“I don’t know why anyone bothers to read fiction!”
That was a recurring thought of mine, as I read this gripping 415-page book about the Russian Revolution by Bard College history professor Sean McMeekin.
The sheer absurdity of the revolution often puts fiction to shame.
The lessons from this period of history also seem dramatically under-considered, and especially relevant to our chaotic world today. That motivated me to write this review, to share what I learned:
Russia has always had a reputation for backwardness. It lagged western Europe dramatically in abolishing serfdom, only doing so in 1861.
Before then, Russia mostly missed the capitalist and industrial revolutions that western Europe experienced. So in 1870, for instance, just 15% of Russians were literate, compared to 76% of Brits.
Russia’s backwardness is widely known, but this was news to me: the Russian economy was charging ahead beautifully in the early 1900s, finally free from centuries of feudal serfdom, and under the administration of an able Minister of Internal Affairs, Pyotr Stolypin. The book notes:
By 1910, Russia’s economy was humming along at an annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent. Like China in the early 21st century, Stolypin’s Russia in the early twentieth was the economic story of its day, a colossus in the making.
Could it last? Russia’s economic potential was vast, and the more this was tapped, the more Stolypin believed her social tensions would resolve themselves. Peasants, turned into property-owners with something to lose, could become a bulwark of law and order in the countryside. In the cities, inequality might increase as industrialists prospered; but workers, too, could see their wages rise, along with a gradual but noticeable improvement in their living conditions.
In this era, the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed — the longest railroad in the world, at more than twice the length of the U.S. Transcontinental railroad.
Stolypin argued that Russia needed just two decades of peace to bring Russia into a truly stable economic situation.
Alas, not everyone was so patient. Socialist revolutionary organizations were brewing in Russia’s rapidly expanding urban centers, along with pro-democracy movements and other ideologies. Although the government suppressed socialist revolutionaries by giving troublemakers several-year exile sentences in Siberia, the book informs that:
While the Siberian climate (especially in winter) could be harsh, conditions imposed on internal exiles were otherwise lenient, astonishingly so compared to later conditions in the Soviet Gulag: exiles even received an annual living allowance from the tsar for clothes, food, and rent, Some well-off exiles, like Lenin (whose father was a hereditary noble state councilor, fourth class in the table of ranks) traveled first class to Siberia: Lenin brought along his mother and his wife and even hired a maid to keep house. So, far from being imprisoned, exiles could do what they liked, as long as they stayed in Siberia.
Young Stalin, too, served an exile sentence in tsarist Siberia — but the enforcement was so lax that he later bragged about having left Siberia 6 times during his sentence. Here’s his 1911 mugshot:
While leftism remained a minority viewpoint in Russia, agitators scored points by committing dozens of assassinations in the early 1900s.
In 1911, an eleventh assassination attempt on interior minister Stolypin succeeded — he was fatally shot in a theater.
The book notes that this was particularly unfortunate because Stolypin could have been a critical, trusted voice for peace in the tsar’s cabinet.
Instead, by 1914, when Serbia asked Russia for military help in fighting its dreaded Austro-Hungarian oppressors, the tsar’s cabinet consisted of no advisors in favor of peace.
Except one! He wasn’t exactly in the tsar’s cabinet, but he earned the deep trust of the tsar and tsarina, after comforting their hemophilic son: Peasant faith-healer Grigori Rasputin.
Caption: Rasputin’s most professional headshot
Rasputin was fervently anti-war, and the tsar and tsarina took his policy views seriously.
Sadly, when the question of war arrived, Rasputin happened to be out of town:
… the faith healer was in his home town of Pokrovskoye, in distant Siberia. Tsarina Alexandra did send him an urgent telegram … warning that “it was a serious moment, they are threatening war.”
Unfortunately:
Just as Rasputin was leaving his house to dictate a reply, he was stabbed in the stomach.
Bleeding profusely, Rasputin survived the assault, but he was confined to a hospital bed for the rest of July.
In this way the last influential voice for peace was silenced, and the tsar was surrounded by a unanimous chorus of belligerence.
Rasputin’s untimely stabbing is just first of many flukes that, the book shows, led to an almost indescribably tragic outcome for Russia — an outcome harmful enough that Russia still suffers from its legacy a hundred years later.
The book hones in on many of these chance episodes, and ultimately makes a convincing argument for what I’ll call the “Butterfly Theory of History” in which the fate of the world depends largely on chance timing events as trivial as the flap of a butterfly’s wings.
This is in contrast to other theories of history, such as — most relevantly for the author — the Marxist dialectical theory that history is fated to go through stages that inexorably lead to true communism. There’s also the “Great Man” theory of history, which holds that history is swayed by particular strong leaders. Arguably Lenin fits that bill, as we’ll soon see.
But overall, the book makes a strong case for frustrating chance as a major determinant of history. This has implications for how we see present-day events; starting with a healthy understanding that many things are not really in our control.
But first, getting back to Tsar Nicholas’s decision to start World War 1 — the book recounts that he really did not want to do that:
In a sign of how desperate he was for reasoned counsel, the tsar refused to see either his war minister or his chief of staff the next day, as he knew they would tell him to mobilize [the military] immediately.
