Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

It cannot be said, then, that the Russian people ever voted in their majority for the Bolsheviks. It was tragic that, in fighting for land, freedom, and self-government, the Russian communities of joint responsibility should have delivered themselves into the hands of an even more oppressive regime.

10. Lenin leaving an educational conference, 1918

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly unleashed civil war between Reds and anti-Reds, usually known loosely as Whites. Faced with the collapse of central power, Russia disintegrated into local communities fighting for survival. The Whites were divided, as ever, by their visions of Russia. Some considered it a developing ‘Western’ country, where democracy and the rule of law would ultimately triumph, and so fought to re-establish the Constituent Assembly. Others opposed the Assembly as a hotbed of socialism and considered authoritarian rule essential; they fought for the reinstatement of ‘Russia One and Indivisible’. It is striking that no White leader openly called for the restoration of Tsarism, so deeply was it discredited among ordinary Russians. All the same, the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas II and his family, and threw their corpses down a remote mineshaft, so that their graves should not become shrines.

The Reds won the civil war largely because they had the support of many peasants, workers, soldiers, and non-Russian nationalities, because they occupied the central strategic position, and because they successfully projected their vision that they embodied the future. The Red Army, under the competent leadership of Trotsky, behaved no less brutally than the Whites, but operated more effectively. The experience of civil war left a lasting mark on the Bolshevik leaders: thereafter, they were in permanent mobilizational mode, seeing enemies everywhere and using the rhetoric of military campaigns to impel social change and economic development.

Chapter 6

The Soviet Union’s turbulent rise

The 1917 revolution looked like a complete break with Russia’s past. Yet before long the main features of that past had reappeared: empire, centralization, a highly authoritarian state, a yawning gap between rulers and people. How did this happen?

One unquestionably novel feature of the Soviet Union was rule by a single party, the Bolsheviks, who renamed themselves Communists (later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU). Its leaders took over the messianism which had always been part of Russian religious culture and transposed it into politics, as the Tsars had never done. Communists believed that Marxism, as interpreted by Lenin, had given them the key to history and entitled them to a monopoly of power. They intended to defeat the class enemy, industrialize Russia, and join with the workers of other industrialized countries to foment world revolution and build communism throughout the world. To achieve this, they forged the party into a tightly centralized organism, directed by a self-perpetuating Central Committee and protected by a ubiquitous security police, the Cheka, later NKVD.

Their conviction that they were fighting for absolute good entailed the equally strong conviction that all their opponents represented absolute evil. In the civil war, they applied this belief to all anti-Reds, whether Russian nationalists, liberals, or non-Communist socialists. In their eyes, the struggle gave them the right not just to defeat but to exterminate their opponents.

The one-party system they established was a logical outcome of their world view. Unfortunately for them, it had a defect which initially appeared to enhance their power, but which ultimately proved fatal for them. Their monopoly of power over every aspect of public life enabled them in the early years to bring about change quickly and to deal with emergencies, but in the long run became rigid and irresponsive to the problems of the real world.