In tribute to that moment in history, Liberation reproduces Lenins own article on the fourth anniversary of the revolution. We also carry some excerpts from October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, (Verso 2017) a recent retelling of the story of the revolution by British writer China Miéville, and from some other sources, to highlight some of the remarkable and less recognized aspects of the revolution.
A few words of introduction are called for. Russia in 1917 followed the Julian calendar which is 13 days behind the modern Gregorian calendar. This is why the October Revolution of October 25 1917 is now called the November Revolution
My Champion Is The People
On 17 March Delo naroda, the SR newspaper, told its readers that they had been lied to, that not only were fairy stories real but that they were living through one. Once upon a time, it continued, there lived a huge old dragon, which devoured the best and bravest citizens in the haze of madness and power. But a valiant hero had appeared, a collective hero. My champion, wrote Delo naroda, is the people. The hour has come for the beasts end, The old dragon will coil up and die.�(October)
The story of the Russian Revolution is a lesson in the speed with which history can move and epochs can change. The period after 1907 was a period of setback and despondency for the revolutionary Left in Russia; its leaders forced into exile, its membership plummeting. And yet within a decade, things changed rapidly. In March 1917, a massive popular upsurge overthrew the Tsar and established a Provisional Government headed by the then immensely popular Kerensky. Edward Dune, a young teenager in Moscow, described how most of the people in the massive crowd of demonstrators that morning had been praying for the good health of the imperial family. Now they were shouting, Down with the tsar� and not disguising their joyful contempt.� (Miéville, October)
The new Government enjoyed plenty of popular support to begin with. But the March 1917 moment had also given birth to another centre of democratic power: From the streets, meanwhile, as this continued, had arisen another kind of control. Some of the insurgents recalled those councils of 1905, those soviets. Activists and streetcorner agitators had already begun to call for their return, in leaflets, in boisterous voices from the crowds.�
(October) And soon after, the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies was born. The Soviet reflected a broad spectrum of the 1917 Russian Left. Between March and November, again, history moved fast. As disillusionment with and anger against the Provisional Government grew among people, the demand grew that the Soviet directly take power. But within the Soviet, amongst the Russian Left, opinion was divided about taking power. The Soviet leadership hesitated to take power, holding on to the notion that the democratic revolution needed an alliance with the bourgeoisie and bourgeois leadership, rather than exclusively proletarian leadership which must wait for a future stage of socialist revolution. Meanwhile, in the interim, the Bolsheviks and Lenin in particular were branded as traitors to Russia, and there was a (partially successful) attempt to whip up some national chauvinist sentiments against them. But as the popular mood in favour of Bread, Peace, and Land grew, the Bolshevik Partys consistency on these questions paid off, and support for it grew exponentially, culminating in the proletarian revolution of November 1917.
The point to be underlined here is the relationship between the people and the revolutionary party. The proletarian revolution did not take place out of some subjective wish of the Bolshevik leadership it was not a coup planned and achieved by Lenin and his party. The peoples determination to win Bread, Peace, and Land to liberate themselves not only from the yoke of the Tsar but from oppression in factories and fields, to end a hated war, to achieve human dignity as workers, as women, as oppressed nationalities and rank-and-file soldiers found expression first in the March revolution. But when the Provisional Government thanks to its very nature betrayed those goals, the people began to wish to take power directly into their own hands and saw in the Bolshevik party the means, the organized force, and the vision to do so.
Workers Assert Democracy and Dignity
What did the revolution mean to Russias workers?
In the months between March and November 1917, workers had already begun to experience and assert direct democracy in the Soviets taking decisions without waiting for the Provisional Governments opinion or approval. Miéville describes it this way: in Petrograd, the Soviet agreed with the factory owners that long-demanded eight-hour day, as well as the principle of worker-elected factory committees and a system of industrial arbitration. Unpopular foremen were shoved in wheelbarrows and tipped into nearby canals. When the Moscow bosses resisted the eight-hour day, on 18 March the Moscow Soviet, recognising what workers were instituting as a fait accompli, simply decreed it, bypassing the Provisional Government. And their decree stood.�
And the workers concerns were not just for wages and working hours they asserted, above all, a newfound sense of human dignity. In the wake of the March revolution, Demonstrations voiced existential demands, even at the expense of income. No tips taken here, said the signs on restaurant walls. Petrograd waiters struck for dignity. They marched in their best clothes under banners denouncing the indignity of tipping, the stench of noblesse oblige. They demanded respect for waiters as human beings.� (Miéville, October)
Take Power When It's Given To You!