Tsar Nicholas ultimately consulted an advisor whom he thought was neutral on the issue of war, but who actually turned out to be pro-war. Ultimately, the tsar — who was not strong-willed by nature — acquiesced to his unanimous cabinet, and took the irreversible decision to go to war with Austria-Hungary (and by extension, Germany too.)
Rasputin, learning this news from his hospital bed, was distraught:
Rasputin … upon learning that mobilization had been declared, tore off his bandages and dictated an urgent telegram to Tsar Nicholas II, which reached him too late to be heeded. If Russia went to war, Rasputin warned the tsar and tsarina, “it would mean the end of Russia and yourselves.”
In hindsight, of course, Rasputin’s prophecy turned out to be right.
The story of war from time immemorial is that both sides expect a quick victory. Then history laughs at them:
As in the other belligerent countries, most Russians had expected a short, victorious war, not a long slog of attrition. Perhaps the best evidence of this “short war illusion” was the decree issued by Nicholas II on September 5, 1914, forbidding the sale of alcohol for the duration of the conflict. In the early flush of patriotic sacrifice, the generals at Stavka [the military high command] had gone the tsar one better by foregoing not only drink but female company, banning women from the staff compound and conducting daily religious services. By December 1914, reality had set in: women were seen at Stavka, and wine and vodka were being served, in ever increasing quantities.
Russia’s current tsar, Vladimir Putin, is known to be a student of history — but clearly he skipped this book. Big mistake.
But returning to World War I, the generals probably turned to alcohol because their armies suffered terrible losses, enduring:
… an average casualty rate of nearly 40 percent from August to December [1914], while losing nearly a million prisoners of war. The “burn rate” for the Russian army so far, according to some estimates, was something like 300,000 losses of all kinds per month. No matter how many millions of peasants could still be mobilized, no country, no army, could maintain such a pace forever.
This is the war in which Russia sent unarmed soldiers to the front — based on the logic that there were plenty of abandoned weapons from dead soldiers they could pick up once they got there.
And for all that, in early 1917, Russia’s European battle line was significantly behind Russia’s pre-war borders. It had lost significant territory to the Germans, while mostly stalemating the Austro-Hungarians, and winning a lot of ground from the Turks.
Because of the revolution, I was under the impression that Russia must have been losing the war. But the book shows that they were actually nearing a win.
First, the book points out that Russia had managed to dramatically ramp up war production, increasing shell production from 358,000 in January 1915 to 2.9 million in September 1916. More than a thousand new corporations were listed on the St. Petersburg stock exchange during the war. It’s a picture of a country with some economic competence.
The book also argues that troop morale was improving, though I think the author makes a bit of an error on that. He notes:
On the Galician front, there had been 35 recorded soldier protests of various kinds in 1916, a 500 percent increase over 1915; but the upward trend then leveled off, with only 7 demonstrations in the first two months of 1917.
Sounds convincing. But wait. Annualized, that 1917 rate is 7 * 6 = 42, actually a slight increase in soldier protests compared with the previous year.
Despite this, the book overall makes a convincing case that the war was about to turn in Russia’s favor. It was gearing up for offensives, and on the brink of big victories in Turkey.
Unknown to the public at that time, Russia had a pact with the western powers that it would get Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) after the end of the war — which would have been an enormous addition to the Russian empire.
And retrospectively, the allies won the war even though Russia was totally knocked out. So, clearly Russia would have won had it had stayed in the fight a bit longer.
Furthermore, the book also makes clear that while wartime Russia may not have been the nicest place to live, there was no widespread starvation. There was no deprivation that could hold a candle to later self-inflicted tragedies:
… the image many of us have from popular histories—of a hungry working-class populace driven over the edge by spiraling bread prices—does not accord with the material facts. There were few signs of burgeoning labor unrest in Russia in early 1917. In May and June 1916, nearly 200,000 workers had walked out for an average of six and a half days. But there were only a fraction as many strikes in November and December, which saw about 30,000 laborers walk out for an average of two and a half days. … The food picture in Petrograd was satisfactory and improving, if still far from perfect. At no time in January or February 1917 did the city’s flour reserves dip below twelve days’ worth.
Because the living situation was not dire, the book notes that almost nobody saw the revolution coming — including Lenin, who was living in Switzerland and was “despondent” about revolutionary prospects.
In … January … 1917, Lenin told a youth-socialist gathering that “we old-timers may not live to see the decisive battles of the upcoming revolution.”
The book notes:
The fact is, no one had any inkling of what was about to transpire in St Petersburg: not frontline soldiers, not the tsar or his advisers, not liberal society, not the Allied ambassadors, not the German agents provocateurs … not Lenin in Switzerland, nor, judging by stable bond prices, the millions of foreigners who had invested in the tsarist regime in Paris, London, and New York. What most people in St. Petersburg were talking about in winter 1917 was not bread shortages, nor the prospect of popular street disturbances in a city so bitingly cold that few people ventured outdoors for long.
