A People's Tragedy A History of the Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (Review 2)

Review by D.N.

“This drive to overcome backwardness was the kernel of Stalin's 'revolution from above', the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans (1928—32). As Stalin himself put it in an impassioned speech of 1931, Russia had been beaten throughout its history because it was backward, it had been beaten by the Mongol khans, the Swedish feudal lords, the Polish-Lithuanian pans, the Anglo-French capitalists, the Japanese and German imperialists: 'We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.”

From my readings on Russia, there is arguably one dominant theme that keeps occurring. That is the concern over Russia’s “backwardness”, be it from its own leaders, its intellectuals, foreign observers or statesmen.

It is obviously a very charged terminology and one that can be hard to truly pinpoint. Nonetheless , it seems pretty accurate in many ways, especially as Russia’s identity came to be increasingly defined by its relation with the west. It could be argued that many other areas in Europe also shared that trait, but Russia came to be compared to the west increasingly as it gained the great power status and entered the ‘concert of Europe’.

From then on, the country has been anchored to Europe. The debate of whether it belongs to Europe, became a dividing line among its native thinkers. Some actually took pride in Russia’s Asiatic culture and history, embracing the Mongol heritage as part of the country’s identity, while others were convinced that the only way forward was toward the west. Later on, the idea of pan-slavism also gained ground and played a non-trivial role in the onset of the First World War as the support for Serbia was seen as a form of moral obligation that excited an ever more vocal public opinion.

Orlando Figes delivers in this book, what is to me, social history at its best.
The picture of a society going through incredible turmoil comes alive through a mix of descriptions, personal narratives and analysis that tackles the deep questions and does not avoid taking a stance on controversial major historiography questions.

The Wikipedia page on ‘social history’ quotes the historian Charles Tilly who defines social history as:

1. Documenting large structural changes

2.  Reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people in the course of those changes

3.  Connecting the two

This is exactly what the book succeeds at. The narrative from the top, the importance of Lenin or the Bolsheviks, recedes into the background. It is not that these agents are not influential, it is more that the author is focusing on what in society allowed for such agents to be influential in the way they have been, in a particular time.

 The book does follow, for the most part, a chronological narrative, accounting for the grand events of the revolution and its main actors, but following what is the main force of the book, I will not focus on the grand narrative too much and instead use the book to try and tackle some of these questions:

What  were the important macro trends in Russia, in the decades prior to the revolution?
How did these trends compare to those occurring in the west?                                          What prevented a more progressive path toward political change?                                     Who were the people that supported and allowed for the revolution to occur?
What were their motivations and how did they experience the sequence of events?
How did those that opposed the revolution and later, the bolsheviks coup failed to mount an effective opposition?
What was the vision of the bolsheviks for the regime and what did it actually accomplish?

Introduction: Russia and western development

Although there were few liberal regimes at the turn of the century, most countries of western Europe were transforming themselves into modern nation-states. Germany had recently been unified into a powerful empire after the defeat of France in 1871 and Italy followed the same process at the same period.

The nation-state was one of the main transforming ideas of the 19th  century. Together with the industrial revolution that was spreading from England, it would profoundly transform the continent.

While most states remained monarchical or even imperial, they were nonetheless experiencing deep structural changes in their organization that influenced their political , economic and societal characteristics.

The state was becoming more powerful. As its resources increased, its capacity to intervene more effectively in the life of its citizens grew along with it.

From a very light bureaucracy that relied on local relays of power, more centralized bureaucracies were established and a higher share of GDP passed through the hands of the state. This process was marked by the centrality of the army, most of the resources were directed for that purpose and it was often the main driver in the quest to increase the state’s revenue.

Keeping the military force in mind, the statesmen of the period saw that there were more to it than sheer strength in number. What the modern era required was a literate population capable of following complex instructions and able to participate in large scale collaboration. This was required of soldiers in the army as it was of workers in the   factory.

The schooling system provided a solution to these issues, it became more widespread and was crucial in the forming of a national consciousness.

From a security state, it was turning into a benevolent one. All over western Europe, the state was getting involved in the betterment of the health and education of its population. The children were slowly being brought out of dreadful working conditions and put into schools, the workers were insured better working conditions, the elderly insured against destitution.

The welfare policies enacted under the premiership of Disraeli in Great Britain or under Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s are good illustrations of that trend.

The other element in the creation of the nation-state was the emergence of a civil society, exercising influence through political parties, unions, church organizations and various associations. Following a process well described by the economist Daron Acemoglu in his book, the more organized the society became , the more able it was to check the increasingly powerful state.

Freedom of the press was a crucial element of this evolution. The newspapers were reaching a growing audience and were the platform for the diffusion of ideas and the expression of collective sentiments.

Politically, the transformations were not less profound, most countries had a parliament that grew more influential with time. The parliaments were first very constrained in their prerogatives. However, with time, they came to impose their primacy as initiators of the law and liberal parties acted as engines for further progressive policies.
The franchise tended to evolve toward more inclusion with some countries attaining universal man suffrage before the turn of the century.

 Although it would be tempting to separate, for instance, the more liberal regimes of France, the only republic with Switzerland on the continent and Great Britain with those of imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and The Russian empire, what is truly remarkable is that these changes were occurring regardless of the form of government.

Russia at the turn of the century

As the title of the book suggests, Figes takes a long view of the revolution, reaching back almost three decades earlier to start his account.

So what does Russia look like at the turn of the century?

 A crucial event to mark the coming of Russia into the modern age is the end of serfdom. In 1861, the Tsar passed the act of Emancipation. Although it was only the beginning of a long process that would rid the majority of the population burdened with many constraints on their freedom, it had enormous consequences from the get go.

Prior to the act of emancipation, major disruptions of the economic system allowed the state to push for such a radical reform:

Many of the squires squandered the small income from their estates on expensive luxuries imported from Europe rather than investing it in their farms. Few appeared to understand that income was not profit. By the middle of the nineteenth century many of the squires had fallen hopelessly into debt. By 1859, one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and aristocratic banks. This, more than anything, helped the government to force Emancipation through against considerable opposition from the gentry. Not that the conditions of the liberation were unfavourable to the landowners: they received good money for the (often inferior) land which they chose to transfer to the peasants.* But now the squires were on their own, deprived of the free labour of the serfs and their tools and animals. They could no longer live a life of ease: their survival depended on the market place.

That trend was thus accelerated:

Between 1861 and 1900 more than 40 per cent of the gentry's land was sold to the peasants, whose growing land hunger, due to a population boom, led to a seven-fold increase in land values. There was a similar rise in rental values and, by 1900, two-thirds of the gentry's arable land had been rented out to the peasants.

Instead of fostering the creation of a new class of civil servants, able to lead the country with a rationalized style of government, the form of a modern administration got mixed in with the archaism of a feudal system  .
Although the sons of commoners were able to join the ranks of the administration, noblemen still accounted for more than 71 percent of the four top civil civil ranks according to a 1897 census. Instead of fixed institutional relations and regular procedures, patronage remained the norm and prevented transparency or accountability.

As it often happens when considering current developing countries with authoritarian rule in comparison with liberal democracies, our tendency is to overrate the strength of the former while downplaying the strength of the latter.
In fact, from the point of view of state capacity, i.e the ability for the state to effectively accomplish policy aims, the richer and better organized society always is often far superior.
In that fashion, counter to a perception linked to its authoritarianism, one great weakness of Russia at the time was under-government:

This vital fact is all too often clouded by the revolutionaries' mythic image of an all-powerful old regime. Nothing could be further from the truth. For every 1,000 inhabitants of the Russian Empire there were only 4 state officials at the turn of the century, compared with 7.3 in England and Wales, 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France.

The regular police, as opposed to the political branch, was extremely small by European standards. Russia's expenditure on the police per capita of the population was less than half of that in Italy or France and less than one quarter of that in Prussia. For a rural population of 100 million people, Russia in 1900 had no more than 1,852 police sergeants and 6,874 police constables. The average constable was responsible for policing 50,000 people in dozens of settlements stretched across nearly 2,000 square miles. Many of them did not even have a horse and cart.

 

Far from emphasizing this failure of modernization as an expression of the essence of an ‘eternal Russia’ that could only have turned out this way, the author highlights the missed opportunity of the reform era following the emancipation in the 1860s.

Unfortunately, as it is often the case, the reforms went far enough to anger those who lost from it (the landlords) but not far enough to content those who stood to benefit the most from it (the peasants). In fact, discontent was very publicly expressed and the 1870s saw an explosion of politically motivated terrorist attacks, culminating in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881.

Inheriting the throne from his father, Alexander III was set to put an end to any possibilities of further liberalization. However, under his authoritarian rule, the economy will grow at an unprecedented rate and will continue to do so until the outbreak of the first world war.

From then on, we can see a growing asymmetry between the acceleration of Russia’s economic development and the fossilization of its political system.

 The Army

Under the reign of Nicholas I ( 1825-1855 ), Russia operated as the “gendarme of Europe” and was the most important actor of the Holy alliance, an alliance created to safeguard conservative politics in the face of the political turmoil brought about by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

The army was by far the main state expenditure and constituted a big part of what prevented further investment in productive areas of the economy. Although the overall trend of decline in army spending relative to economic output ended up reaching Russia, the emphasis on a mass army as opposed to a well-trained and well equipped one remained:

Between 1881 and 1902 the military's share of the budget dropped from 30 per cent to 18 per cent. Ten years before the First World War the Russian army was spending only 57 per cent of the amount spent on each soldier in the German army, and only 63 per cent of that spent in the Austrian.

