Winston Churchill voiced an old idea when he declared that Russia is “an enigma wrapped in a mystery.” Russia has always been a mystery to the western world because: (1) it is a vast country situated in the heart of the world’s largest land mass; (2) its people living on great plains have been invaded so often that they have deep suspicions of foreigners; (3) they have been ruled for centuries by autocrats who did not usually promote foreign observation; and (4) other peoples have studied far too little Russian history.

Today it is easy to say that Soviet Russia has drawn an “iron curtain” around her domain, including half of Europe, and absolve ourselves from the effort of learning about Russia. It is equally easy to accept the proposition that she is an enemy and therefore we do not need to study her history and policies with any sympathy or objectivity.

Each of these ideas is suicidal, for we have reached a point in the evolution of war which precludes its use as a means of settling national rivalries. We cannot conquer or rule the Soviet Union, any more than she can subdue or control North America, but the two of us can destroy western democratic civilization, the very thing we are so anxious to defend. We literally have no alternative except to live on the same constantly shrinking planet with the Soviet Union, and to learn to adjust our differences with her without war. It is a matter of life and death to us and, since it is, we cannot even “defend” our way of life if we have false ideas about Russia and her way of life. This is not to say that any one writer can present the truth about Russia, but it is to say that everyone must strive to present it, for our very self preservation, if for no other reason.

Red Revolution. Our lives are made uneasy now because the Russian Revolution of 1917 resulted in the creation of a rival system to our own. This revolution was the most sweeping in all modern history. We had thought that the French Revolution which began in 1789 was the last word in horror and upheaval. During it many heads rolled and many old privileges were ended.

Yet the French revolutionists did not attempt to change everything. They left most of the old institutions unchanged, or only altered somewhat, and the former ruling classes survived to contest the Revolution itself, down to this very day. The ancien régime never died in France and it retained enough power to contribute heavily to that perpetual split which finally paralyzed France and created the Vichy regime in 1940.

The French Revolution profoundly affected human life and institutions throughout the western world, but it was a mild affair by comparison with the Russian Revolution. In Russia all the old landmarks were swept away. The autocrat of all the Russias was killed and his throne destroyed. The Church lost all of its wealth and power. The landed nobility ceased to exist. Title to all land went to the state and eventually several hundred thousands of the larger farm owners were ruthlessly killed or deported to hard labor while the land was organized into great collective farms. The old bureaucracy was destroyed. The imperial army was no more. The courts no longer functioned. The intellectual radicals who had mainly led the opposition to Tsarism for generations were killed or scattered. All industrial establishments went into the hands of the state and the profit system was absolutely destroyed. Throughout the giant reaches of the Soviet Union no man can employ another, if he profits from his labor.

Many of these social changes might have been accepted by the world’s conservatives in time, but the nationalization of industry, business and the land—never. J. B. Priestley once said that the minds of England’s conservatives snapped shut at the height of the Russian Revolution and had never opened again. This world-wide closing of minds was greatly accelerated by the brutalities of the revolution and the civil war. When it was all over thousands of the high born in Russia had been killed and much larger numbers scattered over Europe as living examples of what Red revolution could do. All who had possessed wealth, privileges and power in Russia went out and an entirely new set of rulers drawn from the lower masses took over and ruled solely in the name of the great masses.

This is why the Russian Revolution shook the world as none ever had and divided it as never before. The division is still deep and vital, yet the new system in Russia inevitably began at once to evolve and it is still in motion. Moreover, the older currents of Russian history began to flow again and they continue to run with growing momentum.

Medieval Russia. What are some of these currents and why did an all-out socialist revolution come to Russia, of all places?

Excellent glimpses of the forces which moulded pre-revolutionary Russia are to be found in a small book by a Russian long resident in England, Soloveytchik’s Russia in Perspective. He denies that Russian history is a mystery. For example, a great state flourished around Kiev in the eleventh century, as modern and as European as any of its contemporaries. For 600 years in the Middle Ages also two northern city states, Novgorod and Pskov, developed an essentially democratic kind of government, along with much European commerce. The 300–year sway of the Tartars, beginning in 1224, profoundly influenced Russia, but did not orientalize her completely since the Tartars were content to leave tax collecting to Russian princes.

