The Russian Revolution is what happens when bad leadership filtered through a bad political system meets bad times on an epic scale. It shows the inadequacy of “implement meaningful political reform” by making token changes to a hoary old institution that “did not alter the autocratic nature of the regime” (Merriman, p.927). No one element can be singled out as inevitably causing the collapse, though the continent-wide meat grinder of World War I comes close. The Russian imperial system had centuries of tradition and institutional stability behind it. For all the faults of Tsar Nicholas’s weak and superstitious personality he “retained the respect and distant affection of most of the Russian people” as the heir to that history, which was incarnated in his person (Merriman, p.930). For all that was in many senses an economic colony to the more developed powers of Europe, “generously providing them with the cheap products of her soil and buying dearly the products of their labor” Russia then as now had a tremendous resource base and population that could potentially be harnessed to fuel an industrial revolution (Perry, 2010, p.86).
Broadly speaking, the causes of the Russian Revolution were the war, poor leadership by the tsar and his family and the failure of political and economic institutions. By political and economic institutions I mean primarily the authoritarian, aristocratic nature of the Russian state. The officer corps of the Russian military was still drawn from the ranks of the nobility, “who addressed the rank and file as masters had spoken to serfs” (Merriman, p.932). When armies were smaller and the military technology of the time was geared toward the sword, lance and mounted warrior this sort of arrangement was more feasible. Older military technology favored the expert, men such as the European knight who had been trained from childhood in the martial arts and had a substantial advantage in their application over a peasant levy. Many have noted that the gun was a great equalizer in that arrangement, as summed up in the old American saying that “God made man, but Sam Colt made them equal.” Artillery then was the perfect equalizer, since no amount of skill could win a contest against an exploding shell. Couple that with the fact that modern conscription and the population boom that preceded it meant that armies were both much larger and far fuller of ordinary peasants and other lower class citizens who “were shocked when ordered to fire on insurgents” when general strikes and bread riots rocked Petrograd (Merriman, p.932). Men who are already predisposed to scorn every governmental figure from their local landlords on up as corrupt and “softies, who squander their capital because they are unable to do hard work” (Merriman, p.89) cannot be expected to side with their social superiors instead of people from the same social and economic backgrounds marching in protest with cries that in Russia they were so poor and oppressed that “to pity a downtrodden, disenfranchised, and oppressed man is to commit a major crime” (Perry, 2010, p.93). Face with a choice between military dictatorship by a military that was demonstrably not entirely loyal to himself and offering concessions Tsar Nicholas acquiesced to granted the population basic civil rights and the promise of “future development of the principle of universal suffrage (Perry, 2010, pp.94-95).
Because of that the Russian Revolution came and succeeded. It ended with two competing claimants to the vacuum left by the deposed tsar, with “the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet were left in the awkward position of serving as dual or provisional governments,” which quickly devolved into a situation that could be more accurately described as ‘duel government’ than ‘dual government’ (Merriman, p.935). The Bolsheviks, like communist parties elsewhere, were not content to share power and regarded democratic government as a stepping stone to seizing full power. Even as “the provisional government granted civil liberties, including the right to strike, democratized local governmentand amnestied political prisoners” (Merriman, p.935) the nascent soviet government demanded more and stronger measures immediately. Lenin, leader of the Russian Marxists and chief ideologue for the Bolsheviks, called for an autocratic government in which they would “confine the membership” of the party and eventually state’s leadership “to people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity” (Perry, 2010, p.100). He went on to declare on the eve of the October Revolution that “the seizure of power is the business of the uprising” and accused the army and provisional government of plotting to establish a military dictatorship (Perry, 2010, p.103). The provisional government was already hard pressed to deal with the twin problems of the war and the economic hardships accompanying it, This was made more difficult by the breakdown in military discipline on the front lines, which was rife with “what may be described as a complete lack of confidence in the officers and the higher commanding personnel” (Perry, 2010, p.96).
All of this culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power. Once their White Russian adversaries were defeated and the new Soviet state was firmly entrenched Lenin’s party consolidated their power and began planning for the future with the murderous genius that only the Man of Steel himself could bring to the table. As Stalin put it in the declaration that launched a decade of frantic industrialization and collectivization, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or the crush us” (Perry, 2010, p.115). Thus, the legacy of the Russian revolution was to crush the Russian people under the heel of a state hellbent on not being crushed by foreign enemies or rivals at home.
References
Merriman, J. A History of Modern Europe: From the Renaissance to the Present. Norton, 10 Feb 2004.
Perry, Marvin. Sources of European History: Since 1900. Wadsworth Publishing, 2010.
