Dimitri’s Reviews > The Russian Revolution 1899 - 1919. > Status Update

[2] Afterwards no one could any longer believe that Lenin's men could be talked into abandoning power. Since there was no effective armed opposition by socialist intelligentsia to them in the central regions of Russia, common sense dictated that the Bolsheviks could use brutality with impunity. The machine gun became for them the principal instrument of political persuasion. From the knowledge gained on January 5.

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 5.1.18 met with surprising indifference in Petrograd. There was none of the fury which in 1789 had greeted rumors that Louis XVI intended to dissolve the Parliament, precipitating the assault on the Bastille. After a year of anarchy, the Russians were exhausted. They yearned for peace & order no matter how purchased. The Bolsheviks had gambled on that mood and won.

(After the failed july putsch) "All power to the Soviets" had lost its validity. The new slogan called for the liquidation of Kerensky's "miltary dictatorship". This was the task of the Bolshevik party, rallying itself behind all anti counterrevolutionary groups headed by the urban proletariat & supported by the poor peasantry.

Nicolas like Louis XVI tought he was facing a rebellion not a revolution. He believed disorder could be quelled by force.
The Duma saw only themselves as capable of restoring order, but their political consessions had the opposite effect of transforming by 1 March the mutiny into a national contest between Duma & Petrograd Soviet.. with an irrelevant Tsar.

(Alltough) February Revolt is often depicted as a worker revolt it's important to emphasise that it was first & foremost a mutiny of peasant soldiers whom the authorities had billeted in overcrowded facilities in the Empire capital city. LIke kindling wood near a powder keg, these reservists born in the 1880s carried in their bones 3 centuries of serfdom, obeying only as long as there was mandatory punishment.

Time was running out in late '16: the opposition felt they were racing against the clock, the question was no longer if but when and IN WHAT FORM a revolution would occur, from above as a coup d'état directed by themselves or from below as a spontaneous and uncontrollable mass revolt.

Thus in the midst of war a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the semi patrimonal state, resembling the vigorous growing of saplings in the shade of an old decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank in government institutions & the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptom of a silent revolution, effectively to meet actual needs instead of utopian visions.

The court and its bureaucracy both civilian and military were determined not to allow "society" to profit from the war to enhance its political influence. Deep in their hearts the entourage continued to regard Russia as the dynasty's private domain & to treat every manifestation of patriotic concern on the part of the population as "meddling".

The socialists thus entered the First & Second Duma for the explicit purpose of sabotaging legislative work & disseminating revolutionary propaganda under the protection of parliamentary immunity. A new electoral law favored the propertied classes by using assets rather than legal status as the criterion of franchise, in the Russian tradition of integrating every independent institution into the state system.

*one of the misleading commonplaces in [Communist historiography] is that Stolypin reforms were meant to promote a class of Kulaks. They had the opposite purpose, to give enterprising peasants an opportunity to enrich themselves by productive work rather than by usury & exploitation.

"How succesful were his reforms?" Here Orlando Figes & other post-Soviet authors might be less undecided....