Serfdom. The role of Peter the Great in westernizing Russia is well known. After he died, in 1725, the enslavement of the peasants and the glorification of their betters both reached ultimate degrees. It would have been difficult to find “a more eccentric, extravagant and profligate society” than during the reign of Catherine II (1762–96). One’s standing was measured by the size of his personal staff. The very rich had from 300 to 800 servants who performed scores of functions, under minute written instructions, the violation of which brought flogging or torture from the masters. There was “little or no protection against their quite pathological abuse of power.”¹

Competition in great entertainment exploits led to gruelling labor for thousands of hapless serfs, as lakes or mountains were ordered created as backdrops for some new show. Each gentleman had some bizarre specialty in grandeur and all considered their serfs as mere cattle, usually to be whipped and worked to premature graves. One prince gave a party at which an entire Turkish war, with its chief battles was reproduced. Only the gentry could own serfs and they had full power over them. One administered 500 strokes of the rod for absence from holy communion. All possessed the right to send their serfs as convicts to Siberia and to reclaim them at will.²

Nineteenth-century Progress. Russia’s nineteenth century, from the death of Catherine in 1796, has been aptly called the era of “autocracy tempered by assassination,” since three of the five Tsars of the period were killed by their restless subjects. Serfdom was finally ended in 1862 and there was a splendid flowering of literature and art. The Imperial law courts, too, had a good deal of integrity. The Soviets sent as many people to Siberia in a year or two during the liquidation of the Kulaks as the Tsars did in their last century. There was slow progress toward a fréer life. Industrialization also made rapid progress after a delayed start. It is a great mistake to believe that all reform began with the Soviets.

Peasant Degradation. Nevertheless, reform was far too slow. Though legally freed the peasants continued to live in hunger, squalor and ignorance. A representative of the old regime has left this description of village life:

“The roads are deep in mud, often rendering them impassable. Near the houses there are no trees, no bushes to rest your eyes on. The horse-pond is close to the well, and the dung oozes into it. In the courtyards everything is filthy, the odor quite intolerable. The cattle in their inclosure stand knee-deep in excrement. The entrance room and the living-room are black from neglect, and the living-room is shared with pigs, sheep, geese; sometimes the cow is also placed here to get warm (an English traveler wondered at the low demands of a Russian cow, that it was able to endure such a room). Still, where there are cattle the lowest pitch of poverty had not been reached. In the same room, a baby crawls on the floor with a potato in its hands. Cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas infest the rooms in legions, and the heads, beards, mustaches and even eyebrows of grown-up men are filled with the most hideous insects. ‘Well, ’tis nothing’. . . . Everything is so utterly foul, there is not a spot where you could lie down. . . . The mark of evil taste and barbarism is stamped on everything, on the household, on the devastated natural surroundings.”³

It was the peasant’s lot to balance perpetually between hunger in good crop years and famine in bad ones. Inevitably, says the leading foreign historian observer of Russia under the last Tsars, all ideas of justice left the younger people. They became “eternally drunk, with disfigured features and averted eyes. Covered with rags, they looked like half-tamed beasts. . . . No trace of anything human remained.”⁴

Church and State. This state of affairs was perpetuated by a tight union of church and state. In the year 1700 the patriarchate had been abolished and thereafter the head of the church was a minister of the state. Each of these two institutions supported the other. The state taught the people to obey the church and the church taught the duty of obeying the “little white father.” The church could be depended on to condemn all liberals and liberal movements and to banish to monastic prisons such of its representatives as evinced progressive ideas. The government starved the peasants by merciless taxation. The church rigorously took its share and sanctified the peasants’ hunger in frequent fasts. Both church and state had an abiding antipathy to education. The government opposed the efforts of some local Zemstvos to establish schools. The Minister of Public Education sought to nullify such public schools as he could not forcibly destroy “by creating rival church schools which reduced education to the narrowest limits.”⁵

A part of the Soviet campaign against the Orthodox Church sprang from the Marxian doctrine that “religion is the opiate of the people,” but this slogan was not needed to doom the church as it existed in Tsarist Russia. A clergy which had prostituted itself to the perpetuation of autocracy, and whose priests were universally charged with rapacity, drunkenness and the grossest immorality, could not expect to escape the severest action from any successful revolution.

