Russian revolution. A very short introduction

land. It was a hugely popular measure. In the central black-earth provinces three-quarters of landowners' land was confiscated between November 1917 and January 1918. How much better off peasants were as a result, is hard to say, since there was no uniformity in the amount of land peasants

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received even within a single township, not to speak of the many regions where there were no gentry estates to redistribute. Nationwide the average allotment expanded by about an acre, but this masks substantial variation. Slightly over a half of all communes received no additional land, and since two-thirds of the land confiscated was already farmed by peasants, the amount of new land that passed into the hands of the peasants only represented just over a fifth of the entire cultivated area. In addition, however, the situation of the peasants was improved by the abolition of rents and loan repayments. Overall, the principal result of the land redistribution was to reduce the extent of social differentiation among the peasantry, reducing the number of wealthy and very poor households and strengthening the ranks of the middling smallholders. Of great concern to the government was the fact that in Russia and Ukraine the most commercialized and technically sophisticated estates and farms were broken up, thereby exacerbating the already lamentable productivity of agriculture.

The widespread expectation was that the Bolshevik seizure of power would lead to the establishment of a government representing all the parties in the Soviet CEC, pending the convening of a Constituent Assembly. On 26 October 1917, however, Lenin formed a Council of People's Commissars, known as Sovnarkom, all 15 members of which were Bolsheviks. Talks to form a coalition got underway, but were scuttled by the intransigence of hard-liners on all sides. Five Bolsheviks promptly resigned from Sovnarkom on the grounds that 'we consider a purely Bolshevik government has no choice but to maintain itself by political terror.' On 10 December, however, the Left SRs, who had now finally split from the main party, agreed to accept seven posts in the government on condition that Sovnarkom became accountable to the CEC. It was they who helped craft the law on land redistribution and engineered the fusion of the All-Russian Soviet of Peasant Deputies, whose SR-dominated executive had backed military resistance to the Bolsheviks, with the CEC.

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Prior to October the Bolsheviks had made much political capital out of the decision by the Provisional Government to postpone elections to the Constituent Assembly from September to November, since the Constituent Assembly symbolized the people's power at the heart of the revolution. Having seized power, however, it was by no means clear that the Bolsheviks would get a majority in the Assembly. Lenin believed that soviet power, being based on direct election by the toilers, was superior to parliamentary democracy, since parliaments merely served to camouflage control of the state machine by the capitalist class. The Bolsheviks nevertheless decided that the elections should go ahead. According to the latest research, 4S.4 million valid votes were cast, of which the SRs gained 19.1 million, the Bolsheviks 10.9 million, the Kadets 2.2 million, and the Mensheviks 1.5 million. The non- Russian socialist parties - mostly sympathetic to the SRs - received over 7 million, including two-thirds of votes in Ukraine. The SRs were thus the clear ? winners, their vote concentrated in the countryside. The Bolsheviks g received the majority of worker votes, together with 42% of the e 5.5 million soldiers' votes, but it was clear that they could not hope to jg have a majority in the Assembly. This vote, incidentally, represented the 1 peak of popular support for the party. Hereafter they lost support as soldiers returned to their villages and as worker disaffection grew.

The Constituent Assembly opened in dispiriting circumstances on 5 January, shortly after pro-assembly demonstrators had been gunned down by Red Guards. The Bolsheviks insisted that the delegates accept soviet power as a fait accompli, but the delegates chose to discuss the agenda proposed by the SRs, making Chernov the chair of the Assembly. After a single session, Bolshevik soldiers shut the Assembly down. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that a deal could have been struck. Some 85% of the delegates were socialists - the 200 SR delegates had spent a total of 1,000 years in prison and hard labour -and on the crucial issues of peace and land, the SRs had shifted closer to the Bolshevik position. But the delegates were not prepared to give way on what was for the Bolsheviks the crucial issue: the abandonment of

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parliamentary democracy in favour of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', based on the Soviets. By closing the Constituent Assembly the Bolsheviks signalled that they were ready to wage war in defence of their regime not only against the exploiting classes, but against the socialist camp. The dissolution doomed the chances of democracy in Russia for 70 years; for that the Bolsheviks bear the largest share of the blame. Yet the prospects for a democratic socialist regime had by this stage become extremely slender. It is true that some 70% of the peasants voted in the Assembly elections-including more women than men - but they did so less out of enthusiasm for democratic politics than out of a desire to seethe Assembly legalize their title to the land. Once it became clear that they had no reason to fear on that score, they acquiesced in the Assembly's dissolution, testifying to the thinness of a culture of democracy and law.

i

Soviet power was established with surprising ease - a reflection of the ?.

с

popularity of the idea of devolving power to the toilers. Bolshevikg.

support was strongest in towns and regions with a relatively|'

homogeneous working class, such as in the Central Industrial Region or^

the mining settlements of the Urals. In less industrial cities, such as?>

Moscow and those along the Volga, the Bolsheviks often relied on theg-

local garrison to declare soviet power; and in the capitals of the^

ID

predominantly agrarian provinces and in smaller towns the Bolsheviks |-

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had difficulty ousting the SRs and Mensheviks from positions of control in the Soviets. In Siberia the revolution was carried along the Trans-Siberian railway and soviet power was declared everywhere by the beginning of 1918: support for the Bolsheviks was strong, in spite of the fact that workers and poor peasants, normally their strongest supporters, were few. In the countryside, peasant reactions were initially mixed. In the middle-Volga province of Saratov in November, 19 townships were favourable to soviet power, two were wavering, eight were unfriendly, and eight downright hostile. By February, however, 86% of townships had created Soviets as an alternative to the zemstvos that were generally under SR control. In the central black-earth belt,

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progress was somewhat slower, with 83% of townships creating Soviets between January and March. These local Soviets believed they had complete control of their localities and ignored decrees of the centre with impunity. С I. Petrovsky, Commissar of Internal Affairs, complained: They prefer their local interests to state interests, continuing to confiscate fuel, timber, designated for railways and factories.'

As early as spring 1918 there was a backlash against the Bolsheviks in many Soviets in provincial towns. This was sometimes due, as in Kaluga or Briansk, to the demobilization of the local garrison and sometimes, as in Tver' or laroslavl', to the rapid growth of unemployment and the deterioration of the food supply. The arbitrary way in