Onwards from 16 July 1917, postal workers, and soldiers being recalled to the war were gathering on the streets of Petrograd as a seething, angry mass.� Even as the demonstrations surged on to the streets, attempts by Soviet leaders to calm them down failed. The massive demonstration converged on the headquarters of the Soviet on 17 July, shouting their demand: all power to the soviets.� The Soviet leadership (hesitant to take power and instead determined to keep supporting the Provisional Government) sent out one of their most popular and well-liked leaders, Chernov, to speak to the demonstrators and calm them down. A big worker pushed his way through and came up close and shook his fist in Chernovs face. Take power, you son of a bitch, he bellowed, in one of most famous phrases of 1917, when its given to you� (Miéville, October)
Peasants' Movements
The March revolution ripened into November and the growing assertion of the peasantry was one of the foremost signs of this maturing revolution. In the Volga region, rural communes began disputing with landowners over rent and rights to the commons. Gangs of peasants were increasingly wont to make their way into private woods with axes and saws and fell the estates trees.� In the north-west districts, peasants simply began to mow the gentrys meadows for their own use, paying only the prices they reckoned were fair for seed. That sense of fairness was crucial. Certainly there were moments of crude class rage and cruelty. But the actions of village communes against landlords were often scrupulously articulated in terms of a moral economy of justice.�
From all over Russia, illiterate peasants got scribes to write letters to the Soviet, to the Government, to the various Left parties, experiencing the thrill of self-expression. They wrote demanding that feudal lands, lands belonging to monasteries, churches and estate owners must be surrendered to the people without compensation.� Some wrote demanding socialist newspapers, others lamented their lack of education and asked for books; others sent meager amounts of money for the revolution. The Rakalovsk peasants sent a letter saying, We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery - we want space and light.�
Support for the Bolsheviks grew among the poor peasants. The First All-Russian Congress of Peasants Soviets took place in Petrograd in May. Reflecting the overlap between peasantry and soldiery, close to half the 1,200 accredited delegates� were soldiers from the front. Despite the Bolsheviks tiny presence a minuscule group of nine, accompanied by a caucus of fourteen non-party delegates who tended to vote with them their influence was growing. This was, in particular, because of their harder, more coherent and clearly expressed positions on the two key questions of war and land, as laid out in an open letter from Lenin to the Congresshe addressed the delegates in person, hammering home his support for the poorest peasants and demanding the redistribution of land.�
Soldiers Sick And Tired Of War, Impatient For Peace
In 2014, Vladimir Putin addressed a youth camp, telling them, Regardless of how hurtful it might be to hear this, perhaps even to some of this audience, people who hold leftist views, but in the first world war, the Bolsheviks wished to see their fatherland defeated. While heroic Russian soldiers and officers shed their blood at the front, some were shaking Russia from within. They shook it to the point that Russia as a state collapsed and declared itself defeated by a country that had lost the war. This was a complete betrayal of the national interest�
Putin is attempting to rewrite history. He knows that Lenin is still viewed as a positive figure by a majority of Russians and he is trying to change that perception. (A poll conducted by the Levada Center in May 2013 found that 40 percent of Russians had a somewhat positive� view of Lenin; 15 percent had a positive� view of Lenin; 18 percent had a somewhat negative� view of him; 16 percent were undecided and 1 percent did not know who he was.
No sentinel, policemen, pickets,
as if there never had been any guards or guns . . . .
Its like telling a starving man, Eat!
And him replying. Im eating! with a smile
From the poem Russian Revolution� ( Mikhail Kuzmin, 1917)
Putins version of history tries to erase the fact that way back in 1917 too, there were many attempts to portray the Bolsheviks as traitors to the fatherland and these proved to be in vain, because the growing disgust for World War I among the poor peasants, soldiers, and women overwhelmed any chauvinist sentiments.
In 1915, at the Zimmerwald conference of the Second International, the right flank of the Mensheviks and SRs had claimed that Russias revolution would be pro-war rather than pacifist�. This social patriotism� patriotism of the social democrats effectively rendered the International defunct. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, revolutionary internationalism went together with a commitment to peace and a firm opposition to war.
