When Democracy Is A Terrible Choice.
(Kerensky stops Kornilov, but allows… Lenin.)
…Having saved Lenin’s skin in the last entry, Kerensky was not done yet with his run of historical blunders. His next blunder was to personally hand power to the man whom he had just declared a traitor to Russia, on a silver platter.
In July 1917, after a series of disastrous defeats of the Russian army on the fields of The Great War (as the First World War had been called before there was a Second), Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky chose to appoint as the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army a great Russian patriot and a military commander of genius General Lavr Kornilov. Charged with the mission of defending Russia from her enemies, General Kornilov saw his main task in restoring the collapsed law and order in Russia’s capital of Peterburg and in suppressing the mischief-making Bolsheviks, who, as he correctly judged, were sabotaging the Russian war effort and aggravating the chaos which had engulfed the nation ever since Tsar Nicholas II had signed his abdication.
Consequently, Kornilov summoned a body of troops and began his march on the Russian capital, which was immediately interpreted by the poor democrat Mr. Kerensky as a coup d’état in progress. Realizing his own powerlessness under the circumstances, but determined to stop this threat to Russian democracy at any cost, Kerensky made the fatal decision of appealing to his enemies the Bolsheviks for help, and, furthermore, he allowed the Bolsheviks to arm their cohorts of factory workers and mischievous troublemakers to the teeth, so that they would be able to stop the Kornilov mutiny!!! In the meantime, he issued an order for Kornilov’s arrest, and General Kornilov was indeed arrested and imprisoned, as he was, in turn, betrayed by his noble-born army generals, who had long been filled with resentment for this commoner, born of a Cossack father and a peasant Tatar mother. Taking orders from him used to be marginally tolerable for them, when he was himself under orders from the Imperial Russian government, but to support him as a renegade officer turned rebel was totally out of the question. (The rest of the Kornilov story is rather sad. Escaping from his prison, he was just about ready to fight the Bolsheviks at the head of the White movement, as his former detractors found out to their horror that it had been their refusal to support Kornilov, that had allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in Russia in the first place, and now greeted Kornilov back as their natural leader and a savior of Russia, when a single grenade thrown into his living quarters in early 1918 was enough to end his life.)
…And as for Kerensky, how many horrific nightmares must he have suffered throughout the rest of his long and unimaginably tragic life as a humbled refugee in exile abroad, all amounting to the same heart-rending scream, to this effect: What have I done, with my own hand stopping the only man who could save Russia from the Bolshevik menace, while with my other hand delivering the power to depose both me and my dear Russian democracy to my worst enemies?!
The rest of the Kerensky story is rather predictable, but sad, nevertheless. He fled the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in Paris, where he wrote three books with loud titles, but disingenuously uninformative contents. (The Prelude to Bolshevism, 1919; The Catastrophe, 1927; and the Crucifixion of Liberty, 1934.) Too bad that he was not forthcoming in any of them, and never told the real story. (Although, perhaps, his publishers would have turned him down, in case he had?) After Nazi Germany had occupied France, he moved to the United States, where, with a short exception, he was to spend the rest of his life. (His 1965 American book, Russia and History’s Turning Point, was no less disingenuous than the three previous ones.) After he died, in 1970, the Russian Orthodox Church in America (unaffiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR, of course) refused to give him burial (blaming him personally for the Bolshevik Revolution), and his body was finally transferred to London, where it was buried in a non-denominational cemetery…
…But now that Kerensky is long dead, let him rest in peace. It is true that he had made a terrible “choice,” by choosing democracy over dictatorship. But it wasn’t really Kerensky, of course, who had handed to the Bolsheviks the power over Russia. In fact, at no time did Kerensky have such power in his hands, to begin with. It was our old friend, la forza del destino, all along!
David Among Goliaths.
In that strange year 1917 there were three major political parties in Russia, although some would say four, and if you have ventured your guess about the fourth, you were probably wrong.
