The Russian bolshevik Revolution-1917
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Russian Revolution was a period of political and social revolution across the territory of the Russian Empire, commencing with the abolition of the monarchy in 1917, and concluding in 1923 after the Bolshevik establishment of the Soviet Union at the end of the Civil War.
Dates: 8 Mar 1917 – 16 Jun 1923
Location: former Russian Empire
Participants: Socialist Revolutionary Party, Constitutional Democratic Party, Mensheviks
The Russian Bolshevik Revolution-1917 :
Many Americans are under the delusion that the Russian Revolution was merely a revolution of industrial workers against a small but powerful group of capitalists. This misunderstanding is due to the fact that most people think it took place according to the predictions of the German socialist writer Karl Marx.
In his most famous works—Capital and The Communist Manifesto—Marx had expressed the belief that the communist revolution would take place in a highly industrialized country like Germany, or possibly Britain.
Russia did not fit Marx’s prophecy
Actually, nothing could have fitted Karl Marx’s revolutionary formula less than did Russia in 1917. At that time, as has already been pointed out, Russia was a backward agricultural country. Much of its industry, then still in its infancy, had been financed largely by foreign, not native capital. In 1917 the vast majority of the population were peasants, and the industrial workers, although growing in numbers, were still in a very small minority.
Even though efforts were being made to introduce legislation regarding wages, hours, and conditions of work, factory workers at that time were living in wretched conditions. These economic hardships caused them to play a far greater part in the November revolution than would have been expected from their numbers.
The really large group of underprivileged people in Russia, however, were not the industrial workers, but the peasants. When they were freed from serfdom in 1861, the peasants got some land and the promise of more. In 1914 there were few really landless peasants. Most peasant families owned land either individually or as part of a collective group called the mir or commune. But their holdings were so small that most of them had to work as tenants or farm hands on the estates of big landowners, or on the farms of richer peasants, known as kulaks (tight fists), or on land owned by the state or the church.
In 1917 Russia had not only factory workers who sought to overthrow an industrial capitalist class, but masses of peasants without enough land to make their living on. They wanted more land and hoped to obtain it at the expense of such great landowners as the monarchy, the nobility, the church, and most important of all, the state. The actual coup that brought Lenin to power, however, was carried out by a group of professional revolutionaries, with the support of the mutinous Petrograd garrison. It is important to note that this coup overthrew the Kerensky government, which was seeking to establish a democratic regime after having overthrown czarism in March 1917.
The Bolshevik leaders
The November revolution was led by a group of intellectuals, most of whom had never seen a worker’s bench or used ; peasant’s plow. Many of them—notably Lenin and Trotsk—had lived in exile abroad because their views had brought them into conflict with the czarist government. The guiding spirit of the revolution was Lenin, who came from the intelligentsia and had spent his life not in manual work but in writing and speaking.
Factory workers played an important role in destroying the old government and in defending the new Soviet regime as it proceeded to socialize production (first of all in industry and trade, then in agriculture). But measured by the size of th forces engaged, the revolution of 1917 was chiefly an agrarian revolt. The slogan of the Bolshevik leaders in 1917 was “Peace, Land, and Bread.”
Bread was desired by everyone, since the war had disrupted transportation and created shortages of food in the cities Peace, too, was desired by many, especially by the soldiers a the front, who lacked munitions. But land, above all, wa desired by the peasants, who for 50 years had suffered from acute “land hunger.”
In 1917 many peasants thought they were going to oust al the big landowners and become individual owners of land themselves. This did not happen, in the long run, because the Soviet government had no intention of transforming peasants into individual property owners. The Soviet leader feared that ownership of land by the peasants would restore capitalism in another form.
The plans of the Soviet leaders met with bitter and stubborn opposition on the part of the peasants.
Now practically all land in Russia is the property of the state. There are afew large-scale state farms which are run like factories, the workers being paid regular wages. Most of the land, however, is cultivated by collective farms whose members receive a share of the farm’s net profits. The most crucial struggle of the Soviet leaders was not a struggle waged by industrial workers against bankers, factory owners, and land lords. It was a struggle between the Bolsheviks and the peas-ants. To the extent that the Soviet government claimed to represent factory workers it was also a struggle between workers and peasants, between the town and the country.