had hastened to summon the Constituent Assembly and to tackle the land question, the SRs and Mensheviks might have been able to consolidate a parliamentary regime. Following the Kornilov rebellion, a majority of moderate socialists finally came round to the view that the coalition with the 'bourgeoisie' had to end, and took up demands for a speedy end to the war, the transfer of land to the land committees, and the immediate summoning of the Constituent Assembly. If these demands had been raised in the spring it might have made all the difference. But then again, there were many in the SR party whose instincts were little different from those of Keren sky and who would have insisted on continuing the war, at least pending an international peace conference (something the Allies had no intention of agreeing to). And therein lay the rub. For the fate of democracy in 1917 was ultimately sealed by the decision to continue the war. It was the war that focused the otherwise disparate grievances of the people. It was war that exacerbated the deep polarization in society to a murderous extent. In 1902 Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social Democrats, had warned:
Revolution which arises from war is a sign of the weakness of the revolutionary class, and often the cause of further weakness, because of the sacrifice it brings with it, and because of the moral and intellectual degradation to which war gives rise.
In the last analysis, it was the war that made the Bolshevik seizure of power irresistible.
Chapter 2
Civil war and the foundation
of the Bolshevik regime
The October seizure of power generated an exhilarating sense that a new world was in the offing where justice and equality would triumph over arbitrariness and exploitation, where the powerof nature would be
harnessed to ensure plenty for all. In the eyes of most workers and soldiers, as well as many peasants, a soviet government signalled land and freedom, the triumph of equality and justice, vengeance on the old privileged classes, and rule bythetoilers. The Bolsheviks deprecated the charge that they were Utopians, insisting that the seizure of power was in step with the logic of capitalist development. Yet like revolutionaries everywhere they could not have endured without an idealized vision of the future society. According to the constitution of July 1918, the aim was nothing less than the:
abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the complete elimination of the division of society into classes, the ruthless suppression of the exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society, and the victory of socialism in all countries.
Determined to project their radical difference from the temporizing Provisional Government, they issued no fewer than 116 different decrees up to 1 January 1918 - on the burning questions of peace, land, and workers' control, and on such varied matters as divorce, self-determination for the Armenians in Turkey, and reform of the alphabet.
In spite of their utopianism, the Bolsheviks were initially circumspect as
to whether socialism was immediately on the cards, since they were
well aware that none of the material preconditions for socialism existed
in this torn and backward country. They hoped that revolution would
break out in the more developed countries of Europe, by no means an
idle hope given the devastation wrought by the First World War. In the
course of 1918 the war did indeed bring about the demise of the
German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the Bolsheviks
were particularly excited by the prospect of a revolution in Germany,
since it had a large industrial base and well-organized working class.
A. A. loffe, Soviet representative in Berlin, spent over a million marks
attempting to promote a Bolshevik-style revolution that would come to
the assistance of Soviet Russia. But although the Kaiser was overthrown, -
following the armistice in November 1918, and although German*
soldiers and workers formed Soviets, most of them came to the^
conclusion that the short-term benefits of reform outweighed the costs ?.
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of revolution. Right up to 1923, however, Europe continued to be profoundly unsettled and Bolshevik hopes were regularly raised by uprisings in Germany, Italy, and the former Habsburg empire.
On 26 October 1917 the Soviet government called on the belligerent powers to begin peace negotiations on the basis of no annexations or indemnities and self-determination for national minorities. They also published the secret treaties of the Allies to expose the 'filthy machinations of imperialist diplomacy'. Not surprisingly, the Entente spurned the Peace Decree, leaving the Bolsheviks little option but to make a separate peace with Germany. The terms proposed by Germany were toughandthe majority of the Central Committee refused to accept them. On 18 February 1918 the German High Command sent 700,000 troops into Russian territory meeting virtually no resistance. On 23 February they proffered terms that were even more draconian. At the Central Committee meeting that evening, Lenin insisted that the terms be accepted, gaining seven votes; Trotsky, who favoured doing nothing, gained four votes; and the left, who favoured a revolutionary
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war against Germany, gained four votes. The peace treaty was duly signed at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. It was massively punitive, excising from the former empire the Baltic provinces and a large part of Belorussia and Ukraine, depriving Russia of access to one-third of the former empire's agricultural land and railways, virtually all its oil and cotton, and three-quarters of its coal and iron.
We must organize our lives according to new labour and socialist principles whereby exploitation by landlords and capitalists, division between masters and slaves no longer exists; whereby only labour and equality reign, whereby all rights, benefits, and wealth belong exclusively to the toilers. The strengthening of these new labour principles demands acceptance and implementation of emergency economic and other measures by the toiling people, starting with the village, then the market town, the township, county, province, region, and ending with the all-Russian centre. It demands the creation of a single toilers' government to guarantee speedily the gains of the toilers. Declaration of the Perm county soviet of peasant and worker deputies,
The other major decree issued bytheBolsheviks wasthat on land, which legitimized the spontaneous seizure of lands owned by the landed gentry, church, and crown and their transfer into peasant hands. Significantly, it did not embody the party's policy of nationalization -taking land into state ownership - but the SR policy of socialization: 'land passes into the use of the entire toiling people'. This left communes free to decide how they would apportion