Meanwhile, all across Europe, the terrible nature of modern warfare, experienced for the first time in World War I, was giving birth to anti-war sentiment even amongst soldiers in the trenches. The English poet Wilfred Owen wrote in 1918, that his poetry was not about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power� - Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.� An entire generation of English war poets�, writing straight from the trenches, described the sheer horror and inhumanity of war; defying jingoistic war-mongering by civilians, these soldier-poets insisted on recognising enemy� soldiers as humans, even as friends.
In Russia, widespread anti-war sentiment among the peasantry and soldiers was a huge factor spurring the March and November revolutions. October quotes a grassroots soldiers song expressing deep-seated resentment among the military rank-and-file against the high-handedness of officers:
Sure wed like some tea
But give us with our tea
Some polite respect
And please have officers
Not slap us in the face.
During the March revolution, workers demonstrations met with displays of solidarity from contingents of soldiers. On one occasion, 2500 Vyborg mill-workers found themselves face to face with a dreaded Cossack contingent of horseback soldiers. Officers ordered the Cossacks to block the street and the soldiers obeyed: With their legendary equestrian skills, they lined up their horses into a living blockade breathing out mist. Again, in their very obedience was dissent. Ordered to be still, still they remained. They did not move as the boldest marchers crept closer. The Cossacks did not move as the strikers approached, their eyes widening as at last they understood the unspoken invitation in the preternatural immobility of mounts and men, as they ducked below the bellies of the motionless horses to continue their march. Rarely have skills imparted by reaction been so exquisitely deployed against it.� (October)
One of the most important documents of the March revolution was Order Number 1� a seven-point order drafted by the soldiers themselves: that decreed 1) election of soldiers committees in military units; 2)election of their representatives to the Soviet; 3)subordination of soldiers to the Soviet in political actions; 4)subordination of soldiers to the Military Commission in so far, again and crucially, as its orders did not deviate from the Soviets; 5)control of weapons by soldiers committees; 6)military discipline while on duty, with full civil rights at other times; 7) abolition of officers honorary titles and of officers use of derogatory terms for their men.� The poet Mikhail Kuzmin wrote that soldiers, like workers, demanded to be addressed with the respectful Citizen, a term spreading so widely it was as if it had been invented just now� (October)
A young Ukranian deserter Aleksandr Dneprovskiy, his his diary A Deserters Notes, bitterly described the patriotic press as tubs of printed slop poured over the heads of long-suffering humanity.� By June and July, mass desertions from the front were the order of the day: By the hot days of July, more than 50,000 deserters were in the city.As the war grew ever more hated, people remembered the Bolshevik partys unwavering opposition to it.� (October)
In spite of this widespread opposition to the war, attempts to brand the Bolsheviks as traitors� continued to have some traction. In July 1917, right wing papers published fake news� claiming that Lenin was a German spy. For a while, this provoked suspicion and even violence against the Bolsheviks among the people. Not only did the right wing feel emboldened to attack Bolsheviks A Pravda distributor was killed on the street� the rumours had an impact even on the Left, among workers. One party activist, E. Tarasova, came into a Vyborg factory she knew well, and instantly the women workers she had been speaking to days earlier screamed abuse, calling her a German spy, and hurled nuts and bolts at her, savagely cutting her hands and face. A Menshevik, they explained, shamefaced, when the panic abated, had been agitating against the Bolsheviks.�
From street to street with sovereign stride
- Whos there? Dont try to hide!
But its only the wind playing
with the red banner ahead
This is the last of you, old world
Soon well smash you to bits.