In short, the Russian soldier went to war worse trained, worse equipped and more poorly serviced than his enemy. The army was so short of cash that it relied largely on its own internal economy to clothe and feed itself. Soldiers grew their own food and tobacco, and repaired their own uniforms and boots. They even earned money for the regiment by going off to work as seasonal labourers on landed estates, in factories and mines near their garrisons. Many soldiers spent more time growing vegetables or repairing boots than they did learning how to handle their guns. By reducing the military budget, the tsarist regime created an army of farmers and cobblers.

Two of the main causes of anger voiced by the soldiers during the revolution were already major reasons of discontent and very low moral within the army.On top of that, soldiers were deeply resentful of participating in police actions :

The demoralization of the army was also connected to its increasing role in the suppression of civilian protests. The Russian Empire was covered with a network of garrisons. Their job was to provide more or less instant military assistance for the provincial governors or the police to deal with unrest. Between 1883 and 1903 the troops were called out nearly 1,500 times. Officers complained bitterly that this police duty was beneath the dignity of a professional soldier, and that it distracted the army from its proper military purpose.

And:

History proved them right. The vast majority of the private soldiers were peasants, and their morale was heavily influenced by the news they received from their villages. When the army was called out to put down the peasant uprisings of 1905—6 many of the units, especially in the peasant-dominated infantry, refused to obey and mutinied in support of the revolution. There were over 400 mutinies between the autumn of 1905 and the summer of 1906. The army was brought to the brink of collapse, and it took years to restore a semblance of order.28

  As well as being subjected to deeply humiliating mistreatment by their officers:

Colonels and generals were to be greeted not just with the simple hand salute but by halting and standing sideways to attention while the officer passed by for a strictly prescribed number of paces. The soldier was trained to answer his superiors in regulation phrases of deference: 'Not at all, Your Honour'; 'Happy to serve you, Your Excellency.' Any deviations were likely to be punished. Soldiers could expect to be punched in the face, hit in the mouth with the butt of a rifle and sometimes even flogged for relatively minor misdemeanours. Officers were allowed to use a wide range of abusive terms — such as 'scum' and 'scoundrel' — to humiliate their soldiers and keep them in their place. Even whilst off-duty the common soldier was deprived of the rights of a normal citizen.

The army was in a poor state overall, with poor organization , poor equipment and very low morale. The leadership was stuck in outdated ways, with a contempt for all the training that would be required for modern warfare. The emphasis remained on cavalry charges, most officers considered digging trenches below their dignity and parading was often the most practiced exercise.

The Church

Looking for the very common theme in European history, of power struggle between the church and the state in Russia, shows a clear cut case of almost complete victory of the state over the church.

Nonetheless, the church remained an important institution , but one that often operated as a tool of the state, especially as an organ of education and propaganda. Many parts of common people’s life remained regulated by church authorities.

On moral issues deemed within the church’s prerogatives, it could take precedence over the secular authorities and could prosecute cases, impose punishments such as incarceration in a monastery and judge the legality of a divorce.

When it comes to the depth of religious belief in the common folk , the situation is much more nuanced than it could seem, describing the ordinary peasant Figes writes:

He crossed himself continually, pronounced the Lord's name in every other sentence, regularly went to church, always observed the Lenten fast, never worked on religious holidays, and was even known from time to time to go on pilgrimage to holy shrines.

Being illiterate, the average peasant knew very little of the Gospels. The Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments were unknown to him. But he did vaguely understand the concepts of heaven and hell, and no doubt hoped that his lifelong observance of the church rituals would somehow save his soul. He conceived of God as a real human being, not as an abstract spirit. Gorky described one peasant he encountered in a village near Kazan, who: pictured God as a large, handsome old man, the kindly, clever master of the universe who could not conquer evil only because: 'He cannot be everywhere at once, too many men have been born for that. But he will succeed, you see. But I can't understand Christ at all! He serves no purpose as far as I'm concerned. There is God and that's enough. But now there's another! The son, they say. So what if he's God's son. God isn't dead, not that I know of.'

The church and its representatives were not always held in high esteem:

The crippling poverty of the peasants and the proverbial greed of the priests often made this bargaining process long and heated. Peasant brides would be left standing in the church for hours, or the dead left unburied for several days, while the peasants and the priest haggled over the fee. Such shameless (though often necessary) bargaining by the clergy was bound to harm the prestige of the Church. The low educational level of many of the priests, their tendency to corruption and drunkenness, their well-known connections with the police and their general subservience to the local gentry, all added to the low esteem in which they were held.

When one compares this with the respect and deference shown by the peasants of Catholic Europe towards their priests then one begins to understand why peasant Russia had a revolution and, say, peasant Spain a counter-revolution.

The last comment emphasizes the failure from the institutions to exercise a profound influence over the minds and behaviors of people. We can see once again a paradox of what seems like an overly constraining system actually serving as a cover for its impotence to alter the traditions and customs of the peasantry.

Nations within the empire

The great wave of romantic nationalism sweeping across Europe was slowly reaching the diverse landscape of the Russian empire.

Referring to the building up of imagined communities, it is interesting to note that the effervescence and passion around the forging of a national culture through folklore and  the gathering of cultural artifacts, costumes, songs, dialects came mostly from educated urbanites thinking that they were ‘rediscovering’ their culture but were ultimately making it up.

Before these efforts were to produce the emergence of a national consciousness for the many nations within the empire, we can have an idea of the self representation of some its people through these examples:

Theirs was a local culture dominated by tradition and the spoken word. It was confined to a small and narrow world: the village and its fields, the parish church, the landowner's manor and the local market. Beyond that was a foreign country. In Estonia, for example, the peasants simply called themselves maarahvas, meaning 'country people', while they understood the term saks (from Saxon — i.e. German) to mean simply a landlord or a master; it was only in the late nineteenth century, when the Tallinn intellectuals spread their influence into the villages, that these terms took on a new ethnic meaning. Much the same was true in Poland. 'I did not know that I was a Pole till I began to read books and papers,' recalled one peasant in the 1920s.

And: 

One British diplomat — though no doubt a great imperialist and therefore somewhat contemptuous of the claims of small peasant nations like the Ukraine — concluded that this was still the case as late as 1918: Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or an Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked 'the local tongue'.

According to the census of 1897, Russians represented 47% of the population in the empire. There was an overt effort of russification that did much to alienate and possibly strengthen the minorities against the power from the center. Especially when it comes to the repression of speech in the mother tongue in Ukraine and Poland, where even the local poets were taught in Russian translation.

Russia was also home to a very large Jewish population that suffered terribly under a legal regime that set them apart from other groups but also from widespread hostility coming from every other group:

The Empire's five million Jews, at the bottom of its ethnic hierarchy, were subject to a comprehensive range of legal disabilities and discriminations which by the end of the nineteenth century embraced some 1,400 different statutes and regulations as well as thousands of lesser rules, provisions and judicial interpretations. They — alone of all the ethnic groups — were forbidden to own land, to enter the Civil Service, or to serve as officers in the army; there were strict quotas on Jewish admissions into higher schools and universities; and, apart from a few exceptions, the Jews were forced by law to live within the fifteen provinces of the western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Poland which made up the Pale of Settlement. This was a tsarist version of the Hindu caste system, with the Jews in the role of the Untouchables 

The village

The divide between the peasantry, still constituting the bulk of the society and the urban minority will be a crucial factor in the forthcoming misunderstanding and violence that will ravage the society.

A good illustration of that, comes from the movement of young educated idealists going off to the countryside in order to ‘preach’ their revolutionary political ideas and encountering a wall of indifference:

Such was their idealized view of the peasants that many Populists even contended that in sexual matters they were more moral and celibate than the corrupted urban population. So, for example, they believed that prostitution did not exist among the peasants (even though the majority of urban prostitutes were originally peasant women); that there was no rape or sexual assault in the village (despite the peasant custom of snokhachestvo which gave the household patriarchs a sexual claim on their daughters-in-law in the absence of their husbands); and that whereas syphilis (which was endemic throughout Russia) might have been venereal in the depraved cities, in the villages it was caused more innocently by the peasant custom of sharing wooden spoons and bowls.

These romantic missionaries were shattered by the reality they encountered in the countryside. Most of the students were met by a cautious suspicion or hostility on the part of the peasantry, and were soon arrested by the police. Looking back on the experience from prison and exile, moderate Populists such as Romas were convinced that the basic problem had been the peasantry's isolation from the rest of society.

This was a divide between two worlds apart, an urban educated youth and traditional peasants who were often illiterate and with little knowledge of the outside world.

In fact, that divide was quite blurry as the cities and factories were becoming filled with newcomers who moved to escape the drudgery of the peasant’s life:

Russia was still a peasant country at the turn of the twentieth century: 80 per cent of the population was classified as belonging to the peasantry; and most of the rest traced their roots back to it. Scratch a Russian townsman and one found a peasant

Russia's towns and cities all remained essentially 'peasant' in their social composition and character. Only a few miles from any city centre one would find oneself already in the backwoods, where there were bandits living in the forests, where roads turned into muddy bogs in spring, and where the external signs of life in the remote hamlets had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages

More interesting, was the common rejection of everything linked to the traditional values attached to the villages from those who managed to escape.  