The most trivial of coincidences sparked the revolution:
What transformed the Russian political landscape in February 1917 was the most natural thing in the world, and the most unexpected: the weather turned. After nearly two months of bitter, unrelenting cold, on the day after the tsar left for the front on … March 7, 1917, serenely unaware his throne was in danger, the mercury suddenly rose sharply to well above freezing, reaching 46 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun came out, too, and the glorious weather would last another five days.
Coincidentally, the spring weather broke out on the socialist-inspired International Women’s Day, turning the demonstrations into a rolling street party, as thousands of city residents ventured outdoors to enjoy their first leisurely stroll in weeks.
At first the mood was festive and relatively peaceful. Although large detachments of police and Cossack cavalrymen were on patrol, few of them wanted to molest crowds demonstrating primarily — it appeared — for cheaper bread, in which women were so prominent. While city officials were taken aback by the size of demonstrations on February 23 … around 90,000 to 100,000 people … there was no sense that the situation was violent or threatening.
But soon, less savory elements started to use the bread-price protests as cover, and (still limited) looting and violence broke out.
Tsar Nicholas, on his way to the front and unable to fully assess the situation, ordered the garrison to put down the riot/demonstration with force. The soldiers fired into crowds and put down the protests. But then, at night in their barracks, the soldiers started talking about what they had done. Some angry soldiers murdered an officer who had ordered them to fire on crowds. The book notes that, under Russian military rules, the entire regiment would be “viewed as collectively guilty” of this, and thus, the entire unit of soldiers “closed ranks behind the mutineers both out of solidarity and self-interest.”
The news spread like wildfire through the garrison, leading one unit after another (though not all of them) toward mutiny. There were good reasons why peasant soldiers, many only recently drafted and then stuffed like sardines into the makeshift barracks of the capital—160,000 soldiers were housed in facilities designed to hold 20,000—may have been primed for protest already.
The next day, the soldiers went out into St. Petersburg and declared their support for the protestors, joining in the revelry and rioting.
Many factions in Russia saw the disorder in the capital not as a calamity, but as an opportunity. Russian upper-class liberals saw it as an opportunity to usher in democracy. Socialists saw it as an opportunity to implement socialism and redistribute land to peasants.
Many others saw it as an opportunity to finally win the war, after what they believed was strategic incompetence on the part of Russia’s leaders, including the tsarina (who was ethnically German) and the family mystic Rasputin (who was murdered by aristocratic conspirators just two months before the revolution.)
The book cites letters from soldiers at the front, also expressing optimism:
“Now that the pro-German ministers have been removed,” an engineer in the 37th Engineering Regiment wrote home, “our valiant army thirsts for battle with enthusiasm. I hope we will destroy the enemy.” Far from an isolated view, no less than 75 percent of letters sent home from First Army in March 1917 expressed similar sentiments…
The book argues that the tsar still has a solid chance of returning with loyal troops and restore order. The revolution was contained to just the capital, St. Petersburg, and so it should have been relatively easy to put down.
That’s not what happened, thanks to a mix of errors.
First, as a precaution, Tsar Nicholas took the long train going back.
The decision to delay the tsar’s arrival … had baleful consequences. Had he traveled home on the direct route [used by his soldiers] Russia’s sovereign would have arrived [after just 34 hours] into the fervent embrace of his adoring children and his affectionate — and stubborn — wife, who would have put some steel into him. Instead the most important man in Russia wasted away a critical day on a meandering train journey, out of touch … Unbeknownst to the tsar, both the generals and the politicians … were conspiring behind his back.
Ambitions collided to produce a perfect storm. Civilian leaders in St. Petersburg, led by Duma leader Mikhail Rodzianko (a Duma, or parliament, existed under the tsar, but was effectively symbolic and had almost no real power), saw an opportunity to take power and create a democracy.
Rodzianko told Russia’s top generals (falsely) that he was in control of the revolution, and that they should pressure the Tsar to abdicate.
Meanwhile, the tsar’s head general, Mikhail Alekseev, saw that the war was about to turn in Russia’s favor, and was eager to do anything to calm the internal crisis so that he could get on with winning the war. As a result, he was too ready to believe Rodzianko’s claims.
… he genuinely believed that Russia was primed to win the war. Only if we understand this can we make sense of the blind trust Alekseev placed in Rodzianko… believing Rodzianko had the situation under control, Alekseev called off the punitive expedition to St. Petersburg, informing general Ivanov that … “the shameful civil strife for which our enemy longs will be avoided.”
The collaboration between politicians and generals to cement the revolution led to a situation in which Tsar Nicholas II was isolated, and found that every voice he turned to for advice urged abdication. And so the tsar, never known for his strong will, did so.
The inability of the Duma to control the revolution became apparent within hours of his abdication.
General Alekseev told his quartermaster-general, “I shall never forgive myself for having believed in the sincerity of certain people … and for having sent the telegram [encouraging] the tsar’s abdication.”
One important lesson here is in the critical importance of reliable information.
Imagine if General Alekseev had access to live reports (Twitter?) from independent journalists on the ground in St. Petersburg. He then could have known directly that Rodzianko had no control over the revolution and that it needed to be dealt with firmly.
