In my last article in this history series, I attempted to shed some light on President Putin’s reasons for claiming the Bolshevik Revolution did significantly more harm than good to humanity over a century ago.

My primary intention in that location was to demonstrate that revolutionary the events of 1905 and again in 1917 had many characteristics of a foreign-directed regime change which disrupted a true revolutionary process then coming into being.

In this sequel I would like to delve more deeply into the 1867-1905 period of vast revolutionary potential that swept across the globe which the counter-revolution of 1905 and 1917 de-railed.

A Revolutionary Process Blossoms

The late 19th century was shaped, in large measure, by the growing U.S.-Russian alliance which saved the USA from dissolution during its Civil War. Masterful diplomacy at the time resulted in Czar Alexander II deploying the Russian navy to assist Lincoln in his efforts to preserve the Union with a direct message to both England and France that any direct effort to join the confederacy in war against Lincoln would be seen as casus belli by the Russians. This U.S.-Russian alliance again amplified its force in 1867 when Russian statesmen arranged the sale of Alaska to the republic with the aim of extending telegraph lines and rail through the Americas and across the Bering Strait by the end of that century. By 1890, pro-American networks in Russia had finally launched the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway which was to soon carry Baldwin locomotives produced in Philadelphia across a 9289 km expansive rugged terrain.

But despite the setback of murdered leaders Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and Czar Alexander II, the momentum behind the growth of a multipolar international alliance of nations continued to grow. In 1890, Colorado Gov. William Gilpin’s designs for a cosmopolitan railway stretching across all nations of earth presented a beautiful vision of the world then coming into being.

In Russia, Finance Minister Sergei Witte led a network of nation builders who worked closely with like-minded collaborators in France, Germany, China and the USA (1).

The common denominators among these nationalist movements were: 1) the application of protectionism to develop native manufacturing sectors, 2) the use of national banking/productive credit, 3) large scale infrastructure projects, 4) an emphasis on education/science and 5) railroad construction to accelerate interconnectivity within and between cooperating nations.

In all cases, British Free Trade, speculation and usury were completely rejected in favor of this superior system of political economy.

As historian William Jones has outlined in his voluminous writings on the subject and showcased in this seminal 1995 lecture, It was Witte, who as Finance Minister from 1891-1903, overhauled the Russian economy, banned free trade in favor of Protectionism (2), brought stability to the ruble by ending speculation by pegging the ruble to gold, and lowered interest rates to favor internal development. He additionally imposed strict controls on foreign direct investments ensuring that his ministry (and not ill willed London-based money lenders) stayed in control of Russia’s economic policies.

With a stabilized currency that won the confidence of international investors, Witte also created a new system of national banking with each new rail station along the Trans Siberian line authorized to institute a bank branch in order to facilitate lending to citizens and industry. The great underdeveloped Siberia and Arctic awoke a form of Russian ‘Manifest Destiny’ and Witte aimed to develop its full potential guided by a similar spirit that guided the best of American System patriots in the 19th century and even the Chinese ambitions to “go west” today.

This positive conception of manifest destiny is not at all tied to the exploitation, and imperialism as is commonly taught, but rather the creative overcoming of limits to growth by a spiritual-intellectual and economic extension of the best of civilization driven by a love for scientific and technological progress.

Dimitry Mendeleyev: Scientist and Nation Builder

Witte set up over 100 new commercial and technical schools across Russia with the help of his close collaborator Dimitry Mendeleyev who not only discovered the table of elements that bears his name but also headed the Committee on the Protective Tariff. Throughout his writings and speeches stretching across 40 years of public service, Mendeleyev promoted a new renaissance culture of citizen scientists. He also polemicized against Adam Smith’s free trade which he likened to the absurd belief in a mysterious substance called “phlogiston” which scientists once believed to be the cause of rust.

Attacking the religious devotion to British Free trade permeating the Russian elite, Mendeleyev wrote in his 1891 Tariff Report:

“I consider it my duty, partly in defense of truly contemporary, progressing science, to say openly and loudly that I stand for rational protectionism. Free tradism as a doctrine is very shaky; the free trade form of activity suits only countries that have already consolidated their manufacturing industry; protectionism as an absolute doctrine is the same sort of nonsense as free trade absolutism; and the protectionist mode of activity is perfectly appropriate now for Russia, as it was for England in its time.” (3)

Mendeleyev was part of the Russian delegation that visited the USA during the 1876 Centennial Exposition organized by Lincoln’s economic advisor Henry C. Carey and which showcased the scientific and industrial accomplishments made possible by the young republic in its first 100 years.

Upon his return to Russia, Mendeleyev championed this system serving as executive director of the Southwestern Railway Company and head of the rail department in the Finance Ministry working closely with Finance Minister Ivan A. Vyshnegradsky. He was simultaneously appointed the scientist to head the Bureau of Weights and Standards where he brought in the metric system to Russia and also led the assessment of mineral potential of Russia’s far east which played a vital role in Russia’s development over the coming century.

Mendeleyev attacked those who asserted that humanity could only adapt to the limits that nature put upon us writing: “The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rouseau… for a ‘back to nature’ existence, is semi childish. Because in a patriarchical society, as well as among higher animals there is a definite limit to growth, but human beings taken as a whole, recognize no such limit”.

Mendeleyev understood that the only way to avoid the destructive effects of Marxist revolutionary chaos was through the uplifting of all citizens through physical, intellectual and spiritual progress. Writing in his Principles of Chemistry, Mendeleyev said: “Chemistry is closely connected with the work of the manufacturer and the artisan. It is a useful part and is a means of promoting the general welfare. In that pure enjoyment experienced on approaching to the ideal, in eagerness to draw aside the veil from the hidden truth and even in that discord which exists between the various workers, we ought to see the surest pledges for further scientific progress.”

Peace Abroad and Progress at Home

The work of Witte and Mendeleyev paid off and by 1900, the Russian rail industry employed 400,000 people directly with millions in secondary and tertiary sectors which went far to pull Russian society out of destitution (7/8th of the population lived on subsistence levels in 1890). Between 1892-1903, Coal production in the Donets Basin tripled, pig iron production tripled and oil, chemical and metallurgical industries blossomed.

Between 1892-1901, 14,814 miles of rail were built (compared to 5466 miles between 1879-1892). Grain imports from Siberia grew from 10,000 tons to 70,000 tons in the same time frame.

Witte worked arduously to ensure treaties of win-win cooperation to break free of British intrigue exemplified by the 1895 Russo-Chinese Bank and Chinese Eastern Railroad both of which involved strong cooperation with Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux’s France. Witte, Hanotaux and their German collaborators loyal to Bismarck’s strategic outlook always focused their efforts on a cooperative entente needed to avoid falling into British traps that could trigger a bloodbath.

Witte had indicated his deep insight into the nature of the Great Game in a 1897 letter to Kaiser Wilhelm- extolling the leader to sign a peace treaty with Russia which would have created a Russian-German-French continental alliance for progress in order to avert a coming storm. In his letter, Witte wrote:

“Imagine, your majesty, the European countries united in one entity, one that does not waste vast sums of money, resources, blood and labor on rivalry among themselves, no longer compelled to maintain armies for war among themselves, no longer forming an armed camp, as is the case now, with each fearing his neighbor. If that were done, Europe would be much richer, much stronger, more civilized, not going downhill under the weight of mutual hatred, rivalry and war… BUT if European countries continue on their present course, they will risk great misfortune.”

Friedrich List’s American System in Russia

This system was directly informed by the works of nationalist economist Friedrich List whose incredibly popular writings guided Russia’s strategic thinking to a much higher degree than anything found in either extremes of Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Witte himself oversaw the translation of List’s ‘National System of Political Economy’ in 1891 whereby he ensured that List became a guiding light for all economists and administrators under his watch.

Having coined the term “American System of Political Economy” after his five-year tour of the USA from 1825-1830, Friedrich List became a global champion of progress spearheading the creation of the German Zollverein (aka: ‘Customs’ Union) and polemicizing relentlessly against British Free Trade. List’s understanding of economics was exemplified in this quote often cited by Witte:

“The more rapidly the genius of discovery and industrial improvement as well as of social and political progress advances, the more rapidly is the distance between stationary nations and those which are progressively increased, and the greater is the peril of remaining behind.”

These nation-building statesmen knew there were two opposing approaches to resolving the mechanism of “class struggle”: 1) violent revolution of the proletariat or 2) the fostering of scientific and technological progress guided by win-win cooperation and a human centered development around a harmony of interests.

The philosophy animating this outlook was summed up Witte’s statement “with the investment in industry, the powerful stimulus of personal interest calls forth such curiosity and love of learning as to make an illiterate peasant into a railway builder, a bold and progressive organizer of industry and a versatile financier.”

Looking at rail construction as far more than merely “infrastructure”, Witte saw it as a civilizing force saying in 1890: “The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

When asked what ideological box he fit into, Witte wrote: “I am neither a liberal nor conservative; I am simply a civilized man. I cannot send someone to Siberia simply because he doesn’t think as I do and I cannot take away his civil rights simply because he does not worship God in the same Church as I.”

Years later, Witte described how he overcame insurmountable odds in the early years of his administration saying: “Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.”

The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.

The British System Strikes

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe as a hegemon for over two centuries.

Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states. This financial warfare took many forms ranging from speculative attacks, usurious money lending, the dumping of cheap goods in order to crush local manufacturing, cash cropping and even drug running.

Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were dominating their economies.

Despite the fact that the Trans-Siberian railway was completed in 1905, a British-manipulated Japanese-Russian War (from 1904-05) devastated the economy as nearly the entire Russian navy.

Not only did $200 million in loans by financier Jacob Schiff grease the wheels of war, but the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 guaranteed that the militarily advanced Japanese would find an easy victory over Russia as the treaty guaranteed British military support for Japan if any second party joined to assist Russia. On May 28, 1905, two thirds of the Russian fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima Strait and all hopes for Siberian-Pacific trade routes came undone.

With this defeat, the planned trajectory for Witte’s hopes for industrialization quickly came undone and the world began its slide into the first of a series of wars and color revolutions that would litter the 20th century.

Witte Returns

Amidst the devastation of the war, a short-lived effort was made by saner advisors of Czar Nicholas II including Grand Duke Nikolai Romanov and the Czar’s mother, to bring Witte back into a position of authority after having been foolishly fired in 1903 (4). These figures understood that Witte was the statesman most qualified to get Russia out of its race into chaos which she found herself locked into.

Witte’s first task as Prime Minister was to solidify a peace treaty with Japan with as few concessions as possible to the defeated Russia. His second major task was to carry out sweeping constitutional reforms needed to avert the emerging revolutionary fervor of millions of Russians then being organized by the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, Parvus and a vast array of London-directed revolutionaries. (5)

Witte commented on his new assignment saying: “when a sewer has to be cleaned, they send Witte. But as soon as work of a cleaner and nicer kind appears, plenty of other candidates spring up”.

Witte accomplished the first task returning to Russia from months of negotiations in the USA as a hero. Upon his return he lost no time authoring the October Manifesto of 1905 which called for sweeping changes of every aspect of Russian governance. Pushing back against those who wished to violently suppress all protest movements, Witte insightfully said:

“The present movement for freedom is not of new birth. Its roots are imbedded in centuries of Russian history. Freedom must become the slogan of the government. No other possibility for the salvation of the state exists. The march of historical progress cannot be halted. The idea of civil liberty will triumph if not through reform then by the path of revolution. The government must be ready to proceed along constitutional lines. The government must sincerely and openly strive for the well-being of the state and not endeavour to protect this or that type of government. There is no alternative. The government must either place itself at the head of the movement which has gripped the country or it must relinquish it to the elementary forces to tear it to pieces.”

This manifesto of October 30, 1905 professed to transform Russia into a constitutional monarchy, expanded civil rights for all citizens, guaranteeing freedom of the press, freedom of association, the right to vote, the right to form trade unions and the creation of the first Duma. Witte also pushed for vast land reform to give peasants the power to own and operate their own land.

However, all of these reforms were rejected by the growing revolutionary organizations which chose to push for regime change.