The will to escape can easily be understood considering the many reasons why one would want to get away from life in the village.

For one, the emancipation of serfs did not translate into an empowerment of individuals to pursue their own goals. To the contrary, communal ownership of the land became the norm through the “rural community” or “land commune” known as Mir.

The Mir was often the most consequential organ regulating the life of peasants, in matters of land management as well as police and judicial function. Under the appearance of consensus ruling, lied a power structure stirred by a minority:

But in fact the decision-making was usually dominated by a small clique of the oldest household heads, who were often also the most successful farmers, and the rest of the villagers tended to follow their lead. The unanimity of the mir was not the reflection of some natural peasant harmony, but an imposed conformity set from above by the patriarchal elders of the village.

 There was deep resentment toward these elders, resentment that would later play a role in the policies of the Bolshevik regime:

Some observers of peasant life (and this was to include the Bolsheviks) described these dominant patriarchs as 'commune-eaters' (miroyeiy) or 'kulaks'.* These were the so-called 'rich' and 'cunning' peasants, 'petty-capitalist entrepreneurs', 'usurers', 'parasites' and 'strongmen', whom the rest of the villagers feared and whose greed and individualism would eventually lead to the commune's destruction. 

The source of anger did not only originate in the political power exercised by the elders over the mir, but from a very strict patriarchal order that regimented all parts of life and left very little space for individual liberty or privacy of any sort.

Violence was widespread and the social control exerted over women or the young was overbearing:

It was not uncommon for cheating wives to be stripped naked and beaten by their husbands, or tied to the end of a wagon and dragged naked through the village. Horse-thieves could be castrated, beaten, branded with hot irons, or hacked to death with sickles. Other transgressors were known to have had their eyes pulled out, nails hammered into their body, legs and arms cut off, or stakes driven down their throat. A favourite punishment was to raise the victim on a pulley with his feet and hands tied together and to drop him so that the vertebrae in his back were broken; this was repeated several times until he was reduced to a spineless sack. In another form of torture the naked victim was wrapped in a wet sack, a pillow was tied around his torso, and his stomach beaten with hammers, logs and stones, so that his internal organs were crushed without leaving any external marks on his body.

And:

'Beat your wife like a fur coat, then there'll be less noise.' A wife is nice twice: when she's brought into the house [as a bride] and when she's carried out of it to her grave.' Popular proverbs also put a high value on the beating of men: 'For a man that has been beaten you have to offer two unbeaten ones, and even then you may not clinch the bargain.' There were even peasant sayings to suggest that a good life was not complete without violence: 'Oh, it's a jolly life, only there's no one to beat.' Fighting was a favourite pastime of the peasants. At Christmas, Epiphany and Shrovetide there were huge and often fatal fist-fights between different sections of the village, sometimes even between villages, the women and children included, accompanied by heavy bouts of drinking. Petty village disputes frequently ended in fights.

Also:

Gorky wrote from his time at Krasnovidovo, 'three families fought with sticks, an old woman's arm got broken and a young boy had his skull cracked. Quarrels like this happened every week.'18 This was a culture in which life was cheap and, however one explains the origins of this violence, it was to play a major part in the revolution

  Some of the customs in the villages seemed as alien to city-dwellers as they do to the modern reader:

They had very little sense of privacy. All household members ate their meals from a common pot and slept together in one room. Lack of private spaces, not to speak of fertility rites, dictated that the sexual act was kept at least partly in the public domain. It was still a common practice in some parts of Russia for a peasant bride to be deflowered before the whole village; and if the groom proved impotent, his place could be taken by an older man, or by the finger of the matchmaker. Modesty had very little place in the peasant world. Toilets were in the open air. Peasant women were constantly baring their breasts, either to inspect and fondle them or to nurse their babies, while peasant men were quite unselfconscious about playing with their genitals. Urban doctors were shocked by the peasant customs of spitting into a persons eye to get rid of sties, of feeding children mouth to mouth, and of calming baby boys by sucking on their penis

Taking these descriptions of life in the villages into account, it does not seem that surprising that , were an alternative to come up, those who could, seized the opportunity to escape from such constraints :

We can see it first in the fragmentation of the patriarchal household during the later nineteenth century. There was a sharp rise in the rate of household partitions following the Emancipation. Between 1861 and 1884 the annual rate of partitions rose from 82,000 to 140,000 households. Over 40 per cent of all peasant households were divided in these years. As a result, the average household size in central Russia declined from 9.5 members to 6.8. The peasants were moving from the traditional extended family to the modern nuclear one. Such partitions made little economic sense — the newly partitioned households, like the ones from which they had split, were left with much less livestock, tools and labour than before — and this was a cause of considerable anxiety to the tsarist government, which for moral and social reasons as much as for economic ones saw the peasantry's livelihood as dependent upon the survival of the patriarchal family

Moving out of a household where you were subservient to the will of elders, and had to wait up a long time to reach some form of autonomy to set up an independent household was one way out, as was moving to the city.

One effort at modernization pushed by the state that was partially successful was mass education. Those who benefited from that education were to play an influential role in later events and were the ones who acted on that resentment of the old order the most by taking advantage of the new opportunities open to them.

In tandem with the rise of literacy in the new generation, the will to rid oneself of all that is attached to the traditional ways and embrace the appearance of the more cultured and urban ways becomes prominent and one other manifestation of revolt:

As an inspector of church schools — who was clearly sympathetic to these concerns — wrote in I9II: The only thing observed [as a result of schooling] is a heightened interest in tasteless and useless dandyism. In many areas, the normal peasant dress is being replaced by urban styles, which cut deeply into the peasants' skimpy budget, hindering major improvements to other, far more important sides of peasant life . .. Family ties, the very foundation of the well-being of state and society, have been deeply shaken. Complaints about insubordination to parents and elders are ubiquitous. Young men and adolescents often verbally abuse their elders and even beat them; they file complaints in the courts and remove from the home whatever [possessions] they can. It seems that parents have lost all authority over their children.

Apart from the political consequences of the collective ownership of land , there were very detrimental economic ones as well. The incentives were not aligned for higher productivity and the post emancipation situation looked very Malthusian:

The basic problem in the central agricultural zone was that the peasantry's egalitarian customs gave them little incentive to produce anything other than babies. The birth-rate in Russia (at about fifty births for every 1,000 people every year) was nearly twice the European average during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the highest rates of all were in the areas of communal tenure where the holding of land was fixed according to family size. The astronomical rise of the peasant population (from 50 to 79 million during 1861—1897) resulted in a growing shortage of land. By the turn of the century 7 per cent of the peasant households had no land at all, while one in five had only a tiny plot of less than one desyatina (2.7 acres).

This may seem odd in a country the size of Russia. But in central Russia, where most of the peasantry lived, the density of the population was similar to that of Western Europe. The average peasant allotment, at 2.6 desyatiny in 1900, was comparable in size to the typical smallholding in France or Germany.

The city

Whereas it took a long time in the west for the industrial revolution to bring about a betterment in the lives of workers, the era saw the enactment of laws that protected children from the worst abuses, allowed collective bargaining and strikes, reduced working hours and provided protection from the worst accidents of life.
Here again, Russia stands as an exception. These descriptions resemble more the situation prevailing in the west 50 years earlier:

Every day at noon they hurried home from the factory to eat cabbage soup — just as the peasants did, 'from a common bowl with wooden spoons'. Kanatchikov slept in a small cot with another apprentice. His windowless 'corner' was dirty and full of 'bed bugs and fleas and the stench of "humanity" '. But in fact he was lucky to be in a private room at all. Many workers had to make do with a narrow plank-bed in the factory barracks, where hundreds of men, women and children slept together in rows, with nothing but their own dirty clothes for bedding. In these barracks, which Gorky compared with the 'dwellings of a prehistoric people', there were neither washing nor cooking facilities, so the workers had to visit the bath-house and eat in canteens. There were whole families living in such conditions. They tried as best they could to get a little privacy by hanging a curtain around their plank-beds.

Such living conditions makes for a dreadful sanitary situation:

The death rate in this City of Tsars was the highest of any European capital, including Constantinople, with a cholera epidemic on average once in every three years. In the workers' districts fewer than one in three apartments had a toilet or running water. Excrement piled high in the back yards until wooden carts came to collect it at night. Water was fetched in buckets from street pumps and wells and had to be boiled before it was safe to drink. Throughout the city — on house-fronts, inside tramcars, and in hundreds of public places — there were placards in bold red letters warning people not to drink the water, though thirsty workers, and especially those who had recently arrived from the countryside, paid very little attention to them. Nothing of any real consequence was done to improve the city's water and sewage systems, which remained a national scandal even after 30,000 residents had been struck down by cholera in 1908—9. There was a good deal of talk about building a pipeline to Lake Lagoda, but the project remained on the drawing board until I9I7

One of the ways, in which the “backwardness” framework seems to explain some part of the success of the coming revolution is in the lack of buy-in from the parts of the population, whose counterpart in the west were becoming responsible stakeholder of the system:

Here Russia stood in stark contrast to Europe, where the most skilled and literate workers tended to be the least revolutionary and were being integrated into the wider democratic movement. There were few signs of such a moderate 'labour aristocracy' emerging in Russia. The print workers, with their high rates of pay and their close ties with the intelligentsia, were the most likely candidates for such a role. Yet even they stood firmly behind the Marxist and Social Revolutionary parties. Had they been able to develop their own legal trade unions, then these workers might have made enough gains from the status quo not to demand its overthrow.

