Well, think about it? If aid had been pulled for Kerensky, he would have had an even harder time than he did. Russia desparately needed the help of the allies.
Also, and perhaps this doesn’t mean anything, but Kerensky believed it was his duty to support his allies-they had given their word, and back then, often times that was a sign of honor. Of course, it seems ironic, but hey, different time.
And even though Lenin did get out of the war, to Russia, Brest-Litovsk was considered a major disgrace and a humiliation.
As far as women’s equality, I believe women had rights even before the Revolution-since the time of Catherine the Great, who made sure of that.
This thread is especially interesting to me since I am living and going to school in St. Petersburg, and deal daily with the post-communist culture and the history- I’ve touched Peter the Great’s sarcophogous. I need more time to clarify my thoughts, but here is an interesting link from the St. Petersburg Times: http://www.sptimesrussia.com/secur/381/tsar/remember.htm.
I attended several classes with Ilya Musin before he died.
JDM
BTW, go to the SPTimes main page, and check out “Global Eye” on the opinion page on Fridays- he’s sort of a liberal Rush Limbaugh…
And what help were they getting? Mostly military aid, which was pushed into fighting the Germans. Stop fighting the Germans, and you don’t need the military aid any more, and you can get people back to work to start producing the food you’re short on. Choosing to support or not support the War had equal advantages and disadvantages.
By? All of my reading seems to indicate that the majority of Russians were just damned happy to have the thing over with. Besides, most of the deals of Brest-Litovsk were overturned a few years later with Versailles.
Though the question of comparative rights in an absolutist monarchy suggests a few questions as to what rights they could have gotten even under an ‘equal’ standing.
Oi! Gde izuchaesh’?! Provel uchebnyj god v SPbGU, v 1995-om i 1996-om godax. Piter - slavnyj gorod takoi! Kak davno tam zhivesh’?
John did a fine job at answering Guinastasia’s questions but I want to take a quick stab at 'em too.
Yes, Kerensky did get aid from the Allies and it was mostly military aid. But the whole package, military and civilian, was dependent on Russia’s continued prosecution of the war. Russia, as we all agree, had been completely mangled by the war at that point and there was strong popular sentiment against it by 1917. Kerensky got put into power precisely because he promised he would pull Russia out of the war. Thus he broke one of his fundamental promises to the Russian people. Lenin did not break that promise.
Which leads us to Brest-Litovsk. Nobody in Russia wanted it, but again they were exhausted from the war effort and were looking for any way out of having to fight any further. If ceding half or more of the Ukraine to the Germans was the only way to do it, so be it. At the same time the Bolsheviks, and most of the Russian workers, were looking for a repeat in Germany of the socialist revolution which would have rendered the point moot anyway.
I would like to hear what rights Catherine the Great gave Russian women as a whole - I strongly suspect that any sort of rights given to women at that time were limited to the upper strata of society. It certainly wouldn’t make any sense to grant universal women’s rights when a majority of men were held in serfdom and poverty and had few, if any, rights to begin with.
Also, remember about Brest-Litovsk that Trotsky had been sent there with the orders “Stall as long as you can.” It wasn’t until the Germans threatened to end the cease-fire that the treaty got signed.
Here’s a copy of the treaty, btw, so that everyone knows what’s in it.
BTW, the above wasn’t meant to be nasty-I appologize if it comes out snarky. I mean, I have never heard that Kerensky advocated pulling out of the war. I’m not saying he didn’t, I’m saying I don’t recall it, that’s all.
I was mistaken on saying Kerensky himself promised to get out of the war. From a quick reading of Cliff’s biography and Trotsky’s History, I guess I was thinking more of certain groups of Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks that had started out in opposition to the war but moved rightwards during 1917 to come out in support of both the war and a coalition with the bourgeois government. Kerensky, on the other hand, was in the Provisional Government from Day One (March 3, 1917) and was in favor of continuing the war as a “defense of the revolution”.