Witte’s enemies in the court used this instability to arrange his firing in April 1906 and soon an iron fist came cracking down upon the rebellious population (anarchist provocateurs and innocents alike) giving rise to new revengiste grievances that would escalate to a boiling point within the coming decade. To get a sense of the tension of the times, between 1905-1916, hundreds of assassinations and terrorist attacks launched by the terrorist cells like “The Black Hundreds” resulted in tens of thousands of dead, including hundreds of Russian politicians. Witte and his heavy-handed successor Peter Stolypin narrowly surviving several attempts which took place in 1906 (6) (Stolypin eventually being killed in 1911).

The Tragic Fall and Hopeful Renewal of Creativity in Statecraft

Sadly, the flowering of the new system of cooperating nation states under a community of progress and common interest was annihilated by a dense array of assassinations, color revolutions and endless wars.

The Witte-Mendeleyev aborted system was fundamentally anti-Malthusian/anti-closed system and tied to the constant self-improvement of the nation and its people. It was never “left” nor “right” according to any conventional definitions given to us following the Marxist/Communist vs Liberal/Capitalist dichotomy.

This system did not then, nor does it now dichotomize the freedom of the individual citizen from the wellbeing of the whole society. It was and is fundamentally driven by a concept of humanity as a species made in the image of a living Creator capable of conceptualizing and then transcending the relative limits to growth which press upon our potential at all stages of society. This system recognizes that these limits are only caused by limits of knowledge and morality. The tension between these two systems: open vs closed/ multipolar vs unipolar has been at the heart of history including the causes of the Bolshevik color revolution.

While representatives of this better tradition have sadly fallen from sight among nations of the Trans Atlantic rules-based liberal order, a re-appearance of this quality of statecraft has begun to be revived among Eurasian leaders.

One prominent leading figure among this renewal is made evident in the recent remarks by renowned Russian economist and EEC leader, Sergey Glazyev who said in an interview titled  “Ideas Rule the World”:

“For many centuries Russia, fighting for a place under the sun in this world, showed miracles of self-sacrifice, miracles of building new meanings. And when these new meanings penetrate people’s souls, a boom arises in society, an opportunity arises to create new things and be “ahead of the rest of the planet.” This remarkable ability or ability to overcome difficulties is, in my opinion, the first component of that deep ideology that is inherent in the entire Russian people. They are not afraid of difficulties and sometimes even “create difficulties and then heroically overcome them.” But, regardless of whether we ourselves create these difficulties by ourselves or our “partners” help us in this, we must understand that the difficulties have been, are and always will be. The theory of long-term economic development, which I am currently pursuing, shows that as human society develops, limits to growth appear, periods of stagnation and threats to the development of humanity’s very existence appear, which must be overcome. The principle of overcoming these limits, difficulties, threats, fighting for something new, positive, creating new opportunities for the development not only of Russia, but of all humanity : this, I believe, is the key principle of ideology that lies in the depths of the Russian character.”

Glazyev was here making the important point that the specific set of ideas which must govern Russia going into the future storm must have certain universal characteristics.

These characteristics are not limited to Russian experience, but are applicable to all societies and are driven, as Glazyev noted, by the mandate to constantly overcome our limits to growth. This is done specifically by increasing the rates of creative leaps, guided by reason and conscience into ever richer forms of discoveries of those invisible causal laws that organize the universe. As discoveries are made through the fostering of scientific progress, new opportunities to translate those ideas into technological progress must be advanced without any assumed end point in this process.

Just as Lincoln, Witte, Mendeleyev and countless great statesmen of the past understood, it is this principled element of the human condition that sets our species apart from and above all other species in the biosphere. The biosphere’s limits only dominate humanity’s destiny when we permit the law of the jungle, rather than the law of civilization, to shape our world… as all empires demand be so.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) Leaders of this process in France included President Carnot and Foreign Minister Hanotaux, in Germany, it was led by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and industrialist Emil Rathenau, while President William McKinley and Secretary of State James Blaine championed Lincoln’s system in the USA against the growing rot of an anglophile deep state
(2) With a protective tariff favoring rail development in 1889 followed by a broader protective tariff in 1891
(3) Mendeleyev’s 1891 Tariff Report citation is taken from SCIENTIST-STATESMAN FOUGHT BRITISH “FREE TRADE” IN RUSSIA by Barbara Frazier, EIR, January 1992
(4) The effect of slanders and court gossip that Witte was “a Rothschild shill” led to the Czar’s hasty decision to fire him. This gossip spread through the courts by Sergei Nilus (confessor of the Czar), Interior Minister Cyacheslav Plehve and even Czarina Hesse-Darmstadt herself fueled this hysteria. The material used to drive the slander was fueled by the work of International Okhrana chief Peter Ivanovich Rachkovsky, Russian Okhrana-chief Sergey Zubatov, and Protocols of Zion author Matvei Golovinsky (who worked for Rachkovsky and later became a leading figure of the Bolshevik revolution). This forgery fueled the fires of anti-Jewish paranoia across the minds of the European elite during these dark days. Proof of the Protocols hoax is told in Eric Bronner’s The Tale of a Forgery: Inventing the Protocols: Conspiracy, Anti-Semitism, and the Protocols of Zion, 2019
(5) Many of these forces, who would increasingly rely on terrorist tactics, often found a strange source of support among controllers of the Russian Secret Police known as the Okhrana who tended to work on behalf of the confused and frightened czar as the Jesuit order worked with the often bewildered papacy.
(6) The Black Hundreds was a paramilitary operation interfacing closely with the Okhrana which was find to be tied to two assassination attempts made on Witte in 1906. After a bomb killed 27 people including two of his children, Stolypin stated: “They will kill me, and those will be members of the Okhranka [secret political police]”

A scandal arose this week as President Putin took some time to denounce the Bolshevik Revolution at the Valdai Discussion Club saying:

“Just over a century ago, Russia objectively faced serious problems… Russia could have dealt with its problems gradually and in a civilised manner. But revolutionary shocks led to the collapse and disintegration of a great power… These examples from our history allow us to say that revolutions are not a way to settle a crisis but a way to aggravate it. No revolution was worth the damage it did to the human potential.”

How could a statesman so critical of the abuses of capitalism, and so masterful in combatting structures of modern imperialism, bemoan the Bolshevik revolution which gave rise to Soviet Russia? Doesn’t Putin respect Soviet Russian accomplishments including the sacrifices made to put down Hitler? How could Putin be a true anti-imperialist if he is an anti-revolutionary?

To do my part in resolving this paradox, let me begin by saying: it isn’t a paradox.

The fact is that Vladimir Putin is both an anti-imperialist, and also a revolutionary, just not in the way you might imagine. To understand what I mean, a certain lesson into recent history is in order.

Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation

The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.

Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner- head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.

These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.

One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:

“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”

Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:

“It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives- the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens- can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this.” [p.35]

The American System Goes Global

Gilpin was not alone in this vision.

In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury and corruption which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.

In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.

As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.

The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialisation and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the west (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’- the emission of productive credit from state banks.

It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.

The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.

The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.

The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud

In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the in the Meiji Palace in 1907.

After crippling the Russian state and military (it’s navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”

American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in the New York Times celebrating the revolution read:

“Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.

The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…

‘The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.’ “

Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:

“May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!”

Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:

“Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.”

Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch who experienced the events of 1917 firsthand wrote:

“In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.” (1)

According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines (2).

Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery

Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.

As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work (3).

For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.

Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish saying: “he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”

Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.

Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.

Parvus and the Pan-European Union

Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.

Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history (4).

Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg, Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.

In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying: “This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.”

This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.

It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to ‘united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.

Located in an 800 year old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. (5)

Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons

I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.

This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller.

I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.

As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured (6).

The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?

It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman Of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:

“The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.”

Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.

In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.

The Frankfurt School Global Revolution

That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?

When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.

Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.

Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.

This group and their role in steering mass education, and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.

Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin

In the midst of Putin’s Valdai Club speech, the Russian leader (who is a revolutionary although he is certainly no Marxist-Leninist) called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”

In the next article, we will explore the fight of Sergei Witte, Dimitry Mendeleyev and compare their vision for a world of win-win cooperation against the perversion of science and culture envisioned by Trotsky and his international imperial co-thinkers.

The author recently delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

Notes

(1) Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)
(2) Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277
(3) One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
(4) Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
(5) This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
(6) In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

The International Anarchist Congress of London, from July 14 to July 20, 1881 was highly unusual in many ways, though it has almost totally been forgotten by history,  save as a curiosity.

It was the last such gathering to be held for more than a quarter of a century until the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam in August 1907. During that time, there were four other unsuccessful attempts to call international congresses, in Geneva in 1882, in Paris in 1889, in Chicago in 1890 and once again in Paris in 1900.

Those interested in the procedural minutiae of the congress can easily enough find obscure academic articles discussing theoretical intellectual positions held and debated at the Congress.

But as far as I have been able to find, no historians have given any serious study to the possibility that the Congress may have been used to coordinate or plan any program of “Propaganda of the Deed” – the assassination of important political leaders across Europe and the Americas, which was central to the achievement of the anarcho-syndicalist movement’s goals.

Nor is there any discussion anywhere – save in terms of abstruse and apparently harmless political theory – of the role that former Prince Peter Kropotkin, the most consistently high-profile and charismatic leader of the anarchist movement played in the convention.

Most striking of all, there appears never to have been any serious investigation conducted as to why the British government permitted its capital London, to be the host of the conference that on the surface stood for the destruction of everything that the British Empire, its traditions and institutions held dear.

The decision to permit the 1881 congress to gather in London was particularly striking – and from the Russian government’s point of view outrageous – because it opened only four months almost to the day after Tsar Alexander II, the Great Liberator who freed 24 million serfs from slavery and supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union through the U.S. Civil War, was assassinated by a specially designed shrapnel grenade thrown by Ignacy Hryniewiecki on Sunday, March 13, 1881.

That hideous crime was planned and committed by the Narodnaya Volya, “The People’s Will” itself a strange, tiny, conspiratorial group shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions to this day.

The name of the group suggests – as it was meant to – a mass popular movement, But the Narodnaya Volya was no such thing. The best estimates of Russian and Western historians alike put it at no more than 200 members. Almost none of these were from peasant backgrounds. They were almost all from favored, prosperous, professional middle class families and in some cases even from aristocratic backgrounds.

Interestingly, the followers of the late Osama Bin Laden in the first generation of al-Qaeda that carried out the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001 exhibit an almost identical set of profiles, as former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Feisal bin Abdelaziz ibn Saud has pointed out.

The Narodnaya Volya was only founded in 1879. But it was totally crushed by 1884. Yet in the first two years of its existence, it operated with apparent impunity carrying out no less than eight attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander. No other tsar in Russian history including Alexander’s son and grandson after him was ever hunted so mercilessly and relentlessly by assassins.

The Narodnaya Volya never lacked for any of the financing it needed for its murderous schemes. The Russian internal security services, who proved extremely efficient and energetic in smashing the group after it carried out its bloody deed, seemed utterly helpless and inept against it until that point. This may in large part have been because the group was so tiny and so novel in its operational techniques.

Who led the Narodnaya Volya? Its documented leaders were Andrey Zhelyabov and Sofya  Perovskaya. Perovskaya came from an aristocratic background but showed little capability beyond her own murderously intense fanaticism and strange obsession with murdering the tsar. Other members of the group when arrested openly commented on her merciless hatred for the ruler who had liberated the serfs.

But Perovskaya from 1872 was personally very closely associated with the then handsome, dashing and charismatic anarchist leader Prince Peter Kropotkin. It is likely they were lovers.

The carefully (British) constructed image of Kropotkin that endures to this day is a tubby, kindly, smiling old, bearded Father Christmas. In his youth, however, he was darkly satanically handsome and was obsessed with Goethe’s devil figure Mephistopheles in  “Faust.”

For Perovskaya, Kropotkin would have been the dashing, aristocratic brilliant love of her life. For Kropotkin, the rather plain Perovskaya would have been a means to an end: The hunting and murder of the tsar.

Kropotkin came from one of the most aristocratic eminent families in Russia. He claimed descent from the House of Rurik, the original ruling family of Russia. He had actually been a personal page of Tsar Alexander II in his early years in power. He had been brutally bullied (or so he later claimed) when entering the Imperial corps of pages. For ever after, he maintained an intense personal hatred of the tsar, intensified by the years he spent as a prisoner for his subversive activities in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg starting in 1872. His escape was engineered by friends in 1876.