Harbingers of the revolution

The first revolution

Before the revolution , there were many occasions for the cracks in the system to appear openly. One such occasion was the famine of 1891, it claimed lives in the hundreds of thousands and provoked lasting resentment, further eroding the legitimacy of the regime.

The outrage was mostly due to the government response or the lack thereof:

But by far the greatest public outrage was caused by the government's postponement of a proposed ban on cereal exports until the middle of August, several weeks into the crisis. It had given a month's warning of the ban, so that cereal merchants rushed to fulfil their foreign contracts, and foodstuffs which could have been used for the starving peasants vanished abroad.

Such cynicism did not seem unjustified. All along, the government had been refusing to admit the existence of a 'famine' (gohi), preferring instead to speak euphemistically of a 'poor harvest' (neurozhat). The reactionary daily Moscow News had even warned that it would be an act of disloyalty to use the more 'alarmist term', since it would give rise to a 'dangerous hubbub' from which only the revolutionaries could gain. Newspapers were forbidden to print reports on the 'famine', although many did in all but name.

Not too long after that calamity, Russia got engaged in a war with Japan over influence in Korea and Manchuria. Just like it would be in 1917, the war was a complete disaster for the Russian Empire.

Suffering defeat after defeat on the battlefield, the home front situation ended up forcing the hand of the tsar to sue for peace.

Strikes and spontaneous demonstrations, later strengthened by successful orators turned organizers, took the street demanding change. The form of these demands fitted the very common pattern among people expressing anger towards their rulers: that of the benevolent king surrounded by evil counselors. ‘Boyars’ refers to the nobility: 

'The Tsar wants justice but the boyars resist' — that had fuelled and legitimized so many protest movements in Russian history. On 3—8 January 1905, when 120,000 workers went on strike in St Petersburg and began to speak about going to the Tsar in order to 'seek truth and justice', Gapon took up their cause. Encouraged by the Liberation Movement, he drew up a list of demands to be presented to the Tsar in a mass demonstration scheduled for the following Sunday. Supplicating and sentimental, the petition moved to tears whole crowds of workers. It began: SIRE We, the workers and inhabitants of St Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE to seek justice and protection.

It is that image of the benevolent tsar that was shattered for many, once the guards started to shoot unarmed protesters:

Only moments after the shooting had ceased an old man turned to a boy of fourteen and said to him, with his voice full of anger: 'Remember, son, remember and swear to repay the Tsar. You saw how much blood he spilled, did you see? Then swear, son, swear!' 

 This crucial choice of shooting unarmed demonstrators got remembered as “Bloody Sunday” , that would itself lead to the largest labor protests in Russian history up to that point. More than 400 000 people went on strike.

Some interesting points that stand out about what would be known as the 1905 revolution:

l The socialist parties were completely taken by surprise by the events and did not play any significant role, most of their leaders including Lenin and Trotsky were abroad in exile.

l The events enjoyed widespread popular support, especially from the peasants who felt empowered enough to impose their own revolution from the bottom. Many parts of the country seceded for a while, creating new forms of local sovereignty, refusing to obey the government, denying it taxes and army recruits. Violence was normalized and the Jews were specifically targeted:

Every day the press reported dozens of these cases of 'mob law' (samosud), along with robberies and murders. Mobs of a different kind went round the streets beating up students and well-dressed passers-by. There were pogroms against Jews. In short, the whole country seemed locked into a downward spiral of violence and anarchy. As the US Consul in Batumi reported: [Russia] is permeated with sedition and reeking with revolution, racial hatred and warfare, murder, incendiarism, brigandage, robbery and crime of every kind ... As far as can be seen we are on the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos . . . One of the worst signs is that the public under this long reign of anarchy and crime is growing callous and the news of the murder of an acquaintance or friend is, by the bulk of the population, received with indifference whilst cases of brigandage are looked upon as being quite in the ordinary course of events

l The “resolution” of the tension came from the Tsar’s wiser advisers and especially the military ones, that pushed for liberalizing reforms while the Tsar thought only in terms of more repression. He even asked his uncle to act as military dictator, who refused, threatening to shoot himself if the Tsar did not approve of the reforms.

l Once the regime gave away on some of the demands for liberalization, state repression was pursued on an incredible scale:

Between 1906 and 1909 over 5,000 'politicals' were sentenced to death, and a further 38,000 were either imprisoned or sent into penal servitude. In the Baltic lands punitive army units went through the towns and villages. During a six-month campaign of terror, starting in December, they executed 1,200 people, destroyed tens of thousands of buildings, and flogged thousands of workers and peasants. The Tsar was delighted with the operation and praised its commanding officer for 'acting splendidly'. In Russia itself the regime did not hesitate to launch a war of terror against its own people. In the areas of peasant revolt whole villages were destroyed by the army and thousands of peasants were imprisoned. When there was no more room in the county jails, orders were given to shoot the guilty peasants instead.

Interrogating officers then rode on horses through the villagers, whipping them on the back whenever their answers displeased them, until they gave up their rebel leaders for summary execution. Liberally plied with vodka, the Cossacks committed terrible atrocities against the peasant population. Women and girls were raped in front of their menfolk. Hundreds of peasants were hanged from the trees without any pretence of a trial. In all it has been estimated that the tsarist regime executed 15,000 people, shot or wounded at least 20,000 and deported or exiled 45,000, between mid-October and the opening of the first State Duma in April 1906.69 It was hardly a promising start to the new parliamentary order. 

To the question: why did the revolution fail ? The author sums up his thoughts:

What were the lessons of 1905? Although the tsarist regime had been shaken, it was not brought down. The reasons for this were clear enough. First, the various opposition movements — the urban public and the workers, the peasant revolution, the mutinies in the armed services, and the national independence movements — had all followed their own separate rhythms and failed to combine politically. This would be different in February 1917, when the Duma and the Soviet performed the essential role of co-ordination. Second, the armed forces remained loyal, despite the rash of mutinies, and helped the regime to stabilize itself. This too would be different in future — for in February 1917 the crucial units of the army and the navy quickly went over to the people's side. Third, following the victory of October there was a fatal split within the revolutionary camp between the liberals and democrats, who, on the one hand, were mainly interested in political reforms, and the socialists and their followers, who wanted to push on to a social revolution. By issuing the October Manifesto the tsarist regime succeeded in driving a wedge between the liberals and the socialists. Never again would the Russian masses support the constitutional democratic movement as they did in 1905.

The Great war

The widespread fear among the the German decisions maker that Russia would soon become an unbeatable behemoth, and thus that it was better to fight it out sooner than later seemed justified:

 By 1914, Russia was spending more than Germany on her armed forces: over one-third of all government expenditures. It is not true, as historians later claimed, that the Russian army was unprepared for war. In manpower and materiel it was at least the equal of the German army, and, thanks to the recent improvement of Russia's western railways, took only three days more than its enemy to complete its mobilization.

Nonetheless, the war proved to be an absolute disaster for the country and set it on the course of tremendous changes of unforeseen consequences.

Interestingly, the war seemed by many in high places as a decision imposed by the bottom, as public opinion expressed through the recently established political parties, the press and public demonstrations of popular sentiment could no longer be ignored by rulers :

Brusilov later claimed that the Tsar had been forced to go to war by the strength of his own people's patriotic fervour: 'Had he not done so, public resentment would have turned on him with such ferocity that he would have been tumbled from his throne, and the Revolution, with the support of the whole intelligentsia, would have taken place in 1914 instead of 1917.' This is undoubtedly an overstatement of the case.

The ”union sacrée”, a term coined after the national rallying behind the war effort that occurred in France was also used to describe the Russian situation. The Duma dissolved itself and statements such as these could be read in the papers: “There are now neither Rights nor Lefts, neither government nor society, but only one United Russian Nation ”. That feeling would prove to be short-lived.

All the themes that were outlined in the first part of this review are re-emerging at the surface through the challenges of war:

The lack of state capacity:

It was true that Russia had by far the largest population of any belligerent country, yet she was also the first to suffer from manpower shortages. Because of the high birth-rate in Russia a large proportion of the population was younger than the minimum draft age. The entire pool of recruitable men was only twenty-seven million, and 48 per cent of these were exempt as only sons or the sole adult male workers in their family, or else on account of their ethnic background (Muslims were exempt, for example). Where 12 per cent of the German population and 16 per cent of the French was mobilized for military service, the figure for Russia was only 5 per cent.

The weak national consciousness:

Russian nation, especially if he himself was not Russian, meant very little to him. He was a peasant with little direct knowledge of the world outside his village, and his sense of himself as a 'Russian' was only very weakly developed. He thought of himself as a native of his local region and, as long as the enemy did not threaten to invade that area, saw little reason to fight with him. 'We are Tambov men,' the reluctant recruits would proclaim. 'The Germans will not get as far as that.' A farm agent from Smolensk, who served in the rear garrisons, heard such comments from the peasant soldiers during the first weeks of the war: 'What devil has brought this war on us? We are butting into other people's business.' 'We have talked it over among ourselves; if the Germans want payment, it would be better to pay ten roubles a head than to kill people.' 'Is it not all the same what Tsar we live under? It cannot be worse under the German one.' 'Let them go and fight themselves. Wait a while, we will settle accounts with you.