From The Twelve, Alexander Blok, translated by Robert Chandler
But the anti-war sentiment was so strong that such prejudice and frenzy against the Bolsheviks dissipated quickly. In August, a soldier, Kuchlavok, and his regiment sent a letter to the Soviet paper Izvestia asking They used to say that the war was foisted off on us by Nicholas. Nicholas has been overthrown, so who is foisting the war on us now?� Another group of soldiers sent the Soviet Executive Committee a letter asking, All of us ask you as our comrades to explain to us who these Bolsheviks are Our provisional government has come out very much against the Bolsheviks. But we dont find any fault with them.�
Women Dreaming of Equality, Bread, and Peace
The March revolution began on International Womens Day - 8 March 1917. The Left parties had organized meetings in factories to commemorate the day but they did not plan what happened next:
women began to pour from the factories onto the streets, shouting for bread. They marched through the citys most militant districts Vyborg, Liteiny, Rozhdestvenskii hollering to people gathered in the courtyards of the blocks, filling the wide streets in huge and growing numbers, rushing to the factories and calling on the men to join them.Abruptly, without anyone having planned it, almost 90,000 women and men were roaring on the streets of Petrograd. And now they were not shouting only for bread, but for an end to the war. An end to the reviled monarchy.They gathered in great crowds by barracks and army hospitals. There they struck up conversations with curious and friendly soldiers.� (October)
Tough sandpaper has polished all our words. Mikhail Kuzmin, the poet
The old sexist taunts and jeers lost their ability to intimidate and shame women: The heaving streets rang with revolutionary songs. Seeing workers from the Promet factory marching behind a woman, a Cossack officer jeered that they were following a baba, a hag. Arishina Kruglova, the Bolshevik in question, yelled back that she was an independent woman worker, a wife and sister of soldiers at the front. At her riposte, the troops who faced her lowered their guns.� (October)
During the March revolution, women also demanded the right to vote. The provisional government was hesitant to grant this demand. Many even in the revolutionary movement were hesitant, warning that, though they supported the equality of women in principle, concretely Russias women were politically backward, and their votes therefore risked hindering progress. On her return to the country on the 18th, Kollontai took those prejudices head-on. But wasnt it we women, with our grumbling about hunger, about the disorganisation in Russian life, about our poverty and the sufferings born of the war, who awakened a popular wrath? she demanded. The revolution, she pointed out, was born on International Womens Day, And didnt we women go first out to the streets in order to struggle with our brothers for freedom, and even if necessary to die for it?� (October)
On 1st April 1917, a massive procession of 40000 demonstrators (mostly women, but also many men) marched to demand womens right to vote. Note, they marched to the Soviet headquarters, not the Provincial Government! Their banners read: If the woman is a slave, there will be no freedom.� The demonstration forced the Soviet and Provincial Government leaders to draft a bill for universal adult suffrage, which was passed in July. Because the demonstration for the right to vote was a cross-class, broad spectrum one, it also included those who were pro-war.
But anti-war sentiment among women grew stronger and stronger. In early April, thousands of soldiers wives soldatki marched through the capital. These women had started the war disadvantaged, browbeaten and precarious, desperate for charity and inadequate state support. But the absence of their husbands could also mean an unexpected liberation. In February their demands for food, support, respect, had started to take on a radical bent. That trend continued. In Kherson province, one observer saw the soldatki forcing their way into homes and requisitioning any luxury they thought was undeserved. Not only did they flout laws and intimidate the authorities wherever they possibly could, there were also direct acts of violence. The state flour trader who did not want to offer them his goods at discounted price was beaten by a band of soldiers wives, and the pristav, the local police chief, who wanted to hurry to his help, escaped the same fate by a hairs breadth.� (October)
In May, Nina Gerd, the organiser of the Committee for the Relief of Soldiers Wives in the Vyborg district, a liberal but an old friend of Krupskaya, surrendered to her the organisation. Three years before, in the recollection of one philanthropist, the soldatki had been helpless creatures, blind moles, pleading with the authorities for help. Now, as she relinquished the committee, Gerd told Krupskaya that the women do not trust us; they are displeased with whatever we do; they have faith only in the Bolsheviks. Soon the soldatki were self-organising in their own soviets.��
National and Religious Minorities Seek Self-Determination
In the revolutionary climate that followed March and built up to November, national minorities (that in many cases also represented religious minorities) rose up against Russian chauvinism and began to pursue self-determination.
The predominantly Buddhist Buryat region of Siberia had more than once in subsequent years been rocked by Buryat revolts against discriminatory laws, and it had faced chauvinist cultural and political threats from the Russian regime. In 1905 a Buryat congress had called for rights to self-government and linguisticcultural freedom: it had been suppressed. Now, with the new wave of freedoms, came a new Congress in Irkutsk which voted in favour of independence.
