Russia’s Collapse and the drive Towards World Revolution: The February Revolution and the 1917 Bolshevik Seizure of power

Chapter 2 Section 1

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This below is Chapter 2 Section 1:

Russia’s Collapse and the drive Towards World Revolution: The February Revolution and the 1917 Bolshevik Seizure of power.

The revolution of the military collapse, to which the National Socialists referred again and again with words and actions, had already taken place in Russia a year and a half earlier than in Germany, in March 1917, but it was a longer and more painful process, because it could not assume the final defeat, but at first just wanted to prevent it.   The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November meant, on the one hand, the continuation and completion of this process, but it was also the beginning of a countermovement to the dissolution of power and the cohesion of the vast empire, as would become apparent after a relatively short time. 

The Bolsheviks, however, understood their “October Revolution” as the fulfillment and realization of the intentions that had guided not the politicians, but the great masses of soldiers and people already during the February Revolution, namely the longing for peace, social justice and freedom. The relationship of the seizure of power to the people's revolution was thus ambivalent, while the National Socialist takeover of power in Germany wanted to have a merely negative relationship to the so much more distant revolutionary collapse.

On March 8, 1917, in Petrograd, where strikes had already been going on for several days in important factories, protest demonstrations over bread shortage developed and quickly gained momentum, renewing themselves on the following days in ever greater proportions. Even from the outset, the President of the Parliament had urged the tsar, who for some time had been the personal commander-in-chief of the armies and was in his headquarters near Mogilev, to form a cabinet of general confidence as soon as possible, because the reserve battalions of the guards' regiments were already killing their officers and, on the other hand, numerous sergeants were involved in the demonstrations.

However, Nicholas II did not agree, and a few days later most of the troops in the capital had taken the side of the demonstrators, almost all of Petersburg's police stations had been burned down, red flags were fluttering everywhere and also on the roof of the Winter Palace, the Romanov dynasty was overthrown, huge crowds drunk with joy were roaming the main streets, and next to a weak "Provisional Government" formed by members of the "Progressive Bloc" in Parliament, a "Soviet of Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies" was meeting. The latter's "Order No. 1" stipulated that councils of soldiers were to be formed in all military units and that they were to have the power of command in all political matters. Even though "the strictest military discipline" was imposed on the soldiers in the performance of their duties, the authority of the officers everywhere was permanently weakened by this order. Reports of insubordination, desertions, and assassinations of superiors piled up; the fabric of the giant Russian army was shaken. As early as March, the army leadership received the news that 90% of the officers had been arrested and were under guard, and that free officers could not walk around with shoulder patches because they were immediately torn off "by the worst elements of the crew." In April, an assembly of sailors and soldiers from Helsingfors drafted a resolution protesting "against all the war slogans spread by the bourgeoisie" and declaring the current lack of ammunition to be the "fault of the businessmen." Soldiers' letters from the front, which were held back by the censors, spoke more and more frequently of the imminent conclusion of peace and of the imminent distribution of the land of the landlords, and alongside stirring testimonies of greater self-confidence, the censors could also read phrases of terrifying ferocity: "The old power did not allow us to be considered human beings...now we are all awakened to life." In our country, all the committees are working and have already worked out projects to give the land to the people for free, without a kopeck.  And if someone resists and goes against the new law, we will slaughter and destroy him, and if I had to, I would not spare even my own parents."  

It became clear very early on that it was a political revolution of war-weary soldiers and, to a certain extent, a social revolution of the majority of the peasants, who wanted to see their old desire to take possession of the nobility's estates fulfilled. At the same time, in Petrograd and the few other industrial centers, the first demands of workers for the socialization of industry appeared. The Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was not expected to fundamentally oppose these demands, since it was largely composed of members of the peasant party of the Social Revolutionaries and the Marxist workers' party of the Mensheviks, while the Bolsheviks were still relatively weak. But the Soviet, of course, knew full well that the peace question far surpassed all other questions in topical importance, and so he addressed impassioned appeals to the "proletarians of all countries," and especially to the German workers and soldiers: they should exert all their forces to compel their governments to conclude a general peace, now that autocracy had been overthrown in Russia and the argument of defending Europe against asiatic despotism no longer had any validity. This Soviet did not want immediate transformation, and it did not claim for itself autocracy. Rather, it was convinced that Russia could be saved only through the cooperation of all leftist parties, including the bourgeois party of "constitutional democrats" (Kadetten), and therefore it considered itself most like The Provisional Parliament of the Provisional Government, which it had sent representatives to from the beginning.  