That muddled information can make things go so badly wrong illustrates how reliable, unvarnished information can be a great public good; even though creators of the reliable information may never even know if their info proved decisive in a situation like this.
Anyway, the abdication of the tsar threw things into chaos.
Things still could have gone alright; the revolution was anti-tsarist, but not pro-communist. Russian liberals in the Duma immediately started making preparations for a national election that would create a legitimate government. In the meantime, they set up a “Provisional Government”, led by a relatively moderate democratic socialist, Alexander Kerensky. Both liberals and democratic socialists worked in the Provisional Government, struggling uphill to continue a world war, keep radicals at bay, deliver tangible progress to the public, and to hold a nationwide democratic vote.
Now let’s turn to Valdimir Lenin.
He had been in western Europe for years, during the war. At one point, he was arrested there, but was released when his hatred for the Russian government became apparent.
Lenin continued to have contact with German officials, who were eager to aid socialism in Russia to help destabilize their enemy. Incredibly, Lenin’s pre-revolution rhetoric was so extreme in calling for Russian defeat that even German officials sometimes suppressed it:
Lenin formulated the minority doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism.” Socialists, he argued, should work to bring about the defeat of their own country—he meant this literally—and thereby “turn the imperialist war into civil war.”
Rather than counsel draft resistance, socialists should encourage workers to join the military and turn the armies “red” by promoting mutinies. Although these views were seen as divisive by the Marxist majority … Lenin was hewing more closely to the spirit of Eugéne Pottier’s socialist anthem, “The Internationale,” which endorsed army mutiny:
The kings intoxicate us with gunsmoke,
Peace between ourselves, war on the tyrants.
Let us bring the strike to the armies,
Fire into the air and break ranks!
If they insist, these cannibals,
‘On making us into heroes,
They'll know soon enough that our bullets
Are for our own generals!
So explosive was Lenin's “Zimmerwald Left” doctrine that, when [German] Consul Romberg explained it to Berlin, the German Foreign Office intervened to quash publication of Lenin's program, lest the Okhrana [Russian Secret Police] use it to justify mass arrests of socialists in Russia.
While they tamped down that specific publication of Lenin’s, overall, Germany was eager to work with him on spreading socialism in Russia, and especially among the Russian army.
As Parvus [a Russian socialist exile working with the Germans] explained to the German minister in Copenhagen in late March, to prevent a revival of Russian fighting morale under the new Provisional Government, the “extreme revolutionary movement will have to be supported, in order to intensify anarchy.”
Or as Parvus explained to the German Socialist leader Philip ‘Scheidemann, then visiting Copenhagen, Lenin was “much more raving mad” than the rest of Russia's socialists.
So, shortly after revolution broke out, Lenin was directly funded by the German government in order to sow division in Russia.
On April 5, 1917, the German government appropriated 5 million gold marks for revolutionizing Russia, and four days later, Lenin was sent on his way.
I was amazed to learn this. But the author gives many stunning quotes unearthed from German intelligence records showing this conclusively.
German army intelligence in Stockholm reported … to the German high command: “Lenin's entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we would wish."
How did I never know that already?!
Anyway, specifically, the German intelligence officer was writing about Lenin’s first act on entering Moscow: Presenting anti-war theses so radical and defeatist that even his fellow Bolsheviks condemned them.
… Lenin launched into a fiery two-hour speech denouncing the “piratical imperialist war," along with party backsliders who had offered support to the Provisional Government still fighting it.
The program Lenin proposed was so extreme that the Party organ, Pravda, initially refused to print it. These “April Theses” are best remembered today for the slogan “All power to the Soviets,” but they were equally extreme on foreign policy, disavowing any support for the war and advocating the abolition of the Russian army. Within hours Lenin’s “extreme radical and pacifist” program was the talk of St. Petersburg…
Specifically, Lenin said:
….without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace…
The most widespread campaign for this view must be organized in the army at the front [lines]…
Abolition of the police, the army, and the bureaucracy!
At the time, even Lenin’s fellow Bolsheviks, such as Josef Stalin, rejected this.
As an exile who had scarcely set foot in Russia for seventeen years, Lenin had been free to devise a policy line unconstrained by concern for comity with fellow Russian socialists or other practical considerations. His perspective on the war thus differed from that of Bolsheviks who had stayed in Russia, such as Lev Kamenev and Josef Stalin …
Stalin … denounced Lenin's “Down with the war” slogan as “useless” in Pravda. In the Central Committee, Lenin's April Theses were voted down soundly on April 8, by 13 to 2.
But Lenin would ultimately win out:
Lenin, however, had an ace to play: German money… After Lenin’s arrival, the Bolsheviks purchased a private printing press on Suvorovsky Prospekt for 250,000 rubles (equal to $12.5 million [USD] today)
As a result:
The circulation of Pravda quickly ratcheted up to 85,000. On April 15, the party launched a new broadsheet, Soldatskaia Pravda, addressed to soldiers in the St Petersburg garrison. Editions aimed at reaching frontline soldiers soon followed. Before long … [distribution] reached six figures.
As a result:
The German investment in Lenin paid immediate dividends….
