11.5 — The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Experiment

In February 1917 the Tsar of Russia abdicated after four days of bread riots in the capital.

Nobody planned it. Lenin was in exile in Switzerland and had told an audience of young socialists six weeks earlier that his generation would probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.

Eight months later his party was running the country.

How that happened, and what it produced, is this chapter.

Why the Tsarist system collapsed

The war is the immediate cause and the structure was already failing.

Russia industrialised fast from a very low base from the 1890s, which produced a concentrated urban working class in a country with no political outlet. The 1905 revolution, triggered by defeat by Japan and by the shooting of a peaceful petitioning crowd outside the Winter Palace, forced the creation of a parliament — the Duma — whose powers were then progressively cut back.

Land was the fundamental grievance. Serfdom had been abolished in 1861 and the freed peasants were required to pay redemption dues for the land, which left them poor, and the commune system restricted mobility. A large majority of the population were peasants who wanted land and did not have enough.

And the war destroyed what remained.

Casualties on a scale nothing prepared for — millions of dead, wounded and captured. Supply failures so severe that units were sent to the front without rifles and told to take them from the dead.

The economy broke. The railways prioritised military traffic, so food did not reach the cities. Petrograd in February 1917 had bread queues in extreme cold.

And the Tsar took personal command of the army in 1915, which meant every defeat was his, and left the government in the hands of the Tsarina and the circle around Rasputin, whose influence was the subject of enormous public scandal.

February 1917. Bread riots and strikes, then a women's demonstration on International Women's Day, then a general strike, and then — the decisive moment — the garrison ordered to fire on the crowds refused and joined them. The Tsar abdicated on 15 March.

Eight months of dual power

Two bodies claimed authority.

The Provisional Government, drawn from the Duma, liberal and moderate socialist, committed to a constituent assembly.

And the Petrograd Soviet — a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies — which controlled the loyalty of the garrison and of the railway and telegraph workers.

The Provisional Government made one decision that destroyed it: it continued the war.

Its reasoning was that Russia had obligations to its allies and that a new democratic Russia should not begin with surrender. Its consequence was that the grievances that had produced the revolution were unaddressed.

Lenin returned in April, transported across Germany in a sealed train by the German government, which correctly calculated that he would disrupt the Russian war effort.

His April Theses rejected any support for the Provisional Government and demanded all power to the soviets. His slogan was three words: peace, land, bread.

Its power was that it named exactly what people wanted and nobody else was offering.

October 1917. The Bolshevik seizure of power was a well-organised operation by a few thousand people, taking the telegraph, the bridges, the railway stations and finally the Winter Palace, against almost no resistance. It is more accurately described as a coup than as a mass uprising, and the mass support for its programme was real.

What followed immediately

Peace. Brest-Litovsk, on brutal terms (Chapter 11.4).

Land. The decree on land legitimised what peasants had already been doing — seizing estates.

And the Constituent Assembly, elected in November 1917 in the freest election in Russian history, gave the Bolsheviks about a quarter of the seats. It met once, in January 1918, and was dispersed by armed guards.

That is the moment the direction was set. A party with a quarter of the vote, having promised a constituent assembly, closed it when it lost.

Civil war and War Communism

1918–21. Reds against Whites — a coalition of monarchists, liberals, nationalists and moderate socialists with no shared programme beyond opposition — plus foreign intervention by Britain, France, the United States, Japan and others, and separate national movements in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Reds won for identifiable reasons: they held the centre with the railways and the arms factories; Trotsky built the Red Army into a real force using former Tsarist officers held under supervision; they had a single command and a coherent programme; and the Whites had no agreed aims and included people who wanted the landlords back, which was the one thing guaranteed to keep peasants supporting the Reds.

War Communism — grain requisitioning from the peasantry, nationalisation of industry, forced labour, and the abolition of money in some transactions — produced economic collapse and famine.

The 1921–22 famine killed around five million people. Foreign relief, including a large American programme under Herbert Hoover, fed millions.

And the Kronstadt rising of 1921 — sailors who had been among the revolution's strongest supporters demanding free elections to the soviets, free speech and an end to requisitioning — was suppressed by force.

Lenin then reversed course. The New Economic Policy from 1921 restored private trade and small private enterprise and replaced requisitioning with a tax in kind. The economy recovered. It was described as a temporary retreat and Stalin ended it.

Stalin

Lenin died in 1924. His testament, dictated shortly before, warned that Stalin had concentrated unlimited authority and recommended his removal from the post of General Secretary. It was suppressed.

Stalin won the succession by controlling appointments — the General Secretaryship was an administrative post nobody had thought important, and it meant he selected the personnel who selected the delegates who voted.