From Trotsky’s History:
Kerensky’s attitude toward the war (which I infer was much the same, since his first position in the ProvGov was Minister of War) nevertheless was already out of sync with the army, if not the general public, from the start. At one point, roughly about the time he moved from War Minister to head of government, he took a tour of the front, meeting with the soldiers and sailors. Trotsky cites one episode aboard the battleship Republic:
Essentially, then, the war had been unpopular for a while before 1917 and efforts to continue it were met with unrelenting hostility from the rank and file of the army and of the workers in general. Kerensky was not some sort of mediator between two opposing sides of the revolution, he was unabashedly on the side of the bourgeois both at home and abroad who wanted to continue the war and who sought to prevent the revolution from going any further than it already had.
The question of supporting or being opposed to the war was something that divided the Socialists in most of the beligerent countries. When the German Social Democrats voted for war credits in 1914, that split the party, leading to the formation of the Independent Socialists (who went on to become the German Communist party).
Olentzero, I’d have to disagree with you when you said:
[q] Kerensky was not some sort of mediator between two opposing sides of the revolution, he was unabashedly on the side of the bourgeois both at home and abroad who wanted to continue the war and who sought to prevent the revolution from going any further than it already had.[/q]
because on the war issue, while it was foolish for the provisional government to continue the war, IMO, the argument Kerensky could have made (and that some Mensheviks did make) was that the war was neccesary to preserve the revolution, because a victory by reactionary Germany would doom the new socialist state. In fact, a war by a socialist state against the reactionary Germans could be a fufillment of the revolution and in accordance with the dialectic. Also, (it’s possible) the soldiers and workers of the new socialist state might fight with more enthusiasm, because, instead of fighting for their class-enemies, they’d be fighting to spread the cause of world socialism. Obivously, in the case of the Russian Revolution, objective conditions didn’t match that analysis, but theoretically, continuing the war could be defended from a revolutionary standpoint.
Captain Amazing - the argument for continuing the war was widely made - a position that came to be called ‘defensism’. I’ll hit the books later tonight and come back on public opinion on defensism and the Bolsheviks’ analysis of it, though I think it’s pretty obvious from my last post that defensism didn’t find much of a warm reception among the soliders and workers.
OK - skimmed a couple of books and can at least speak to the Bolshevik analysis.
It was pretty much agreed among both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as far as I understand it, that the February revolution was bourgeois. Most figured that the bourgeois revolution had to be completed first before the socialist revolution could occur (Trotsky being an exception), but Lenin argued as early as 1915 that the nature of the war would not change a bit if a bourgeois revolution overthrew tsarism. Therefore to promote the war as some sort of ‘defense of the revolution’ was essentially to declare an alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie against the workers of the other belligerent countries - an unacceptable stance for anyone who called themselves internationalist.
The defensist line did get a lot of play across the political board - even from right-wing Bolsheviks like Stalin, who edited Pravda in April 1917. Lenin, on the other hand, consistently argued against the defensist position and eventually won the argument - thus when the Bolsheviks won a majority in the soviets, they were able to effectively withdraw Russia from the war.
Olentzero,
Theoretically, though, isn’t it possible to argue that while the February revolution was bourgeois, the government developing in Russia by the provisional government was still more progressive than that of the Central Powers, because it was wiped clean of its feudal remnants? Remember that, although Germany, for example, was a constitutional monarchy, it still was a constitutional MONARCHY, and feudal nobility still had considerable power. Isn’t it legitimate, then, for proletariat as well as bourgeois to participate in wiping out Germany’s feudal remnants? It’s like participation in the French Revolution and the army of Napoleon. While that was clearly a bourgeois revolution, its success benefited not only the bourgeois, but even those peasants who found themselves becoming proletariat, and Napoleon made possible the dreams of '48.