In this flood of discontented humanity pouring into revolutionary Russia, Lenin was but a single individual. But in the extremity of his views on the war … Lenin was the critical catalyst of chaos, a one-man demolition crew sent to wreck Russia's war effort.
I find this amazing. Here we have a foreign subversion plot that really worked. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. 100 years later, Germany’s subversion agent is still embalmed in his mausoleum in the central square of Russia’s capital!
It almost didn’t work. Lenin’s contemporaries caught on. After a failed Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917 (read the book if you want all the details), government agents raided Bolshevik headquarters and found evidence of the German backing. Based on this,
On July 6, the Provisional Government formally charged eleven Bolsheviks — including … Lenin … with “high treason and organizing an armed uprising.”
Lenin, however, managed to evade arrest in Finland. But things looked bleak for him and the Bolsheviks.
But then another butterfly flapped its wings. This episode feel almost like the plot director leaned to heavily on a “deus ex machina” to bail out Lenin, but — basically, the head of the Provisional Government, moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, appointed a revered general named Aleksandr Kornilov to head up military operations.
But because of Kornilov’s widespread popularity, Kerensky had some distrust for him. But the two were still making things work.
That is, until an “aristocratic dilettante” named V.N. Lvov, who had recently been fired by Kerensky, decided to help everyone out.
The book says:
… in his own mind, Lvov was a patriot trying to save the country.
He traveled to General Kornilov, where he then pretended to be a messenger from Kerensky.
What transpired next could be played for farce, were the consequences not so catastrophic.
Lvov then claimed to the general that he had a message from Kerensky that their current arrangement was not working, and that they should instead adopt one of three options:
(1) a new government with Kerensky as dictator; (2) a small oligarchy of “three or four members” including both Kerensky and Kornilov; (3) a military dictatorship under Kornilov.
Kornilov stated that he preferred option 3, “as long as Kerensky and [another person] remained as ministers.”
Then Lvov traveled back to Kerensky, and informed him that Kornilov had proposed taking power — without including the context of his ruse; that Kornilov thought he was responding to a proposal from Kerensky.
Kerensky was apoplectic, naturally, and now feared a “right wing” coup coming from Kornilov — and immediately moved to arrest the general. Attempts to clear up the misunderstanding failed.
As part of Kerensky’s moves against Kornilov, charges against the Bolsheviks were allowed to fall by the wayside, as Kerensky thought he might need Bolshevik help in a fight.
He didn’t end up needing them, and any potential threat from Kornilov was successfully put down.
The normally dispassionate author can’t seem to hold back his anger towards Lvov, calling him “an imposter, playing ventriloquist with the fate of millions.”
It seems Lvov’s exact motivations are lost to history. He may have just been indulging his curiosity about coups, or perhaps he was trying to curry favor by being “in the know” and sharing (fake) news to both Kerensky and Kornilov about their rival’s intentions.
According to another historian, Nikita Sokolov,
we will never know whether the Lvov demarche … was a result of mental clouding or a cunningly conceived and masterly revenge [after having been fired], but its consequences were catastrophic.
Lvov died in a gulag thirteen years later (unrelated to this action of his.)
I think the severe harm from this prank / fake information re-iterates the lesson from above: Accurate information is so critical, and valuable!
Thanks to the “Kornilov Affair”, Lenin soon returned to St. Petersburg and immediately began plotting to overthrow the Provisional Government.
As usual, Lenin took the hard line, even among fellow Bolsheviks — he argued that they needed to seize power before the national democratic vote was held, as they were sure to lose the vote.
Lenin argued that waiting [to seize power] was “senseless,” as the Bolsheviks would never win a national election in which peasants, unlike in urban soviet-style elections, could vote. With an eye, perhaps, on the warrants for his arrest plastered all over Russia, he argued that the Bolsheviks should seize power now.
Lenin succeeded both in convincing his colleagues to lauch a coup, and then the coup succeeded, too. You can read the book for the details. The Bolsheviks honestly remind me of Antifa in their instant willingness to use force, even against more moderate leftists, and their view that the “ends always justify the means.”
German internal intelligence documents report that things were going according to their plan.
German intelligence reported on November 2 that “the Bolshevik uprising was completely expected” (although the agent predicted with equal confidence that the Bolsheviks would shortly be overthrown in turn.)
Despite Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks now holding physical power in the capital of St. Petersburg, democratic elections went ahead around the country as planned. The results:
the elections of November 1917 were conducted with remarkable integrity, with a turnout of 41 million, half of eligible voters. As expected, the SRs [a socialist party popular among peasants] won a plurality, scoring just above 40 percent, with the Bolsheviks coming in second at 24 percent (though Lenin's party won nearly 50 percent of the army, including 70 percent of serving men in Moscow and Petrograd). Impressive though this was in comparison to where the Bolsheviks had stood just months earlier, it was hardly reassuring to a ruling party of usurpers that more than three quarters of the Russian electorate had voted against them, leaving them with only 175 seats out of 707. As one observer noted, the democratic verdict sat with the Bolsheviks like a “bone in the throat.”
So, when the new parliament tried to convene, the Bolsheviks crushed it.