Kropotkin’s relationship with Perovskaya starting in 1872 in the Tchaikovsky (not the great musical composer) Circle is the key documented fact that links Kropotkin directly to the murder of the great tsar he so intensely personally hated. The group’s leader Nikolai Tchaikovsky, like Kropotkin found protection in Britain for most of his later life.

Kropotkin was a noted scientist in his day who contested Darwin and argued a version of evolution based on natural cooperation rather than natural selection. In fact it was superficial and crackpot but interestingly has recently been revived, along with his scientific reputation in British academic circles.

During the remainder of his own long life (he died in 1921 at the age of 79), Kropotkin was allowed to live in complete peace and security in Britain. Not coincidentally, Britain was the only major country in Europe not to suffer from the mysterious outbreak of assassinations that swept the continent and even the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century.

As Matthew Ehret has noted, the anarchist assassinations seemed to disproportionately target major leaders who rejected free trade and a global economic order dictated by British financial interests from the City of London. Its victims included U.S. presidents James Garfield (1881) and William McKinley (1901), French President Sadi Carnot (1894), Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas (1897) and King Umberto I of Italy (1900).

In addition, in 1878 alone, anarchists attempted to kill Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany twice as well as the Kings of Spain and Italy. Kropotkin hailed all these efforts at “the Propaganda of the Deed.” Not coincidentally, all of these leaders, especially the old Kaiser, Bismarck’s patron and protector stood like Tsar Alexander II squarely opposed to British efforts at global financial domination.

Yet despite all these outrages – or more likely because of them – Kropotkin, the guiding figure of anarcho-syndicalism and the great champion of the murder of national leaders continued to enjoy a charmed life protected by the British Empire.

To this day, British historians and other writers have unanimously continued to swallow the approved line that Kropotkin was a kindly, brilliant, pacifist saint – belonging to the company of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King rather than that of Sergei Nechayev and Dostoyevsky’s “Devils.”

The hyper-energetic, much loved and woefully idiotic American popular historian Barbara Tuchman spread this Disneyworld fairy tale image of Kropotkin in her enormously popular and influential history of the pre-World War I world “The Proud Tower” in 1966. Typically, she won the Pulitzer Prize twice for writing other histories that got their central facts and theses wrong.

A serious study of the role of Kropotkin and his “Anarchist International” in the assassinations of the late 19th century is well over 100 years overdue.

But even in that age of carefully selected and discriminating terror, the hunting and murder of the great liberator Tsar Alexander stands out for its relentless nature and obsessive cruelty.

That age of assassinations and the Anarchists Congress that the British so incongruously hosted in July 1881 is not just a matter of abstract curiosity about a long forgotten and irrelevant past. It offers disquieting parallels to the use of targeted assassinations and the methodical destabilization of great nations in the name of free trade, democracy and human rights that continues at a feverish pace in our own time.

As the great American novelist William Faulkner rightly wrote in “Requiem for a Nun,” “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Amid the bi-partisan mania over the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki, fevered, anti-Russian rhetoric in the United States makes conceivable what until recently seemed inconcievable: that dangerous tensions between Russia and the U.S. could lead to military conflict. It has happened before.

In September 1959, during a brief thaw in the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev made his famous visit to the United States. In Los Angeles, the Soviet leader was invited to a luncheon at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios in Hollywood and during a long and rambling exchange he had this to say:

“Your armed intervention in Russia was the most unpleasant thing that ever occurred in the relations between our two countries, for we had never waged war against America until then; our troops have never set foot on American soil, while your troops have set foot on Soviet soil.”

These remarks by Khrushchev were little noted in the U.S. press at the time – especially compared to his widely-reported complaint about not being allowed to visit Disneyland.  But even if Americans read about Khrushchev’s comments it is likely that few of them would have had any idea what the Soviet Premier was talking about.

But Soviet – and now Russian — memory is much more persistent.  The wounds of foreign invasions, from Napoleon to the Nazis, were still fresh in Russian public consciousness in 1959 — and even in Russia today — in a way most Americans could not imagine.  Among other things, that is why the Russians reacted with so much outrage to the expansion of NATO to its borders in the 1990’s, despite U.S. promises not to do so during the negotiations for the unification of Germany.

The U.S. invasion Khrushchev referred to took place a century ago, after the October Revolution and during the civil war that followed between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces, the Red Army against White Russians.  While the Germans and Austrians were occupying parts of Western and Southern Russia, the Allies launched their own armed interventions in the Russian North and the Far East in 1918. 

The Allied nations, including Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the U.S., cited various justifications for sending their troops into Russia: to “rescue” the Czech Legion that had been recruited to fight against the Central Powers; to protect allied military stores and keep them out of the hands of the Germans; to preserve communications via the Trans-Siberian Railway; and possibly to re-open an Eastern Front in the war.  But the real goal – rarely admitted publicly at first—was to reverse the events of October and install a more “acceptable” Russian government. As Winston Churchill later put it, the aim was to “strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle.”

In addition to Siberia, the U.S. joined British and French troops to invade at Archangel, in the north of Russia, on September 4, 1918.

In July 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had personally typed the “Aide Memoire” on American military action in Russia that was hand-delivered by the Secretary of War at the beginning of August to General William Graves, the designated commander of the U.S. troops en route to Siberia. Wilson’s document was curiously ambivalent and contradictory. It began by asserting that foreign interference in Russia’s internal affairs was “impermissible,” and eventually concluded that the dispatch of U.S. troops to Siberia was not to be considered a “military intervention.”

The Non-Intervention Intervention

But the American intervention began when U.S. soldiers disembarked at Vladivostok on August 16, 1918.  These were the 27th and 31st infantry regiments, regular army units that had been involved in pacification of U.S.-occupied Philippines.  Eventually there were to be about 8,000 U.S. troops in Siberia.

Judging from his memoires, General Graves was puzzled by how different things looked on the ground in Siberia than his vague instructions seemed to suggest.  For one thing, the Czechs hardly needed rescuing.  By the Summer of 1918 they had easily taken control of Vladivostok and a thousand miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

For the next year and a half, General Graves, by all appearances an honest and non-political professional soldier, struggled to understand and carry out his mandate in Siberia.  He seems to have driven the U.S. State Department and his fellow allied commanders to distraction by clinging stubbornly to a literal interpretation of Wilson’s Aide Memoire as mandating strict non-intervention in Russian affairs. The general seemed incapable of noticing the broad “wink” with which everyone else understood these instructions.

Graves strove to maintain “neutrality” among the various Russian factions battling for control of Siberia and to focus on his mission to guard the railroad and protect Allied military supplies.  But he was also indiscrete enough to report “White” atrocities as well as “Red” ones, to express his distaste for the various Japanese-supported warlords in Eastern Siberia and, later, to have a skeptical (and correct) assessment of the low popular support, incompetence and poor prospects of the anti-Bolshevik forces.

For his troubles, it was hinted, absurdly, that the General may have been a Bolshevik sympathizer, a charge that in part motivated the publication of his memoirs. 

In the face of hectoring by State Department officials and other Allied commanders to be more active in support of the “right” people in Russia, Graves repeatedly inquired of his superiors in Washington whether his original instructions of political non-intervention were to be modified. No one, of course, was willing to put any different policy in writing and the general struggled to maintain his “neutrality.”

By the Spring and Summer of 1919, however, the U.S. had joined the other Allies in providing overt military support to “Supreme Leader,” Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s White regime, based in the Western Siberian city of Omsk.  At first this was carried out discretely through the Red Cross, but later it took the form of direct shipments of military supplies, including boxcars of rifles whose safe delivery Graves was directed to oversee.

Domestic Intervention 

But the prospects for a victory by Kolchak soon faded and the Whites in Siberia revealed themselves to be a lost cause.  The decision to remove the US troops was made late in 1919 and General Graves, with the last of his staff, departed from Vladivostok on 1 April 1920.

In all, 174 American soldiers were killed during the invasion of Russia. (The Soviet Union was formed on Dec. 28, 1922.)

Interestingly, pressure to withdraw the U.S. troops from Siberia came from fed-up soldiers and home-front opinion opposing the continued deployment of military units abroad long after the conclusion of the war in Europe. It is notable that during a Congressional debate on the Russian intervention one Senator read excerpts from the letters of American soldiers to support the case for bringing them home.

Then, as in later U.S. foreign interventions, the soldiers had a low opinion of the people they were supposed to be liberating.  One of them wrote home on July 28, 1919 from his base in Verkhne-Udinsk, now Ulan Ude, on the southern shore of Lake Baikal:

“Life in Siberia may sound exciting but it isn’t. It’s all right for a few months but I’m ready to go home now…  You want to know how I like the people? Well I’ll tell you, one couldn’t hardly call them people but they are some kind of animal. They are the most ignorant things I ever saw. Oh, I can get a word of their lingo if they aren’t sore when they talk. They sure do rattle off their lingo when they get  sore. These people have only one ambition and that is to drink more vodka than the next person.”

Outside of the State Department and some elite opinion, U.S. intervention had never been very popular.  By now it was widely understood, as one historian noted, that there may have been “many reasons why the doughboys came to Russia, but there was only one reason why they stayed: to intervene in a civil war to see who would govern the country.”

After 1920, the memory of “America’s Siberian Adventure,” as General Graves termed it, soon faded into obscurity.  The American public is notorious for its historic amnesia, even as similar military adventures were repeated again and again over the years since then.

It seems that we may need to be reminded every generation or so of the perils of foreign military intervention and the simple truth asserted by General Graves: 

“…there isn’t a nation on earth that would not resent foreigners sending troops into their country, for the purpose of putting this or that faction in charge.  The result is not only an injury to the prestige of the foreigner intervening, but is a great handicap to the faction the foreigner is trying to assist.”

General Graves was writing about Siberia in 1918, but it could just as well have been Vietnam in the 1960s or Afghanistan and Syria now. Or a warning today about 30,000 NATO troops on Russia’s borders.

consortiumnews.com

Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin accused some of his colleagues of “strike breaking” and of losing their nerve.

This was one time when entrenched elites could not dam up a revolutionary tide. Centuries-old grievances of the peasant and proletarian masses, aggravated by the bloodshed of the Great War, created the right circumstances for revolution. The Bolsheviks put themselves at the head of this popular movement, mobilising its remarkable energy through the Soviets (or councils) of soldiers’, workers’ and eventually peasants’ deputies to seize power in Russia. It was of course one thing to take power and quite another to hold on to it. The Bolsheviks had many enemies. Amongst the so-called revolutionary parties, only the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) supported the Bolsheviks and entered into a coalition government with them in December 1917. Other fringe groups backed the new Soviet government, but the rump SRs and most of the Mensheviks allied themselves with the Kadet party, representing the old elites, to oppose the Bolsheviks and indeed to oppose the authority of the Soviets.

The Bolsheviks had to organise new forces to defend the revolution in the distant reaches of the country

For the Russian elite the Bolsheviks were “gorillas”, or “genuinely insane people who belong[ed] in a psychiatric hospital.”

“Where is the escape from this bedlam?” the “decent” classes wanted to know.

The Bolsheviks were themselves not united in taking power or in attempting to govern alone through the Soviets. Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin accused some of his colleagues of “strike breaking” and of losing their nerve. The faint-hearted could of course marshal plenty of arguments for their lack of boldness. Groups of army officers and officers-cadets sought to overthrow Soviet authority, supported by rump SRs and Mensheviks, who hated the Bolsheviks as intensely as the old tsarist elites. In December 1917 everything was in chaos. Soldiers went on a long binge in the capital, raiding the wine cellars of the elite. Latvian sharpshooters and firefighters were called in to stop the looting and flood the cellars. While comrades were drunk, who would defend the revolution? It was the middle of winter and cities had to be supplied with food and coal for heat. Workers who backed the Bolsheviks had to be kept employed when the economy was failing and factories were closing. Families had to be fed.

Russia’s frontiers stretched far beyond Petrograd and Moscow. Enemies were everywhere trying to overthrow Soviet authority. The Bolsheviks had to organise new forces to defend the revolution in the distant reaches of the country. How audacious of Lenin to think he could overcome the chaos. The elites at first laughed at the Bolsheviks’ temerity, thinking they could not hold power for more than a few days, or a few weeks. Armed resistance began at once and was put down in bloody skirmishes near Petrograd and in Moscow. These first victories wiped the smiles off the faces of the privileged classes.

