So How Did The Russians Revolution

How does a revolution happen? Does everyone decide “okay, it’s time for communism now”? How does one seize power over the state? I’ll illustrate with the Russian Revolution.

Ah, Mother Russia at the turn of the 20th century. A poor, backwards, and too-large multi-ethnic Empire of about 130-ish million, in which the dominant social struggle is about the oppression of the agricultural peasantry, who make up about 80% of the population. The peasants hunger for land, they want it bad, and they are not getting it. Besides the peasants, about 10% of the population is engaged in industrial labour (eg. mining and construction) and only 1–2% works in factories. And they’re also not happy, because conditions for Industrial Revolution factory workers were horrific, and it was even worse in Russia.

Regardless, the Russian Empire at the start of the 20th century is buckling under the onslaught of modernity. The old noble elite are fading away (they used to keep the peasants in check), the Emperor is incompetent but undercuts anyone capable of reforming the regime, and the Empire is in the middle of a prolonged economic contraction. Pretty much everyone is unhappy.

Then in 1905 the “barely-civilized” Japanese surprise-trounce Great Russia in a war in the Far East. The already-rickety state, the massive military mobilisation, and the lost war trigger a failed revolution in the form of strikes, peasant violence (they hunger for land!), and mutinies. The bureaucracy and the soldiers returning from the front crush the uprisings, while Emperor Nicholas II is pushed to allow a parliament. Nicholas refuses and asks the Grand Duke to create a military dictatorship, but the Grand Duke says he’ll shoot himself if the Emperor does not agree to create a parliament. Nicholas accedes, and then spends the rest of his life trying to fight and weaken the parliament and reclaim his power, preventing the formation of a non-revolutionary political alternative.

Bloody Sunday in 1905 by Wojciech Kossak

Once the 1905 revolution is put down, another heroic bureaucrat called Stolypin tries to save the system with a two-pronged attack: reforming agriculture to solve the peasant land-hunger problem, and repression (killing). Russia experiences an economic boom, but Stolypin dies before he can finish the reforms, and a few years later Franz Ferdinand gets shot.

Stolypin Necktie

Nicholas tries to avoid war with the Germans, but eventually decides a war will be regenerative, unite the country, solve all the annoying social problems, and be a great patriotic, religious, victorious war.

The war starts disastrously for the Russians. Emperor Nicholas, like all boys, loves soldiers and war, so he leaves the capital to live with his general staff and lets his wife influence the running of the country.

She erratically appoints and dismisses government ministers at a high rate, culminating in the appointment of Protopopov as Minister of the Interior (i.e. the guy responsible for keeping the country together). He suffers from frequent mental breakdowns, hallucinations, and erratic mood swings, and consults mystics, spiritual mediums, and fortune-tellers for major decisions. Another blow to the populace’s faith in the government ¹.

So the war goes on, and despite more losses and a constant high rate of desertions, the state holds together and after a few years manages to deliver a lot of combat power to the front. It develops into a stalemate on the Eastern Front. They haven’t lost, but they’re barely still in the fight.

Territorial losses by the Russian Empire

But the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back is the food supply to the capital collapsing. In response there are mass demonstrations and strikes, and the capital garrison mutinies instead of firing on them.

Finally, enter the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Soviets, of which the Bolsheviks (the main characters) are a only small faction. Soviet is Russian for “council”, so it’s like a rival government running out of the same capital whose influence rested on the soldiers and workers. The Soviet They don’t have power beyond this, remember that 80% of the population is in the countryside, farming. The Bolsheviks flood the front line with agitators to ideologise more soldiers.

The generals at this point have lost faith in Nicholas and see him as incompetent, so they pressure him to abdicate so someone else can take the crown. Nicholas does so, handing the crown to the next in line, but the next in line unexpectedly declines. So the monarchy is accidentally abolished. Oops.

What if Nicholas hadn’t spent so much time undercutting parliament, perhaps at this point a powerful and legitimate parliament could’ve take over and right the situation?

A provisional government forms, but it wants to continue the war and won’t redistribute the land without an assembly. Desertions and seizures of land by peasants skyrocket.

The Bolsheviks in the Soviet declare that they want to end the war, and the Germans pick up on this and transport the top Bolshevik Lenin into the Soviet. Lenin calls for an immediate end to the war.

The provisional government tries to hold the centre together, balancing the right wing and the left wing (the Soviets). The War Minister Kerensky gambles that a successful offensive against the Germans will legitimise the provisional government, but the offensive fails disastrously.

July Days. The army had just opened fire on street protesters.