Urban Squalor. The leadership of the industrial proletariat in any revolution was equally certain. The young industrialism of Russia was in its rawest exploitative stage, comparable to the period in British industrialization when women and children were worked long hours in the coal mines, many of them remaining underground for months and years.

In Moscow fifty years ago living conditions were not much better for the new factory workers. In 1899 the Moscow city administration gathered data about 15,922 flats in which factory workers lived. A total of 174,622 persons lived in these flats, or eleven per flat, yet three-fourths of these “flats” consisted of one room only. Tenants rented stalls, corners, any fraction of space in rooms which the city investigators described as follows: “The air is hot and stale,” says one account, “the rooms incredibly crowded. The flat is damp and exceedingly low; a tall man can hardly stand upright. The odor is foul.” . . . “The sight of the flat is horrifying,” states another investigator; “The plaster has crumbled down, the walls are full of holes and stuffed with rags. Everything is filthy. The stove is a mere ruin. There are legions of cockroaches and bed-bugs. It is cold. The lavatory is in a dangerous position and children are not permitted to go there. All the flats of the house are in a similar condition.” . . . “The atmosphere is suffocating,” remarks a third investigator: “The exhalations of the people, the evaporations of wet clothes and dirty linen fill the air. The walls are wet; cold draughts blow from everywhere. When it is raining, the water covers the floors, two inches deep.”⁶

The Russo-Japanese War. Yet the infinite misery of life in both town and country might gradually have been eased had it not been for the wars in which the Tsarist government engaged. It was these wars which made its violent end certain.

This was revealed as clearly as a flash of lightning in the Russo-Japanese war and the revolution which followed it in 1905. The Russian adventure in Manchuria, threatening to expand into Korea, was a purely imperialistic exploit intended to recoup the fortunes of the ruling elements in Russia. Illimitable natural resources lay undeveloped in the huge Russian realm. Conquests in China could enrich a few, but for the people it was a mere colonial exploit. For them it was a matter of being carted 6000 miles to extend a hateful dominion, only to suffer more than usual from official incompetence. Large supplies of food and medical supplies were routed through German ports and dispersed there. The same fate met heavy winter clothing sent over the Siberian railroad in the summer. Boots had paper soles and sugar was carefully mixed with sand and flour.⁷

In the field there was equal incompetence. Officers would not learn to use telescopic sights on artillery. They sent home large sums intended for the pay of troops. The kitchens and harems of the Grand Dukes filled two entire trains. Drunkenness, debauchery and gambling alleviated steady defeats by the despised “little yellow monkeys.”

“Instead of enhancing the prestige and increasing the physical resources of the regime, the war, with its endless misery and disgrace, completely sapped the system’s vitality and laid bare its utter rottenness before the eyes of Russia and of the world generally, so that the population, whose needs had been neglected for many years by a corrupt and inefficient government, finally lost patience and fell into a state of indescribable confusion.”⁸

These were the words of the Tsar’s ablest minister, Count Witte, who had to cope with the consequences.

The Revolution of 1905. The final demonstration of the regime’s ineptitude came on Bloody Sunday, January 22, 1905. On that day one of the many unions organized by the secret police attempted to present a petition to the Tsar under the leadership of a daring priest, Father Gapon. The great procession was led by the Cross and pictures of the Tsar. It came singing religious and patriotic songs, after full notice and a written plea that the petition be received.

Its terms were respectful but plain:

“We the workingmen and inhabitants of St. Petersburg of various classes, our wives and children, our helpless old parents, come to Thee, Sire, to seek defense. We have become beggars; we have been oppressed; we are burdened by toil beyond our powers; we are scoffed at; we are not recognized as human beings; we are treated as slaves who must suffer their bitter fate and keep silence. We are pushed further into the den of beggary, lawlessness and ignorance. We are choked by despotism and irresponsibility—the limit of our patience has been reached. There has arrived for us the tremendous moment when death is better than the continuation of our intolerable tortures.”

The petition detailed that it was illegal to ask for higher wages, a shorter day, or to stop death in the work-shops from the “awful draughts, rain and snow.” Each of these requests was a legal crime. “In reality,” cried out the petition, “in us, as in all Russian people there is not recognized any human right, not even the right of speaking, thinking, meeting, discussing our needs, taking measures for the improvement of our condition. We are deprived of the possibility of organizing ourselves into unions for the defense of our interests.”