Buoyed by the February revolution, and feeling it vindicated their own programme, members of the progressive, modernizing Muslim Jadidist movement set up an Islamic Council in Tashkent, Turkestan, and across the region, helping to dismantle the old government structures already undermined by the spread of local soviets and enhancing the role of the indigenous Muslim population. At the end of the month, the council convened the first Pan-Turkestan Muslim Congress in the city. Its 150 delegates recognised the Provisional Government, and unanimously called for substantial regional autonomy.� (October)
Along with the assertion of self-determination, there were also democratic stirrings within communities and oppressed nationalities. At the All-Russian Muslim Womens Congress held in May in Kazan in Tatarstan, fifty-nine women delegates met before an audience 300 strong, overwhelmingly female, to debate issues including the status of Sharia law, plural marriage, womens rights and the hijab. Contributions came from a range of political and religious positions, from socialists like Zulaykha Rahmanqulova and the twenty-two-year-old poet Zahida Burnasheva, as well as from the religious scholars Fatima Latifiya and Labiba Huseynova, an expert on Islamic law.Delegates debated whether Quranic injunctions were historically specific. Even many proponents of trans-historical orthodoxy interpreted the texts to insist, against conservative voices, that women had the right to attend mosque, or that polygyny was only permitted a crucial caveat if it was just; that is, with the permission of the first wife. Unsatisfied when the gathering approved that progressive-traditionalist position on plural marriage, the feminists and socialists mandated three of their number, including Burnasheva, to attend the All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow the next month, to put their alternative case against polygyny. The conference passed ten principles, including womens right to vote, the equality of the sexes, and the non-compulsory nature of the hijab.�
The All-Russian Muslim Conference in Moscow was attended by 900 delegates from Muslim populations and nations Bashkirs, Ossets, Turks, Tatars, Kirghiz and more. Almost a quarter of those present were women, several fresh from the Womens Muslim Congress in Kazan; one of the twelve-person presidium committee was a Tatar woman, Selima Jakubova. When one man asked why men should grant women political rights, a woman jumped up to answer. You listen to the men of religion and raise no objections, but act as though you can grant us rights, she said. Rather than that, we shall seize them� Finally, at the conference, a powerful programme of womens rights was adopted, and, as the left at the Womens Congress had advocated, polygyny was banned, if only symbolically. Against the plans of the powerful Tatar bourgeoisie for extraterritorial culturalnational autonomy, and against pan-Islamic aspirations, the conference advocated a federalist position of cultural autonomy. This could, and indeed would, mature into calls for national liberation.�
Revolutionising All Aspects of Life
There was scarcely any aspect of life that was not utterly transformed by the Russian revolution. Lenins piece reproduced by us touches upon the most significant changes in the lives of workers, peasants, oppressed nationalities and women: that made it a much deeper and more consistent democracy that any bourgeois democracy.
A few other remarkable advances deserve our attention. The revolution made a bold bid to transform the patriarchal family; in Lenins words, We really razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality, restricting divorce and surrounding it with disgusting formalities, denying recognition to children born out of wedlock, enforcing a search for their fathers, etc., laws numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, are to be found in all civilised countries.� (A Great Beginning, June 1919) On womens demand, abortion too was legalized, giving women a measure of control over the size of their families. In that piece Lenin candidly acknowledged that Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping.� Lenin stressed that the solution lay in nurturing the shoots� which already existed in capitalism: Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens -- here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life. Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens -- here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life.� Spurred by Lenin, the fledgling Soviet state did in fact make an enormous advance in this field, thus bringing women in very large numbers into the workforce and into public life.
Another remarkable blow to patriarchy was struck by the Bolshevik Revolution when it struck down the tsarist-era laws criminalizing homosexuality. A 1923 pamphlet The Sexual Revolution in Russia, written by Dr. Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene declared: The present sexual legislation in the Soviet Union is the work of the October Revolution. This revolution is important not only as a political phenomenon, which secures the political rule of the working class. But also for the revolutions which emanating from it reach out into all areas of lifeSoviet legislation bases itself on the following principle: It declares the absolute noninterference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no ones interests are encroached upon. [Emphasis in original.]
Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality�Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called natural� intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters. Only when theres use of force or duress, as in general when theres an injury or encroachment upon the rights of another person, is there a question of criminal prosecution.� (Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation, Sherry Wolf, Haymarket Books
