique. In the commanding staff, the ignorance, light-mindedness, and thievery of the ruling classes found their expression. Industry and transport continually revealed their bankruptcy before the concentrated demands of wartime. Although appropriately armed, as it seemed, on the first day of the war, the troops soon turned out to have neither weapons nor even shoes....

"In answer to alarmed questions from his colleagues as to the situation at the front, the war minister Polivanov answered in these words: 'I place my trust in...the mercy of Saint Nicholas Mirlikisky, Protector of Holy Russia[.]'...

The ministers themselves...wasted hours in those days discussing such problems as whether to remove or not to remove the bones of the saints from Kiev....

"In the past, Russia had been successful against inwardly decomposing states like Turkey, Poland, and Persia....

"The Russian army lost in the whole war more men than any army which ever participated in a national war—approximately two and a half million killed, or 40 percent of all the losses of the Entente. In the first months, the soldiers fell under shell fire unthinkingly or thinking little; but from day to day they gathered experience—bitter experience of the lower ranks who are ignorantly commanded. They measured the confusion of the generals by the number of purposeless maneuvers on soleless shoes, the number of dinners not eaten....

The swiftest of all to disintegrate was the peasant infantry....As early as September 17, 1915, [soon-to-be northern front commander] Kuropatkin wrote, citing [liberal Kadet leader] Guchkov: 'The lower orders began the war with enthusiasm; but now they are weary, and with the continual retreats have lost faith in a victory.'...

"An observant woman, Feodorchenko, serving as sister of mercy, listened to the conversations of the soldiers[.] The little book thus produced, The People at War, permits us to look in that laboratory where bombs, barbed-wire entanglements, suffocating gases, and the baseness of those in power had been fashioning for long months the consciousness of several million Russian peasants, and where along with human bones age-old prejudices were cracking. In many of the self-made aphorisms of the soldiers appear already the slogans of the coming civil war....

"'The army in the rear and especially at the front,' reports a secret service agent, 'is full of elements of which some are capable of becoming active forces of insurrection, and others may merely refuse to engage in punitive activities.' The Gendarme Administration of the Petrograd province declares in October 1916...that 'the relation between officers and soldiers is extremely tense, even bloody encounters are taking place....Everyone who comes near the army must carry away a complete and convincing impression of the utter moral disintegration of the troops.'...On October 30, 1916, the director of the police department wrote...of 'the weariness of war to be observed everywhere, and the longing for a swift peace, regardless of the conditions upon which it is concluded.' In a few months, all these gentleman...will nevertheless assert that the revolution killed patriotism in the army, and that the Bolsheviks snatched a sure victory out of their hands." – pp. 13–18

"[T]ens of hundreds of millions, mounting up to billions, flowed down through distributing canals, abundantly irrigating the industries and incidentally nourishing numberless appetites....

"Nobody had any fear of spending too much. A continual shower of gold fell from above. 'Society' held out its hands and pockets....All came running to grab and gobble, in fear lest the blessed rain should stop. And all rejected with indignation the shameful idea of a premature peace....

"The Duma, divided on the eve of the war, achieved in 1915 its patriotic oppositional majority which received the name of 'Progressive Bloc.' The official aim of this bloc was of course declared to be a 'satisfaction of the needs created by the war.'...The minister of the interior, Prince Sherbatov, at that time characterized the bloc as a temporary 'union called forth by the danger of social revolution.'...Miliukov, the leader of the Kadets, and thus also of the opposition bloc, said at a conference of his party: 'We are treading a volcano....The tension has reached its extreme limit....A carelessly dropped match will be enough to start a terrible conflagration....Whatever the government—whether good or bad—a strong government is needed now more than ever before.'...

"How did the tsar's government...survive for over a year and a half after that?...[T]he profits...continued. However, the chief cause of the successful propping up of the monarchy for twelve months before its fall was to be found in a sharp division in the popular discontent. The chief of the Moscow Secret Service Department reported a rightward tendency of the bourgeoisie under the influence of 'a fear of possible revolutionary excesses after the war.' During the war, we note, a revolution was still considered impossible....

"The Duma again assembled on November 1[, 1916]. The tension in the country had become unbearable. Decisive steps were expected of the Duma. It was necessary to do something, or at the very least say something. The Progressive Bloc found itself compelled to resort to parliamentary exposures. Counting over from the tribune the chief steps taken by the government, Miliukov asked after each one: 'Was this stupidity or treason?' High notes were sounded also by other deputies. The government was almost without defenders. It answered in the usual way: the speeches of the Duma orators were forbidden publication. The speeches therefore circulated by the million....