The petition contained a broad program of social reform, under three heads, and as its main request it urged the calling of a national assembly. Its terms were known all over St. Petersburg, for it had been debated in workmen’s gatherings for several days. It was prepared in a time when strikes almost paralyzed the life of the capital. It raised a critical problem for the government which warned the people not to crowd the streets of the city on the day scheduled for its delivery. Many troops had been mobilized, yet nothing was done to stop the gathering of the immense procession, some 250,000 strong. It converged on the Tsar’s palace in an ecstacy of religious and patriotic enthusiasm, confident in the belief that the petition would at least be received.

Then when the vast square before the palace was filled soldiers appeared and suddenly fired into the dense mass of people, killing upwards of 1500 and wounding twice as many.

This event shattered the mystical connection which had been created with much success between the Tsar and his people, especially since he lectured the workmen two weeks later, ending with the declaration: “I forgive them their guilt.”⁹ The strikes, riots and peasant revolts which had already severely shaken the regime increased in violence and number. Some 2000 manor houses were burned, and in October 1906 a completely effective general strike finally forced the Tsar to promise a responsible parliament. Then it transpired that some units of troops returning from their shameful handling in Manchuria responded to special feeding and treatment and shot down the rebels. Thereafter the revolution was ruthlessly suppressed, with the aid of many pogroms against the Jews organized by the authorities. Soon “the prisons were crammed and typhus finished what the rifle and the hang-rope had left undone.”

Tsarism Subsidized by the Democracies. The suppression of the Revolution of 1905–6 was made possible by a huge international loan from western Europe to the Tsar’s government. Sponsored by his ally, France, which contributed more than half of it, the sum of $450,000,000 was raised in the spring of 1906. This was the largest international loan ever floated up to that time. It was enough to finance the suppression of the revolution and to make the government independent of the new Duma before it could meet. Important voices were raised in France against this financing of bloody repression, but the rightist elements clung firmly to the Russian alliance against Germany. The two leading French newspapers even opposed the new Duma, alleging that the Russian people were not ripe for democratic reforms.¹⁰

There were many warnings that the huge French “investments” in Russia would be lost unless the Russian people were made partners in the Franco-Russian alliance. After the Duma had been dissolved by the Tsar many of its outlawed members, meeting in Viborg, Finland, warned that fresh loans made without the consent of the Russian people would not be repaid. Maxim Gorky, also holding the loans responsible for the perpetuation of Tsarism, uttered a deeply prophetic warning. He wrote: “If the state of tension in which the nation is living goes on much longer, there will be such an accumulation of hatred and cruelty in the Russian soul that, when the inevitable explosion comes, the outpouring of these pent-up forces will horrify the whole world.”¹¹

None of these warnings had any effect on the French conservatives, or upon the balance of power politics which bound France to Russia. The savings of French peasants continued to pay the perennial deficits of the Tsar’s government down to 1914.

In the moment of its greatest danger the Tsar’s government had yielded to the demand for the election of a representative assembly, the Duma. This was the government’s opportunity to become constitutional and to move toward democracy, but instead of seizing it the government successively dissolved the Duma, changed the election laws to make it more and more conservative and then largely ignored it. It did continue to serve as one place in the land where the governmental abuses could be denounced, but it could do little more.

The First World War. In the first half of 1914 it appeared that the “inevitable explosion” in Russia was about to occur. During 1911 only 8000 workmen participated in political strikes in Russia, but in 1912 and again in 1913 the number exceeded 500,000. Then it jumped to more than 1,000,000 in early 1914.¹²

These strikes were one of the factors which convinced Austria and Germany that Russia probably would not fight for Serbia in August 1914. They may also have tempted the Tsar to divert his people with war, but the evidence is to the contrary. When his ministers demanded general mobilization Nicholas at first assented, then cancelled the order and refused to see any of his ministers for many hours. When at length he signed another mobilization order he was pale and shaken. Weak as he was, he had intelligence enough to know that he was probably signing the death warrant of his dynasty.