They had never heard of the ambitions of Germany; they did not even know that such a country existed

The still incomplete spread of basic education and training :

Many of these breakdowns in communication were caused by the errors of badly educated soldiers. Too many telephonists were unable to mend a broken line, too many drivers unable to read a map. The telegraphs would suddenly cease to function and an investigation of the lines to the rear would reveal a party of soldiers cooking their tea on a bonfire made of chopped-up telegraph poles

The backward state of the economy :

There were not even plans for the mass manufacture of boots and when the Ministry finally looked to its soldiers' footware, it discovered that the whole Russian Empire contained one factory capable of producing tanning extract, and that before 1914 virtually all of the country's tannin had been imported from Germany. New boots had to be ordered from the United States, but meanwhile thousands of soldiers fought barefoot. 'They still haven't given out overcoats,' one frozen soldier wrote to his mother. 'We run around in thin topcoats .. . There is not much to eat and what we get is foul. Perhaps we'd be better off dead!' Another soldier wrote home after the visit of the Tsar to his unit: 'For the Tsar's inspection they prepared one company and collected all the best uniforms from the other regiments for it to wear, leaving the rest of the men in the trenches without boots, knapsacks, bandoliers, trousers, uniforms, hats, or anything else.

And finally the brutality of officers towards the common soldier:

The officers responded all too often with more force. Reluctant soldiers were flogged or sent into battle with their own side's artillery aimed at their backs. This internal war between the officers and their men began to overshadow the war itself. 'The officers are trying to break our spirits by terrorizing us,' one soldier wrote to his wife in the spring of 1915. 'They want to make us into lifeless puppets.' Another wrote that a group of officers had 'flogged five men in front of 28,000 troops because they had left their barracks without permission to go and buy bread'

The combined effects of these elements eventually led the country to military disasters, a collapsing morale, a shattered economy unable to fulfill the basic needs of its population and a growing discontent waiting for an outlet.

 Mostly as a consequence of the disorganization in the railway system due to the requirements of war, the food supply in the cities became scarce and the rumors of penury more widespread.
Massive inflation ate away at the workers’ wages, in 1916 a requisition programme was put in place but failed to secure much needed grain from the countryside. black-marketeers took over.

Early in the war, the situation looked very grim on the home front:

Between 1914 and 1916 the calorie intake of unskilled workers fell by a quarter; infant mortality doubled; crime rates tripled; and the number of prostitutes increased by four or five times. From Petrograd, where he had been living since the start of the war, Gorky wrote to Ekaterina in November 1915: We will soon have a famine. I advise you to buy ten pounds of bread and hide it. In the suburbs of Petrograd you can see well-dressed women begging on the streets. It is very cold. People have nothing to burn in their stoves. Here and there, at night, they tear down the wooden fences. What has happened to the Twentieth Century! What has happened to Civilization! The number of child prostitutes is shocking. On your way somewhere at night you see them shuffling along the sidewalks, just like cockroaches, blue with cold and hungry. Last Tuesday I talked to one of them. I put some money into her hand and hurried away, in tears, in such a state of sadness that I felt like banging my head against a wall. Oh, to hell with it all, how hard it has become to live.

 The seeds of revolution were definitely sowed:

On the eve of 1917 the average working woman in Petrograd was probably spending around forty hours per week in various queues for provisions.78 The bread queues, in particular, became a sort of political forum or club, where rumours, information and views were exchanged. It was in these queues that the streets began to organize themselves for the coming revolution. The February Revolution was born in the bread queue. It began when a group of women textile workers on the Vyborg side of Petrograd became impatient with waiting in line and went off to rally their menfolk in the neighbouring metal factories for a protest march to the centre of the city

Russia in revolution

The February revolution

 On the 19th of February, the government, facing ever more acute problems of logistics, announced the coming rationing of food.

That gave more strength to the rumors that were already spreading in Petrograd. Accordingly, panic buying ensued, the grocery stores and bakeries were emptied out, sometimes violently.

In the following days, especially after the 23rd , when women workers from textile factories went out in the streets to ask for bread, demonstrations of strikers in increasing numbers filled up the streets of Petrograd.

For a time, the police were unresponsive, no orders were issued and they seemed to be overwhelmed by the demonstrations.

That all changed when on the 25th, the tsar reacted by ordering the garrison commander to suppress the rioting. On the 26th, the city looked like a militarized camp with mounted patrols and police present at all the strategic locations. Logically, violence against the demonstrators , reminiscent of the 1905 revolution’s turning point, broke out on that same day :

The bloodiest incident took place on Znamenskaya Square, where more than fifty people were shot dead by a training detachment of the Volynsky Regiment. It was a terrible atrocity. An officer, who had been unable to get his young and obviously nervous soldiers to shoot at the demonstrators, grabbed a rifle from one of his men and began to fire wildly at the crowd. Among the dead bodies, which were later piled up around the 'Hippopotamus', were two soldiers from the regiment who had gone over to the side of the people. This shedding of blood — Russia's second Bloody Sunday — proved a critical turning point. From this moment on the demonstrators knew that they were involved in a life-or-death struggle against the regime

On returning from duty, soldiers from the Petrograd garrison mutinied against their officers. They joined the ranks of the demonstrators and took a leading role in organizing the nascent revolution.

As tempting as it is to contrast the “good revolution” of February with its later confiscation at the hands of the Bolsheviks, disorganized violence was present from the start of the revolutionary process:

The idea that the February Days were a 'bloodless revolution' — and that the violence of the crowd did not really take off until October — was a liberal myth. The democratic leaders of 1917 needed it to legitimize their own fragile power. In fact many more people were killed by the crowd in February than in the Bolsheviks' October coup. The February Revolution in Helsingfors and Kronstadt was especially violent, with hundreds of naval officers killed gruesomely by the sailors. According to the official figures of the Provisional Government, 1,443 people were killed or wounded in Petrograd alone.

Although the Bolsheviks and other and other socialist parties had some influence in the demonstrations of February, notably by radicalizing the demands through the spread of slogans such as “ down with the Tsar “ and “down with the war”, what was more remarkable was their lack of preparedness to take advantage of the situation.
Once again, all the Bolsheviks leaders were either in exile abroad or in Siberia.

The split between the bottom up political organizing and the capture by a minority was present from the get go. On the 27th , a few dozen socialist militants proclaimed themselves to be the 'Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies'.

The Petrograd soviet of workers, was a council set up to represent the workers’ interests constituted with elected representative, but the executive committee was constituted of career politicians from the socialist parties:

It was not so much a democratic body as a self-appointed one made up of the various socialist factions and then superimposed on the Soviet. The next day, as 600 Soviet deputies were elected by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, two more representatives from each of the major socialist parties — the Trudoviks, the Popular Socialists, the SRs, the Bund, the Mensheviks, the Inter-District group* and the Bolsheviks — were added to the Executive Committee. The effect was to strengthen its right wing, those who were most opposed to taking power. The voice of the workers, who might well have demanded that they did take power, was not heard. There was not a single factory delegate on the Soviet Executive — and that in a body claiming to represent the working class.

Meanwhile, members of the progressive bloc in the state duma were wondering whether they should obey the Tsar’s order to prorogue the parliament. When their preferred alternative, setting the Tsar’s brother as dictator, failed, they proclaimed themselves in authority as the provisional committee of the State Duma.

The uneasy balance between the two bodies, commonly defined as the ‘dual power’, defined the political balance until the Bolshevik coup:

By 28 February, then, two rival centres of power had emerged: in the right wing of the Tauride Palace there was the Temporary Committee of the Duma, which had the closest thing to formal power but no authority in the streets; while in the left wing there was the Soviet, which had the closest thing to power in the streets but no formal authority.

 Members  of the Duma, described as “reluctant revolutionaries” by Figes, were constantly expressing their fear of the masses and were therefore very prudent in their actions. The soviet representatives seemed to be, for their part, very concerned about legitimacy and legality and thus did not try to seize power but planned to use their power to pressure the provisional government.
The soldiers, who exercised by far the biggest influence within the soviets, set out to dictate their demands to the government to ensure that their revendications would turn into political realities:

The result was Order Number One, perhaps the most consequential document to be written as a result of the February Revolution. It was a list of the soldiers' demands and conditions for their return to the garrisons.

It provided for the establishment of soldiers' committees as a democratic counterbalance to the authority of the officers. It declared that the soldiers would recognize only the authority of the Petrograd Soviet, and that the orders of the Duma's Military Commission would be executed only in so far as they did not conflict with the Soviet's. 

As more new freedoms were granted, Russia was turning into the ‘freest country in the world’:

Freedoms of assembly, press and speech were granted. Legal restrictions of religion, class and race were removed. There was a general amnesty. Universal adult suffrage was introduced. The police were made accountable to local government. The courts and the penal system were overhauled. Capital punishment was abolished.

Popular support for the revolution reached all strata of the population:

There was hardly a town, however small, that did not celebrate the revolution with jubilant processions, patriotic speeches and the singing of the Marseillaise.

Lights were lit in all the houses. The streets filled with people. The doors of many houses stood open. Strangers, weeping openly, embraced each other. The solemn, exultant whistling of locomotives could be heard from the direction of the station. Somewhere down one street there began, first quietly, then steadily louder, the singing of the Marseillaise: Ye tyrants quake, your day is over, Detested now by friend and foe!