In so doing, of course, he took a path that had been hotly disputed even among the Western European Socialists up to the outbreak of the war, the path of collaboration with the class enemy, the bourgeoisie; but he believed, with good reason, that any other path must lead to the disaster of a separate peace, for the constant defeats of the Russian troops by the German armies were the real cause of the desire for peace, and the armies of the Central Powers were deep in Russia: They had occupied all of Poland and large parts of the Baltic provinces, and they were knocking at the gates of Ukraine. If the Russian army disbanded, the country would be at the mercy of German military power, and only the early conclusion of a general peace could protect the socialist forces from the accusation of having led the country into defeat.  Therefore, even the Bolsheviks sided with the government, which had to save the country "from decline and collapse," now that the way was clear for a "democratic republic" and the convening of the Constituent Assembly. The first great paradox of this revolution in the desire for peace was that it was only possible because the public opinion had demanded victories and had become more and more suspicious of the Tsar's court, where Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, a German princess by birth, was supposedly working for a separate peace with the German emperor and was spreading the spirit of defeatism through her favorite Rasputin. Rasputin was indeed an opponent of this war, and his assassination in December 1916 was a victory for the war party at court, which also had numerous champions in parliament and in the Duma. After all, the war was waged in alliance with the western democracies of France and England, and the Russian intelligentsia and the strong industrial bourgeoisie in Petersburg had long since promised an end to autocracy and the transformation of Russia into a constitutional monarchy.

 Therefore, a powerful part of public opinion welcomed the revolution as a transformation that would lead a free Russia, strengthened by freedom, to the final victory over Prussian-German militarism, at the side of the free peoples of the West.  This was how the revolution was often seen abroad, and some Americans compared the new prime minister, Georgy Lvov, to George Washington.  However, not all representatives of the Allies were so optimistic.  The secretary of the French legation, Count Louis de Robien, for example, already suspected in March and April what the outcome would be when he had to write in his diary that his good friend, General Stackelberg, had refused to comply with the demands of the soldiery and had been slaughtered in front of his wife and thrown into the Neva. Robien was equally disturbed when he noticed a little later that among the soldiers were "badly shaven students with long hair and green caps...all typical Russian nihilists." After all, he knew as well as all his colleagues that the Germans expected a separate peace from the revolution and had been trying for some time to exert a corresponding influence through money and agents. It probably served not least to reassure the Allies that the new foreign minister and leader of the Kadetten, Paul Miliukov, underlined the Russian will to win in a note and reminded them of the Russian war goals, including Constantinople.  

After all, he knew as well as all his colleagues that the Germans expected a separate peace from the revolution and had been trying for some time to exert a corresponding influence through money and agents. It probably served not least to reassure the Allies that the new foreign minister and leader of the cadets, Paul Miliukov, underlined the Russian will to win in a note and reminded them of the Russian war goals, including Constantinople. In this way, against his will, he caused the second and even greater paradox: that the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who had returned to Petersburg from exile in Zurich in mid-April and had been received there with great ceremony, was gaining more and more support with his "April Theses". The Mensheviks, as well as many of their own party comrades, had at first taken note with bewilderment of Lenin's opinion that the provisional government was a bourgeois government, a government of the capitalists, and that the genuine socialists had to wage the fiercest struggle against it, but also against the "defenders of the fatherland" or "social chauvinists" among the "petty-bourgeois" Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, in order to establish a "commune" or soviet state that would "abolish the police, the army, the bureaucracy" and represent the immediate transition to socialism. But that the polemic against the capitalists and the "bourgeoisie" was popular was already evident from the fact that Milyukov had to resign after large demonstrations, and it was soon impossible to overlook the fact that Lenin had given voice to a strong popular sentiment when he tore open a huge rift within revolutionary democracy. On the one side were the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, as well as some smaller socialist parties, which - at first still the great majority - under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky sought to narrow the distance between the Soviet and the government, so that the Provisional Government soon consisted of about half socialists. On the other side were the Bolsheviks and the so-called internationalist Mensheviks around Julius Martov, as well as the small group of Leon Trotsky, who had returned to Russia from America.  They all demanded that "all power be given to the Soviets," since only a government free of capitalists and paternalists could make a credible appeal to the people of the warring states and thus bring about a general peace.  

Of course, this was by no means the first rift that Vladimir Ulyanov, the son of an ennobled inspector from Simbirsk, had torn open between himself and other socialists. In 1903, he had brought about the split of the barely founded Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, because he wanted to assert his concept of the party as a "stable and continuity-preserving leadership organization" and a "closely-knit group" of professional revolutionaries against the more democratic ideas of Martov, for whom the spontaneity of mass action was more important than the consciousness and leadership of socialist intellectuals.  After that, Lenin had fought relentlessly against liquidators, fideists, and other deviations, and after the outbreak of the war, he was the only one among all the socialists of Europe who virtually demanded the defeat of his own country and demanded the "transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. And at the same time, this friend of peace had spoken with such abysmal contempt against the whining Petty Bourgeois and their abhorrence of blood and the use of weapons that an observer had good reason to suspect that a completely new kind of socialism was being born in this man's mind. Neither Kautsky nor Rosa Luxemburg, however, had regarded him quite as one of their own, since his tactics seemed far too adapted to the specific conditions of the Russian autocracy, and the number of his followers was still very small in 1914 compared to the members and voters of German Social Democracy. At the beginning of 1917, the number of party members was only about 50,000, but in no other socialist party in Europe was the authority of a single man so great and unquestioned. 