Not being able to trust the people, the Tsarist bureaucracy had to undertake the entire management of the war itself. Within its lights it made a tremendous effort, but the job was beyond it. Expecting a short war, it sent the none too numerous skilled workers to the army and replaced them with impulsive, undisciplined people. Attempting to compensate for the lack of arms and equipment, it mobilized 15,000,000 men in an effort to overwhelm the Central Powers with mere animal strength. These hordes of men, mainly illiterate peasants, overflowed all depots, barracks and transportation systems, crowded, stepping on each other, cursing, and unhappy. The Minister of War, General Sukhomlinov, who directed all these men, could not even listen calmly to the words “modem warfare.” He declared in the Military Academy that “for twenty-five years I have not read a single military book.”¹³ The people around him were of the same kind. For months they even declined offers of help from private factories.¹⁴

In spite of this kind of leadership the Russian armies made an immense contribution to the final allied victory. Thrusting two armies into East Prussia with unexpected speed, they contributed to the first victory at the Marne. In the south they swept to the Carpathians, aided by mass surrenders of Slavs in the Austrian armies. It required German strength and leadership to drive them back in 1915. Thereafter they still held a continuous line 800 miles long, even after the deluded Tsar had replaced the Grand Duke Nicholas, who had proved himself an able strategist, as supreme commander-in-chief. In 1916 General Brusilov made a feint toward Galicia and the Austrian front again “broke like a pie crust” along a front of 200 miles, costing Austria-Hungary 1,500,000 men and once more requiring great German aid.

It is difficult to see how France and Britain could have withstood the combined might of the Central Powers on the Western front without Russia’s immense sacrificial diversion in the East until American aid arrived. As it was, France almost fell out of the war in 1917. What would the situation have been if the Eastern front had not constituted an enormous drain on German and Austrian resources? How many westerners remember what Russia did for them in the First World War?

Hopelessness in the Armies. The effort of the Tsarist regime to smother the Central Powers with myriads of half-armed men was colossal in its effects as well as in its size. Even illiterate men knew that something was wrong when they went into battle with only one rifle to three men, or when they fought armed only with oaken clubs. The effect of throwing these hosts of peasants suddenly against the perfectly armed and commanded Germans was bound to be profound. All kinds of awesome German weapons defeated the almost defenseless Russians. At the end of the first ten months of war the Russian losses already amounted to 3,800,000 men.¹⁵ As early as November 1914, General Yanushkevich reported that “Ruzsky and his assistants have suddenly lost faith in their troops.” Surrenders en masse had begun wherever the officers were killed off. As early as December 1914, General Kuropatkin recorded in his diary that “they are all hungry for peace.”¹⁶ Whole battalions of troops ordered to counter-attack went up to the German trenches and raised their weapons in token of surrender.

The officer corps, mainly recruited from the upper classes, was insufficient to staff the huge levies from the start, and as the older officers, fighting intrepidly, were rapidly killed, more and more officers had to be drawn from the masses in the army. Desertion was rife from the beginning. By 1917, 2,000,000 deserters drifted about the country. The conviction spread, says Rodzianko, a very conservative Russian, that even victories were of no avail, that “all the fighters’ superhuman efforts and sacrifices were at bottom fruitless because of unfortunate and clumsy orders.”¹⁷

Efforts to enforce discipline under these conditions became more and more barbaric, “degrading the soldier and trampling his self respect in the dirt.” In 1915 flogging was officially introduced. An effort was made to combat “finger wounds” by the death penalty, but when the mass of soldiers had lost all faith in its commanders, flogging and the firing squad only made matters worse. By the summer of 1917 the largest army ever put into the field by any nation had become, in the words of a military report, “an enormous, exhausted, badly clothed, badly fed, embittered mob of people, united by thirst for peace and general disillusionment.” Chamberlin, a strong opponent of the Soviets, adds that “in the breakdown of the whole army the role of the Bolsheviki seems to have been relatively subsidiary.”¹⁸

Despair in the Villages. Behind the front conditions were not notably better. The tremendous drafts of the strongest men, a large part of which could not be used to any effect in the army, threw an increasingly heavy burden upon those left behind. A writer who was in the monarchist camp during the civil war wrote of one of the later mobilizations that the first and second class reservists had already gone, men over forty, many gray bearded. When still another call came “a groan went up from the villages. Excitement rose ominously. Everywhere new, audacious words were heard. ‘What does this mean, do they want to bury us all, to have room for them?’”¹⁹