"A group of extreme rights, sturdy bureaucrats inspired by Durnovo, who had put down the revolution of 1905, took that moment to present to the tsar a proposed program....The authors of the program speak against any concessions whatever to the bourgeois opposition...because...the liberals are 'so weak, so disunited, and...so mediocre...that their triumph...would be unstable.'...A revolutionist, they point out, is a different thing[:] 'The danger and strength of these parties lies in the fact that they have an idea, they have money (!), they have a crowd ready and well organized.' The revolutionary parties 'can count on the sympathy of an overwhelming majority of the peasantry, which will follow the proletariat the very moment the revolutionary leaders point a finger to other people's land.'...

"The positive part of their program was not new, but consistent: a government of ruthless partisans of the autocracy; abolition of the Duma; martial law in both capitals [Moscow and St. Petersburg – MB]; preparation of forces for putting down a rebellion. This program did in its essentials become the basis of the government policy of the last prerevolutionary months. But its success presupposed a power which Durnovo had in his hands in the winter of 1905, but which by the autumn of 1917 no longer existed....Ministers were shifted upon the principle of 'our people'—meaning those unconditionally devoted to the tsar and tsarina. But these 'our people'—especially the renegade Protopopov—were insignificant and pitiful. [T]he military forces prepared for putting down the rebellion were themselves seized by rebellion....

"All the organizations of the enfranchised bourgeoisie supported the November speeches of the Duma opposition with a series of new declarations. [Per] the resolution of the Union of Cities on December 9: 'Irresponsible criminals, fanatics, are preparing for Russia's defeat, shame and slavery.' The...Duma was urged 'not to disperse until the formation of a responsible government is attained.' Even the State Council, organ of the bureaucracy and of the vast properties, expressed itself in favor of calling to power people who enjoyed the confidence of the country. A similar intercession was made by a session of the united nobility....But nothing was changed. The monarchy would not let the last shreds of power slip out of its hands.

"The last session of the last Duma was convoked, after waverings and delays, on February 14, 1917. Only two weeks remained before the coming of revolution. [A]longside an announcement by the chief of the Petrograd Military District, General Khabalov, forbidding demonstrations, was printed a letter from Miliukov warning the workers against 'dangerous and bad counsel' issuing from 'dark sources.'...Pretending that the question of power no longer interested it, the Duma occupied itself with a critical but still strictly business question: food supplies. The mood was languid, as [president] Rodzianko subsequently remembered: 'We felt the impotence of the Duma, weariness of a futile struggle.' Miliukov kept repeating that the Progressive Bloc 'will act with words and with words only.'" – pp. 19–25

Chapter 3: The Proletariat and the Peasantry

"The Russian proletariat learned its first steps in the political circumstances created by a despotic state. Strikes forbidden by law, underground circles, illegal proclamations, street demonstrations, encounters with the police and with troops—such was the school created by the combination of a swiftly developing capitalism with an absolutism slowly surrendering its positions. The concentration of the workers in colossal enterprises, the intense character of governmental persecution, and finally the impulsiveness of a young and fresh proletariat, brought it about that the political strike, so rare in western Europe, became in Russia the fundamental method of struggle....

"With the weakness of the petty bourgeois democracy, the scatteredness and political blindness of the peasant movement, the revolutionary strike of the workers becomes the battering ram which the awakening nation directs against the walls of absolutism....

"The first war months are marked by political inertness in the working class, but already in the spring of 1915 the numbness begins to pass....

"Would the mass offensive of 1912–1914 have led directly to an overthrow of tsarism if the war had not broken out?...

"The Bolshevik faction in the Duma, [a]long with the Menshevik deputies,...introduced a declaration in which it promised 'to defend the cultural weal of the people against all attacks wheresoever originating.'...Not one of the Russian organizations or groups of the party took the openly defeatist position which Lenin came out for abroad....In contrast to the Narodniks and Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks began in 1914 to develop among the masses a printed and oral agitation against the [Great] war. The [Bolshevik] Duma deputies soon...renewed their revolutionary work....In November [2014] the Bolshevik deputies were arrested....The police department remarked with satisfaction that the severe sentences dealt out to the deputies did not evoke any movement of protest among the workers.

"It seemed as though the war had produced a new working class....

"[O]n the 16th of August[, 1915 Prime Minister] Goremykin expressed himself...concisely: 'The trouble among the workers' leaders is that they have no organization, since it was broken up by the arrest of the five members of the Duma.' The minister of the interior added: 'We must not amnesty the members of the Duma (Bolsheviks)—they are the organizing center of the movement in its most dangerous form.'...