Quite apart from dealing with internal enemies, there was a war going on against Imperial Germany and its allies, whose armies were approaching Petrograd. Nor could the Entente powers, Russia’s allies in the Great War, be ignored. They viewed the revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power as an unfathomable catastrophe. The so-called Allies were appalled by the collapse of the Russian armies and by the resulting threat to Allied economic interests in Russia. The British and French military missions were well informed and reckoned that the Russian army could not fight beyond the coming winter, no matter who governed in Petrograd. Ideas were mooted in Paris and London about “a peace on the back of Russia” with the country dismembered, much as China was, and divided into great power spheres of interest. In effect, Russia would cease to exist as a united, independent state. These contingency plans were developed before the Bolshevik seizure of power when the Allies hoped that the Soviets would be dispersed and the Bolsheviks hanged.

Lenin had no illusions about the western imperialist powers, but he seemed not to have paid too much attention to them in his calculations for seizing power and establishing a Soviet government. It was first things first. His biggest concerns were to neutralise or defeat internal enemies and to end the war with Germany and its allies. The Bolsheviks had no choice. The soldiers at the front were demobilising on their own initiative and abandoning the trenches. Lenin had himself talked of “revolutionary war” against the German invader, but that was only possible if you had armies willing to fight. “Go and take a walk,” he said to colleagues, “hear what the soldiers say in the streets.” All the same, his fellow Bolsheviks were a highly independent-minded lot, and many were not prepared to accept a disadvantageous peace imposed by Imperial Germany.

General N. N. Dukhonin

On 7/20 November the Soviet government ordered the commander of Russian forces, General N. N. Dukhonin, to seek an armistice with the German high command. Unwilling to comply, General Dukhonin ignored Soviet orders. Lenin immediately sacked him. He named veteran Bolshevik N. V. Krylenko as the new commander-in-chief, and despatched him to the front. On 13/26 November Krylenko sent delegates across no-man’s land, preceded by a bugler and a large white flag. They were met by a German officer who led them back across German lines.

N. V. Krylenko

As these events unfolded, the Allied ambassadors in Petrograd were discussing how to check the Bolsheviks. One idea was to send 8 to 10,000 Allied troops to Petrograd to protect Allied nationals and back any government which might follow the Bolsheviks. This was putting the cart before the horse. The proposal was scotched as unrealistic.

General Henri Albert Niessel

On 9/22 November the new French président du Conseil, George Clemenceau, sent instructions to General Henri Albert Niessel, the head of the French Military Mission, to inform Dukhonin that France refused to recognise the new Soviet government and counted on the Russian high command to reject all “criminal peace negotiations” and to keep the Russian army in the field against the common enemy. Clemenceau, le tigre, was effectively encouraging Dukhonin to raise the army against the Bolsheviks. Since many if not most Russian soldiers backed the Bolshevik plan to end the war, the French démarche was a needless provocation more likely to be dangerous to Dukhonin than to the Bolsheviks.

Georges Clemenceau

The Bolshevik reaction was predictable. Accusing the Entente of meddling in Soviet domestic affairs—which was the least one could say—L. D. Trotsky, commissar for foreign affairs, responded by publishing the so-called Entente “secret treaties” dividing up enemy territories after the war.

L. D. Trotsky

“You see,” Lenin declared to Allied soldiers, “you are only cannon fodder fighting for the plunder of western imperialist elites.” Lenin’s idea was to mobilise European public opinion against the war and provide propaganda for militants in the west who wanted to make their own October Revolutions. As Trotsky made clear, the Soviet government desired a general, not a separate peace, so soldiers in Europe could turn their bayonets against their own bourgeois elites.

At a meeting in Paris at the beginning of December (new style), the Entente powers could not agree on a collective reply to Trotsky’s call for an armistice on all fronts. Once anyone started to talk peace, the Italian foreign minister noted, French and Italian soldiers would refuse to take up arms again. Prime Minister David Lloyd George feared “a rot would set in” over continuing the war. The Bolsheviks were counting on just that. It was not an unrealistic calculation: even Allied leaders feared popular anti-war opposition. A general armistice was therefore out of the question. The Allies agreed to stop shipping supplies to Russia and to start generous funding of “pro-Allied propaganda” hoping an acceptable Russian government would replace the Soviets.

In the meantime, General Dukhonin remained in contact with the Allied embassies in Petrograd and continued to make trouble at the front. He released from custody the infamous General L. G. Kornilov and other high-ranking officers who fled to the south. Their intention was to organise armed resistance against the Soviet government. Dukhonin would not be joining them however: on 20 November/3 December he was beaten to death by angry soldiers.

“What would ‘the comrades’ do next?” one anti-Bolshevik professor in Moscow wrote to his journal: “Events are unfolding at a mad pace.”

Captain Jacques Sadoul

The Allied leaders were not fools and had no intention of walking into the trap which Lenin and Trotsky had set for them. The Bolsheviks would have to negotiate alone with the Germans. Trotsky drew the logical conclusion that the Soviet government needed options and potential allies. If an  armistice did not hold, the Bolsheviks would have to fight and to fight they would need help. The only help available was from the Allied powers. In Petrograd French General Niessel drew the same conclusions and therefore authorised one of his junior officers, Captain Jacques Sadoul, to keep in touch with the Bolsheviks. Every day Sadoul talked to Lenin, Trotsky and various other Bolshevik leaders. He had lengthy discussions with Trotsky who himself raised the question of French assistance in organising a new army (2/15 December). Sadoul wanted to pursue this option and urged his superiors to keep an open mind. Kornilov, the rump SRs, Mensheviks, and so on, were “burnt-out stars” (étoiles éteintes). Their attempts to organise against the Bolsheviks had been “still-born”. Everyone agreed on the necessity of an immediate peace, but “the aristocracy and bourgeoisie” were more inclined to capitulation than the Bolsheviks. Even Lenin was keeping his options open if he was willing to meet a subaltern French officer on a regular basis.

Captain Sadoul could not speak directly to the government in Paris, let alone in London or Washington. Clemenceau would not have listened anyway for he dismissed the Bolsheviks as “German agents”. In Washington, President Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, were outraged by the Bolshevik seizure of power and by their attempt to turn the rightful class order of things (as Lansing put it) upside down. While Sadoul was talking cooperation with Trotsky, other French and British officers were recommending financial support to fund anti-Bolshevik resistance in southern Russia, in particular in the Ukraine and the Don. At end of November (n.s.) a first credit of 50,000 francs was approved, then a million rubles, for General Niessel. A week later, it was three million francs and before the ink was dry on that authorisation, unlimited credits were approved for the French military mission operating out of Jassy in rump Romania, that part of the country not occupied by German forces. The blank check in effect was for action in the Ukraine and the Don, where armed resistance against the Bolsheviks was being organised. The British did the same. The Anglo-French policy was to throw packets of banknotes to the four winds and hope they stirred up resistance to the Bolsheviks. There were more sober reports, and not only from Captain Sadoul, saying that the Allies should not count on Russian generals and Ukrainian “nationalists” to fight anyone. But Clemenceau refused to listen. The French idea was “to support elements of resistance to the Bolshevik usurpation.” That was the main objective, overthrow “the Bolsh”. In late December (n.s.) the British and French agreed to “spheres of action” in southern Russia which corresponded to the pattern of their pre-war investments. It was a further step along the line earlier laid out to partition Russia into great power spheres of interest.

When Sadoul looked around, he saw colleagues driven by a “blind fury” against the Bolsheviks. According to them, the Entente faced two enemies, Germany and the Bolsheviks, but Sadoul’s colleagues “detested and feared the second more than the first.” They preferred to let Germany crush the Soviets rather than to help them to defend Russia because that would leave the Bolsheviks in power. Better to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Would this politique du pire work? There were enough skeptics in Paris and London to keep the door ajar to Sadoul’s ideas. In mid-December (n.s.) the British Cabinet decided to avoid an “open breach” with the Bolsheviks and to pursue a policy similar to what Captain Sadoul was proposing. “Let’s not drive them into the German camp” was the general idea. Prime Minister Lloyd George was particularly receptive even as British agents went to work in the Ukraine to support “nationalists”. The British minister in Jassy sent £30,000, not pin money in those days, to an agent in Kiev. Assistance to forces in the south was to be directed against the Germans not the Bolsheviks. Did the Allied left hand know what the right hand was doing? Of course, it did. Anyone who knew anything, knew that the new forces which the Allies were bankrolling would fight the Bolsheviks, not the Germans.

There was bedlam in Russia, and a policy of chaos might be the best way to counter it. Did Sadoul’s ideas have a chance in such circumstances? Would the Bolsheviks be open to working with Anglo-French imperialists? At the end of December 1917 it was too early to tell, but in the first months of the new year this question would be addressed at the highest levels of the Entente governments.

Thus it was that women demonstrating for bread in the streets of Petrograd, the Russian capital, set off the popular movement which brought down the tsar. The army went over to the people and the seemingly eternal, all-powerful tsarist order fell apart as though it were only a child’s house of cards. New democratic organs of government were set up; they were called Soviets (or councils) of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies and they spread rapidly across the country.

Women demonstrating for bread in the streets of Petrograd, the Russian capital, set off the popular movement which brought down the tsar

Some historians claim that the tsar’s abdication was a fluke and that the Russian people were passive participants in the revolution of 1917, oafish clods in effect, who did not know their own interests and were easily fooled by a tiny party of murderous Bolsheviks. These historians pursue a “neoliberal” political agenda to discredit the revolution of 1917 and the men and women who led it. They are Atlanticists and Russophobes settling old scores with past generations of historians or projecting Bolshevism on to the present leadership of the Russian Federation and in particular on to its president, Vladimir Putin, as absurd as that may seem. History is politics when it comes to the USSR and Russian Federation.

Alexander F. Kerensky, the leader of the new Russian government, was no more a socialist, or a democrat for that matter, than an actor playing that role on stage

In fact, the abdication of the tsar was no fluke, and the common people were not passive, dull-minded or easily manipulated. Workers, soldiers and peasants had nevertheless to learn to distinguish between the various “socialist” parties who wanted to lead them. These were in the main Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The first two groups claimed they could not lead the revolution without the help of “the bourgeoisie”, in particular, the K-D or Kadet party, representing the former urban and rural tsarist elites. But Kadets did not want to secure the revolution; they wanted to stifle it before it could harm their economic and financial interests. The SRs and Mensheviks, timid socialists, could talk a long streak, but then hesitated before the precipice of revolutionary action. They therefore ceded power to the “more politically experienced” Kadets and other members of the tsarist elite, organised into the so-called Provisional Government. This was ironic, since the ministers of the Provisional Government were neither democratically elected nor revolutionaries.

The leader of the new Russian government came to be Alexander F. Kerensky, a so-called Trudovik, or a member of an S-R breakaway faction. Kerensky was no more a socialist, or a democrat for that matter, than an actor playing that role on stage. He saw himself as a potential dictator and boasted of it. On the key issues, he wanted to keep the war going and to stall land reform. These questions were the only things that mattered to peasant-soldiers who thought solely of staying alive and returning to home to profit from land redistribution. Kerensky was as determined as his Kadet colleagues to stop the revolution, close down the Soviets and jail or hang the Bolsheviks.

L. D. Trotsky was one of the most important and visible leaders of the Bolshevik party

Yes, the Bolsheviks were Kerensky’s bête noire. They were real revolutionaries who would not be satisfied with seeing off the tsar and then collaborating with the tsarist elite. The SRs and Mensheviks, who in March held a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, quickly lost ground to the Bolsheviks. The revolutionary movement galloped to the left, and Kerensky could not stop it. Soldiers and workers, who at first did not recognise the differences between various “socialist” politicians, became more sophisticated in the ensuing months. They were smart enough to know their interests, essentially peace, land and bread, and to understand that the only party willing to take up these political objectives were the Bolsheviks. If they were a minority party in March; by autumn the Bolsheviks held majority positions in many Soviets, the most important being Petrograd and Moscow. For the SRs and Mensheviks, it was galling to see their popular base erode away.