The deep resentment of the villages was increased by the government’s handling of the prisoners of war. These were liberally farmed out to the large landowners for a pittance wage of three rubles a month. The gentry thus had plenty of labor, enough to enable them to carry out many capital improvements, while the women, children and old people in the villages were “bent, overstrained and even crippled by work exhausting for the muzhik in the flower of his strength.” This, too, was not the only difference which the war brought to the village and the manor. The latter was now independent of the village and need not aid it because of dependence on its labor.²⁰

Corruption at the Top. To complete the people’s loss of faith in the regime the Tsar, playing commander at the front, left the government in the hands of the Tsarina and her dissolute mentor, the monk Rasputin, whose rule reached into every branch of the administration. Rasputin certainly dictated drastic orders interfering with transport and the food supply. All sorts of unclean elements and financial adventurers gathered around him and used him. His political aims were reactionary and he was opposed to the war from the beginning, until he was murdered by an imperial Prince on December 30, 1916.²¹

By that time the government was without friends. General Denikin, leading anti-Red general in the civil war, wrote that: “Owing to the unrestrained orgy of power in which the successive rulers, appointed at Rasputin’s suggestion, had indulged during their short terms of office, there was in 1917 no political party, no class upon which the Czarist Government could rely.”²²

In these circumstances the only possible hope of preventing revolution lay in the Duma, but the Tsar would not allow it to meet. Early in March 1917 he prorogued it once again, and once too often. The Duma refused to obey, just at the time when economic discontent came to a head.

Economic Disintegration. With all classes of people turned against the Monarchy, the economic effects of the war were bound to be decisive. The army had evacuated all Jews from the front areas at the start of the war, under a vague fear of spies. Later it uprooted and drove to the rear great numbers of people in an effort to depopulate and devastate areas about to be occupied by the Germans. These masses of wretched evacuees were thereafter a source of economic weakness.²³ The giant mobilizations of men who could not be armed or led drained the labor supply. Casualties and disease among them put the nation into mourning. Wages and prices soared to fantastic heights as the printing presses poured out money. Machinery and rolling stock wore out. The railroads were more crippled each day. Goods of all kinds became scarce, and the number of men who laid down their tools reached ominous proportions. The supply of food in the nation was perhaps sufficient, but it could not be distributed properly, due partly to the breakdown of transport and partly to the free use of their power by military commanders to go into a district and forbid any shipment of food except to the army.

The March Revolution, 1917. It was only a question of time until food riots would develop in the cities. On March 8, 1917, long queues besieged the bakers’ shops in Petrograd. The next day the police fired on the crowds. Then all factories and schools stopped work and everyone was on the streets. The soldiers began to go over to the people, but one regiment exacted heavy casualties from them on March 11. During that night its members decided to shoot no more, and in the morning led the bulk of the garrison over to the side of the people. The rest of the country was taken by telephone and telegraph.

The Tsarist government simply ceased to exist. It was succeeded largely by a vacuum, but on March 12, 1917, two efforts were made to fill it. The very conservative Duma which the Tsar’s government finally permitted to exist, after two dissolutions and much purging of leftist elements, set up a Provisional Government, in which a lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, came to be the principal leader. The other body was a Soviet or Council of Delegates hastily elected from the factories and barracks of the Petrograd area, of which Kerensky was also Vice-President.

Similar Soviets were soon formed in all parts of the country, the delegates from peasant groups predominating in the rural areas. In Petrograd the local Soviet rivaled the Provisional Government from the start, often in friendly fashion. It grew to be a large, unwieldy body of 2500 delegates, yet it pulsated with life and had direct and swift contact with a great number of bodies of citizens. There was a rough democracy in these bodies, if it be granted that they voiced mainly the views of the leftist parties—the Social Revolutionaries, the Mensheviki, and the Bolsheviki. The latter were not important in the Soviets for many weeks. It was a month before the famous sealed carriage brought Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and other Bolshevik leaders across Germany, by agreement with the German General Staff. Trotsky came from Canada still later.

Toward Red Revolution in November. The revolution, which began so bloodlessly in March, with something like 2000 casualties, swept on in the hearts and minds of the ill-prepared people. In the villages the peasants took things into their own hands, disposing of the landlords and taking the land, until by December no squires remained. Division of the land was not equal: each one took what he could and the resulting scramble added to the wave of desertions from the armies at the front.