What this might mean in an extreme situation became clear to the public at large when Lenin gave a speech at the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917 in which he not only explicitly declared himself ready to "take over all power" with his party, but also announced that he would have the biggest capitalists arrested immediately after his victory, since they, like their French and English counterparts, were nothing but robbers and dangerous schemers. Kerensky still received great applause when, with all the pathos of humanitarian socialism, he denounced as oriental the suggestion that people should be arrested and punished merely for their class allegiance. Lenin's old teacher, Georgy Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism, polemicized against him no less harshly when he denounced "the almost pathological striving of the Bolsheviks for the seizure of power" and declared that Lenin was by nature incapable of understanding that the defeat of Russia must also mean the defeat of Russian freedom.  

Meanwhile, the masses' urge to find and attack identifiable culprits grew stronger, and in the speeches Lenin delivered from the balcony of the Palace of the Dancer Kshesinskaya, his headquarters, he bluntly propagated the popular principle of "rob the robbed," and he invoked the Red Rooster, which must be placed on the houses of the landowners. This was already happening throughout Russia, and in some places trade and commerce had come to a virtual standstill as peasants withheld shipments of timber or grain destined for distant areas and already paid for, simply to meet local needs. But the difference between unavoidable or obvious social tensions and their deliberate demand and aggravation became symptomatically apparent in a letter sent in June by the colonel of a Siberian regiment to his army high command: "It only remains for me and the officers to save ourselves because a Lenin devotee, a soldier of the 5th Company, has arrived from Petrograd. A meeting will be held at 4 p.m. It has already been decided to hang me, Morozko and Egorov, to arrest the officers and settle accounts with them.  I'm going to Lozhany...Many of the best soldiers and officers have already escaped."  

It is almost unbelievable that an army in such a state of disintegration still had the strength to undertake a major and initially successful offensive against the enemy in early July, the so-called Burssilov offensive. The minister of war, Kerensky, had ordered it not least to counter the growing doubts that the allies had about Russia's loyalty to the alliance and its reliability. But the advance was soon followed by retreat and catastrophic defeat, and the number of soldiers leaving the front on their own grew inexorably. The extent to which the Bolsheviks' propaganda played a part in these events cannot be determined with precision, but there can be no doubt that it was considerable.  

Nevertheless, an uprising in Petrograd, which was only mildly supported by the party and resulted in several hundred deaths, seemed to undo all the successes in July, and when the government issued arrest warrants against the leading Bolsheviks and had several of them taken to prison, Lenin said before going into hiding: "Now they will shoot us one by one." But the Humanitarian Socialists were still in power, and in prison Leon Trotsky wrote article after article for the numerous organs of the party, which merely changed their names, while Lenin took lodgings in Helsingfors with the city's police chief, who sympathized with the Bolsheviks. In fact, the situation of the party would have been hopeless if the government and the Soviet had decided to take up the struggle with all their forces, because the Bolshevik party had a weakness that could be decisive. Lenin had returned home with a number of his most important tours through Germany, and it was obvious that the German government had been guided by certain intentions when it gave its consent to such an unusual operation.  Moreover, the party had conspicuously large funds at its disposal. What could be more obvious than that Lenin was working on behalf of the Germans for an early Russian withdrawal from the war? Indeed, it has long been no secret that this very idea had been decisive for the German leadership and, not least, for General Ludendorff, and that substantial sums of money had already been flowing to Russia since 1915 for revolutionary agitation, through the mediation of the former left-wing socialist Alexander Parvus Helphand, who had become a social patriot as a result of the war but remained a hater of tsarism. With good reason, therefore, von Kuhlmann, the secretary of state, could write in September that without the steady and extensive support of the German government, the Bolshevik movement would never have been able to assume the size and influence that it has today.  In July, however, the masses, especially the soldiers in Petersburg, were still very patriotic despite the war weariness, probably not least because the government had guaranteed the garrison that it would not be transferred to the front, since it had to secure the revolution in the capital. The soldiers were therefore much easier to rally against German agents than against rich capitalists. But the social revolutionaries and the Mensheviks seized this opportunity only half-heartedly at best, and it was not only humanitarianism that was decisive, but also the feeling that they could not do without the Bolsheviks as allies for fear of the reaction. 

