Power In The Hands Of The People - For A While: One hundred years on, the revolution which the Bolsheviks not so much made, as destroyed, deserves to be remembered for what it was – a joyous eruption of ‘people power’. It unleashed the creative political and cultural energies of ordinary men and women in ways that by turns astounded, delighted and inspired the whole world. So much so that, even today, a century later, it is the event’s historic assertion: that a better world is possible; which keeps the vivid colours of the Russian people’s revolution so bright in the memory – and hopes – of humankind.
“GO HOME!” Ordered the Bolshevik soldiers surrounding the
Tauride Palace in Petrograd. The assembled delegates to the All-Russian
Constituent Assembly looked at the rifles and bayonets pointed at them, looked at
one another, and dispersed. Thus, was representative democracy ushered-off the
Russian political stage in the snows and freezing mists of January 1918. The
Assembly, elected by more than 40 million Russians in the first free election
of their nation’s history, had deliberated for precisely thirteen hours.
The shutting down of the Constituent Assembly by the
Bolshevik government of Vladimir Lenin provoked very little in the way of
protest. Lawyers and other professionals objected, of course, rightly foreseeing
that a revolutionary regime upheld by rifles and bayonets was unlikely to be
the most reliable guarantor of individual liberty and human rights. For the
remainder of the politically active population, however, there was simply too
much going on.
Their revolution, which had begun nine months earlier on
International Women’s Day (8 March) 1917 was still in full-swing, Constituent
Assembly, or no Constituent Assembly. So, too, was the debate about the best
form of democracy. Perhaps Comrade Lenin was right on this issue. Perhaps the
workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ “soviets” (councils) whose members were
directly elected at the factory, barracks and village level, and instantly
recallable if they deviated from their mandates, were a better and more accountable
form of democratic representation.
What mattered most to Russia’s political activists in the
winter of 1917-18 was their conviction that the revolution still belonged to
them: that they were still in charge; still directing the flow of events. Many
of them, while harbouring serious reservations about the Bolsheviks’ blatantly
unconstitutional seizure of power on 7 November 1917, were nevertheless
relieved that the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, and its
criminal determination to continue the war against Germany, had been removed.
They were also heartened by the Bolsheviks’ uncompromising determination to
defend the revolution against Tsarist reactionaries like Kornilov. It was
possible to fault Lenin’s methods, but not his revolutionary zeal!
With the benefit of a century’s hindsight, it is easy to
dismiss these notions as short-sighted and naïve. How could any thinking
Russian not understand that a political party guilty of seizing power in a
carefully-planned and ruthlessly executed coup d’état had already pronounced
the revolution’s death sentence? That the Bolshevik’s aggressively ideological
regime, based on the fragile majorities it had constructed in the
far-from-stable urban soviets (while the peasantry, 80 percent of Russia’s
population, gave their support, overwhelmingly, to the Bolshevik’s rivals, the
Socialist Revolutionary Party) could only ever be a regime of rifles and
bayonets?
Easy, yes, but wrong. It would take the Bolsheviks many
years to fasten a collar around the boisterous puppy that was the Russian
Revolution. Many years, during which they would have to overcome innumerable
setbacks and dangers.
On 30 August 1918, the young Left Socialist Revolutionary,
Fanny Kaplan, very nearly assassinated Lenin. Her party had rebelled against
Lenin’s cession of vast tracts of the former Russian Empire to their German
foes in the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, causing the Bolsheviks to proscribe
her party and arrest its leaders. Lenin recovered from Kaplan’s attack, but her
bullets left him frail and in deteriorating health.
In the crackdown that followed Kaplan’s attempted
assassination, the Bolshevik “Extraordinary Commission”, the Cheka, began its
ominous transition: from skilful intelligence gatherer, to the Bolshevik Government’s
terroristic secret police.
Meanwhile, the British, French and Americans dispatched
troops to Russia, and supplied huge quantities of arms and ammunition to the
counter-revolutionary “Whites”, in a concerted effort to strangle the world’s
first socialist revolution in its cradle. The resulting civil war which raged
from 1918 until well into the 1920s cost millions of Russian lives – including
tens-of-thousands of the most decent and democratic Bolsheviks.
As we who live in the Twenty-First Century can well attest,
civil wars and the terror-tactics they unleash are tremendously corrosive of
civilised values and the democratic institutions they underpin. Mass killing
and systematic repression coarsens a culture – raising up sociopaths and
psychopaths to dangerously important political and administrative positions.
Socialism did not make Joseph Stalin inevitable, but the Bolsheviks’ utter
refusal to share power with any of the other participants in the Russian
Revolution most certainly did.
One hundred years on, the revolution which the Bolsheviks
not so much made, as destroyed, deserves to be remembered for what it was – a
joyous eruption of ‘people power’. It unleashed the creative political and
cultural energies of ordinary men and women in ways that by turns astounded,
delighted and inspired the whole world. So much so that, even today, a century
later, it is the event’s historic assertion: that a better world is possible;
which keeps the vivid colours of the Russian people’s revolution so
bright in the memory – and hopes – of humankind.