Kerensky takes over the government, pivots right (alienating the left), and appoints the right wing’s Hard Man General to run the army and Restore Order. The Hard Man General moves on the capital to Restore Order. Kerensky interprets this as a coup, denounces him as a traitor, and arms the Soviets to resist the Hard Man General (alienating the right). To this day it’s still unclear if the Hard Man General was actually plotting a coup or not.

The Hard Man General’s commands no longer have the authority of the government, the railway and telegraph workers obstruct his units’ movements, and anyway the soldiers refuse to obey orders. Oh, and now the Soviets have guns!

What if Kerensky tried to end the war instead of starting an offensive? What if he communicated better with the Hard Man General and they managed to put down the Soviets in Petrograd?

So the monarchy is gone, the provisional government has lost all authority, and control over the army is slipping.

At this point the Bolsheviks don’t so much seize power in the capital as walk into lightly-defended government offices with some desultory shooting. Hooray, utopian revolution is here!

Meanwhile in the countryside, the peasants are organically seizing and redistributing land. In terms of sheer scale and social restructuring, this is the real revolution.

Russian peasants in the early 1900s

Okay, back to the Soviets, they’ve now “seized power” in the capital. Which means they control a very small fraction of the country. How do the Soviets get national support, since “Workers’ Revolution!” is irrelevant to more than 80% of the population, who are concerned with land. Lenin picks the slogan “Peace, Land and Bread”, which is exactly what everyone wants.

It’s a popular message, but all throughout this period the peasants are already seizing the land in the countryside without waiting for a political party in the city to give them permission. Still, the Bolsheviks are legitimising the land revolution, and that’s very popular.

What if the provisional government or Kerensky came up with the program of Peace, Land, and Bread before the Bolsheviks did? Would they have become wildly popular and legitimate in the eyes of the peasants and the soldiers?

A note: when I say Soviet, it’s not just “communists”. There are a variety of socialist parties like the Mensheviks, the Left SRs, and the Right SRs, and they disagree with each other. Some support parliamentary democracy, some only care about the peasants, and others want to keep the war going defensively to avoid territorial losses.

There’s a national election that the Provisional Government sets in motion before it collapsed, and the SRs win 40% of the vote, while the Bolsheviks get only 24%. So the Bolsheviks are dominant inside the Soviets, but are a strong minority on the national level.

Here’s an important pattern: if the Bolsheviks allow a unity government of all socialist parties they could be diluted, so they refuse a left-unity coalition and ally with one half of the SRs, leaving the other wing out in the cold with no power, only to later destroy that ally once it is convenient.

Okay, so the Bolsheviks have taken power in the capital and take over the other parallel Soviet revolutions in the big cities, but they don’t control the countryside at all. They don’t have a state yet.

Everywhere the Bolsheviks don’t control falls into a complex mess of factions, split up between the Whites who want to restore the old order, anti-Bolshevik socialists, nationalists who want to break away from the Russian empire, anarchists, local warlords, etc. It turns into a huge civil war.

The Bolsheviks organise the Red Army through mass conscription, seize enormous stockpiles of arms (which are in the cities, where the Bolsheviks are in control!), reinstate conscription, and incorporate former Imperial officers (they can always be killed later!).

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919

What’s the difference between conscripted soldiers and slavery?

Despite having most of the old Imperial generals and large armies, the Whites are hamstrung.

See, the Bolsheviks have tight control from above with a strong political programme: land for the peasants, peace for the soldiers, and worker power for the factory workers. Fighting for the Reds makes sense; you’re fighting for a good future, even if in practice they are incredibly brutal to their soldiers (just as the Whites are).

The Whites, on the other hand, refuse to promise land for the peasants, have no unifying figure or no political programme, and are excessively Russian-nationalist, which alienates potential allies in the nationalists movements.

What if the Whites, at last, promised land to the peasants and liberation to the national minorities to bolster their support?

European Theatre in the civil war. Blue lines are White advances.

You’d think that being surrounded by the Whites would be a disadvantage for the Bolsheviks, but it’s the other way around: this gives them the advantage of interior lines. The Soviets control the cities and the rail lines between them, while the Whites are stuck in the vast countryside with no good way to shift large amounts of forces and supplies around.

So both forces are in utter disarray, experience high rates of desertion, and can barely muster supplies, but the Reds win in the end. All that’s left is for the Bolsheviks to reconquer as much of the periphery as they can.

So how does a revolution happen?

There have to be a number of national calamities, alternative centres of power need to keep self-destructing until only the revolutionaries are left.

1. Interestingly, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister frequently consults mystics for political decisions as well. I wonder why it works out so well for him. Maybe Canadian mystics are better. ↩