Was the Russian Revolution of 1917 inevitable? Did it determine the start of the civil war? These and other questions were answered by Doctor of Historical Sciences, Leading Researcher of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor of the European University in the framework of the discussion "Reforms and Revolutions" organized by the Yegor Gaidar Foundation and the European University in St. Petersburg. in St. Petersburg Boris Kolonitsky. Below are the main points of his speech.
World War I factor
In the year of the centenary of the Russian revolution in 1917, fierce debates about its causes and consequences flared up again. Was it accidental or inevitable? How did the First World War affect the events of 1917? I divide the respondents to these questions into three groups: optimists, pessimists and idiots. Idiots say that everything was fine and wonderful in Russia, but some kind of conspiracy ruined it. Of course, there really were various conspiracies, but serious historians do not believe that the Russian revolution was the result of someone's malicious intent.
Optimists say Russia was doomed to revolution with the outbreak of World War I. They believe that if our country held out until its end and ended up in the camp of the winners, this would solve many of its problems. But we now know that not only for the defeated, but also for the winners, the end of the First World War was a great test.
Take, for example, Italy, which was then called "the vanquished in the victor's camp." At first there was a big offensive by the left, and the country was on the brink of revolution, but then it emerged from the post-war socio-political crisis by establishing a fascist dictatorship in 1922. Or Great Britain - a country that, it would seem, only benefited from the end of the First World War.
But here is a list of events that then seriously shook the British Empire: the crises in India and Egypt, the defeat of the British colonial troops in Afghanistan, the forced recognition of the independence of Ireland. Why then do optimists believe that Russia, a country with a much larger set of problems and with much greater difficulties, would have successfully survived the end of the First World War?
Now for the pessimists, to whom I include myself. The revolution in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was inevitable, and the point was not even the First World War, from participation in which our country could not evade due to the difficult geopolitical situation and the mood of the political elite.
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Let's imagine a hypothetical situation that Russia, by an incredibly happy coincidence, would have avoided this war. There is a graphic historical example that shows that it would have been in serious trouble anyway. Imagine a country that has long been trying to become a constitutional monarchy, where the court and the military elite are still of great importance. The agrarian question is acute in this country, and millions of peasants believe that only the division of large estates can make them happy. In addition, there are national and colonial issues, there is a young aggressive working class, the process of secularization is painfully going through, and there is a powerful anti-clerical and atheistic movement.
Very similar to Russia, isn't it? But I was just talking about Spain, which did not participate in the First World War, but on the contrary - thanks to military orders, it only benefited from it. Despite this, Spain could not escape the 1931 revolution, after which it fell into the civil war of 1936-1939, one of the bloodiest civil wars in European history.
Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin direct the actions of the proletariat in 1917
World wave of revolutions
This comparison clearly shows that the events of the Russian revolution cannot be considered outside the world context. The international situation on the eve of the First World War seems calm to us. But what really happened? In 1905 there was a constitutional revolution in Persia, in 1908 - a revolution in the Ottoman Empire, in 1910 - a revolution in Portugal, in 1911 - a revolution in China. The revolution in Portugal, after which the country became a republic, aroused great enthusiasm among republicans and anti-clericals all over Europe. And then there was the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. Mexico may be too far away, but revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Persia and China took place very close to the borders of Russia. Sometimes the same people participated in the revolutions in Persia, Turkey and Russia.
We say that the First World War gave birth to the revolution. But the revolution in Turkey gave rise to a deep crisis in the Ottoman Empire, against which the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912 flared up. The direct consequence of this war was the First Balkan War of 1912-1913 and the Second Balkan War of 1913, preparing the conditions for the First World War. In fact, sometimes wars give rise to revolutions, and sometimes revolutions give rise to wars. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a whole complex of revolutions and wars in the world, and the Russian revolution was an integral part of this global process.