This reaction, however, consisted primarily of a desperate effort on the part of army headquarters to control the tendencies toward disintegration in the army and the fleet and to restore the command of the officers as the indispensable precondition of resistance against the German hereditary enemy. In principle, the generals were under the control of the government, and the death penalty was reintroduced at the end of July. Apparently Kerensky, who had been prime minister since July and was under constant pressure from allied ambassadors, was now seriously considering establishing a kind of dictatorship in this emergency situation, and in this his wishes apparently coincided with those of the commander-in-chief, Cossack General Lavr Kornilov. But Kerensky wanted to be dictator himself, and among the officers an abundance of distrust had accumulated against him. Thus, a few accidental and yet obvious misunderstandings resulted in September in the so-called Kornilov coup, which Kerensky, in order to keep himself in power, qualified as an anti-government enterprise and thus as high treason. Immediately all the left-wing parties united against the attempt at revolution, and the Bolsheviks took the leading role, circulating such effective slogans as the following: "A triumph of Kornilov would be the downfall of freedom, the loss of the country, the victory and omnipotence of the landowner over the peasant, of the capitalist over the worker, of the general over the soldier." They threw a whole army of agitators at the onrushing troops of the commander-in-chief to convince them that if they obeyed the orders of their officers they would act against their own interests, demand war, and pave the way for a restoration of tsarism. In fact, not only on the roads to Petrograd, but in many parts of the country, the troops succumbed to the persuasive power of arguments that articulated only their own and still half-hidden desires and fears. None of the officers concerned would ever be able to forget how his soldiers slipped away from him, not under the fire of the grenadiers, but in the storm of words, and everyone would understand by Bolshevism, first and foremost, the activation of the loss of authority to which he had been exposed since the beginning of the revolution. Now there was no stopping it. The front broke up more and more; not only countless individuals, as before, but entire units deserted. The talk of the imminent distribution of the land of the landowners seized the minds of the peasant-soldiers with irresistible force. The influence of the Mensheviks declined rapidly, and among the Social Revolutionaries the left wing became ever stronger. More and more the conviction spread among the masses that the capitalists and the cadets were to blame for the fact that the war had not yet come to an end, and the reintroduction of the death penalty was now seen, in a paroxysm of fear and hatred, as one of the proofs of the government's intention "to exterminate the soldiers, workers and peasants.”

Now the third great paradox of the March People's Revolution and its consequences became manifest. The second All-Russian Congress of Soviets had to be held at the beginning of November, and the elections resulted in overwhelming majorities for the socialist parties. It was generally expected that the congress would dismiss the Kerensky government and immediately initiate elections to the constituent assembly, but then an appeal for peace would be made with full authority to the people of the world and the distribution of the land of the landlords could be started in an orderly manner. At this very moment, when the victory of his program seemed inevitable, Lenin demanded from the central bodies of his party a decision on armed insurrection and thus on the seizure of power by the party before the meeting of the Soviet Congress, with ever greater insistence, even declaring that a drawdown would be fatal. At a meeting of the Central Committee, which he attended in disguise - an assembly of twelve men - he pushed through this decision on October 23, even though his closest associates Zinoviev and Kamenev saw in it an obstruction and also made their misgivings public. Once again, a coincidence came to his rescue. The government announced that it would send the main part of the Petrograd garrison to the front. Thus it broke its solemn promise, and once again a large-scale agitation was able to declare the revolution in danger. The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet constituted a "military-revolutionary committee," which, taking advantage of and ostensibly defending the "Soviet legality" under the leadership of Trotsky, but without the participation of the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, prepared with great energy the armed uprising against the government. It quickly became apparent that, while most of the garrison declared itself merely neutral, the government had virtually no reliable units. Symptomatically, the Winter Palace, the seat of government, was defended mainly by a battalion of women. Hardly any revolution was less like a people's revolution, with large crowds of people engaged in a fierce struggle against the encroachments of a domineering government: Nevsky Prospekt was bustling with traffic, the streetcars were running, and the theaters were packed. But individual units and detachments of the Red Guard, the party army of the Bolsheviks, occupied the Peter and Paul Fortress and the bridges, and the cruiser Aurora fired a few rounds that caused no significant damage, the government troops in the Winter Palace withdrew mostly without incident, leaving their place to the slowly infiltrating insurgents, who arrested the provisional government, including the socialist ministers, albeit without Kerensky, who had escaped in time. When the Second Soviet Congress opened, posters announcing the fall of the Provisional Government could already be read, and delegates were greeted with the announcement that a new Provisional Government had been formed from members of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin's chairmanship. The delegates of the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks protested most vehemently against the criminal seizure of power by a party which was presenting the Congress with a fait accompli, and they left the hall, while Trotsky sneeringly shouted after them that they belonged on the garbage heap of world opinion. Thus, the October Revolution was, in fact, first and foremost the coup of a socialist party against the other socialist parties and, not least, against the intentions of the Soviet Congress, which would undoubtedly have responded to the overwhelming mass desire and formed a Soviet government from the socialist parties to the exclusion of the bourgeois. Lenin's motive could only have been the conviction that the advance of anarchy and dissolution, which had begun in march, would become unstoppable if he were bound in a cabinet to Julius Martov and Viktor Chernov, and that only a dictatorship of his party could now do what was necessary, namely save Russia and set the world revolution in motion. Nothing was really new compared to March and summer: not the red flags, not the speeches about peace and land distribution, not the impassioned appeal to the people of the whole world; but what was new was the firm will of the Council of People's Commissars and its chairman, and in this respect the proclamations and decrees about land and peace, which were adopted by the Congress in the early morning of November 8 with great enthusiasm, were also new. 