Red Guards surrounded Taurida Palace and dispersed the Constituent Assembly by force after it finally convened, killing eight people … the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly liberated the Bolsheviks from accountability to public opinion.
Now people got to experience more pure Bolshevik rule under Lenin. Russia soon collapsed in every way possible. First, militarily:
By July 1918, Russia had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Siberia’s cities were ruled by Czechs and Slovaks [don’t ask], its hinterland by Siberian Cossacks … Transbaikal Cossacks lorded over Manchuria, while … Japanese sponsors eyed Vladivostok. Finland was lost for good. Formerly Russian Poland, the Baltic area, White Russia, and Ukraine were German satellites, patrolled by a million occupying troops. There were 600,000 German troops in Ukraine alone…
Far from escaping the world war, Lenin’s peace policy had turned Russia into the playground of outside powers.
This gets to the part of the book that took me months to finish because every few pages I’d be like “this is too depressing” and put it down.
First, Lenin ordered the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, which was carried out in the most brutal way.
While the Bolsheviks made Nicholas’s execution public, they wanted to pretend that his family was still alive, to avoid angering people too much. At the same time, they needed the family dead, because if any of his relatives ever escaped their control, that could pose a threat.
The Bolshevik’s initial solution was to dump the bodies in a mine shaft, but it:
turned out to be too shallow to afford much camouflage if the Czechs, or another hostile anti- Bolshevik force, came through. And so the corpses were lifted up again and put back in a truck. Because of heavy rain, the roads were soon impassable. After some debate, the Bolshevik disposal team simply stopped along the Ekaterinburg-Moscow road, dumped the bodies, and poured sulfuric acid all over them. Yurovsky then covered the bodies with brushwood and ran over them repeatedly with a truck to mangle the corpses beyond recognition in case they were discovered. Buried in a shallow grave, the remains lay undisturbed until 1989. For good measure, on the next day, July 18, the tsar’s blood relatives held at nearby Alapaevsk—including two Romanov grand dukes, a grand duchess, and their children—were strip searched, robbed of valuables, shot, and dumped in a mineshaft while at least several of the victims may still have been alive.
The treatment of the tsar and his family was obviously horrific, but sadly it wasn’t that unique, as the Bolsheviks soon began their “Red Terror”, which:
claimed nearly fifteen thousand lives in the first two months alone — more than twice the total number of prisoners of all kinds executed in the last century of tsarist rule (6,321.)
I was stunned by that statistic. Those deaths came along with these orders:
On August 8, Lenin ordered that “in all grain-producing areas, 25 designated hostages drawn from the best-off of the local inhabitants will answer with their lives for any failure of the requisitioning plan.”
On August 9, he instructed the Nizhny Novgorod Soviet to “introduce mass terror,” to execute anyone “caught in possession of a firearm,” [early gun control!] and to begin “massive deportations of Mensheviks [more moderate socialists] … the same day, he ordered the Penza Soviet to intern “kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp.”
On August 10, Lenin wired Penza that,
The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make an example of these people.
(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.
(2) Publish their names.
(3) Seize all their grain.
(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.
Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble.
Watching the “Red Terror”, even the Germans now felt bad for what they had started, and drew up a battle plan to remove the Bolsheviks from power. But in another “butterfly coincidence”, just before they were about to launch their operation, Germany’s Bulgarian ally collapsed in the south, sealing Germany’s loss in the war, and making them unable to launch their offensive against the Bolsheviks.
At the [German] high command, Ludendorff threw up his arms, telling aides that “the war is lost.”
Within two weeks, Germany sued for peace.
Allied powers soon made half-hearted attempts to dislodge the Bolsheviks, but never acted decisively enough to make it happen. “White Russian” resistance armies came close, but faced an uphill battle, because the Bolsheviks had inherited an enormous trove of gold and weapons that the tsars had accumulated:
… including 2.2 million rifles, 18,036 machine guns and 3 billion clips, 430,000 midrange or light guns, 500 Vickers heavy guns, 1.56 million hand grenades, and 167,000 officers’ pistols and revolvers. The Bolsheviks also controlled the arms factories of Tula.
With these, the Bolsheviks defeated white resistance armies.
That done, they also implemented nationalization of all industry.
Economic indices declined even more precipitously than before. In the revolutionary chaos of 1917, industrial production had declined to some 77 percent of the last prewar year, 1913. In 1919, it fell to 26 percent of the 1913 total; in 1920, to 18 percent. This was true even of energy and raw materials output, with output of oil falling to 42 percent of prewar levels; coal falling to 27 percent; cotton yarn, to 5 percent; and iron ore, to a woeful 2.4 percent.
The human toll was enormous.
By 1920 Moscow and St Petersburg, once the crown jewels of a fabulously wealthy empire, had become ghost towns. The pre-1917 population of St Petersburg (about 2.5 million) had been reduced to 750,000. Emaciated city residents stumbled around in a perpetual half-stupor, with barely the energy to stand in line at government rationing centers for bread (which sold on the black market for thousands, then millions, of rubles).