Lenin pushed his idea to govern through control of the Soviets on 10/23 October, and plans were set in motion to overthrow the Provisional Government

V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky were then the most important and visible leaders of the Bolshevik party. Trotsky became president of the Petrograd Soviet in the early autumn, while Lenin formulated policy and pushed it forward amongst his highly independent-minded colleagues. Overthrow the government of landlords and capitalists, he said. “All power to the Soviets” became Lenin’s watchwords. The Bolsheviks would govern through control of the Soviets. This idea was easier said than done because many Bolsheviks were uncertain whether they had sufficient popular support to take and hold power. Petrograd was red, but what about the rest of the country? Lenin pushed his idea through the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10/23 October, and plans were set in motion to overthrow the Provisional Government. A week later, a Military Revolutionary Committee (voenno-revoliutsionnyi komitet) was set up. It was dominated by Bolsheviks but was an organ of the Petrograd Soviet and included Left SRs and anarchists amongst others. Its task was to take the concrete measures necessary to transfer state power to the Soviets. This meant in the first instance asserting control over garrison troops and weapons depots heretofore under the nominal authority of the Provisional Government. Sailors from Kronstadt and Helsinki were ordered to move to the capital. Some Bolsheviks, like L. B. Kamenev, opposed an immediate seizure of power. Lenin was beside himself with fury.

“Hurry,” he responded when preparations seemed to be lagging. “Not enough,” he would scowl when it seemed too few sailors and soldiers were ordered to the capital. The overthrow of the Provisional Government had to be accomplished before the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 October/7 November. “The government is tottering,” Lenin told his colleagues: “It must be given the deathblow at all costs. To delay action is fatal.”

On Sunday, 22 October/4 November, the best Bolshevik orators went out into the city to rally support. Trotsky’s speech that day at the House of the People drew a huge crowd. “The revolution is in danger,” Trotsky declared: “Only you can defend it.”

“Will you support the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies?” he asked.

As one, his listeners raised their hands. “We swear it,” they shouted.

“Let this vote of yours be your vow,” Trotsky responded, “with all your strength and at any sacrifice to support the Soviet….”

Still holding up their hands, the crowd responded again, “We will, we swear it.”

Wherever Trotsky spoke to rally workers and garrison soldiers, he was greeted with commotion, excitement and thunderous hurrahs. When he rose to speak, the bustling crowd would finally settle down to listen. “It became still,” one observer remembered: “there followed not so much a speech as an inspirational song.” Who can say the workers and soldiers of Petrograd were passive by-standers, stupid oafs, who could not understand their own interests?

“In the relations of a weak government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses,” wrote American journalist John Reed

In the meantime, Kerensky could feel the noose tightening around the neck of the Provisional Government. He was meeting his cabinet daily to take measures to stop the Bolsheviks. Indictments were issued against the members of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Unfriendly newspapers were ordered shuttered; editors and journalists were to be arrested. Young military cadets, convalescing war-wounded, a shock battalion of women, anyone who could walk or limp with one leg or two was ordered to a duty station. Kerensky was trying to get the cold, iron grip of the Military Revolutionary Committee from around his neck.

On orders of the Military Revolutionary Committee, soldiers, sailors and Red Guards set up checkpoints around the capital

To no avail. Orders went unanswered. Newspapers which had been closed were reopened on Trotsky’s orders. The more Kerensky tried to loosen the noose around his neck, the more it tightened. “In the relations of a weak government and a rebellious people there comes a time,” wrote American journalist John Reed, “when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses….” That time had come. Kerensky, said one Left SR, could not find a dozen soldiers who would come to his defence.

On orders of the Military Revolutionary Committee, soldiers, sailors and Red Guards set up checkpoints around the capital. Government troops guarding the bridges across the Neva were dispersed and replaced by detachments loyal to the Petrograd Soviet. Key offices were occupied—post, telephone and telegraph, the state bank, railway stations and junctions. The noose was tightening still more around Kerensky’s neck, and few people seemed to care. Typically, some woe-begotten Mensheviks tried to save his skin and that of the Provisional Government. It was too late.

Scenes around the capital were surreal. While some parts of the city were dark and shuttered, the fashionable Nevsky prospekt was open for business as usual. Prostitutes were out and about, looking for clients. Gambling saloons were open, noisy and stinking of tobacco smoke and cold sweat. For lounge lizards and the wealthy elite it was perhaps a last chance to swig champagne and challenge Lady Luck. Smartly dressed couples walked arm in arm, perhaps planning to go to the theatre or to a restaurant where no workers or soldiers ever ventured except as janitors and dishwashers. The trams were running, noted John Reed, and the shops and cinemas were brightly lit. “We had tickets to the Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre—all the theatres were open,” he remembered, “but it was too exciting out of doors.”

At around 9:30 pm the cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva, fired a reverberating blank round, which encouraged other defenders of the Winter Palace to abandon their posts

In the meantime, Lenin huffed and fumed whenever he perceived the slightest slackening of action. The Military Revolutionary Committee became more aggressive. In the early hours of 25 October/7 November insurgent soldiers took control of the Petrograd electric station. Electricity to most government buildings was shut off. So were telephone lines to the war ministry and to what became the last redoubt of the Provisional Government, the Winter Palace. At 11am that day, Kerensky left Petrograd in a borrowed Renault from the US embassy to look for loyal troops. His search was all but fruitless. “We can say,” the head of the French Military Mission reported to Paris, “that he [Kerensky] no longer has a single supporter.” At about the same time the Military Revolutionary Committee issued a proclamation sent across the country declaring that the Provisional Government had been overthrown.

At about 2 am on 26 October/8 November, forces of the Military Revolutionary Committee entered the Winter Palace

This was not quite true because the Winter Palace, where Kerensky’s cabinet was holding out, had not yet fallen. The building was sealed off, but there were hitches in logistics and delays in launching the final assault.  Representatives of the Military Revolutionary Committee went into the palace to talk its defenders into leaving the building peacefully. Many did so. At around 9:30 pm the cruiser Aurora, anchored in the Neva, fired a reverberating blank round, which encouraged other defenders to abandon their posts. A little later artillery from the near-by Peter and Paul Fortress opened up, firing live rounds this time. Finally, at about 2 am on 26 October/8 November, soldiers and sailors entered the Winter Palace: cabinet ministers were arrested, their last defenders having given up without a fight. “Where is Kerensky?” soldiers wanted to know.  They were furious that he had escaped their grasp.

There were still spasms of resistance in Petrograd. The first session of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened in the early evening of 25 October/7 November.  There were pressures to create a so-called “joint all-Socialist government”. Lenin was having nothing of it for he had seen enough of Menshevik and SR “compromises” with the old tsarist elite. Even then, Kamenev was still trying to put a spoke in Lenin’s wheel. “We can’t hold on,” he whined, “Too much is against us. We haven’t got the men.” You can imagine Lenin’s furious reaction.

“We must now devote ourselves,” Lenin said, “to the construction of a proletarian socialist state.”

John Reed managed to get into the meeting hall and witnessed these events. Lenin arrived at the congress a little before 9pm. “A strange popular leader,” Reed wrote in his iconic Ten Days That Shook the World: “a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms… And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.” As Lenin entered the congress hall, he and his comrades were greeted with “thundering waves of cheers”. “Bozhe ty moi [Oh my God], we’ve done it,” those delegates must have thought to themselves amidst the tumult. “We shall have a soviet government,” Lenin declared, “our own organ of power without the participation of any bourgeois….” That was the main point. “We must now devote ourselves,” Lenin concluded, “to the construction of a proletarian socialist state.”  You can imagine the thunderous applause that followed his words.

“Lenin, with Trotsky beside him, stood as firm as a rock,” Reed remembered: “Let the compromisers accept our programme and they can come in! We won’t give way an inch. If there are comrades here who haven’t the courage and will to dare what we dare, let them leave…”   The Left SRs stayed in. Mensheviks and an SR rump, walked out of the congress in the early morning hours to protest the Bolshevik seizure of power. They played right into Lenin’s hands.

Trotsky famously rose to respond to their departure. “A rising of the masses of the people requires no justification. What has happened is an insurrection, and not a conspiracy. We hardened the revolutionary energy of the Petrograd workers and soldiers… And now we are told: Renounce your victory, make concessions, compromise. With whom? I ask… With those wretched groups who have left us…? You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out, go where you ought to go; into the dustbin of history!” The congress broke into tumultuous applause, and the last of the Mensheviks left the hall amidst whistling and mockery. 

In Pskov, Kerensky met with General P. N. Krasnov, a Don Cossack general and no defender of the revolution.

Elsewhere, the mayor of Petrograd and deputies of the city Duma, still under the control of Kadets and SRs, demonstrated against the seizure of power. They spearheaded a “Committee for the Salvation of the Country” which planned an uprising to overthrow the new Soviet authorities and to restore the Provisional Government to power. Their idea was to act in conjunction with Cossack forces, which Kerensky was then seeking to lead against the Bolsheviks. The Military Revolutionary Committee having got wind of it, the insurrection launched prematurely and failed. Soldiers and workers in Petrograd were not going to risk life and limb to re-establish the rotten Provisional Government. Menshevik and SR willingness to ally with Cossacks raised by Kerensky marked their utter bankruptcy, as Trotsky would no doubt have noted with his characteristic disdain.

In the meantime, Kerensky had made his way to Pskov, the northern front army headquarters, about 280 kilometres southwest of Petrograd. He met with General P. N. Krasnov, a Don Cossack general and no defender of the revolution. On paper, Krasnov commanded large forces but he could only muster a thousand men to march on Petrograd. These were the same forces on which the Mensheviks and SRs counted to restore the Provisional Government.

“Kerensky counts on arriving in Petrograd tomorrow,” said one French report. That was on 28 October/10 November. Another report said Kerensky would arrive  two days later. Almost the entire front was said to support “action against bolshevikism (sic).” That must have been a moment of French wishful thinking. On that day, in fact, Krasnov’s small force was defeated and dispersed at Pulkovo, not far from Petrograd. It was a bloody fight with serious losses on both sides. Soviet commanders paroled Krasnov and his surviving men in exchange for a promise not to take up arms again against the new Soviet government. It did not pay to be so generous for Krasnov had no intention of respecting his parole and went south to organise an anti-Bolshevik army. As for Kerensky, one French telegram to Paris indicated that after talking of suicide, he had “disappeared”. In fact, he went into hiding before fleeing the country and eventually ending up in Paris. Such was the ignominious end of the would-be all-powerful dictator of Russia.

There was also some fighting in Moscow, but there, too, Soviet forces took the upper hand. Soviet authority spread quickly across the country, although not everywhere. In the Ukraine, the Cossack territories and the Caucasus opposition sprang up, encouraged by Entente agents carrying bags of rubles. Lenin’s attention was bracketed on internal enemies so that he apparently failed to anticipate the danger, which might come from Russia’s western allies, intent on overthrowing Soviet authority. The spread of world revolution, he gambled, would take care of German imperialism, but what about the Entente? And what if Soviet peace proposals went unanswered? “We want a just peace,” Lenin explained, “but we are not afraid of a revolutionary war.” On s’engage, et puis on voit. Lenin knew this axiom from Napoléon and even cited it years later to explain how the revolution had been victorious. That was hindsight. In the meantime the Allied governments began to lay plans to destroy the nascent Soviet republic. What then would the Bolsheviks do?

In 1898 when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was established, the leaders of 1917 were students or people in their twenties

After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, the revolution moved rapidly to the left. A Provisional Government was set up, though it had no democratic legitimacy nor was it revolutionary. It represented the interests of the tsarist elite intent on stopping the revolution. The new government clashed with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ deputies, a tumultuous “council” or assembly of the revolutionary masses. Soviets spread across the country and provided the venues of the rough and ready democracy of the Russian Revolution. They were the der’mocraty, or “democraps” as one disgusted university professor in Moscow called them, in a play on words, der’mo meaning shit. The Russian bourgeoisie feared and loathed the revolutionary masses, “the gorillas”, who stank of tobacco, sweat, and wielded rifles tipped with long bayonets

The Provisional Government clashed with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ deputies, a tumultuous “council” or assembly of the revolutionary masses.

At first Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks dominated the Soviets, but not for long. They insisted that representatives of the former tsarist elite be included in the Provisional Government. One might as well as have planned the sabotage of the revolution, because the last thing the elites wanted was a deepening of the revolutionary movement. Either the SRs and Mensheviks did not know what they were doing, or they did and could not be trusted. One way or another, the menu peuple caught on quickly and recalled them from the Soviets to be replaced by representatives with stiffer backs and a better understanding what needed to be done to secure the revolution in Russia. These new Soviet deputies tended to back the Bolsheviks, led by V. I. Lenin, the brain of the Russian Revolution, and L. D. Trotsky, its sword.   