And yet the events of November 6 and 7 did not represent a mere hand coup by the Bolsheviks against their socialist allies, and certainly not a clearly recognizable counterrevolution. Apparently, the People's Commissars were recognized throughout Russia by countless people and especially by the front-line soldiers as credible representatives of the demands already raised in March, and within a few days and weeks they had asserted themselves in the most important parts of the Russian Empire. John Reed recounts how, at the close of the Second Congress of Soviets, the Internationale was sung in rapt credulity by all the participants, and how a young soldier beside him kept bursting out the words under trances, "The war is over, the war is over." An old worker, in turn, whom he met on the outskirts of Petrograd, after the troops gathered by Kerensky had dissolved before the force of the agitation just as those of Kornilov had done before, turned to the city with a beatified face, spread his arms and said: “My Petrograd, it is all mine now.” This urge to take possession of what had hitherto been withheld from them - self-respect, participation, education - took the most diverse forms, and even if Lenin had wanted it, he could hardly have prevented that soon the workers, too, placed the factories under their control, and that there was more and more talk of socialism, which had to be brought about by the nationalization of industry and which would soon spread victoriously over the whole world. The idea quickly spread that in this revolution the great uprising of all slaves against all masters was taking place and that it would spread to all countries of the world; but whoever stood in the way of the liberation of the workers and peasants to peace was an enemy of humanity and guilty of death.  

If the great revolution, which was to lead to world peace and the liberation of the masses, was not to consist in the free election of a Constituent Assembly, in the cooperation of all progressive or socialist parties, in a regulated reorganization of land relations and in the opening of a period of free economic development, but if it was to be identical with the seizure of power on November 6 and 7, then it had to suppress the bourgeois press and the hostile press in general, and then it had to fight all other parties ruthlessly. Conversely, the other parties had to see in the Bolsheviks the party of civil war, which, through its program of action, declared war on the other political and social forces. In this sense, in the first days after the overthrow, the representatives of all parties, from the Cadets to the Social Revolutionaries, expressed themselves: The Petrograd City Duma deplored the "civil war started by the Bolsheviks," the right-wing Social Revolutionaries declared that the Bolsheviks were doing everything in their power to bring about a bloody civil war, and the left-wing Social Revolutionaries, a mere 10 days after the overthrow, turned against "the treacherous system of terror," which had come to light with the banning of numerous newspapers and was bound to lead to civil war. But strong opposition also arose within the Bolshevik Party, and a number of People's Commissars and members of the Central Committee, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, Ryazanov, and Nogin, resigned from their posts on the grounds that a purely Bolshevik government could hold on to power only by means of political terror. For Lenin, the situation was just the opposite: since those classes and parties opposed the Bolsheviks, they were already judged by history, and the sentence had to be carried out. Thus, in the uprising of the officers' school, which was merely a continuation of the resistance of November 7, it was crushed with extraordinary brutality in the very first days, with Trotsky establishing the principle that five of the captured Junkers had to be shot for each fallen Bolshevik. Even Lenin's wife Krupskaya, who was certainly far from bloodthirsty, in her memoirs as late as 1934, without any disapproval of the event, reproduced the exclamation of a neighbor: “They bayoneted a Junker like a beetle.”  It did not take the creation of the Cheka, the "Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage," to set the terror in motion; it was, after all, little more than the Council of People's Commissars' benevolent approval and demand of mass anger against the Bourgeoise and their parties. The elections to the Constituent Assembly, which took place soon after the seizure of power, showed that not only the right-wing social revolutionaries had won a considerable majority, but also that the cadet party had won a surprisingly large share of the vote, which could not have come only from rich bourgeois. On December 11, the members of the National Assembly, who had arrived in Petrograd by then, moved to their meeting place, the Tauride Palace, accompanied by a huge crowd, which, according to some reports, numbered no less than 200,000 people, and the guards did not dare to deny them entry. The opening ceremony could not take place because the number of deputies was too small, but Lenin apparently saw a serious threat in the event and had the Cadet Party considered hostile to the people because it was involved in conspiracies and supported the insurgent Cossacks. A number of cadets were arrested, including the highly respected former ministers Shingarev and Kokoshkin. A few weeks later, the two were murdered in the prison hospital by infiltrating sailors, and the government declared that the perpetrators were anarchists who would be punished as soon as they were caught. But the end of the Constituent Assembly was not due to anarchy and popular anger, but was brought about by a government decision on January 21, after the deputies had met for a single day under the threatening guns of the guards and elected the leader of the right-wing Social Revolutionaries, Viktor Chernov, as president.  

