Radicals in the United States and around the world were inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, a popular revolution led by socialists in a country previously ruled by an autocracy. World War I had broken out between the major powers in Europe in 1914, but by 1917, peasant soldiers were deserting the Russian army en masse, and their government collapsed. In the February Revolution of 1917, Russian liberals and leftists established a provisional government that was weak and inexperienced. In the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, launched a coup and seized the Winter Palace, the last stronghold of the provisional government.
At the same time as the Bolshevik government declared itself a dictatorship of the proletariat, it faced internal enemies and a looming external threat as well. Lenin concluded that the Bolsheviks needed an armistice to protect the domestic revolution and allow revolution to spread throughout Europe. On March 3, 1918, Russia and Germany signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended Russian participation in the war.
Fearing that the new communist government would destabilize eastern Europe, the western Allies (Britain and France) pressured the United States to intervene. When a civil war broke out in Russia, the United States sent an expeditionary force (the Siberian Expedition) to assist any opposition to the Bolshevik army in the summer of 1918. Some of the American troops stayed there until April 1920. The Bolsheviks won the civil war and maintained their power, but the world revolution Lenin had hoped for never came to fruition. When Lenin died in 1924 after suffering from several strokes, Joseph Stalin succeeded him, consolidated his power, and eliminated his enemies, expelling Trotsky from the country by 1929. The United States refused to formally recognize the government of the Soviet Union until 1933, when diplomatic relations were restored.
The Russian Revolution had a significant influence on radicalism in the United States. In the postwar period, the United States experienced unprecedented labor unrest. More than four million workers went on strike in 1919. A strike wave began in Seattle, when shipyard workers walked off their jobs. The action spread into a general strike that paralyzed the city. In the Seattle General Strike, workers and war veterans formed councils of workers, soldiers, and sailors in several industries, declaring that they had established these Soviets to practice managing the economy.
In the United States, postwar hysteria against communism was accentuated when the Bolsheviks founded the Third International (or Comintern) in 1919 to export revolution around the world. When the Communist Party (CP) was founded in 1919, both the CP and Communist Labor Party claimed to have nearly 70,000 members. During the war, many radicals had left the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party when they had been weakened by domestic repression. The Justice Department had targeted both socialists, who saw the war as a meaningless conflict between capitalist nations, and radical syndicalists in the IWW for their criticisms of militarism that had the potential to disrupt war production in the western lumber and copper industries. More than a thousand opponents of the war had been convicted for sedition and espionage.
Fears of domestic Bolshevism heightened when a series of bombs exploded in the spring of 1919. In November 1919, the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, mounted the first Palmer Raid. On New Year’s Day in January 1920, at the peak of the Red Scare, the federal government rounded up 6,000 radicals in one night. Federal agents thought that they would find caches of weapons and explosives, but they found only three pistols and no dynamite. Although most of the arrested radicals and aliens were released eventually, about 500 of the detainees who did not have U. S. citizenship were deported. In the absence of labor militancy, the Red Scare dissipated by the summer of 1920.
Although antiradical and antiimmigrant sentiments had been persistent throughout American history, the Russian Revolution illustrated to some American leaders that communism was a real threat in the world. The fear of communism remained a salient feature of American society throughout the 20th century.
At the same time, the concrete example of the Russian Revolution created a division on the American Left. On the one hand, for some progressives and leftists in the United States, the revolution provided an example of the benefits of a worker-controlled state and a rationalized economy. Furthermore, when the United States refused to recognize the new government and intervened in the Russian civil war, some on the American Left saw the Soviet Union as a victim in the face of capitalist intervention. On the other hand, liberals and leftists criticized Lenin’s signing of the armistice with Germany, because it increased Allied casualties by allowing the Germans to devote more of their troops to the western front in Europe. In addition, many on the American Left condemned the undemocratic actions and brutality of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union.
The contradictions of the Russian Revolution produced diverse reactions in the public and on the Left in the United States. The revolution gained praise among radicals as a concrete example of a socialist state in the 20th century. At the same time, it created a rift on the American Left and provoked anticommunist hysteria in the American public.
Further reading: Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
—Glen Bessemer
World History