However the limits of imagination from a population only used to the tsarist regime were showing:

One soldier said he wanted to elect a President and when asked, "Whom would you elect?" he replied, "The Tsar." ' Soldiers' letters voiced the same contusion. 'We want a democratic republic and a Tsar-Batiushka for three years'; 'It would be good if we had a republic with a sensible Tsar.' It seems that the peasants found it difficult to distinguish between the person of the monarch (gosudar' ) and the abstract institutions of the state (gosudarstvo). Their conception of the democratic order was similarly couched in personalized terms.

The pressure from the ever more politicized masses was growing constantly, rather than analyzing the situation in terms of a “dual power”, Figes, proposes to emphasize the proliferation of a multitude of local powers.
More than 600 soviets were set up all over the country, the politicization of the masses was ever more apparent :

The servants and house porters demand advice as to which party they should vote for in the ward elections. Every wall in the town is placarded with notices of meetings, lectures, congresses, electoral appeals, and announcements, not only in Russian, but in Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew . . . Two men argue at a street corner and are at once surrounded by an excited crowd. Even at concerts now the music is diluted with political speeches by well-known orators. The Nevsky Prospekt has become a kind of Quartier Latin. Book hawkers line the pavement and cry sensational pamphlets about Rasputin and Nicholas, and who is Lenin, and how much land will the peasants get.

In the countryside, peasants took the revolution on their own hands and did not wait for any directives to topple the old order:

In the village of Bor-Polianshchina, in Saratov province, for example, a band of peasants, led by some soldiers, forced their way into the manor house of Prince V V Saburov, and hacked him to death with axes and knives. It was a bloody retribution for the role his son had played as the local land captain in 1906, when twelve peasant rebels had been hanged in the village before their screaming wives and children.

Workers in the cities organized as well, in defiance of the new government:

No organization better reflected the growing self-assertiveness of the working class than the Red Guards. Like the factory committees, they were an innovation of 1917, and the initiative for their establishment came essentially from below. During the February Revolution a wide range of workers' armed brigades had sprung up to defend the factories. They refused to disarm when the government set up its own militias in the cities. So there was a dual system of police — with the city militias in the middle-class districts and the workers' brigades in the industrial suburbs

The revolution had already taken a life of its own, when under the leadership of Kerensky, the provisional government had decided to carry on fighting the war:

When, in May, Brusilov assumed the Supreme Command and reviewed the units on the Northern Front, where the spirit of mutiny was strongest, he found that hundreds of officers had already fled their posts, while more than a few had even been driven to suicide. 'I remember one case when a group of officers had overheard their soldiers talk in threatening tones of "the need to kill all the officers". One of the youngest officers became so terrified he shot himself that night.

Most soldiers were also peasants, and their minds were fixated on carrying out the revolution at home instead of fighting a war which felt alien to them, under the orders of officers they did not respect:

The peasant conscripts naturally assumed that, if only they could overthrow their noble officers, then peace, bread and land would be the result. As one soldier put it at a meeting of his regiment in March to discuss the abdication of the Tsar: Haven't you understood? What is going on is a ryvailoosbun! Don't you know what a ryvailoosbun is? It's when the people take all the power. And what's the people without us, the soldiers, with our guns? Bah! It's obvious — it means that the power belongs to us. And while we're about it, the country is ours too, and all the land is ours, and if we choose to fight or not is up to us as well. Now do you understand? That's a ryvailoosbun

And: 

The soldiers wanted only one thing — peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme. They did not have the slightest understanding of what either Communism, or the International,* or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called 'Bolshevism'.

Unsurprisingly, with the collapsing morale of the soldiers combined with the persistence of supply and basic organization problems, what would be the last attempt at offense from the Russian army turns into a disaster:

For two days the advance continued. The German lines were broken and a glorious 'Triumph for Liberty!' was heralded in the patriotic press. Then, on the third day, the advance came to a halt, the Germans began to counter-attack, and the Russians fled in panic. It was partly a case of the usual military failings: units had been sent into battle without machine-guns; untrained soldiers had been ordered to engage in complex manoeuvres using hand grenades and ended up throwing them without first pulling the pins. But the main reason for the fiasco was the simple reluctance of the soldiers to fight. Having advanced two miles, the front-line troops felt they had done their bit and refused to go any further, while those in the second line would not take their places. The advance thus broke down as the men began to run away.

And:

The retreat degenerated into chaos as soldiers looted shops and stores, raped peasant girls and murdered Jews. The crucial advance towards Lvov soon collapsed when the troops discovered a large store of alcohol in the abandoned town of Koniukhy and stopped there to get drunk. By the time they were fit to resume fighting three days and a hangover later, enemy reinforcements had arrived, and the Russians, suffering heavy losses, were forced to retreat

Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand why Lenin’s mantra of “Bread and peace” could strike the right chord with the soldiers and the population at large.

More demonstrations followed, with an ever more radicalized gathering of soldiers, workers and revolutionaries from all backgrounds. The unpreparedness of the politicians that were supposed to be the leaders of the revolution showed to the point of comedy as they outright declined the opportunity of seizing power once presented to them. On the other side, the protesters that tried to empower them also proved too attached to formalities and hierarchy to take matters into their own hands:

Some sailors began to penetrate into the palace, climbing in through the open windows. They called for the socialist ministers to come out and explain their reluctance to take power. Chernov was sent out to calm the crowd. But as soon as he appeared on the steps angry shouts were heard from the sailors. The crowd surged forward and seized hold of him, searching him for weapons. One worker raised his fist and shouted at him in anger: 'Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you.'' Several armed men bundled the SR leader into an open car. They declared him under arrest and said they would not release him until the Soviet had taken power.

And:

The Kronstadters all knew the figure of Trotsky and waited for his instructions. Had the Bolsheviks planned for the seizure of power, this was surely the moment to urge the sailors on to the storming of the Tauride, the arrest of the Soviet leaders and the proclamation of a socialist government

Finally, the soviet leaders, after discussing whether they should abide the popular demand and seize power, refused to do so claiming that: 'The decision of the revolutionary democracy cannot be dictated by bayonets'.
From then on , the crowd was powerless to pursue any other course of action. That deadlock left them vulnerable when the loyal forces came to reimpose order. Once again the fear from the mob on the part of the soviet leaders is telling:

By this stage, loyal troops were flocking to defend the Tauride Palace. The Izmailovsky Regiment was the first to arrive, on the evening of the 4th, with a thunderous rendering of the Marseillaise — as if in response to the Internationale of the Kronstadters — from its military band. As they heard the sound of it approaching, the Soviet leaders embraced each other with tears of relief: the siege of the Tauride Palace was finally over. Standing arm in arm, they broke spontaneously into the stirring chorus of Aux armes, citoyens'. It was, as Martov angrily muttered, a 'classic scene from the start of a counterrevolution'.

This was indeed the beginning of the end for the February revolution. The new coalition government leaned further to the right, the soviets were marginalized and there was a backslide on the recently acquired freedoms. The death penalty was restored.

Many Bolshevik leaders got arrested for their alleged role in the protests while Lenin took refuge in Finland. However, apart from Lenin, most Bolshevik leaders were on the side of restraint and did not think in terms of seizing power immediately using their popular backing but preferred to play politics within the established framework.

The former aristocrats of the tsarist regime longed for the return of order but remained powerless throughout these events, only able to recreate a semblance of life under the old regime:

Countess Speransky found that in Kiev, 'parties on the river, auto-picnics to chateaux in the neighbourhood, dinners and suppers with gypsy-bands and chorus, bridge and even tangoes, poker, and romances were the order of the day'. The funeral of the seven Cossacks killed by the Bolsheviks during the July Days became a stage for the propertied classes to indulge themselves in a patriotic show of emotion.

However, with the new government more inclined to please reactionary sentiments, the new commander of the army, general Kornilov, became the champion of all those who felt nostalgia for the old days. Ironically, the fear of reaction, bolstered by the new policies enacted by the coalition combined with the possibility of a coup carried by Kornilov provoked an even stronger backlash that opened the space for a Bolshevik coup.

The other socialist parties did much to preserve the bolsheviks :

The left-wing Mensheviks, many of whom still harboured hopes of reuniting their party with the Bolsheviks, were especially assiduous in their opposition to government repressions; and it was largely due to their efforts that the public trial and commission set up to examine the treason charges lost momentum and came to naught. It was this, more than anything else, that ensured the survival of the Bolsheviks. Because of the reluctance of the Soviet leaders to cut their ties with them, a prime opportunity had been missed to end the Leninist threat once and for all. Twelve months later, when many of these same Soviet leaders sat in Bolshevik jails, they would come to regret it.

Meanwhile, as these parties became more moderate and turned away from the soviets’ program, the bolsheviks gained popularity and appeared as the only party in phase with the people’s revendications:

The Bolsheviks made dramatic gains in the city Duma elections of August and September. In Petrograd they increased their share of the popular vote from 20 per cent in May to 33 per cent on 20 August. In Moscow, where the Bolsheviks had polled a mere II per cent in June, they swept to victory on 24 September with 51 per cent of the vote, while the SR vote collapsed from 56 per cent to 14 per cent, and the Mensheviks from 12 per cent to 4 per cent. The Kadets, on the other hand, as the only party representing the interests of the bourgeoisie, increased their share of the vote from 17 per cent to 31 per cent.