Yes, it is possible, and fundamentally correct. Tbe bourgeois revolution was supported by everyone who opposed the tsar. But events on the ground had already gone further than that - the workers’ councils (soviets) were already up and functioning and taking control of the daily running of society. Essentially there were two centers of power - the political in the Provisional Government, and the socioeconomic in the soviets. It was called ‘dual power’ and by its nature is very unstable. Either the bourgeois would win, consigning the workers to wage slavery, or the proletariat would, pushing the cause of world socialism further than it had ever gone before.
Where did Guinastasia go, anyway? Haven’t seen her for a bit.
I really don’t have anything to add at this point.
Seriously, if you’re looking for someone to defend Nikolai himself, I’ll do it. If you’re looking for me to defend the Tsarist system of government, I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken.
I honestly can say that someone like Lenin or Stalin was probably inevitable. I think that Russia might have had a better chance had the monarchy changed to a constitutional monarchy, such as in England or Scandinavia. It didn’t.
I too am having difficulty listening to these vapid defenses of V.I. Lenin.
The man was a brutal monster. When the Bolsheviks took power, they issued a whole series of decrees that had a disastrous effect on the economy and caused massive starvation and economic destruction. The Bolsheviks finally had to relent and remove them, and Lenin then re-wrote history and claimed that the measures were intended to be temporary all along, calling it “War Communism”.
He also institutionalized slavery in his forced labor movement, which called up citizens like a military draft and forced them to toil on state projects. A strange practice for one who came to power purportedly to help the workers be free.
And I take it we’ve all forgotten the ‘Red Terror’, in which people were rounded up en masse and executed upon mere suspicion that they were against Lenin? Some 100,000 to 500,000 people were executed.
Then there were the new concentration camps for undesirables, started under Lenin. They housed upwards of 100,000 people, many of whom died due to the brutal conditions in the camps.
Then there was Lenin’s war on the peasantry, and his forced expropriation of all their agricultural goods which led to massive famines , carried on by Stalin’s continued collectivization of agriculture. Anyone who resisted having their food taken away by the Cheka at gunpoint were often shot, and sometimes entire families or even entire villages were murdered. In the end, 30-40 million people died due to these barbaric policies, many of them on Lenin’s watch (3-10 million deaths in 1920-1921).
Then there was Lenin’s treatment of religion. Lenin ordered the confiscation of religious relics, and when the clergy stood up to him and refused to turn them over, he had them executed - as many as 8000 of them.
I haven’t even mentioned many of the smaller uprisings and revolts that were brutally put down by Lenin.
This century has produced a number of monsters, but a handful of men racked up body counts so unbelievable and atrocious that they will be remembered as some of history’s greatest tyrants. Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Lenin lead the list.
Let me close by quoting verbatim a translated letter from Lenin (copied from the Library of Congress web site):
You’re really missing a lot of the context of the situation at the time. Blaming a set of decrees for the total ruin of Russia is absolutely foolish. The country had been devastated by the fighting of the First World War, and almost immediately thereafter by the invasion of 14 foreign armies and the White Terror.
For a short while after October, there still existed an Employers’ Federation, which by December 1917 had begun closing factories where they felt workers’ control was too strong. Basically they forced the workers into nationalizing the factories themselves; the ratio of nationalized factories on workers’ initiatives to those nationalized on state initiative was roughly 4:1 (Dobb, Soviet Development since 1917, London 1945). Nationalization of industries didn’t begin until May 1918; over the period of July-Dec 1918, 863 industries were nationalized on the initiative of the workers in them, whereas only 345 were nationalized at the initiative of the state (Kritzman, Die heroische Periode der grossen russischen Revolution, Frankfurt 1953). So much for nationalization being an enforced policy. The civil war had much to do with the accelerated pace of nationalization in the first place - greater intervention by foreign capitalists necessitated a stronger defense against the capitalists at home.