A little later, the Council of People's Commissars canceled all external and internal debts, thus dealing a very significant blow to the Allied powers, but at the same time completely ruining the Russian bourgeoisie by ordering it to pay wages and at the same time blocking its accounts. Nothing was less surprising than the fact that resistance began to make itself felt in many places and that, in particular, the tendencies toward secession or at least autonomy strengthened in many peripheral areas, such as the Don region, Ukraine, the Caucasus and the eastern provinces. These tendencies, however, were encouraged by the Bolsheviks themselves, and Lenin spoke of Russia's readiness to renounce its great power status, since the tsars had created and maintained the giant empire only through conquest and oppression.  However, wherever there were efforts to break away, there were also Bolshevik partisans, and in the case of the Don Cossacks, the Bolsheviks early on asserted themselves on their own against the government of Hetman Kaledin. A new period of turmoil had begun, and Russia would not have been spared the disintegration of the empire into its constituent parts even if the Constituent Assembly had prevailed and if the party of total power had not been able to maintain its position.

It quickly became apparent that the party of the civil war was also the party of the separatist peace.  As early as November 22, Lenin called on the soldiers and sailors to independently negotiate armistice with the enemy, and in this proclamation were the following sentences: "Soldiers, the cause of peace is in your hands. Do not allow counterrevolutionary generals to trample on the great cause of peace. Surround them with guards to prevent lynch law, which is not worthy of a revolutionary army, and do not deprive them of the sentence that will be passed upon them." A few days later, a group of soldiers interpreted the hint quite incorrectly and barbarically killed the commander-in-chief, General Duchonin, in spite of the presence of his successor, the bannerman Krylenko. The government's subsequent decrees on the "democratization of the army" even made one of the very few generals who had sided with Soviet power, Michael Bonch-Bruyevich, realize to his horror that the government was deliberately destroying the last remnants of the old army still facing the enemy. How could the Germans now doubt that they had won a complete victory in the Eastern theater of war? They formally accepted the Soviet government's proposal to participate in a general peace conference, but after the Allies rejected it, mere negotiations for a separate peace took place in Brest-Litovsk. When the Soviet delegates, headed by Abram Joffe and the new Foreign Minister Trotsky, appealed urgently to "the German proletariat," they were obviously filled with hopes for an early revolution in Germany, but they also used these hopes as a justification for action that would bring about a "treacherous peace of servitude. Lenin obtained the approval of the highest bodies only with the greatest difficulty, arguing that no sacrifice was too great to preserve the only socialist state on earth until the imminent outbreak of revolution in Germany and throughout the West, but he had himself given the authority on the 7th Party Day to tear up all peace treaties and declare war on the whole world when the appropriate time came.  

Only now Lenin's government got into a really dangerous situation. It was severely criticized by the Left faction of its own party, the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had finally entered the government, were now preparing an uprising, former officers were conspiring, counter-governments were forming in various parts of the country. The decisive factor, however, was the undiminished hostility of the Allies, who saw the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty as a breach of international treaties and supported with large sums of money any opposition that they thought would lead Russia back to war against Duchy. Due to the influence of the Allies, but also to hasty disarmament orders of Trotsky, who had been appointed war commissar and was building up a "Red Army", the uprising of the Czechoslovaks, former Austrian prisoners of war, who tried to get to the front in France via Vladivostok and who now seized almost all of Siberia within a short time.   

Lenin saw in all this the World Bourgeoisie at work, and he was determined not only to destroy the Russian bourgeoisie, the main tangible enemy, as a class, but also to follow it up with the physical extermination of numerous individuals. The fundamental disenfranchisement, indeed the practical expulsion from the community of staatsburgers, received constitutional status as early as July 1918. At the same time, the resistance of this already hard-hit and miserable burghers, and even that of their militant elite, the former tsarist officers, was conspicuous. Claude Anet tells the story of a general who had to accompany the armistice delegation to brest-litovsk and who committed suicide out of despair over the preparations for the separate peace, but who did not think of turning the gun on the leaders of the delegation. In July 1918, during the uprising of the leftist social revolutionaries, when the fate of the government was hanging by a thread and only a few regiments of Latvian soldiers were still providing protection, there were at least 20,000 former officers in Moscow, but they were apparently so worn down by living conditions that they did not retreat.   The influx into the volunteer armies of General Denikin in the south and Admiral Kolchak in the east fell short of expectations, and the few intervention troops sent by the Allies to Arkhangelsk and other places were essentially limited to securing previously supplied war material. But if the actual war and civil war operations remained relatively small in scope at first, the danger was great, and the Bolshevik government displayed the utmost determination, making its opponents wonder whether it was the will to win of credible ideologues or the desperation of brutal power hungry men in a hopeless situation.  