 By this time, the socialist leaders were more or less on the same page, viewing the establishment of a coalition of only socialist parties as the most desirable outcome. The Bolsheviks shared that view, apart from Lenin who thought the opportunity was there for an armed insurrection to seize power unilaterally, sidelining both the soviets and the other parties.
Lenin, once again, prevailed against the other leaders and imposed what was an ultra minority view within his own party:

The most important decision in the history of the Bolshevik Party — to launch the armed insurrection — was thus taken by a minority of the Central Committee: it passed by ten votes to two (Kamenev and Zinoviev)

And:

The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began. Until late in the evening of 24 October the majority of the Central Committee and the MRC had not envisaged the overthrow of the Provisional Government before the opening of the Soviet Congress the next day. Trotsky, who in Lenin's absence had effectively assumed the leadership of the party, repeatedly stressed the need for discipline and patience.

As is is now a recurrent theme of the book, the fear to take action and the delusions of the other actors left an incredible power vacuum that Lenin seemed to be the only one ready to fill:

The poetess and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius, wrote in her diary on 24 October: 'Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.' This just about sums it up. Brusilov, who since his dismissal as Commander-in-Chief had become an advocate of the need to raise a civilian militia in order to fight the Bolsheviks, found that he could muster neither volunteers nor money to buy mercenaries. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. The bourgeoisie and the Rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Nobody wanted to defend it, least of all the monarchists. They preferred to let the Bolsheviks seize power, in the belief that they would not last long and would bring the country to such utter ruin that all the socialists would be discredited, whereupon the Rightists would impose their own dictatorship

That was the reaction from the rightist groups, but once the insurrection came to a successful end, the reaction from socialist parties was equally if not more baffling:

The mandates of the delegates showed an overwhelming majority in favour of a Soviet government. It was up to the Congress to decide how this should be formed. Martov proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to avert a civil war. The proposal was met with torrents of applause.

But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was at last about to be formed, a series of Mensheviks and SRs bitterly denounced the violent assault on the Provisional Government. They declared that their parties, or at least the right-wing sections of them, would have nothing to do with this 'criminal venture', which was bound to throw the country into civil war, and walked out of the Congress hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them

The ‘criminal venture’ is referring to the armed insurrection carried out by the bolsheviks. For a time, it felt as if many paths were still open, the insurrection did not mean that the bolsheviks got complete power, the insurrection was perceived by most, including the bolshevik militants as a mean to establish a coalition of the socialists parties and reset the revolution on its original course.

After Lenin fought for primacy of his party over the other ones, he fought to establish himself as the dictator of his own party. From the very onset, we can see the tactics that would characterize power plays within the communist party for many decades. Lenin never expressed any doubts about the necessity of terror to accomplish his goals:

On 2 November the Central Committee was bullied into passing a series of quite astounding resolutions: Kamenev was accused of 'un-Marxist' activities against the October Revolution; his supporters were ordered to withdraw from the Central Committee; and if they failed to submit to the party's policy against the inter-party talks — submitted in the form of an 'Ultimatum from the majority of the Central Committee to the minority' — were threatened with expulsion from the party altogether

And:

Alongside it was printed a second letter of protest from five People's Commissars, a third of Lenin's cabinet, four who resigned and six other prominent Bolshevik leaders, in which it was stated that a purely Bolshevik government could be maintained only by means of 'political terror' and that, if this path was taken, it would lead to 'the establishment of an unaccountable regime and to the destruction of the revolution and the country'. This was without doubt one of the most critical moments in the history of the Bolshevik Party. Though Lenin's revolution had been carried out, the party emerged from it hopelessly divided and isolated from the rest of the revolutionary movement. Few people believed, in its second week, that the Bolshevik regime could survive.

Under Lenin’s ruthless leadership, the Bolsheviks are now busy concentrating power into their own hands, they are not simply setting themselves as the main party but are actively repressing all forms of dissents.

The soviet is bypassed by the party, the elections are rigged and where there is an open show of opposition, the repression is swift. After a large demonstration against the many abuses of power by the Bolsheviks, the other parties are accused as “counter revolutionaries”, some parties are banned while party leaders are arrested.

The party was growing as violent as it was growing powerful, a political police, the Cheka, was established under Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was bound to surpass in violence and cruelty the Okhrhana, its predecessor from the tsarist era, in no time.

Very soon, the constituent assembly, the representative body with the most democratic legitimacy, was under direct attack by the Bolsheviks. Unless it accepted submission to the Soviet, the Bolsheviks simply asked for the closure of the assembly . The repression against the public outcry was indicative of the direction of the new regime:

Petrograd was in a state of siege on 5 January, the opening day of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had placed the capital under martial law, forbidden public gatherings and flooded the city with troops. Most of them were concentrated near the Tauride Palace, where the Assembly was due to convene. The palace was cordoned off with barricades guarded by Bolshevik pickets.

It was the first time government troops had fired on an unarmed crowd since the February Days. The victims were buried on 9 January, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, next to the victims of that massacre in the Preobrazhensky Cemetery. The historic parallels did not go unnoticed

To understand the scale of the revolution and how it managed to affect so many people in such a dramatic manner, it is important to stress the amount of buy-in that there was within the population at large.
As we have already seen , the peasants and the workers often had their own agenda and profited from the political struggles at the top to impose their own revolution from the bottom.
Considering the dire situation, due to the poor handling of the war, the economy, and the counterproductive policies implemented by the communists, what did the new regime offer to those that supported the revolution?

The phrase “looting of the looters”, that the Bolsheviks would make their own, is used by Figes to describe the process by which the regime managed to build itself on the worst sentiments of the masses:

If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own — and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction. After 1918, as the revolution's ideals became tarnished and the people became more and more impoverished, the Bolshevik regime was increasingly inclined to base its appeal almost exclusively on these vulgar pleasures of revenge. In an editorial to mark the start of 1919, Pravda proudly proclaimed: Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupted 'golden life'?

And:

In one People's Court the jurors made it a practice to inspect the hands of the defendant and, if they were clean and soft, to find him guilty. Speculative traders were heavily punished and sometimes even sentenced to death, whereas robbers — and sometimes even murderers — of the rich were often given only a very light sentence, or even acquitted altogether, if they pleaded poverty as the cause of their crime. The looting of the looters had been legalized and, in the process, law as such abolished: there was only lawlessness.

The new regimeWhen the Bolsheviks were taking over the apparatus of the state, there was a widespread resistance to serve under their authority from the civil servants. Upon the arrival of the newly appointed ministers, the employees of the ministry would often just leave the building and many participated in strikes . As a consequence, many civil servants got replaced and a whole new class of administrators took over. The lack of basic knowledge on the running of government affairs was considerable and resulted in some instances in grotesque improvisation, notably when it came to the state’s finances:  

Ten days later the Bolsheviks finally seized control of the bank and forced the employees, at the point of a gun, to open the vaults. Five million roubles were removed, taken off to the Smolny in a velvet bag and deposited on Lenin's desk. The whole operation resembled a bank holdup. The Bolsheviks now took over the State Bank, making it possible for them to dip their hands freely into the nation's coffers; yet none of them had the slightest idea of how such a vast bank worked. 'There were people among us who were acquainted with the banking system from books and manuals,' recalled one of its new directors, 'but there was not a single man among us who knew the technical procedure of the Russian State Bank. 

Regardless of the ignorance concerning the ins and outs of government among the new ruling class, they sincerely believed in their ideology and were definitely committed to implement it.

By doing so, they embarked on a journey that would profoundly reshape Russian society and those of the republics that would soon constitute the USSR. There was, of course, the economic policies that are at the core of communist ideology, but on top of that, there was a grand vision of the new man that could be shaped to fit in a communist state.
In that regard, the bolsheviks, did not especially got their inspiration from traditional marxist theory, they were the product of an era in which many dreamed about the rationalization of man :

As Lilina Zinoviev, one of the pioneers of Soviet schooling, declared at a Congress of Public Education in 1918: We must make the young generation into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists .. . We must rescue children from the harmful influence of family life . .. We must nationalise them. From the earliest days of their little lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools. They will learn the ABC of Communism... To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet State — that is our task.

This impulse to create everything anew and start from a “blank slate” allowed for extreme violence to be justified, the view that the worst aspects of the regime were the results of Stalin’s personality who corrupted the initial vision of the more benign bolsheviks leaders gets shattered when considering utterances like these: 

They were now despatching armed brigades to requisition the grain from the peasantry by force; and their propaganda made it clear that this was to be seen as a 'battle for grain'. Trotsky himself told the meeting on 4 June: 'Our Party is for civil war! Civil war has to be waged for grain. We the Soviets are going into battle!' At this point a delegate had shouted: Long live civil war!' No doubt he had meant it as a joke. But Trotsky turned on him and replied with deadly seriousness: 'Yes, long live civil war! Civil war for the sake of the children, the elderly, the workers and the Red Army, civil war in the name of direct and ruthless struggle against counter-revolution.'

And:

Trotsky had once said: 'We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.' And that is what the Cheka did. Shortly after the murder Dzerzhinsky told the press: The Cheka is the defence of the revolution as the Red Army is; as in the civil war the Red Army cannot stop to ask whether it may harm particular individuals, but must take into account only one thing, the victory of the revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy even if its sword falls occasionally on the heads of the innocent.