And from 1928 he transformed the country by two policies.

Collectivisation

Peasant holdings were amalgamated into collective farms under state control, with the state taking the produce.

Why. To extract a grain surplus to feed the cities and to export in exchange for machinery, and to destroy the peasantry as an independent social force.

How. Coercion. Peasants who resisted were classified as kulaks — supposedly rich peasants, in practice anyone who objected — and were deported, imprisoned or shot. Millions were deported to Siberia and Central Asia.

And the peasants' response was to slaughter their livestock rather than surrender it. The Soviet cattle and horse population fell by roughly half and took decades to recover.

The famine of 1932–33 followed. Estimates of deaths range from around five to eight million across the Soviet Union, with the heaviest mortality in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus.

Ukraine's case — the Holodomor — is recognised as genocide by a substantial number of countries. The argument turns on intent. What is documented: grain procurement quotas were maintained and increased as the famine developed; peasants were prevented from leaving affected areas by internal passport controls; villages that failed quotas were blacklisted and cut off from all goods; and grain continued to be exported. Whether that constitutes intent to destroy a national group as such, in the legal sense, is a genuine argument among historians, and the facts underlying it are not disputed.

Industrialisation

The Five-Year Plans from 1928.

And the achievement was real and enormous. The Soviet Union went from a largely agrarian economy to the world's second industrial power within roughly a decade. Steel, coal, machinery, tractors, electricity — Magnitogorsk, Dnieprostroi, whole cities built from nothing. Literacy went from a minority to near-universal. Women entered the workforce and the professions on a scale nowhere else matched at the time.

And it was built by extracting everything from the countryside and by using forced labour on a very large scale. The Gulag system held millions; the White Sea Canal and much of the mining and timber industry in the far north were built by prisoners in conditions with extremely high mortality.

It also worked, in the specific sense that mattered in 1941. The industrial base built in the 1930s, and its relocation eastward ahead of the German advance, is why the Soviet Union could out-produce Germany in tanks and aircraft (Chapter 11.7).

The Terror

The Great Purge, 1936–38.

Show trials of Old Bolsheviks — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin — who confessed to fantastic charges after interrogation and were executed.

The military purge removed a very large proportion of the senior officer corps, including three of five marshals, which is a substantial reason for the catastrophic Soviet performance in 1941.

And the mass operations. NKVD Order 00447 in 1937 set numerical quotas by region for arrest and execution of "anti-Soviet elements". Local officials requested increases to the quotas.

Documented figures from the opened archives: around 680,000 to 750,000 executions in 1937–38 alone, plus millions sent to camps.

The mechanism is worth naming. Denunciation was encouraged and rewarded, which meant private grudges, career competition and simple fear produced accusations. Confession was extracted by torture and by threats to families. And nobody was safe, including the people running it — two successive heads of the NKVD were themselves executed.

The assessment

The honest ledger.

What it achieved: industrialisation from a peasant economy within a generation; mass literacy and universal schooling; a healthcare system that raised life expectancy substantially; the industrial base that defeated Nazi Germany, which cost the Soviet Union around 27 million lives; scientific and technical achievement including the first satellite and the first human in space; and a genuine expansion of opportunity for people from peasant and worker backgrounds and for women.

What it cost: the famine deaths; the executions; the camps; deportation of whole nationalities including Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Volga Germans; the destruction of the peasantry as a class; the elimination of all independent institutions, press, art and inquiry; and a system in which everyone was afraid.

And what it demonstrated economically. Chapter 9.6 stated it: a planned system can direct resources to specified objectives with brutal effectiveness and cannot handle information, incentives or innovation. Soviet growth was rapid while it consisted of moving peasants into factories and building more factories, and it slowed and stopped once that source was exhausted. By the 1970s the system could put a station in orbit and could not supply meat.

Where this shows up in your life

The Soviet model shaped development thinking everywhere for forty years, including India's planning commission and heavy-industry emphasis (Chapter 6.28) — which is why understanding what it did and did not achieve matters for reading Indian economic history.

And the political lesson is the one this Part keeps arriving at. A movement that dissolves the assembly when it loses the vote has told you what it is, and everything after January 1918 followed from that decision. Chapter 16.3 makes it general: the test of a political system is not what it does when it wins but what it does when it loses.

What the next page covers

The other totalitarian system of the century came to power by winning elections. Chapter 11.6 covers how fascism and Nazism actually worked — what fascism is as a doctrine, why Weimar Germany failed, how a party with a third of the vote took total power in six months, what the mechanism of a totalitarian state actually is, and the specific warning signs, which are worth knowing because they are not obscure.