Of course, it doesn’t end there. The Bolsheviks now had to eliminate any possible room for internal dissent:
Crushing proletarian dissenters
Some of the original Bolshevik revolutionaries weren’t thrilled by the devastation and authoritarianism. In particular, soldiers from Kronstadt, who had played key roles in early Bolshevik victories, condemned their own government.
Although [Trotsky] denounced the protestors as “White Guards,” the tenor of the Kronstadt rebellion was, as Trotsky surely knew, anarchist-socialist. On March 8, the local Izvestiya [publication] hit the Bolsheviks where it hurt. “In carrying out the October Revolution,” the paper announced, “the working class hoped to achieve its liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.”
Instead of freedom, Russia's urban workers now faced “the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka,” while her peasant masses were being “drenched with blood.”
The author notes that this protest was the first case in which the Bolsheviks truly had no ideological excuse to act brutally. Their opponents were not aristocrats, businessmen, foreigners, or reactionary peasants — they were proletarian revolutionaries.
The Bolsheviks didn’t care. The sent the army in and crushed the Kronstadt revolutionaries in a battle, with thousands killed on both sides.
Crushing the Peasants
Pre-war, Russia had become more than self-sufficient in food.
In 1913, Russia had exported 20 million tons of surplus grain, which suggested that the days of famine were behind her.
Even during the war, things held together.
Yields had remained robust during the war, despite the decline in the rural population owing to the draft. It was only after 1918, with the onset of civil war and the draconian requisitions of War Communism, that grain production levels truly plummeted.
Any peasant caught hoarding produce was “tortured and whipped to the blood.” Angry farmers fought back with whatever tools they had on hand, bludgeoning to death, according to the regime's figures, eight thousand Bolshevik food requisitioners in 1920 alone.
8,000 communist officials killed by peasants in one year! That’s an incredible statistic.
But the peasants didn’t have much of a chance. Soon, thanks to government “requisitions” there was a severe, deadly shortage of food.
Lenin did make some orders for food imports, but:
… these were for the cities, and they mostly consisted not of grain and seed, but perishable luxuries such as Persian fruits, Swedish herring (40,000 tons), Finnish salted fish (250 tons), German bacon (7,000 tons), French pig fat, and chocolate.
As one of Lenin's own purchasing agents later recalled with a shudder, Communist elites in Moscow and Petrograd were consuming “truffles, pineapples, mandarin oranges, bananas, dried fruits, sardines and lord knows what else” while everywhere else in Russia “the people were dying of hunger.”
Far from easing up on the starving peasants of the Volga basin, on July 30, 1921, Lenin instructed all regional and provincial Party committees to “bolster the mechanisms for food collection” and to “provide the food agencies with the necessary party authority and the total power of the state apparatus of coercion.”
About 5 million Russians died of starvation in this episode, and many millions more would have died, if not for the quick and effective intervention of a U.S. humanitarian relief effort led by Herbert Hoover.
Crushing the Church
One of the most cold-blooded things documented here was how Lenin used the famine as a ruse to loot churches. Thanks to the famine:
Peasant resistance was now crumbling, overriding Lenin's reservations about targeting the Church. Meanwhile, Patriarch Tikhon had embarrassed Lenin no less badly than had Hoover with his own response to the famine. By the end of June 1921— more than a month before Lenin had issued his own appeal — Tikhon had printed up 200,000 copies of a moving appeal to Russia's Christians to “take the suffering into your arms with all haste... with hearts full of love and the desire to save your starving brothers.”
The patriarch then established his own famine relief committee, which collected 9 million rubles. On August 22, 1921, Tikhon wrote to Lenin, asking permission for the Church to be allowed to buy food supplies directly and organize relief kitchens in famine areas. Enraged by the patriarch’s impudence, Lenin ordered Tikhon’s famine relief committee dissolved, arrested its leaders, and exiled them to Russia's far north.
Tikhon, still under house arrest, continued receiving donations, but he was forced to turn these over to the government.
Lenin, who had began cutting back his work hours due to failing health, deputized Trotsky to handle accusing the church of perpetuating the famine by refusing to turn over church artifacts and gold for relief.
Trotsky created a slogan “Turn gold into bread!” and invited mobs to loot churches, to give the gold to famine relief.
In the looting, around 1,200 clergy and 20,000 parishioners were killed defending their churches. Mobs successfully looted “a quarter-ton of gold, 167 tons of silver, 12,124 diamonds” and many other things, for famine relief.
Except — documents show that none of it went to famine relief.
It had been meticulously planned out in advance the previous December at a series of closed-door sessions … culminating in a top-secret … resolution “on the liquidation of Church property” passed on January 2, 1922, which explicitly stated that valuables obtained from the Church would go not to famine victims, but to the State Treasury of Valuables … All trains on which looted Church vessels were transported would be guarded by Red Army officers …
Lenin explained this very bluntly in a memo:
“It is now and only now, when in the famine regions there is cannibalism, and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses, that we can (and therefore must) carry through the confiscation of Church valuables with the most rabid and merciless energy ... so as to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles ... no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us such a mood among the broad peasant masses such as will assure us [their] neutrality, that victory in the battle to remove the [Church] valuables will remain unconditionally and completely on our side.”