The Russian bourgeoisie feared and loathed the revolutionary masses, “the gorillas”, who stank of tobacco, sweat, and wielded rifles tipped with long bayonets.

In the swing to the left of the revolutionary movement, the key event was the abortive Kornilov-Kerensky putsch which occurred in the late summer. A. F. Kerensky was the head of the Provisional Government and General L. G. Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the army . They planned a coup d’état to stop the revolution, disperse the Petrograd Soviet and punish militant soldiers and Bolsheviks. That was the plan. But in a comedy of confusion and errors, the plan went wrong and Kerensky and Kornilov fell out like thieves, denouncing one another. Kerensky had to turn to militant workers and garrison soldiers to save himself. “Defend the revolution, not Kerensky,” said the Bolsheviks.

General Lavr Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russsian army

Kornilov was arrested and Kerensky went back to his old ways of trying to stop the revolution. “General Kornilov’s objectives were praiseworthy,” said one important minister of the Provisional Government, “but the method was bad and the moment, inopportune.”

“Now the difficulties are going to start,” he added in an understatement, “for we will have to face a resurgence of hostility from soldiers against their commanders.”

Kerensky offered the same message to the French ambassador and the new head of the French military mission. “Kerensky spoke to us in favourable terms about Kornilov,” they reported to Paris: “He recognised that the former commander in chief did not harbour any personal ambitions and was solely motivated by a patriotic interest…” His entourage was to blame for “the counter-revolutionary coup d’état”.

This was eyewash of course. Kerensky was trying vainly to back pedal, looking for support in the French and British embassies in Petrograd. Any observant worker or soldier could see that the Provisional Government was no guardian of the revolution. The French ambassador observed that Kerensky had to rely “on the parties of the centre and the right”; his “popularity” being “much diminished”. Here was another understatement. “Kerensky will not long last in power,” said frustrated British and French officers and diplomats watching everything go wrong. For them the revolution was a calamity.

 “The abortive coup d’état could hasten the Russian withdrawal from the war,” opined one French officer. It had rallied militant workers and garrison soldiers to the Bolsheviks. The Soviets in Petrograd and Moscow voted Bolshevik majorities. Trotsky became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. Bolshevism was spreading like wildfire. A group of arrested generals being transferred from one town to another were made to walk through the streets between a gauntlet of yelling, cursing soldiers throwing rocks and mud. When the generals got to the railway station they were forced to ride in a goods wagon instead of a passenger car. The generals were lucky to get away with their lives, observed one French officer.

French soldiers were sick and tired of being slaughtered in senseless frontal attacks on German trenches by generals sitting comfortably in their offices in Paris sipping cognac

The former tsarist elite could see the writing on the wall. It was sauve qui peut. “The bourgeoisie, almost unanimously, is less concerned with the moral and territorial conditions of a future peace settlement than with the future settlement of social issues,” reported a French diplomat: “Patriotic fervour… will be subject to class interests.”

The French high command was worried by Russian revolutionary propaganda. “I cannot insist enough,” wrote the French chief of staff, General Ferdinand Foch , “on the danger which would represent the spread of [this] propaganda in the Allied countries… I am concerned it would find fertile ground… in France and that it could contribute to an agitation similar to that which undermined the army and the French nation last spring….” The French army had mutinied in the spring of 1917. Common soldiers were sick and tired of being slaughtered in senseless frontal attacks on German trenches ordered by generals sitting comfortably in their offices in Paris sipping cognac.

Elites remembered the horrors of the French Revolution. The red genie of revolution seemed to be coming out of his lamp again. That much was clear. But what could the “Entente” powers do about it? To the French general staff it looked like Russia would soon conclude a separate peace or fall into such disorder as to make it easy prey for the enemy. There were no good options. The least that should be done was to protect “the considerable economic interests” of the Entente powers and their citizens. The French high command contemplated military intervention. Only the United States and Japan had sufficient available forces to send, but that option was not practical either. To get across Siberia was a long way especially on the single track, low capacity Trans-Siberian Railway. Something nevertheless had to be done: the French general staff proposed, for example, taking control of Russian “natural resources and means of production” as “collateral” for Entente “interests”.

French chief of staff, General Ferdinand Foch

The first step, according to one French study, would be for the United States to take control of Russian railways. “It would also be desirable to organise more or less open Allied control of customs, ports, postal and telegraph services, mining operations, metallurgical plants in the state domain, etc.” The “etc.” meant just about anything of value in Russia, and these ideas circulated in Paris while Kerensky was still trying to hang on to power. Was Russia to become a semi-colony like China? It began to look like it: the French had taken out their carving knives. “A few Japanese or American divisions would undoubtedly be sufficient” to protect Allied interests. But taking control of Russian resources would not solve the problem created by a Russian withdrawal from the war. For that eventuality, the only solution was “a peace on the back of Russia”. In the summer and autumn of 1917, this was a popular idea in Paris and London. It was “a measure of justified retaliation”, according to the French, though not very practical.

Impractical or not, general staff officers could still dream and had to plan. Here is what the French had in mind in October 1917. Germany would obtain Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Byelorussian territories. A federation of Poland and the Ukraine would be created under an Austro-Hungarian protectorate. Finland would go to Sweden and Bessarabia to Romania. Eastern Siberia would be ceded to Japan. The Cossack territories of the Kuban, the Don and Caucasus would become independent. A “Muscovite state” including western Siberia would be created “under the control of the western powers.”

So much for Russia remaining an ally of France. Could the plan work? Would Germany agree to give up gains in the west and to pay reparations in exchange for large territorial gains in the east, and in effect for “the dismemberment of Russia”? Not in October 1917, when the war was going relatively well for Germany. And what about the Americans? They seem to have been left out of French calculations. If Russia was to be parceled out, control of the Trans-Siberian would hardly be enough to satisfy the US government, nor would it want to see the Japanese settled in the Russian far east. These French ideas were unrealistic, but they were by no means the last to be considered in Paris and London.

While the French and British contemplated “a peace on the back of Russia”, the Bolsheviks had to decide what to do with their rapidly growing popular support. Bolshevik organisation was too good, according to French and British observers: it could only be explained by German agents and German “gold”.

In fact, the Bolsheviks were far from one mind about what to do next. Some of the old guard, for example Lev B. Kamenev and Grigorii E. Zinoviev, advocated a go-slow approach. We’re not ready, they said, to seize power even from the rotten Provisional Government. We may not have enough organised armed support in Petrograd and more generally in the country. Front line soldiers are demoralised. We should not rush developments but build up our forces and wait for the right moment to act. It hasn’t come yet.

Yes, it has, and that’s just the point, an impatient Lenin retorted. He rushed back to Petrograd from Finland where he had been hiding out to avoid arrest by the Provisional Government.

“Comrades! Look around you… and you will realise that the peasants and soldiers cannot tolerate it any longer. Kerensky is again negotiating with the Kornilovite generals… to prevent the soviets from obtaining power!

Go to the barracks, go to the Cossack units, go to the working people and explain the truth to them…

All power to the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies!”

Here was the Bolshevik call to arms. Vest power in the Soviets which represented workers and peasants, and excluded the former tsarist elite which would stop at nothing to abort the revolution.

Zinoviev and Kamenev continued to drag their feet, even publishing Bolshevik plans to seize power. They sounded like broken-down Mensheviks, insisting on the need for collaboration with the bourgeoisie and opposing the seizure of power. Lenin was beside himself with fury, but he won the debate in the party. On 10/23 October, the Bolshevik Central Committee approved a resolution calling for the preparation of a popular armed uprising to transfer power to the soviets.

The Petrograd press was full of speculation about the date of a Bolshevik seizure of power. On 19 October/1 November the British military attaché in Petrograd telegraphed London to warn that an attempt to seize power would occur on 7 November/25 October. But who knew for certain? There had been previous false alarms. Would this new report prove true? If the Bolsheviks seized power, could they hold on to it? Time would soon tell.

In the Petrograd Soviet Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks, who held a majority of votes, were too insecure to take power themselves and feared the revolutionary masses whose interests they claimed to represent. The Bolsheviks were only a minority party, and even they were not united on the big issues of war and peace. The tsarist elite of the Provisional Government and milquetoast socialists of the Petrograd Soviet were like a cork in the bottle holding back the revolutionary masses. No wonder there were continuous crises and tensions in Russia during the spring and summer of 1917.

Officers nursed a deep loathing for the mutinous soldiers, and bided their time until they could halt the revolution and shoot the mutineers

In the Russian army too there were deep animosities between peasant soldiers and the former tsarist officer corps. Desertion was rift amongst soldiers who wanted to return home to take advantage of the redistribution of agricultural lands set off by the revolution. Officers could do nothing to stem what amounted to a vast mutiny of common soldiers, and those who attempted to enforce discipline were defied, insulted, beaten, or lynched. Officers therefore nursed a deep loathing for the mutinous soldiers, and bided their time until they could halt the revolution and shoot the mutineers.

A continuation of the war for the officer corps and for the Provisional Government was the key to stopping the revolution and punishing the militant soldiers of the Petrograd garrison. The SRs and Mensheviks went along with the policy of continuing the war all the while saying it should be ended by negotiations. This was an unrealistic policy since the western «allies», notably France, Britain and the United States, would not agree to a negotiated settlement of the war except perhaps «on the back of Russia». The SRs and Mensheviks played into the hands of those for whom a continuation of the war was the key to stopping the revolution. They forgot apparently that it was the revolutionary masses who had given them power in the Soviets and that repression would lead to the disappearance of the Soviets and to the loss of their own authority and perhaps even their own lives.

Hoping thus to turn soldiers from revolution back to the war, the Trudovik, or right-wing socialist Aleksandr F. Kerensky, then minister of war, launched a major offensive on the southwestern front on 18 June (o.s.)/1 July (n.s). After some initial gains the offensive turned into a calamitous rout leading to a general retreat of some 250 kilometres. According to French officers attached to the Russian army, if the Germans had had sufficient resources, they could have walked through Russian defences and ended the war. It was only a matter of time, winter at the latest, these officers believed, before Russia would have to ask for an armistice.

It was with this intention that the Trudovik, or right-wing socialist Aleksandr F. Kerensky, then minister of war, launched a major offensive on the southwestern front

In Revolutionary Petrograd, workers, soldiers and sailors were restless and went out into the streets during the «July Crisis» (3/16- 7/20 July) to disperse the Provisional Government and hand power over to the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks hesitated between supporting the demonstrations and encouraging workers and soldiers to wait for a more opportune time to take power. The Mensheviks and SRs opposed the passage of power to the Soviets and supported the repression of the militants. A number of Bolshevik leaders were arrested. It looked for a few weeks like Kerensky had taken the upper hand. In fact, his upper hand was only an illusion.

Russian army officers and elements of the tsarist political and economic elite planned a coup d’état against the Provisional Government if it failed to follow through on the repression of the Bolsheviks and militant workers, soldiers and sailors. The planning for the coup d’état was an open secret. Groups of businessmen and bankers, landowners and officers sought to form an alliance to establish a dictatorship to eliminate the Soviets, crush the revolutionary masses and keep Russia in the war. Some elements sought to establish the dictatorship with the backing of the Provisional Government and even the Petrograd Soviet; others did not care a pin about such support. From the early days of the revolution Kerensky himself had openly discussed the establishment of a dictatorship with himself as strongman. His idea was to break the power of the Soviets and to re-impose strict military discipline in order to crush mutinous soldiers. This was always the formula to break the revolutionary movement. As the tsarist elites put it, in a convenient, self-interested formulation, the choice was between the country and the revolution.

Becoming prime minister on 8/21 July Kerensky and his closest associates sought the collaboration of the army high command without which it would be impossible to establish the dictatorship. The general officer who rose quickly to the top as a candidate to lead a coup d’état against Petrograd was General Lavr G. Kornilov. One colleague said he had «a lion’s heart and the brains of a sheep». He was brave without a doubt but not stupid being a polyglot and in his younger days an explorer in Central Asia. Another colleague said that Kornilov was an «absolute ignoramus in politics» and this appears to have been true. In July and August 1917 he had meetings with Kerensky and his closest collaborators to establish the terms of an agreement to set up a dictatorship, to crush militant soldiers and sailors in the capital and to re-impose military discipline in the armies using machine guns if necessary.