We perceive the period from 1905 to 1914 in Russia as an exclusively peaceful period. Everything seems to be fine: the State Duma is in session, the literacy of the population is gradually increasing, urbanization is underway, and modernization is underway. But as a result of all this, a young, aggressive working class appears, and on the eve of the First World War, strikes are shaking the whole country, especially in St. Petersburg, where a real little civil war is unfolding on the streets.
Russian soldiers flee under the onslaught of German troops, World War I
Russia was a police state
Could the impending revolution have been averted by timely reforms? I believe that the political choice of the moment of reform is very important. When a political crisis begins, it is sometimes very dangerous to start reforms. And although it is sometimes impossible to do anything else, they require a special sapper's care.
Any reforms begin and pass in the presence of some kind of coalition of reforms or a vector of reformational impact, require qualified expertise. It is important to create a working coalition of reform that would work both for its lobbying and for its practical implementation. The process of lobbying the reform coalition is not always easy and is very often accompanied by conflicts, sometimes quite violent.
I am now thinking a lot about the problem of the culture of conflict, which can be very different. Pre-revolutionary Russia was largely a police state, but it had an insufficient number of police officers. A trained police force is expensive.
How did you get out of the situation? First, they attracted the population to perform police functions: various sotskie, tenth and other prototypes of Soviet voluntary people's squads. Secondly, in Russia, the armed forces were often used to solve police tasks, primarily the Cossacks, but sometimes the infantry. But the troops, if used to carry out police missions, do what they are trained to do - that is, shoot and kill.
Therefore, in Russia, political conflicts often took the form of small civil wars. This feature of the domestic political culture does little to create a favorable political and cultural background for the implementation of reforms and overcoming crises.
Lenin and brick
It is hard for me to imagine that Russia would be able to go through this period of its history calmly, without revolutionary upheavals. Another thing is that it was possible to do without the Civil War, all the more so bloody and fierce. From the experience of world history, we know that revolutions are often accompanied by interventions and even more often slide into civil wars.
One of the key questions for Russia after February 1917 was whether civil war could be avoided. For example, in 1918, the revolution happened in Germany. After that, what was just not there: the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, the Kapp coup in 1920, "Red October" and the beer putsch in 1923. That is, in Germany, local civil wars periodically broke out, sometimes with the use of artillery, armored vehicles and aviation, but a big civil war was avoided there.
An artistic representation of the events of Bloody Sunday
This happened thanks to the interaction of social democrats and trade unionists on the one hand and generals on the other. Personally, they did not tolerate each other, but they had some experience of cooperation during the First World War. And despite occasional difficulties, this collaboration has stood the test of time.
In Russia, as we know, such a coalition was destroyed after the failure of the so-called speech of Kornilov. The point, of course, was not only in the peculiarities of the personal relationship between Kerensky and Kornilov, not in the vanity and envy of one and the dictatorial ambitions of the other. The problem went deeper.
Fyodor Stepun, a famous Russian philosopher who, by the will of fate, became the head of the political department of the War Ministry of the Provisional Government, observed this whole situation with his own eyes and described the confrontation between Kerensky and Kornilov as a conflict between two social and cultural groups: the intelligentsia and the officers. They could not work together in any way: they too despised their opponents, were too intolerant of them. After the collapse of the "Kornilovism" civil war became inevitable, since a very complex and unstable coalition of generals, progressive industrialists on the one hand and moderate socialists on the other was irreversibly destroyed.
I once wrote that if a brick fell on Lenin's head in early October 1917, and a tram ran over Trotsky, a civil war would still have occurred. After the February Revolution, the conflict between the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government smoldered even without Lenin and Trotsky - it was simply programmed by the course of revolutionary events.
Of course, it would be wrong to completely exclude the influence of the Bolshevik leaders on the course of events, but at the end of 1917, the long-term confrontation between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet had to be somehow resolved. It so happened that a civil war broke out after the October Revolution, but I am deeply convinced that it would have happened without him.