"After the arrest of the Duma faction, the Bolsheviks had no centralized party organization at all....However, the reviving strike movement gave them...some strength in the factories. They gradually began to find each other....The underground work revived. In the police department they wrote later: 'Ever since the beginning of the war, the Leninists, who have behind them in Russia an overwhelming majority of the underground social democratic organizations, have in their larger centers...been issuing in considerable numbers revolutionary appeals with a demand to stop the war, overthrow the existing government, and found a republic. And this work has had its palpable result in workers' strikes and disorders.'

"The industrialists grew less and less willing to grant anything to the workers, and the government, as usual, answered every strike with severe repressions. All this pushed the minds of the workers from the particular to the general, from economics to politics: 'We must all strike at once.' Thus arose the idea of the general strike....In the first few months of 1917, political strikes involved six times as many workers as economic....

"Many of the old beliefs are burned up in the fires of this struggle....The terrible pressure of the war and the national ruin is accelerating the process of struggle to such a degree that broad masses of the workers, right up to the very revolution, have not freed themselves from many opinions and prejudices brought with them from the village or from the petty bourgeois family circle in the town. This fact will set its stamp on the first stage of the February Revolution.

"By the end of 1916, prices are rising by leaps and bounds. To the inflation and the breakdown of transport, there is added an actual lack of goods....In October the struggle enters its decisive phase, uniting all forms of discontent in one....A wave of meetings runs through the factories. The topics: food supplies, high cost of living, war, [and] government. Bolshevik leaflets are distributed; political strikes begin; improvised demonstrations occur at factory gates; cases of fraternization between certain factories and the soldiers are observed[.]

"Comparing the situation with that in 1905, the director of the police department, Vassiliev, reaches a very uncomforting conclusion: 'The mood of the opposition has gone very far—far beyond anything to be seen in the broad masses during the above-mentioned period of disturbance.' Vassiliev rests no hope in the garrison; even the police officers are not entirely reliable. The Intelligence Department reports a revival of the slogan of the general strike, the danger of a resurrection of the terror. Soldiers and officers arriving from the front say of the present situation: 'What is there to wait for?—Why don't you take and bump off such-and-such a scoundrel? If we were here, we wouldn't waste much time thinking,' etc. Shliapnikov, a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee, himself a former metalworker, describes how nervous the workers were in those days: 'Sometimes a whistle would be enough, or any kind of noise—the workers would take it for a signal to stop the factory.' This detail is equally remarkable both as a political symptom and as a psychological fact: the revolution is there in the nerves before it comes out on the street....

"The first two months of 1917 show 575,000 political strikers, the lion's share of them in the capital....The mood was tense....The workers all felt that no retreat was possible. In every factory, an active nucleus was forming, oftenest around the Bolsheviks. Strikes and meetings went on continuously throughout the first two weeks of February." – pp. 26–34

"The belated half-liberation of the peasants in 1861 had found agricultural industry almost on the same level as two hundred years before....The peasantry felt still more caught in a trap because the process was not taking place in the seventeenth but in the nineteenth century—that is, in the conditions of an advanced money economy[.] The learned agronomes and economists...proposed to the peasant to make a jump to a higher level of technique and culture without disturbing the landlord, the bailiff, or the tsar. But no economic regime, least of all an agricultural regime, the most tardy of all, has ever disappeared before exhausting all its possibilities. Before feeling compelled to pass over to a more intensive economic culture, the peasant had to make a last attempt to broaden his three fields [with]in the three-field system....This could obviously be achieved only at the expense of nonpeasant lands. Choking in the narrowness of his land area, under the smarting whip of...the market, the muzhik was inexorably forced to attempt to get rid of the landlord once and for all.

"On the eve of the first revolution, the whole stretch of arable land within the limits of European Russia was estimated at 280 million dessiatins. The communal allotments constituted about 140 million. The crown lands, above 5 million. Church and monastery lands, about 2.5 million. Of the privately owned land, 70 million dessiatins belonged to the 30,000 great landlords, each of whom owned above 500 dessiatins. This 70 million was about what would have belonged to 10 million peasant families. The land statistics constitute the finished program of a peasant war.

"The landlords were not settled with in the first revolution....