 When in July the Czech legions advanced from Siberia to Ekaterinburg, where the tsar and his family were imprisoned, the Uralsoviet had Nicholas II executed, and with him were shot his wife, son, daughter, personal physician, cook, servants and chambermaids; but the government in Moscow expressly approved the deed, although it tried to keep the murder of the tsarina and the children secret for a while. There had never been such an act in European history; the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI could not be compared, because the English king had fought at gunpoint against Cromwell's Puritans and the Frenchman had actually colluded with foreign countries; moreover, trials had been held, and only the French Terreur offered a distant analogy to the destruction of families. Calls for "mass terror against the bourgeoisie" piled up, but it was the social revolutionaries Leonid Kannegiesser and Fannija Kaplan who carried out assassinations against Cheka chief Uritzki in Petrograd and against Lenin in Moscow on August 30. Uritzki was killed and Lenin only relatively lightly wounded, but immediately many hundreds of captured officials and bourgeois in both capitals and countless others in the rest of the country were shot, because anyone who resisted had to be a mere agent of the bourgeoisie, the real enemy. The decree on "red terror" of September 5 was the final stage in a class annihilation for which there was no precedent in European history, any more than for the murder of the tsar's family, and it is not surprising that the word “asiatic” kept coming to the lips of observers.  The decree stipulated "that it is essential to strengthen the Soviet Republic against its class enemies by means of their isolation in concentration camps and that all persons in contact with the organizations, conspiracies and mutinies of the White Guards must be shot...” A few days earlier it had been announced that all counterrevolutionaries and all inspirers of counterrevolutionaries would be held responsible. The definition was thus so vague that anyone could be shot by the Cheka without trial, and it was not even a genuine innovation, since since the beginning of the year the guards who supervised the bourgeois conscripted into forced labor had been ordered to use the gun in case of resistance or even opposition.  

So it would not be correct to say that the Bolshevik regime was harassed by its opponents and engaged in a civil war, and in its defense showed great harshness and sometimes terrible cruelty. On the contrary, from the very beginning the regime was an active force which, based on a momentary mass mood, declared war on all its political opponents and on all social forces that were not among the poor or bondsmen, and declared annihilation. And it quickly became clear that even workers were not exempt from the war and annihilation if they did not submit to the party dictatorship. The day after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, when a protest meeting was formed, the Red Guard fired into the crowd, leaving about twenty dead in the streets. The official report claimed that they were petty bourgeois. But when an independent workers' movement developed in the following months, one could read in its illegal publications sentences like the following: "The worker standing at the gate replied (to the commissar) by pulling out his revolver and shooting the worker."  Another worker's early report on his stay in the Cheka's Taganka prison concludes with the sentence that such "graveyards of the living" were spread all over Russia, where people were shot day after day under the threat of truck engines.  

The most moving testimony to the survival and then the eventual death of the impulses of "humanitarian socialism" are the "Untimely Masses of Thoughts on Culture and Revolution" published by Maxim Gorky in his newspaper Novaya Zhizny in 1917 and 1918.  As early as November 20, 1917, he notes that Lenin, Trotsky, and their dangers were infected "by the rotten poison of power"; a few days later, he complains that "insane dogmatists" regarded the people as material for social experimentation, and that Lenin was not by chance a Russian nobleman who had a "decidedly uncompassionate attitude toward the life of the masses"; the "elimination of the cadet party 'was' an attack against the most cultured people of our country." In January 1918, he pointed out the ominous consequences of the unrelenting attacks against "the bourgeoisie": already, in the factories, the unskilled workers had claimed that the locksmiths and foundrymen were "bourgeois," and in Pravda, madmen were agitating: "Beat the bourgeoisie to death. Beat the Caledin-Cossacks to death." In all this, Gorki sees the deplorable consequences of old traditions in Russia, which is still shaped by “asiatic” notions of the insignificance of individuals, where the "mass extermination of dissidents" was a tried and tested method and where today a sailor is allowed to say that if the welfare of the Russian people is at stake, one can go ahead and kill a million people. Only from "the most sinful people on earth" could have arisen the arithmetic of madness that declares “for each of us, a hundred heads of the bourgeoisie fall.”