Apart from the incredible cruelty that defined the repression exercised by the Cheka, its fanatical endeavor also showed in situations such as this one:

Peshekhonov, Kerensky's Minister of Food, who was imprisoned in the Lubianka jail, recalls a conversation with a fellow prisoner, a trade unionist from Vladimir, who could not work out why he had been arrested. All he had done was to come to Moscow and check into a hotel. 'What is your name?' another prisoner asked. 'Smirnov', he replied, one of the most common Russian names: 'The name, then, was the cause of your arrest,' said a man coming towards us. 'Let me introduce myself. My name too is Smirnov, and I am from Kaluga. At the Taganka there were seven of us Smirnovs, and they say there are many more at the Butyrka... At the Taganka they somehow managed to find out that a certain Smirnov, a Bolshevik from Kazan, had disappeared with a large sum of money. Moscow was notified and orders were issued to the militia to arrest all Smirnovs arriving in Moscow and send them to the Cheka. They are trying to catch the Smirnov from Kazan.' 'But I have never been to Kazan,' protested the Vladimir Smirnov. 'Neither have I,' replied the one from Kaluga. 'I am not even a Bolshevik, nor do I intend to become one. But here I am.

At that point of the civil war, the disorganization of the economy was such that the workers fled the cities in the search for means of subsistence in the countryside, bartering goods on the black market to the peasants . The chaos that ensued was in part a justification for ‘war communism’ which was the response of the new regime to what they interpreted as the failure of the capitalist system to secure the necessities of life to the population.

The economy had to be fully planned and each was assigned a role, that precluded any possibility of individual choice:

The Bolsheviks were adamant on the state's need to control the movement of labour. This was the essence of War Communism — 'the right of the dictatorship', as Trotsky put it, 'to send every worker to the place where he is needed in accordance with the state plan'

Ironically, in word and in deed, the Bolsheviks reproduced the worst aspects of what they described as the essence of the capitalist system:

The word for a worker (rabochii) was returning to its origins: the word for a slave (rah). Here was the root of the Gulag system — the mentality of dragooning long lines of half-starved and ragged peasants onto building sites and into factories. Trotsky epitomized this when he said that the labour armies were made up from a 'peasant raw material' (muzhitskoe syr'ie). It was the idea that human labour, far from being the creative force which Marx had extolled, was in fact no more than a raw commodity which the state could use up to 'build socialism'. This perversion was implicit in the system from the start. Gorky had foreseen this in 1917 when he wrote that 'the working class is for a Lenin what ore is for a metalworker'

Unsurprisingly, this use of ‘peasant raw material’ did not translate into an effective economic policy :

The whole country would be one armed camp.' All this was nothing but a bureaucratic dream. The peasant labour teams, like the labour armies, proved fantastically inefficient. It took fifty conscripts one whole day, on average, to cut down and chop up a single tree. Roads built by labour teams were so uneven that, in the words of one observer, they 'looked like frozen ocean waves' and to travel on them was 'worse than an amusement ride'.

In the countryside, the collectivization effort proved to be catastrophic, the new managers came with a depth of ignorance that set the local peasants against it:

The sovkhozy were largely made up of unemployed workers who had fled the towns; the kolkhozy of landless labourers, rural artisans, and the poorest peasants, who through misfortune, too much drinking, or simple laziness, had never made a success of their own farms. Peasant congresses were inundated with complaints about the poor way the collective farms were run. 'They have got the land but they don't know how to farm it,' complained the peasants of Tambov province.

As a result of poor management, skewed incentives that went against efficiency and a general opposition to the strong encroachment on the peasants liberty, the collectives were a resounding economic failure:

Despite their exemption from the food levy and generous state grants of tools and livestock, very few collectives ran at a profit, and many of them ran at a heavy loss. Less than a third of their total income was derived from their own production, the rest coming mainly from the state. Some collectives were so badly run that they had to conscript the local peasants for labour duty on their fields. The peasants saw this as a new form of serfdom and took up arms against the collectives. Half of them were destroyed in the peasant wars of 1921.

 That same class of newly educated young peasants that resented their life in the countryside and all the restrictions that came with it, formed the battalions of revolutionaries and were also those that stood to benefit the most from the new regime. As Figes says : “Throughout the peasant world, communist regimes have been built on the fact that it is the ambition of every literate peasant son to become a clerk.”

Their dream of social ascension could be fulfilled by joining the apparatus of the state which was going through a tremendous inflation:

From 1917 to 1921 the number of government employees more than quadrupled, from 576,000 to 2.4 million. By 1921, there were twice as many bureaucrats as workers in Russia. They were the social base of the regime. This was not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat but a Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy. Moscow, in Lenin's words, was 'bloated with officials': it housed nearly a quarter of a million of them, one-third of the total workforce in the city by the end of 1920. The centre of Moscow became one vast block of offices, as committees were piled on top of councils and departments on top of commissions.

 In perhaps was what to prove the most perfect combination of the anarchy coming from the bottom and the will to impose order from the top, the bloated nascent bureaucracy led to inefficiencies of farcical proportions:

Perhaps a third of the bureaucracy was employed in the regulation of the planned economy. It was an absurd situation: while the economy came to a standstill, its bureaucracy flourished. The country was desperately short of fuel but there was an army of bureaucrats to regulate its almost non-existent distribution. There was no paper in the shops but a mountain of it in the Soviet offices (90 per cent of the paper made in Russia during the first four years of Soviet rule was consumed by the bureaucracy). One of the few really busy factories was the Moscow Telephone Factory. Such was the demand of this new officialdom for telephones that it had a waiting list of 12,000 orders. This correlation — empty factories and full offices — was not accidental. The scarcer goods were, the harder it became to control their distribution, since the black market thrived on shortages, so that the state increased its intervention. The result was the proliferation of overlapping offices within the economy.

Conclusion

Nobody knows the full human cost of the revolution. By any calculation it was catastrophic. Counting only deaths from the civil war, the terror, famine and disease, it was something in the region of ten million people. But this excludes the emigration (about two million) and the demographic effects of a hugely reduced birth-rate — nobody wanted children in these frightful years — which statisticians say would have added up to ten million lives.* The highest death rates were among adult men — in Petrograd alone there were 65,000 widows in 1920 — but death was so common that it touched everyone.

The death toll is almost unbelievable, but the human tragedy cannot be understood uniquely referring to the casualties. For many who survived throughout these events, the veneer of civilization was off :

 Death was so common that people became inured to it. The sight of a dead body in the street no longer attracted attention. Murders occurred for the slightest motive — stealing a few roubles, jumping a queue, or simply for the entertainment of the killers. Seven years of war had brutalized people and made them insensitive to the pain and suffering of others. In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. 'No they were not. "He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what's the odds, if we kill one another there'll be more room in the land." '

And :

'In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village — and all of them serve up young children.' The phenomenon really took off with the onset of winter, around November 1921, when the first snows covered the remaining food substitutes on the ground and there was nothing else to eat. Mothers, desperate to feed their children, cut off limbs from corpses and boiled the flesh in pots. People ate their own relatives — often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet. In some villages the peasants refused to bury their dead but stored the corpses, like so much meat, in their barns and stables.

The brutalization, and normalization of violence that defined many parts of Europe following the ‘end’ of World War I, was very acute in the Russian case. We already described many instances showing the low concern for human life throughout the events of historical intensity that occurred in Russia but the rationalization by some of the perpetrators of violence makes a grim depiction of the human condition:

 In 1921 Gorky asked a group of soldiers from the Red Army if they were uneasy about killing people. 'No they were not. "He has a weapon, I have a weapon, so we are equal; what's the odds, if we kill one another there'll be more room in the land."

And: 

One soldier, who had also fought in Europe in the First World War, even told Gorky that it was easier to kill a Russian than a foreigner. 'Our people are many, our economy is poor; well, if a hamlet is burnt, what's the loss? It would have burnt down itself in due course.' Life had become so cheap that people thought little of killing one another, or indeed of others killing millions in their name. One peasant asked a scientific expedition working in the Urals during 1921: 'You are educated people, tell me then what's to happen to me. A Bashkir killed my cow, so of course I killed the Bashkir and then I took the cow away from his family. So tell me: shall I be punished for the cow?' When they asked him whether he did not rather expect to be punished for the murder of the man, the peasant replied: 'That's nothing, people are cheap nowadays.'

The children were not spared from the worst of this brutalization:

 A survey of 1920 found that 88 per cent of the girls had engaged at some time in prostitution, while similar figures were found among the boys. Some of the girls were as young as seven. Most of the sexual acts took place in the streets, in market-places, in station-halls and parks. The girls had pimps — themselves usually no more than teenage boys — who often used them to rob their clients. But there were also paedophil-iac brothels run by so-called 'aunties', who gave the children food and a corner of a room, whilst putting them to work and living off their earnings.13 For millions of children this was the closest thing they ever had to maternal care.

Despite widespread calls to limit the children to six hours of labour, and to make employers provide two hours of schooling, the authorities chose not to intervene, claiming it was 'better to have the children working than living from crime on the streets', with the result that many minors ended up by working twelve or fourteen hours every day. Children also made excellent soldiers. The Red Army had many young teenagers in its ranks. Having spent the whole of their conscious lives surrounded by the violence of war and revolution, many of them had no doubt come to think that killing people was part of normal life. These little soldiers were noted for their readiness to do as they were told — their commanders often played the role of surrogate fathers — as well as for their ruthless ability to kill the enemy, especially when led to believe that they were avenging their parents' murder.

Which makes us wonder how these traumatic experiences experienced by the young generation would play a part in explaining what was yet to come.