One colleague said General Lavr G. Kornilov had «a lion’s heart and the brains of a sheep»

The only big question which could not be resolved was who would be dictator, Kerensky or Kornilov? Kerensky worried about controlling Kornilov; while Kornilov worried about Kerensky sticking to a firm programme of repression. At one point Kerensky claimed to want to take a middle road, but in fact he was deluding his interlocutors. His programme differed little from Kornilov’s, and if implemented, would have led to the destruction of the revolution in all but name.

French diplomats reported the troubles between Kerensky and Kornilov and did not think they could come to terms. A crisis was brewing, they advised: the «bourgeois» elite and officers’ groups were lining up behind Kornilov. That would not be enough to carry him, however, for he could expect to meet a «furious resistance» of the revolutionary masses. They were always the problem. Another French report advised that the Bolsheviks were gaining in popularity which underlined the urgency for government action against militants in Petrograd. The idea was to pre-empt surging Bolshevik popular support.

What happened next between Kerensky and Kornilov was essentially a failing out amongst thieves, each misconstruing the intentions of the other. This confusion led in the very last days of August (o.s.) to a rupture of relations and an attempt by Kornilov to seize control in Petrograd. Amongst French officers serving in Russia, there were cautious expectations that Kornilov might win. The Provisional Government, opined the chief of the French military mission, «is discouraged, irresolute, weak, and a slave of the extreme parties of the left». The latter comment about a «slave» of the Petrograd Soviet in effect was a slur and an expression of contempt. The revolution had to be stopped to keep Russia in the war. That much was clear.

Confusion led in the very last days of August (o.s.) to a rupture of relations and an attempt by Kornilov to seize control in Petrograd

«We are in the midst of a coup d’état», reported a French brigadier: «I have to say that Kerensky himself had the idea to launch a coup d’état in his own interests. He wants to get rid of the Soviets. He came to agreement with Kornilov. At the last moment he lost his nerve and panicked. He then made accusations against Kornilov, and that is how everything started…»

In Paris there also were hopes that Kornilov would be victorious. For the French government, Russia’s «well-being» was calculated in terms of «fulfilling its obligations to the allies» and staying in the war. «French public opinion is unanimous», said Quai d’Orsay official Pierre de Margerie, «in hoping that a regime of order and authority wins out in Russia… Everyone… from the first day wished instinctively for the success of General Kornilov…» Margerie’s only concern was that the coup d’état appeared premature and poorly organised. «To speak like Kornilov», Margerie concluded, «may God bless Russia. It desperately needs divine intervention for it appears to have been abandoned by Providence».

Pierre de Margerie, a French diplomat

Officers of the British military mission held views similar to those of their French counterparts. Except that while the French were relatively prudent in their relations with Kornilov and other Russian officers, the chief of the British mission, General Sir Charles Barter, appears to have gone beyond his instructions from London. His nominal subordinate, Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, who was in charge of an armoured car squadron, planned to put his armoured cars at the disposal of Kornilov with whom he was in direct contact. Senior officers of the British military mission were thus compromised in the abortive coup d’état. Their activities became news trumpeted in the Bolshevik press.

Defences were prepared in the capital: workers were armed, trenches dug and barricades erected

It was therefore not Providence which had abandoned Russia, as Margerie saw it, but the revolutionary masses who united to oppose Kornilov’s attempted coup d’état. In a remarkable demonstration of spontaneous, effective resistance, workers, soldiers and sailors halted Kornilov’s forces on railway sidings and in stations on the approaches to Petrograd. Defences were prepared in the capital: workers were armed, trenches dug and barricades erected. Agitators descended en masse upon Kornilov’s troops and either brought them over to the side of the revolution or obtained their neutrality. As for the Bolsheviks, Lenin was still in hiding in Finland as a consequence of the «July crisis»; other Bolsheviks remained in prison, though they began to be released as the emergency passed. Lenin gave his belated advice from Finland, but the revolutionary masses did not need the Bolsheviks and still less the Mensheviks and SRs to tell them how to organise the defence of «Red Peter» against Kornilov. What extraordinary Russians, these men and women, who rose as one to defend their revolution!

Kerensky was compelled to turn to the very elements he had hoped to crush in order to save his own skin. Even as arms were distributed to workers, Kerensky tried to stop it. As soon as the emergency had passed, he reverted to his plans to organise a dictatorship in coalition with right wing «socialists» and members of the former tsarist «liberal» elite. Kerensky had learned nothing from the popular defence of the capital. His political reputation was ruined though it never amounted to much outside the groups which wanted to end the revolution. The Provisional Government had no popular support, representing as it did, only the former tsarist elite and milquetoast socialists. The SRs and Mensheviks rapidly lost their constituencies. The Bolsheviks won a first majority in the Petrograd Soviet on the evening of 31 August/1 September (o.s.). SR and Menshevik deputies were being recalled and replaced by workers and soldiers more disposed to support the Bolsheviks. On 25 September (o.s.) the Bolsheviks formed a narrow majority in the presidium of the Petrograd Soviet (4 to 3), and Lev Davidovich Trotsky became its chair for the second time, the first having been during the revolution of 1905. When he went to the podium to preside over the meeting of the Soviet, delegates greeted him with tumultuous applause.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky

The writing was on the wall. Kerensky’s days were numbered. Kornilov and other officers were arrested. «As to the war with Germany», said one French report, «no one wanted to hear any more about it. They [the Provisional Government] continue it [the war] because they don’t have the strength to do otherwise…». No one knew then how the revolution would develop or how to end the war, but if Kerensky’s days were numbered, so were those of the Provisional Government.

Revolutionaries of all stripes, including Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), rushed to organise Soviets (literally «councils»), tumultuous democratic assemblies of soldiers, workers and peasants, but they were reluctant to take all governmental power into their own hands. These socialists could endlessly debate this or that point of revolutionary theory, but actual governing was another matter where revolutionary principles were often not much help. So the Petrograd Soviet, at first dominated by confused Mensheviks and SRs, allowed the creation of a so-called Provisional Government composed of members of the former tsarist elite and its «liberal» political parties. These men were anything but revolutionaries, and had nothing in common with the soldiers and workers who had compelled the abdication of the tsar. In fact, the Provisional Government desired not to consolidate or deepen the revolution, but to bring it to a halt. Where peasant-soldiers demanded an end to the war and redistribution of agricultural lands, the Provisional Government proposed a continuation of the war and a reaffirmation of tsarist war aims. As for land redistribution, it could wait until sometime in the future. Peasants, who were anything but stupid, knew what that meant. They had been waiting for more than fifty years for some elemental justice from the tsarist aristocracy. For them, waiting was a fool’s game which they were no longer willing to play.

Peasants had been waiting for more than fifty years for some elemental justice from the tsarist aristocracy

So you can see that a conflict was bound to occur between the Soviets, which spread across the country, and a Provisional Government, which represented the former tsarist rural and urban elites. The former wanted to secure the gains of the revolution; the latter, to stop the revolution in its tracks. The Provisional Government was the cork in the bottle trying to plug the revolutionary movement. It was only a matter of time before revolutionary pressures blew the cork out of the bottle.

The left wing of the socialist movement, the Bolsheviks, quickly gained their bearings with the help of their leader Vladimir Lenin, who returned from exile in April. Their objective was to win the support of the revolutionary masses, especially soldiers and workers, which they did during the spring and summer of 1917.

Aleksandr F. Kerensky, who became war minister, hoped to re-establish military discipline, send soldiers back to the front and keep Russia in the war

A first governmental crisis occurred in May when the foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, resigned after having tried to maintain tsarist war aims and to keep Russia in the war. Five Mensheviks and SRs then entered the Provisional Government to give it legitimacy vis-à-vis the revolutionary masses who were growing impatient with a government that did not represent their interests, six socialist ministers or not (including Aleksandr F. Kerensky). The cork was still in the bottle and the stall was still on. Representatives of the former tsarist elite continued to control the Provisional Government and the would-be dictator and faux socialist, Kerensky, became war minister. He hoped to re-establish military discipline, send soldiers back to the front and keep Russia in the war. Basically, this was a formula for halting the revolution. The western Allies, especially France and Britain, supported these intentions, and their diplomatic and military agents kept in close touch with the Russian high command.

Kerensky went to the front to drum up support for a summer offensive, with French and British blessings, but not much optimism. Soldiers were mostly peasants and they made it plain even to their senior officers that they did not care a pin about the Provisional Government or any doubtful promises about land reform in the future. The land is being redistributed now, they said, and we don’t want to be killed before getting our share. Already a tacit truce existed in numerous places along the front. Infantry soldiers threatened to bayonet any artillerymen who fired on the enemy. Officers were lynched with or without any pretext. In one case, two companies of soldiers returning to the front asked to speak to their commanding officer. He came out to meet them, but before finishing the traditional greeting to his men was shot in the head. The soldiers then marched off to the front as though nothing had happened. An investigation led nowhere, and the day of the general’s funeral, the battalion chosen to present arms, refused to march. Such incidents were commonplace during that summer of 1917. Even Russian officers admitted that there was an abyss between themselves and their men. Many still came from the rural landed elite who often treated their soldiers as abusively as they did peasants on their estates.

French officers attached to the Russian high command considered a separate peace to be inevitable. In the countryside, peasants were taking matters into their own hands. «Anarchy», according to one French officer, was spreading «like an epidemic». No sooner had it burned out in one area, then it erupted in another.

The «Russian people», avowed one French diplomat, «have an extraordinary capacity for anarchy».

A French officer opined that «the Russians have less good sense and less patriotism than us».

«Rather more», any Bolshevik would have replied sarcastically, laughing at such «bourgeois», ethnocentric ideas.

Lenin, who almost no one had heard of before he returned to Russia, became the Entente’s bête noire. He was the evil genius behind the burgeoning «anarchy». His programme was simple and effective: an end to the war and the immediate redistribution of land to the peasantry. The war, Lenin told his followers, serves only the interests of capitalist elites, and you are their cannon fodder!

One French officer noted that Lenin spoke nightly to ever increasing crowds at the former residence of the ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaya, which became Bolshevik headquarters. «One would have thought», the officer remarked, «that having returned to Russia across Germany, he [Lenin] would have been immediately discredited». But no, «on the contrary», he is gaining a wider hearing. He does not have everyone with him yet, said this officer, as though trying to come up with something positive for his report to Paris.

Lenin spoke nightly to ever increasing crowds at the former residence of the ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaya, which became Bolshevik headquarters

If you were an officer in the French military mission in Russia in 1917, the situation offered little grounds for optimism. Soldiers and workers in Petrograd were becoming more and more militant. The Bolsheviks were not quite sure what to do. Lenin was cautious, uncertain if the time had come to move against the Provisional Government. He tried to hold back the militants in Petrograd until the provinces and front-line army units had caught up with them. «Be patient», he said, «time is on our side». It almost seemed as if the Bolsheviks were running after the revolutionary masses in order to take direction of their movement. Caution was a good idea in the volatile situation in Petrograd, but if you did not keep up, your followers might leave you behind. The Bolsheviks discouraged one potentially dangerous street demonstration in June, but equivocated with regard to another in mid-July which led to some street fighting in the capital.

The Bolsheviks discouraged one potentially dangerous street demonstration in June, but equivocated with regard to another in mid-July which led to some street fighting in the capital

Mensheviks and SRs tried to calm down angry soldiers, blaming everything on the Bolsheviks, accused of being «anarchists» and «German agents». Be reasonable was the general line, and trust the Provisional Government which in fact was falling apart. «Take power, you son-of-a-bitch», responded one angry worker, «when it’s given to you». To militant workers and soldiers it was increasingly obvious that only the Bolsheviks had the will to do so.

The Provisional Government momentarily gained the upper hand: it raided Bolshevik headquarters at the Kshesinskaya mansion, shut down the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda and incarcerated a number of Bolshevik leaders. Even casual dissent could lead to arrest. Kerensky and his associates claimed to be «saving the revolution», but in fact the opposite was true. How could it be otherwise, since Kerensky had allied himself with the «liberal» parties of the former tsarist elite?