In the cities the number of declassed people with no prospects or hope had been vastly increased by the war which had hurled so many millions out of their accustomed places into others where life was still more precarious. These people were open to the appeals of the Bolsheviks, who denied the contention of the Mensheviks that socialism could not be established in Russia until industrialization had progressed much further. The tireless zeal and singleness of mind of the Bolshevik leaders steadily won converts in the Soviets everywhere, though the main leaders remained in the capital. During the late summer Bolshevik minorities rapidly turned into majorities in the Soviets all over the land. Local elections were held in Moscow for ward councils in July, the Social Revolutionaries polling 58 per cent of the vote and the Bolsheviki 11 per cent. Similar elections in October gave the Social Revolutionaries 14 per cent and the Bolsheviki 50 per cent.²⁴

Kerensky’s one hope of getting a solid basis under his increasingly powerless government was to get elected the Constituent Assembly which had been provided for as the ultimate repository of authority at the time the royal family abdicated. Yet in September he made the fatal blunder of postponing the election of the Assembly from September 30 to November 25, that body to meet on December 12.

The Kerensky government was doomed not only because it was a moderate group, but above all because it tried to carry on the war. Under the prodding of Russia’s allies, the Western democracies, another offensive against the Austrians at Tamopol was actually opened on July 1. The enthusiasm of a few officers made a breach in the Austrian lines, but whole regiments quit marching when they felt tired, and presently a last great Russian rout was in progress. The nation was already deeply disgusted with the war before the revolution. After it the revolution was the main interest of the people, not the war. The Red slogan “Peace, Bread and Land!” was far more effective than any appeals to continue the endless agony and humiliation of the war.

Yet with all these advantages the Bolsheviki might have failed to seize power had it not been for the inflexible will of Lenin. The Petrograd Soviet had elected a Central Executive Committee and it in turn had created a Presidium. Similar national organs were also set up. None of these major bodies was controlled by the Bolsheviki until they won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet on September 22. The same thing happened in widely scattered Soviets about the same time.

Even then the Bolshevik leaders held back. Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed drastic action. On September 28 the Bolshevik Party Central Committee rejected a call for revolt by Lenin and instead took measures to see that no outbreak occurred. Lenin discerned, however, that the abortive effort of General Kornilov to seize power from the Right had opened the way for a similar attempt by the Left. He saw, too, that the effort must be made soon or the heat of revolutionary activity would cool and the election of a Constituent Assembly would remove the occasion for a seizure of power. He therefore hammered incessantly for a quick stroke, aided ably by Trotsky and, after a tremendous propaganda drive, the capital was taken over by well organized and directed action on November 5–7, 1917. Resistance melted away before overwhelming odds and only half a dozen lives were lost.²⁵

The decisive strategy had been Lenin’s. Chamberlin characterizes him as “a supreme genius of revolutionary leadership” and adds that “one must go back a full two centuries in Russian history before a personality among the rulers of the country fit to stand comparison with Lenin can be found.”²⁶

War-bred Communism. The length of the First World War made it inevitable that the Tsarist government would be overthrown. The near success of the revolution of 1905–6, after the lesser sufferings and humiliations of the Russo-Japanese War, made it certain that the prolonged agony and disintegration of 1914–17 would produce an upheaval. It was not foreordained, though, that a small band of able extremists should take over the revolution and create the first communist state in a land where even Marxist theory taught that the soil was sterile. Only a combination of able leadership playing upon immense numbers of people liberated and yet made desperate by the war could have done that.

Revolution was overdue in Russia and it probably would have come soon in some form. Yet in a state of peace the army would have been a powerful bulwark for the regime and every other conservative force could have made itself felt. The pressure for reform could also have achieved increasing results without revolution. Above all, if it finally came there would have been infinitely greater chances of keeping it within democratic channels, on the Western European model. It was the First World War which produced communism in Russia. Without the chaos created by the war it is difficult even to imagine circumstances under which a small band of extreme socialists could have taken control of a vast benighted peasant country, ruled by a powerful autocracy. The war brought communism to the largest state on the globe.

This is a mountainous fact which should be pondered deeply by all those who greatly fear communism and who are tempted to think that another war would scotch it.

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