Gorky finally sided with the Bolsheviks after his newspaper was banned, and the observation that the Bolsheviks' fiercest enemies increasingly declared the Jews to be the sole culprits instead of the bourgeoisie seems to have been decisive in this. Among the few representatives of the foreign press who were in Petrograd and Moscow, the path went rather the other way around, from initial sympathy to sheer horror. Thus, Alfons Paquet, the reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, who was later removed from the Prussian academy of poetry by the national socialists for cultural Bolshevik tendencies, wrote in august 1918 that the terror was shaking Moscow like a fever and that the moment had come “to call upon mankind to protest against the savagery now going on in all the cities of Russia: the systematic destruction of an entire class of society, the destruction of countless human lives linked by a thousand threads of education and profession to the rest of the peoples of the earth.” The correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, Hans Vorst, saw in the mass terror a staging by the party that wanted to "stir up the political passions of the tired working class anew. Reports like these were widely circulated in Germany, but also in the Allied countries, despite the difficulties of news transmission; in the fall of 1918, every newspaper reader in Europe knew in great detail that something qualitatively new was happening in Russia, something unprecedented in Europe. On September 3, 1918, the Vorwarts wrote: "To hold a class responsible for the acts of individuals with such severity is a novelty in criminal law and could probably serve as a justification for holding the working class responsible for the acts of a fanatic in another social stratification, as has often been done in a milder form.”

And yet even Louis de Robien, who was already considering the idea of a common defensive front of all European states against the destruction of civilization in the east, confessed that he could not suppress a strange sympathy for Lenin and Trotsky, and countless soldiers and workers in Germany and France found it plausible when the Bolsheviks declared the war to be a "millionfold class murder" committed by the bourgeoisie against the mass of the population, and they drew hope from phrases like “win Russia and then the world.” If the Bolsheviks were power hungry, it was mainly because they were ideologues who believed they had a remedy for the world mired in the morass of state slavery: the unification of all slaves against all masters, to whom the sole blame for the sufferings endured by many millions of people in all countries could be attributed. In an almost classic way, Cheka-Magazine expressed the new ethos by writing: "Our humanitarianism is absolute; it is based on the ideals of the destruction of all coercion and all printing. For the first time in the world we raise the sword...in the name of universal freedom and liberation from slavery."  

In this context there is also a statement, which at first sounds unbelievable in its monstrosity, namely those sentences which Gregory Zinoviev formulated on September 17, 1918 in a party meeting in Petrograd: "Of the hundred million of the population in Soviet Russia we must win ninety for ourselves. We have nothing to say to the rest, we must exterminate them." 

In 1917 in Russia, as later in 1933 in Germany, it was a matter of a party seizing and asserting power, a party revolution, as one might say. But in Russia, all the events were more elementary and monumental. The Bolsheviks' repeatedly proclaimed goal was eternal peace in a world that would have neither states nor classes, because only under this condition would lasting peace be possible at all; the National Socialists' openly announced goal was the liberation of Germany from the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and, internally, the harmony of a national community. The Bolsheviks seized power in a moment of defeat amidst threatened dissolution of the state; the National Socialists followed the former government in an almost entirely legal manner, and despite the world economic crisis, a modern and diverse social life took place in many aspects in Germany. In Russia, a genuine civil war emerged; in Germany, opponents of the ruling party were completely crushed with a few hard blows, and the death toll among non-combatants was far lower. Nevertheless, Hitler met with far less sympathy and understanding abroad than Lenin, and it is to be assumed that not only the old fear of most Europeans of Deutschland played a part in this, but not least anti-Semitism, which was not based on any directly social principle and appeared particularly repugnant and medieval against the background of the broad normality of life. However, the mere parallelizing comparison is not enough, but the main difference is that in the Germany of 1933 the Russia of 1917 was known and perceived only as a horror image, while the Bolsheviks in 1917 had the German Reich of Wilhelm II and Ludendorf as a helper and enemy in their own country.  

The situation changed fundamentally when in November 1918 Germany asked the Western Allies for an armistice and had to withdraw its troops from the depths of the Russian territory, which it had occupied beyond Rostov and Kharkov. It could now seem that a larger, older and more respected force was coming to the forefront of the struggle for peace and socialism, namely the mass of Germany's industrial workers who had gathered before the war in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Lenin was apparently convinced that the Bolsheviks had only asserted themselves for a moment and that hegemony would soon return to the German workers' movement, which had been the great model for him until the outbreak of the war. In fact, the Bolsheviks in Russia had not been able to assert themselves at all until the February Revolution, and afterwards their own actions had seemed necessary but also irregular. What kind of a phenomenon they actually were can be seen better in the party which was the first in the center of Europe to profess Marxism, which Hitler opposed with his anti-Marxism.