"However, the defeated revolution did not pass without leaving traces in the village....The frightened landlords not only made considerable concessions in the matter of rentals, but also began a large-scale selling of their landed estates. These fruits of the revolution were enjoyed by the better-off peasants, who were able to rent and buy the landlords' land.v

"However, the broadest gates were opened for the emerging of capitalist farmers from the peasant class by the law of November 9, 1906, the chief reform introduced by the victorious counterrevolution. Giving the right even to a small minority of the peasants of the commune, against the will of the majority, to cut out from the communal land a section to be owned independently, the law of November 9 constituted an explosive capitalist shell directed against the commune. The president of the Council of Ministers, Stolypin, described the essence of this governmental policy toward the peasants as 'banking on the strong ones.' This meant: encourage the upper circles of the peasantry to get hold of the communal land by buying up these 'liberated' sections, and convert these new capitalist farmers into a support for the existing regime....

"Agriculture entered upon a state of indubitable capitalist boom....This meant that broad masses of the peasantry had been proletarianized, and the upper circles of the villages were throwing on the market more and more grain.

"To replace the compulsory communal ties of the peasantry, there developed very swiftly a voluntary cooperation, which succeeded in penetrating quite deeply into the peasant masses in the course of a few years, and immediately became a subject of liberal and democratic idealization. Real power in the cooperatives belonged, however, only to the rich peasants, whose interests in the last analysis they served. The Narodnik intelligentsia, by concentrating its chief forces in peasant cooperation, finally succeeded in shifting its love for the people onto good solid bourgeois rails. In this way was prepared, partially at least, the political bloc of the 'anti-capitalist' party of the Social Revolutionaries with the Kadets, the capitalist party par excellence....

"Before it could become a support to the existing order, this peasant bourgeoisie had need of some order of its own wherewith to cling to its conquered positions....The peasant deputy Petrichenko once declared from the tribune of the Duma: 'No matter how long you debate you won't create a new planet—that means that you will have to give us the land.' This peasant...was a Right deputy, a monarchist....

"Peasant hostility toward the war sharpened from month to month. In October 1916, the Petrograd Gendarme Administration reported that in the villages they had already ceased to believe in the success of the war—the report being based on the words of insurance agents, teachers, traders, etc. 'All are waiting and impatiently demanding: When will this cursed war finally end?'...

"The possessing classes could not but foresee that the village was going to present its bill. But they drove away these black thoughts, hoping to wriggle out of it somehow. [T]he peasant...thought that first of all the thing to do was to smoke out the landlord, and then see....v

"But all the same the peasantry, even after learning to handle firearms, could never of its own force have achieved the agrarian democratic revolution—that is, its own revolution. It had to have leadership. For the first time in world history the peasant was destined to find a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole, difference between the Russian Revolution and all those preceding it.

"In England serfdom had disappeared in actual fact by the end of the fourteenth century—that is, two centuries before it arose in Russia, and four and a half centuries before it was abolished. The expropriation of the landed property of the peasants dragged along in England through one Reformation and two revolutions to the nineteenth century. The capitalist development, not forced from the outside, thus had sufficient time to liquidate the independent peasant long before the proletariat awoke to political life.

"In France, the struggle with royal absolutism, the aristocracy, and the princes of the church, compelled the bourgeoisie in various of its layers, and in several installments, to achieve a radical agrarian revolution at the beginning of the eighteenth century. For long after that an independent peasantry constituted the support of the bourgeois order, and in 1871 it helped the bourgeoisie put down the Paris Commune.

"In Germany, the bourgeoisie proved incapable of a revolutionary solution of the agrarian problem, and in 1848 betrayed the peasants to the landlords, just as Luther some three centuries before in the peasant wars had betrayed them to the princes. On the other hand, the German proletariat was still too weak in the middle of the nineteenth century to take the leadership of the peasantry. As a result, the capitalist development of Germany got sufficient time, although not so long a period as in England, to subordinate agriculture, as it emerged from the uncompleted bourgeois revolution, to its own interests.

"The peasant reform of 1861 was carried out in Russia by an aristocratic and bureaucratic monarchy under pressure of the demands of a bourgeois society, but with the bourgeoisie completely powerless politically. The character of this peasant emancipation was such that the forced capitalistic transformation of the country inevitably converted the agrarian problem into a problem of revolution. The Russian bourgeois dreamed of an agrarian evolution on the French plan, or the Danish, or the American—anything you want, only not the Russian. He neglected, however, to supply himself in good season with a French history or an American social structure. The democratic intelligentsia, notwithstanding its revolutionary past, took its stand in the decisive hour with the liberal bourgeoisie and the landlord, and not with the revolutionary village. In these circumstances, only the working class could stand at the head of the peasant revolution.

"The law of combined development of backward countries—in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors—here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian Revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realize the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war—that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development—and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalizing its decline. That is the essence of 1917." – pp. 34–9

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.