TWENTIETH CENTURY EUROPE

Twentieth Century Europe

Twentieth Century Europe

Q: To what extent can the success of the Bolsheviks during 1917 be explained by the impact of the First World War on Russia?

Ans: The Russian Revolution had its origin in the Russian entry into World War I. The Russia of Tzar Nicholas II, who had ruled from November 1894, was a country terribly unprepared for the onslaught of modern war. Rural Russia, as Richard Pipes wrote in The Russian Revolution, could no longer offer its growing population arable land. Russian industries could not offer them work, with in Pipes's words, “an annual accretion of 1 million rural inhabitants” attempting to find employment. This formed, in Pipes's rueful judgment, “an unassimilable and potentially disruptive element” in Russian society (Haimson, 2005). At the same time, neither Russian industry, nor the Russian high command, the STAVKA, were in any way prepared for the horrors of World War I.

At the Fourth (Unification) Conference in Stockholm in April 1906, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks attempted a reconciliation and worked together again within the RSDLP. At the Fifth Conference in London in May 1907, the Bolsheviks regained majority support but the two factions once again began to operate independently of each other. After defeating the urban revolutionary uprisings of 1905-1906, in which the Bolsheviks played a relatively small role, the government of Tsar Nicolas II (1868-1918) instituted minor political reforms, including the legalization of parliamentary political parties, a restricted franchise, and an elected Duma (parliament) with very limited authority. Divisions appeared within Bolshevik ranks, as Lenin and his followers Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936) and Lev Kamenev (1883-1936) argued for Bolshevik participation in the new Duma while Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) argued for a boycott of the Duma by the RSDLP representatives (Cohen, 2007). After Lenin's attack on Bogdanov's views in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin regained majority support at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris the same year. Lenin opposed reunification with the Mensheviks, and contacts between the two groups in 1910 came to naught.

In January 1912, a Bolshevik-only party conference in Prague formally expelled Mensheviks as well as Bogdanov and his supporters from the RSDLP. At the Prague conference, the Bolsheviks ceased to regard themselves as a faction within the RSDLP and declared themselves to be an independent party, the RSDLP (Bolshevik). During World War I (1914-1918), the Bolsheviks took a principled stance based on Marxist internationalism and refused to support the Russian war effort (Service, 2006). They saw nationalism, Russian or otherwise, as an ideology that divided the workers of the world and deflected proletarian revolutionary energies into a patriotic fever that bolstered an oppressive status quo that the Bolsheviks were determined to change. As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, the war as a whole pitted conscript worker-soldiers from one nation against conscript worker-soldiers from another, and the Bolsheviks, following Marx and Engels, firmly believed that the proletariat had no country but needed to direct its energies into overthrowing ruling classes and capitalist and semi-capitalist regimes around the world in order to ...