On 1 July, just before the disorders in Petrograd, the offensive was launched on the southwestern front facing the Austrian army

In the meantime Kerensky had finally got the offensive he wanted. Success would give the Provisional Government credibility and allow it to put down indiscipline in the army and especially in the Petrograd garrison. That was the plan, ill-conceived, as it turned out. On 1 July, just before the disorders in Petrograd, the offensive was launched on the southwestern front facing the Austrian army. After some initial successes, Austrian resistance stiffened and the German army intervened to throw back Russian forces. The offensive became a fiasco, and the Russian retreat did not stop until German forces were exhausted and could advance no more, some 250 kilometres behind the original Russian lines. A French report indicated that the Germans had let one Russian regiment withdraw, rifles hitched over shoulders, while German units followed a few hundred metres behind. The Russian army was played out, and Kerensky’s days, numbered, according to French officers, «because his ideas went against those of the masses». According to General Maurice Janin, head of the French Military Mission, «if the enemy here decides to undertake serious operations, it will mean the collapse [of Russian resistance]».

In the aftermath of the failed offensive, the credibility of most Mensheviks and SRs also suffered, because of their coalition politics with the former tsarist elite. They, too, were going against the popular will, and were more and more perceived as has-beens and dupes. The Provisional Government—that rotten, dried out cork in the bottle—could no longer hold back the growing forces of popular revolution.

Tsarist officers were reported to be at the end of their patience. Why fight for a government, they said, that «wants to take our lands»

There remained those who would try. The tsarist officer corps, still intact and very angry, began to talk openly of a coup d’état against the Soviets. French officers reported the first rumours in early June well before the July offensive. «Moscow is at the head of the movement… money is not lacking», one report advised: «They say that a lot of French and British money has been given for the counter-revolution. The big banks have also committed themselves to a large degree». The planned offensive is «the last card to play». If it doesn’t work, another report indicated, «the only solution» would be «a military coup d’état» in order «to re-establish discipline» in the army. To this end Russian officers were willing to work with the Provisional Government, but if necessary, in spite of it.

«Personally», reported one French officer, «I do not see the salvation of the army and the country except in a vast Cossack movement which will sweep away all the bad elements… and re-establish order by force if necessary…».

«They often say», remarked another French officer, «that ‘the Cossacks have always saved Russia.’ They like coups, and they like discipline and order. It’s time to turn them loose at a full gallop».

Tsarist officers were reported to be at the end of their patience. Why fight for a government, they said, that «wants to take our lands». Indeed, some officers, said one French report, were waiting for the German army «to restore order in the country».

The French government had to put down its own mutinies after a senseless spring offensive against German trenches. «Grave and painful incidents» had occurred, according to the government in Paris, which had required the rapid application of the death penalty, imprisonment and the purging of affected military units. Repression was also directed against subversive civilian elements seeking «to encourage indiscipline in the army». The government in Paris took heart when Italian authorities used armoured cars and cavalry to crush a mutiny in the Italian army. Thirty-one mutineers were shot. Armoured cars were lined up behind the firing squads «to force obedience if necessary». If only the Russian high command could have taken similar measures; it certainly thought of doing so. Russian soldiers and sailors, however, were far beyond the control of the officer corps, and any attempted repression would have provoked armed resistance.

The Bolsheviks suffered only a temporary setback in July. The failed Kerensky offensive undermined any advantage, which the Provisional Government had gained as a result of the abortive street demonstrations in Petrograd. Russian officers were overheard openly discussing a «counter-revolutionary» coup d’état to put down the Bolsheviks and the soldiers and sailors who supported them. A showdown was imminent, but who knew how it would turn out?

Alexander Kerensky

Kerensky was an ambitious man, and disregarded the Soviet decision against socialists serving in the new cabinet. If the Petrograd workers became too aggressive, Kerensky boasted to a colleague, he would not hesitate to establish a dictatorship. «I’ll arrest the agitators and crush any disorders». Kerensky is the St Just of the Russian Revolution, the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue reported to Paris at the end of March 1917, the man who would re-impose strict discipline in the army and send it back to the front. «He is the real head of the Provisional Government», Paléologue wrote in a subsequent report. In March 1917 Kerensky was already the great hope of Allied diplomats in the Russian capital.

Socialists from the Petrograd Soviet declined to become members of the new government because they did not want to damage their standing with the revolutionary masses by joining an essentially centre-right cabinet, which represented only the tsarist rural and urban elites. Nor did socialists feel confident enough to dispense with Duma liberal politicians and to govern directly through the Petrograd Soviet. So they made a compromise which essentially accorded «limited support» to the Provisional Government.

This was the beginning of the period of so-called «dual power». The Petrograd Soviet would not take power directly, but in effect would govern indirectly, acting as a sentinel of the revolutionary masses and «usurping» government authority, as western diplomats saw it. Dual power was a formula for chaos especially since the Provisional Government represented  traditional tsarist elites, and the Soviets, the revolutionary masses. In fact, the Provisional Government had no popular base at all. Not even the Imperial Duma could buttress it, Ambassador Paléologue reported, for the Duma «had disappeared». The Petrograd Soviet is now «the parliament of all Russia». Hence, if there was «dual power» in Russia, it tilted heavily to the side of the new Soviets.

The two big issues in the spring of 1917 were peace and land redistribution. The Provisional Government was for a continuation of the war until victory and postponement of land redistribution until the election of a Constituent Assembly, which could mean postponement until the calendes grecques. The Petrograd Soviet, composed mostly of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks, would support the war for the time being, but favoured a negotiated peace without annexations and without indemnities. They were also impatient for land reform. They could not be otherwise without losing the support of their revolutionary constituencies. These first Soviet deputies were woolly-minded «moderate» socialists who knew what they wanted but not how to get it.

Leon Trotsky

At the outset of the revolution, the Bolsheviks were scattered to the four corners of globe. Among others, V. I. Lenin was in Switzerland, L. D. Trotsky and N. I. Bukharin were in New York City, and I. V. Stalin, Ya. M. Sverdlov and L. B. Kamenev, in Siberia in exile near the Arctic Circle. Bolshevik leaders at liberty in Petrograd and Moscow were few and far between. As soon as the tsar abdicated, the jails were opened, and exiled revolutionaries of whatever allegiance, wherever they were, hastened to make their way back to Russia. Stalin and others from Siberia were the first to arrive in Petrograd.

Trotsky booked passage home on a steamer from New York, but was arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Held in a POW camp, he talked up revolution to German prisoners of war. «He is a man holding extremely strong views and of most powerful personality» observed one Canadian official: «his personality being such that after only a few days stay here he was by far the most popular man in the whole Camp with the German Prisoners of War, two-thirds of whom are Socialists». Canadian authorities therefore thought it best to get rid of him and sent Trotsky on his way.

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin was provided with a «sealed train» and safe passage to cross Germany to get back to Russia via Sweden. «Lanine (sic), the head of the Russian anarchist community in Zurich and thirty or so other Russian revolutionaries», reported the French ambassador in Berne, had left for home on 30 March/12 April. It did not take long for French diplomats to learn how to spell Lenin’s name. Ambassador Paléologue reported that he had returned on 3/16 April and that his first speech had been a failure, «totally alienating his audience». Some of Lenin’s colleagues thought he had become unbalanced, saying that February was only the beginning of the revolution and that the revolutionary masses could not stop halfway without taking power into their own hands. Conditional support for the Provisional Government was like shooting oneself in the foot. According to the French military attaché, Lenin treated the SRs and Mensheviks as «rotten» detritus of the revolutionary movement. No one could hurl invective as effectively as Lenin. But some of his colleagues threw it back at him, claiming he had lost his reason and become a «raving anarchist».

Believe me, Lenin was no anarchist. If the Petrograd Soviet supported the Provisional Government however cautiously, it would dig its own grave and halt the revolution in its tracks. Lenin was right and not the  least bit mad, for this is exactly what people like Kerensky and Milyukov had in mind. He quickly shook the cobwebs out of the heads of his Bolshevik colleagues, winning majorities for his ideas in party conferences in April.

Russia was in chaos, and the common people responsible for the February Revolution, would not wait long for action on their agenda of land and peace

Lenin soon gained a wider audience amongst workers and soldiers in Petrograd. British diplomats often saw him or one of his colleagues addressing revolutionary crowds not far from the British embassy. Russia was in chaos, and the menu peuple, the common people responsible for the February Revolution, would not wait long for action on their agenda of land and peace. We have to support the Provisional Government, Paléologue wrote to Paris in early April, for otherwise, if it disappears, we face «a leap into the unknown». «The situation of the Provisional Government is critical», he wrote a day later. The French ambassador recognised that the Provisional Government could gain no popular support by standing against Land and Peace. In fact, the two issues were linked. Russian soldiers, who were mostly peasants, made it plain to anyone who would listen that they did not care a pin about the Provisional Government or any constituent assembly to decide the land question. They were determined to benefit from immediate redistribution of lands and did not want to be killed beforehand.

«The total number of desertions [from the army]», reported General Maurice Janin, head of the French Military Mission, «is enormous… I have calculated a number so high (more than one million) that I do not dare to guarantee it».

General Maurice Janin

The Provisional Government could never take the upper hand against the Petrograd Soviet in spite of Kerensky’s private boasting of a dictatorship. Whether it was Paléologue or General Janin, the message was the same. The Provisional Government had no authority. There were food shortages in Petrograd and disorders and fights in front of bakeries and food shops as people tried to obtain provisions. The army was mutinous. Officers have no authority, Paléologue reported, and are repeatedly humiliated and insulted. «The streets are full of soldiers looking for trouble… rifles slung over their shoulders». They commandeer tramways and trains, and no one can control them because the police have been «massacred, jailed or dispersed». Into this situation Lenin has now waded, reported Paléologue: he is encouraging the peasants to push for an immediate redistribution of the land. «No argument can be more persuasive in the eyes of a Russian soldier».

Pavel Milyukov

The Foreign Minister Milyukov did not see matters with the same lucidity as the French ambassador. Milyukov wanted to keep Russia in the war and send soldiers back to the front where they would be made to fight the Germans and to forget about the revolution. This was the Allied hope as well, at least in Allied capitals. With all the blood that had been spilled on the western front, there could be no question of a negotiated peace and the renunciation of «programmes of conquest». The French high command was planning a new spring offensive and directed General Janin to obtain Russian consent for an offensive in the east to distract the Germans. Clearly, the generals in Paris had no clue what was going on in Russia, in spite of Janin’s and Paléologue’s best efforts to enlighten them. As it turned out, the French offensive proved a catastrophe, prompting widespread mutinies in the French army and giving the French high command a strong taste of what their Russian counterparts were facing.

It was not for nothing that on 14/27 March the Petrograd Soviet issued a manifesto calling for an end to the war based on no annexations and no indemnities. For Milyukov and his «liberal» colleagues, the Soviet call for negotiations to end the war could not be left unchallenged, however weak the position of the Provisional Government. Milyukov issued a statement for the press saying that Russia would continue to fight for Ukrainian territories under Austro-Hungarian suzerainty and for Constantinople and the Straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles.

It was not for nothing that on 14/27 March the Petrograd Soviet issued a manifesto calling for an end to the war based on no annexations and no indemnities

«No, Russia would not fight for conquest,» came the Petrograd Soviet’s reply. Nothing could have more incensed even the milquetoast socialists in the capital. During the «April Crisis» soldiers and workers went back into the streets. Even the Bolsheviks had to run to catch up with the revolutionary masses in Petrograd. The Soviet’s preoccupation with peace irritated Paléologue who suggested that the flagging Russians, should they exit the war, could cover the costs of an eventual Allied victory.

The Provisional Government backed down against the Petrograd Soviet, and Milyukov resigned in mid-May. Six SRs and Mensheviks entered the cabinet to try to give the Provisional Government a legitimacy it had heretofore lacked. In the end their presence in the government could not give it a democratic patina for Prince Lvov still headed the cabinet along with eight other so-called liberals. Kerensky, the potential dictator, became minister for war. It was the Petrograd Soviet and other Soviets across the country—tumultuous, boisterous democratic assemblies of soldiers, workers and peasants—who represented the long repressed democratic instincts of the Russian people. It was not the defunct Imperial Duma, or its liberal debris taking portfolios in the Provisional Government, which could do that, as events in Petrograd and elsewhere in Russia would soon demonstrate.