Look – I never thought Lenin was a good person.
But I did think of him as, at least, “more moderate than Stalin.” Which is still true. But, as with “more moderate than Hitler”, it’s not very informative.
Lenin is also known for bowing to reality and implementing the NEP (“New Economic Policy”) which re-allowed minimal private property to get production back online.
But this book and his “let no crisis go to waste” famine reaction make me realize that he does indeed deserve a spot in the mass murderer pantheon.
World War I was horrific — Russia suffered well over a million casualties. It led to the revolution.
And yet, it was nothing compared to the loss incurred in the revolution itself.
The book notes:
A peasant … could be forgiven for wondering what the point had been. The convulsions of the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror, the Civil War, the peasant wars, and the Volga famine had cost the lives of some 25 million people … a figure 18 times higher than Russia’s losses in the world war from 1914 to 1917.
Bolshevik Party propagandists had spent years denouncing tsarist police repression, only to erect a secret-police apparatus geometrically larger and more murderous in its place…
…one Russian autocracy had merely been substituted for another.
In case it’s not obvious, I highly recommend this book. Sean McMeekin makes a ridiculously under-studied era of history come to life. He also uses first-hand quotes frequently, so you don’t have to just take his word for things.
A big reason I love history is to learn about the world, so we can do well in the present. Here are seven lessons that I took away from this excellent book:
Lesson 1: Careful what you wish for
Both the war, and the tsar’s abdication, had been cheered by Russia’s democracy-minded liberals. But now we’ve seen how their dreams turned out.
The author points out,
“Ruling the vast multiethnic Russian Empire turned out to be far more difficult than these men expected., and the liberals certainly performed no better than the tsar or his ministers did … they did far, far worse.
Lesson 2: Chance plays a big role in history.
Far from an eschatological “class struggle” borne along irresistibly by the Marxist dialectic, the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances.
The large role that “chance” events play in history should make us a bit more humble in our predictions. It should also make well-meaning people calmer; if our favorite candidate loses in an election, for example, that could be for the best. The number of variables in play is just so vast that we need to admit that even something that looks great (“finally, democracy for Russia!”) might turn out to be anything but.
Lesson 3: Humility optimizes for the best outcome for society; but to WIN POWER, boldness and misplaced confidence can be best
This touches at a conflict point in rationalism. For example, the techniques outlined in Julia Galef’s excellent “The Scout Mindset” really are the best way to get at the truth. It’s laudable that we rationalists promote and practice those.
But we must also understand the reality that humans evolved “soldier mindset” for a reason — so that they could be like Lenin and crush any and all opposition that stands in the way.
Yes, that makes the practitioner a bad person. But we also must be aware this is power of decisiveness exists. Lenin’s ruthlessness and messianic conviction are a major reason he prevailed over the high-minded liberals and the democratic socialists who were backed by the majority of the nation.
As the author notes:
… it was Lenin’s ferocious will to power that truly set him apart from rival politicians like the nervous [liberal] Rodzianko … and the volatile [democratic socialist] Kerensky. Above all, Lenin had a clear, unambiguous political program.
Perhaps this just re-enforces the need to instill more “rationalist” values more broadly in society, and condemnation of politicians who are particularly simplistic and power-hungry.
Lesson 4: Autocrats must be careful when using conscripts, as they can turn quickly
Putin hasn’t read this book, but maybe Belarus’s Lukashenko has. His refraining from entering the war in Ukraine can very likely be explained by fear that calling up reserves of questionable loyalty could endanger his regime.
Lesson 5: The critical time to fight is when a brutal ideology is taking over by force
The Russian civil war, despite the Bolsheviks’ dramatic advantage in arms, was actually quite close, with the resistance armies failing just outside of St. Petersburg.
Most wars are really stupid to fight in — what’s the point of dying for Germany or Russia or the US in World War I? I don’t see a good one. But the people who fought with the “White Russian” resistance armies nearly saved tens of millions of lives. They failed. But it gives some sense of the kind of war in which one can make the most difference.
Basically: fighting for nationalist nations against other nationalist nations = generally pointless. But fighting against militarized bad ideologies — if you’ve got a chance, that might be the hill to die on.
Lesson 6: True information can be incredibly valuable.
This lesson was already discussed early on, but to recap: it’s striking how a little dose of true information at the right time (say, about the mindset on the streets during the revolution, or the mindset of rival politicians at the right time) would have averted millions of brutal deaths.
Lesson 7: DON’T STOP THE BUS!!
The tragedy of Russian Revolution is compounded by the fact the country was so rapidly improving before being crushed and then subjected to decades of slavery and oppression.
We may forget it, but our current world is also growing rapidly — with historically rapid technological advances all over, from medicine, to communications, to space flight, to AI.
Many of us, including myself, are sometimes tempted by injustices to “blow up the system” and set things right.
The biggest lesson of the Russian Revolution is to NOT do that.
Let’s keep moving forward, and avoid risks (world war, cough) that could blow things up.
Keep things running. Improve on the margins. Bring about progress through marginal revolution.
