One Aspect of Bolshevist Liberty

Magazine article

By: Ludovic Naudeau

Date: 1917

Source: Naudeau, Ludovic. "One Aspect of Bolshevist Liberty." Current History. New York: New York Times, 1918.

About the Author: Ludovic Naudeau was a correspondent for the Paris Temps based in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Russia, when he wrote this article in 1917.

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the twentieth century Russia's feudal agricultural economy struggled to provide food for its rapidly increasing population and to support a growing number of industrial cities. The country's involvement in the First World War (1914–1918) only exacerbated these problems. Her industrial infrastructure could not equip the army for modern warfare, and she suffered major defeats and heavy losses as a result. At home, the economy collapsed from the pressure, and severe food shortages and riots became commonplace.

From 1916 onward, public demonstrations and strikes protesting the Tsar's refusal to withdraw from the war increased steadily, culminating in a series of violent demonstrations in February 1917. On returning from visiting the troops at the front, Nicholas II heeded his ministers's advice to abdicate.

Russia's legislative body, the Duma, then established a provisional government to replace the tsar and restore public order. Headed by Alexander Kerensky, a socialist member of the Duma, the new government consisted of both liberals and socialists. The new administration, however, continued to fight the war instead of tackling Russia's domestic problems; this undercut its authority, and chaos erupted. Resistance to all forms of government became common over the following months, in both the countryside and the cities.

Between February and October there was no clear political leadership in Russia, although several groups vied for power. When the First All Russian Congress of Soviets was held in June, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the largest single bloc, outnumbered the Bolsheviks—then a radical Marxist splinter group. Although small, the Bolsheviks gained support over the following months as people became increasingly dissatisfied with the provisional government. Bolshevik efforts to incite military and civilian rebellion against the government and the continuation of the war met with little success, however, and Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik party leader, began to execute his plan to take control of the government by force.

On October 24, 1917, Lenin's Red Army stormed the Winter Palace, and the Bolsheviks established a totalitarian state, which they called a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Civil war broke out between the "Reds" (communists) and "Whites" (those who opposed their rule and wanted to establish a democratic government). After the Bolshevik victory in 1919, Lenin established a police state, making communist rule because even more oppressive.

PRIMARY SOURCE

One Aspect of Bolshevist Liberty Ludovic Naudeau, a Petrograd correspondent of the Paris Temps, writing in October, 1917, drew this amusing sketch of one phase of life in the Russian capital:.

One morning recently I was awakened by the cries of my neighbor in the next room. His boots had been stolen. The same day the manager of a newspaper office told me that he had been robbed of six pairs of pantaloons. What use could any one have for six nether garments? The star reporter came in with eyes bulging. "Four hundred thefts every night!" he cried; "that is the average for the last two weeks. The Petrograd militia are vainly seeking for the 18,000 criminals who are living in liberty among us. It is frightful!"

Under the old regime we were guarded by 5,750 police agents—large, strong men—who cost $2,500,000 a year. Those Pharaohs have been replaced by 7,000 small, mean-looking militiamen, who cost, in present taxes, $8,500,000 annually. Formerly we enjoyed sweet security. Today things fly out of one's pockets of themselves; watches escape from their fobs; apartments empty themselves automatically of their objects of value. Every night one-half of the population is busy robbing the other half. Sometimes the thieves are civilians dressed as soldiers, and sometimes they are solders dressed as civilians. It is robbery made free-for-all—a socialistic budge-all-catch-all.

Besides, the persons whom one meets in prison do not stay there. One no longer stays in prison; it is not good form. Sometimes a new outburst of popular wrath opens the doors; sometimes the guards and sentinels give the prisoner to understand that the best thing he can do is to go away. There is talk of organizing a mass patrol of the streets, in which all the honest men of the city would have to go on guard by turns "in squads."

All this is true, confirmed by a thousand witnesses. During the weeks immediately following the fall of the empire, the capital, in a sort of solemn and anguished waiting, enjoyed absolute peace, a truce of the underworld, a sort of petrification of crime. But today robbery has risen to the rank of a social institution. And yet, as Russia has not ceased to be a land of contrasts, there are no Apaches in the streets, no highwaymen, no hold-up men, none of those bloodthirsty thugs who menace life at night in other capitals. Many petty thieves and relatively few assassins! I wrote this note in a street car, and when I put my notebook in my pocket I discovered that I had been relieved of my purse; a fact that is not without its good side, since I had forgotten to mention the pickpockets, who are as numerous as the pockets of honest men.

The Russian people lived for centuries under an autocracy, and yet they are by nature the most parliamentary of all the nations, doubtless because they are the most placid, the least irritable. We observed this once more at the All-Russian Congress, where a few momentary tumults did not destroy our general impression of a dignified and rather sad calmness. In that old and pompous Alexandra Theatre, under the blaze of the candelabra, amid the dull radiance of gilding almost a century old, we saw 1,5000 [sic] delegates. Their controversies were long, grave, sometimes noisy, but the spectator who recalled the Boulanger episode and the Dreyfus affair noticed how much less irascible and excitable the Russians were by comparison. If the Russian people did not have, deep in their nature, a vast fund of cheerful and accommodating plasticity, a great tendency to prevent or rather to postpone conflicts by means of discussion and pacific "readjustment," of provisional agreement, civil war would have broken out fifty times since last March.…

SIGNIFICANCE

The social and economic changes that occurred in early twentieth-century Russia made its monarchy unsustainable. Although the Tsar recognized the need to modernize the country and industrialization proceeded rapidly, the new cities and factories provided opportunities for organized political opponents to develop, while rapid industrialization resulted in overcrowding and poor living conditions that increased frustration among the working classes.

Under these conditions, political change was inevitable. While some scholars argue that a coup staged by a minority party does not qualify as a true "revolution," there is no doubt that the changes in Russian politics and in the lives of ordinary people were revolutionary, indeed. The revolution ended Russia's longstanding feudal autocratic rule by the tsars, only to replace it with a totalitarian communist state that finally disintegrated in 1991.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Chamberlin, William Henry. The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Figes, O. A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. London: J. Cape, 1996.

Miller, M., ed. The Russian Revolution: The Essential Readings. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Periodicals

Darby, Graham. "The October Revolution (Russia's Bolshevik Revolution of 1917)." History Review (Issue 28) September 1997.