The collapse of production and the economy was a result of the war and intervention, not the Bolshevik economic policy. Whole regions that supplied the cities with raw materials for processing were cut off by occupation; the blockade by the foreign armies also wrought severe havoc. Of course, the army was taking the lion’s share of what was being produced because of the war effort, which didn’t leave a whole lot either for the workers in the city or to trade for grain with the peasants in the countryside. Unfortunately sheer physical exhaustion was one of the leading causes of the sharp drop in industrial productivity; the workers needed food badly in order to continue producing what they could. Hence the grain requisitioning. Not out of some sort of ‘class hatred’ for the peasantry but out of the necessity of ensuring the workers who had made the revolution didn’t die off.
During the time of War Communism there was some enthusiasm for it; some comrades saw it as the way communism actually should be (like Bukharin) whereas Lenin didn’t see it that way:
After War Communism ended, Lenin admitted the policy was mistaken:
Nevertheless he is quite clear that there was little choice in the matter:
Trotsky agrees:
There is a huge difference between making a virtue of necessity and admitting the mistake and pulling some sort of Big Brother revision of history to cover it up. I do not believe you can substantiate your assertion of the latter.
What sort of ‘state projects’ would be possible in a country five-sixths of which is occupied by enemy forces and in which most of the raw materials are out of your hands? Moreover, as early as July 1918 Lenin was putting out the call for the city workers to head out to the countryside to find food - there was no sense in staying at the factories and starving. Doesn’t sound like he was much on the program of forced labor to me. Stalin, on the other hand, didn’t have to worry about the threats of war and had free rein to do much as you described.
According to historians’ estimates and examination of the records, a total of 22 people were shot by the CheKa in the period of Sep 1917-June 1918. From then until Dec 1918, 6,000 more were shot. Overall in the Civil War, a total of 12,737 people were shot in the Red Terror.
The White Terror, which I presume you’ve never heard much about, shot 10,000 people in Finland in the month of April 1918 alone. It’s quite clear that the Red Terror was nowhere near as bloody as the White Terror, and given that the number of executions picked up well after April 1918, when the civil war was swinging into high gear, it indicates to me that the Red Terror was a retaliatory phenomenon rather than a political expression of Marxist theory. Though Marx did assert that revolutionary terror would be necessary; of course he drew his conclusions from the French Revolution of 1789.
The best estimates historians can come up with is far less than 100,000, and that was at the peak of the civil war. By 1922, as I mentioned earlier, the CheKa was pushing for the closure of many of the prisons and camps, arguing that only those who were clearly dangerous to the revolution (counter-revolutionaries, monarchists, generals etc., as opposed to speculators and black marketeers) should remain imprisoned.
7 million did indeed die over the course of the civil war, but again it is because of the disease and starvation wrought by all-out war and economic blockade rather than the policies of the ruling party. Much like Iraq over the past decade.
Can you get me some cites on this? The sources I have only talk about the rescinding of religious privileges and the imprisoning of openly counter-revolutionary clergy, but there’s no mention of an organized pogrom against members of the Church.
In the first half of 1918 there were some 200 kulak revolts. Considering they had the active support of the counter-revolutionary Whites, it’s hardly surprising they were put down. If you’re trying to safeguard a revolution that’s being throttled on all sides, you’re not going to give your openly declared enemies any sort of quarter.
Oh, brilliant. One short letter out of tens of thousands of pages of written material really is going to make a point. I am unable to locate the quote I found earlier in my readings, but essentially the gist was “Let the bourgeois enemy be. So long as they leave us alone, we won’t hunt them down.” I can find any number of quotes that can counterpoint any quotes you can come up with. The point is to understand the context in which they were made rather than thinking they serve to illustrate the whole picture.
Okay, under WHAT conditions do you think it would be okay to round up 100 Kulaks at random and hang them, and to ‘kill all the hostages’? Oh, and this isn’t an out-of-context quote, this is the complete contents of a letter he sent. The LOC site I got it from has a digitized picture of the original letter in Lenin’s handwriting.
And it seems that whatever ‘historians’ you are using, they are in conflict with at least some others. The numbers I gave came from the Library of Congress collection.