During the summer, the crisis worsened, and in July, riots
by workers and soldiers in the capital led the provisional
government to outlaw the Bolsheviks and call for Lenin’s
arrest. The “July Days,” raising the threat of disorder and
class war, aroused the fears of conservatives and split the
fragile political consensus within the provisional government.
In September, General Lavr Kornilov, commander
in chief of Russian imperial forces, launched a coup
d’état to seize power from Alexander Kerensky, now the
dominant figure in the provisional government. The revolt
was put down with the help of so-called Red Guard
units, formed by the Bolsheviks within army regiments
in the capital area (these troops would later be regarded
as the first units of the Red Army), but Lenin now sensed
the weakness of the provisional government and persuaded
his colleagues to prepare for revolt. On the night
of October 25 (according to the old-style Gregorian calendar
still in use in Russia), forces under the command of
Lenin’s lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, seized key installations
in the capital area. Kerensky fled from Russia in disguise.
The following morning, at a national congress of delegates
from soviet organizations throughout the country,
the Bolsheviks declared a new socialist order. Moderate
elements from the Menshevik faction and the Social
Revolutionary Party protested the illegality of the Bolshevik
action and left the conference hall in anger. They
were derided by Trotsky, who proclaimed that they were
relegated “to the dustbin of history.”
With the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917,
Lenin was now in command. His power was tenuous and
extended only from the capital to a few of the larger
cities, such as Moscow and Kiev, that had waged their
own insurrections. There were, in fact, few Bolsheviks in
rural areas, where most peasants supported the moderate
leftist Social Revolutionaries. On the fringes of the Russian
Empire, restive minorities prepared to take advantage
of the anarchy to seize their own independence,
while “White Russian” supporters of the monarchy began
raising armies to destroy the “Red menace” in Petrograd.
Lenin was in power, but for how long?
The Russian Revolution of 1917 has been the subject
of vigorous debate by scholars and students of world affairs.
Could it have been avoided if the provisional government
had provided more effective leadership, or was it
inevitable? Did Lenin stifle Russia’s halting progress
toward a Western-style capitalist democracy, or was the
Bolshevik victory preordained by the autocratic conditions
and lack of democratic traditions in imperial
Russia? Such questions have no simple answers, but some
hypotheses are possible. The weakness of the moderate
government created by the February Revolution was
probably predictable, given the political inexperience of
the urban middle class and the deep divisions within the
ruling coalition over issues of peace and war. On the other
hand, it seems highly unlikely that the Bolsheviks would
have possessed the self-confidence to act without the
presence of their leader, Vladimir Lenin, who employed
his strength of will to urge his colleagues almost singlehandedly
to make their bid for power. Without Lenin,
then, there would have been no political force with the
sense of purpose to fill the vacuum in Petrograd. In that
case, as in so many cases elsewhere during the turbulent
twentieth century, it would probably have been left to the
army to intervene in an effort to maintain law and order.
In any event, the October Revolution was a momentous
development for Russia and for the entire world. Not
only did it present Western capitalist societies with a
brazen new challenge to their global supremacy, but it
also demonstrated that Lenin’s concept of revolution, carried
through at the will of a determined minority of revolutionary
activists “in the interests of the masses,” could
succeed in a society going through the difficult early
stages of the Industrial Revolution. It was a repudiation of
orthodox “late Marxism” and a return to Marx’s pre-1848
vision of a multiclass revolt leading rapidly from a capitalist
to a proletarian takeover (see Chapter 1). It was, in
short, a lesson that would not be ignored by radical intellectuals
throughout the world.
World History
