A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

them the favoured channel of Bolshevik activity in 1917.²⁴

No organization better reflected the growing self-assertiveness of the

working class than the Red Guards. Like the factory committees, they were an innovation of 1917, and the initiative for their establishment came essentially from below. During the February Revolution a wide range of workers' armed brigades had sprung up to defend the factories. They refused to disarm when the government set up its own militias in the cities. So there was a dual system of police — with the city militias in the middle-class districts and the workers' brigades in the industrial suburbs — which mirrored the dual power structure in Petrograd. Gradually the workers' brigades were, albeit loosely, unified under the direction of the district Soviets. But from the start it was the Bolsheviks who had the dominant influence on them; and it was a Bolshevik, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who first used the term 'Red Guard'. Whereas the Soviet leadership looked upon the Red Guards as a dangerous precedent which threatened to subvert the government, the Bolsheviks, once Lenin had returned, became keen supporters of the arming of the workers and helped to shape the Red Guards' self-image as a workers' army, permanently on alert, to defend 'the revolution' against any threat. The arming of the workers — and by July there were about 20,000 workers in the Red Guards of Petrograd alone — was a vital aspect of their psychology. These were the workers whom Lenin had in mind when he said that the workers were 'to the left' of the Bolsheviks. They were young (over half the Red Guards were under twenty-five), single, highly literate and skilled workers, most of whom had joined the industrial war during the militant strikes of 1912—14, when the Bolsheviks had first gained a hold on the working class of Petrograd and Moscow. Most of them belonged to or at least were sympathetic to one of the maximalist parties — usually the Bolsheviks or the Anarchists — and had an image of themselves as a 'vanguard of the proletariat'.²⁵

The Provisional Government was quite unable to contain this rise of labour militancy. It was misguided by the liberal industrial ethic of the War Industries Committees, of which its Minister of Trade and Industry, Konovalov, as well as its Minister of Finance, Tereshchenko, had been leading members. Central to this ethic was the (frankly rather bogus) notion of the government as the guardian of a 'neutral state', above party or class interests, whose role in industry was to mediate and conciliate between labour and capital. The important thing was to keep production going in the interests of the military campaign. The class war was to be stopped to win the war against Germany.

During the first weeks of Konovalov's rule there were some signs of this new spirit of industrial partnership. As part of the agreement on the eight-hour day brokered by Konovalov on 10 March, conciliation boards, composed equally of managers and workers, were established in many factories to resolve disputes without costly strikes. The administration of the railways was handed over to local railway committees in which the workers participated alongside the

technicians and officials. Konovalov himself arbitrated many industrial disputes and leant on the employers to make concessions — often compensating them in other ways — in the interests of the war economy. V G. Groman, the Menshevik economist, even began to draw up the outlines for a 'planned economy' in which the workers, technicians and employers would come together to regulate the economy under the tutelage of the Soviet and the state.²⁶

Yet this armistice in the class war did not and could not last for very long. The government's would-be 'neutral' stance was itself a major reason for the resumption of hostilities. For each side suspected it of favouring the other. On the one hand, the workers were encouraged by their early gains — there were reports of some workers receiving a five-fold or six-fold pay increase — and this engendered unrealistic hopes of what it was possible to achieve by industrial action. Their expectations were further increased by the Mensheviks' entry into the government on 5 May (with Skobelev, a Menshevik, the Minister of Labour). It appeared to give them a green light for more strikes and an assurance that they had supporters in the government. Workers came out with new and often excessive strike demands, became disappointed when they lost, and accused the government of backing their employers. It was a disaster for the Mensheviks.

The employers, on the other hand, were becoming increasingly impatient with the workers' claims, and with the government's failure to contain them. They blamed the industrial crisis on the workers' inflationary pay rises, on the reduced length of the working day, and on the constant disruptions to production caused by strikes and factory meetings. They were alarmed by the Menshevik entry into the government: it seemed to signal more regulation and a swing towards the workers' point of view. From the start of May, they began to move away from Konovalov's path of industrial compromise. They closed ranks and began to resist the workers' strike demands, even at the cost of a lock-out and the closure of the factory. Whereas before strikes had been averted by negotiation, now both sides were more ready for a fight, and the resulting strikes were violent and protracted, since neither side could be leant on to back down. The bitter strike at the huge Sormovo plant in Nizhnyi Novgorod, which brought chaos to the country's biggest defence producer throughout preparations for the offensive in June, was the first real sign of this new climate.²⁷ It put an end to the liberal hopes of spring, and beckoned in a summer of industrial war.

* * * As the self-proclaimed guardians of the Russian state, the leaders of the Provisional Government were united on one thing: the need, for the time being, to preserve its imperial boundaries intact. It was, as they saw it, their primary duty to preserve the 'unity of the Russian state' until the conclusion of the war and the resolution of the Empire question by the Constituent Assembly. This did

not rule out the possibility of conceding, as an interim measure, rights of local self-rule or cultural freedoms to the non-Russian territories. Indeed the liberals thought this was essential. They assumed that the grievances of the non-Russian peoples were essentially the result of tsarist discrimination and oppression, and that they could thus be satisfied with civil and religious equality. They collapsed the question of national rights into the question of individual rights; and believed that on this basis the Russian Empire could be kept together. But defending the 'unity of the Russian state' did rule out, as the Kadets put it, giving in to nationalist pressures that would lead to 'the division of the country into sovereign, independent units'. Even the SR and Menshevik Defensists, who as revolutionaries had declared their support for the principle of national self-determination, lined up behind the Kadet position once they joined them in the government during 1917. As socialists, they still supported federalism; but as patriots, they were reluctant to preside over the break-up of the state in the middle of a war. The SR leader, Mark Vishniak, speaking at the Third SR Congress in May, compared Russia to a huge Switzerland: a decentralized federation, in which the cantons, or republics, would have the maximum national rights (including the right to their own currencies), but with a single unified state.²⁸

This position, like that of Gorbachev during pemtroika, was quite inadequate as a response to the growing pressures of nationalism after February 1917. True, not everywhere were the non-Russians bursting to break out of the Empire. Some of the more peasant-dominated peoples were barely aware of themselves as a 'nation' as opposed to an ethnic group (e.g. the Belorussians, the Lithuanians, the Azeris, and some might argue the Ukrainians). Others were by and large satisfied with civil and religious rights (e.g. the Jews). Others still combined their ethnic and social grievances in a single national-socialist revolution which looked towards Russia for the lead (e.g. Latvians and Georgians). Armenia, for purely nationalist considerations, looked to Russia for-protection against the Turks. Yet elsewhere — and in certain classes of these peoples — the collapse of the tsarist system did result in the rise of mass-based nationalist movements which first demanded autonomy from Russia and then, when this was not granted, went on to call for independence.

The emergence of independence movements was partly the result of opportunity. The coercive power of the old state had collapsed; the persuasive power of the Provisional Government was, to say the least, extremely limited; while the Germans and the Austrians, whose armies occupied the western borderlands, were only too ready to help the nationalists set up mini-states they could control and use against Russia. Yet the nationalists were more than 'German agents', even in those countries (e.g. the Ukraine and Lithuania) where independence was achieved with a separate peace and at the price of a German puppet-state. Many of the nationalist parties achieved mass electoral support. In

the Ukraine, for example, 71 per cent of the rural vote went to the Ukrainian