One of these was the KD, or Kah-Deh, commonly known as the Cadets, an acronym for the Constitutional Democrats, the party that had so much shocked the Tsarist Russian Government back in 1905 when it had won national prominence by its domination of the first Duma, that fledgling Russian Parliament. In 1917, however, it was seen by others as the right wing of Russian politics, and many had gone so far as to brand the Cadets, quite unfairly, as the downright reactionaries, representing the outdated legacy of Tsarism. The Cadets mostly consisted of liberal Russian nobility and British-style-democracy-loving intellectuals. They talked a lot, but had no understanding of where Russia was going, nor how to play hardball politics, either. None of them were monarchists however, as the latter, although numerous, were disinclined to engage in the democratic process, and did not form a party of their own.
The second large party, to the left of the Cadets, but only slightly to the left, comparatively speaking, were the SD, Social Democrats, whom Western historians have astonishingly labeled as Mensheviks, following Lenin’s false cue, and the subsequent Soviet Propaganda. Lenin, of course, had used this word derogatorily, but the West has accepted it with a straight face. It would have been much fairer and more sensible to call them Social Democrats, the term well familiar to all Europe, and signifying essentially the same thing.
The third, and most populous party, by far, were the SR, Socialist Revolutionaries, still farther to the left. It was their extreme left wing, the Left SR, who were the bona fide heirs of Nechayev, the notorious nihilists, Russia’s professional terrorists and trouble-makers, on a scale much greater than the Bolsheviks, because of their huge numbers across Russia, who were often referred to as the fourth party, certainly deserving such honor, on account of being quite distinctive in their activity, and also far more numerous than all the other parties put together.
Then, there was the Trudovik Party, claiming to represent Russia’s labor force. It was, however, too small to account for anything, even though Kerensky himself had chosen to belong to it for a while, in the course of his notoriously habitual party-switching.
Where does all of this leave the Bolsheviks?, one may ask. The Bolsheviks were indeed a ridiculously tiny bunch, and they were not even considered a party by most, but as some rabid inflamed appendix inside the body of the SD. And yet at the end this minuscule David would make a short shrift of all those Goliaths and end up not even as a “first among many,” but, literally, as “the one and only.” How could such a thing at all become possible?
Democracy was a new thing to Russia, a rara exotic avis, brought in from overseas, which nobody seemed to know how to handle, except for the Bolsheviks, who knew only too well how to mishandle it.
The Cadets and the SD were both fairly respectable, and would have thrived in a British-style democracy, had such a thing been possible in Russia. Well, it was not, as the events did not tarry to prove.
The SR were mainly passionately dedicated, but undisciplined anarchists, who knew how to do their job of throwing bombs and shooting guns at close range, but had no political skills whatsoever. It was, therefore, up to the Bolsheviks to prove the overwhelming advantage of Lenin’s Party Principle (I am tempted to call it the ParteiPrinzip) over the vastly superior numbers of everybody else, no matter how much respect and/or popularity those others were capable of mustering for their claim to power in Russia.
The Bolsheviks understood how it was possible for a handful of aggressive agitators to sway large crowds, using the Archimedes’ lever technique, that is, by finding a clever fulcrum, such as, in their case, was their populist slogan “land to the peasants, peace to the nations, bread to the hungry” (none of which promises they intended to keep, at least, in the short run). Cheap demagoguery, vicious invective, intimidation, and direct terrorization of their political opponents and of all who might find themselves in their way--- all these tactics turned out to be immensely effective against their pathetically ineffectual competition, but the most effective of all was their unscrupulous Wille zur Macht, an overpowering sense of purpose and unflinching readiness for immediate and extremely radical action.
They broke their word just as easily as they gave it. They refined the Divide et Impera rule to perfection. It was their time to take Russia by a perfect storm, and they were handily up to the task.
Still, there have been few such total miracles in the history of the world, and, under normal circumstances, Lenin’s crowd would not have stood a chance, but these were not normal circumstances. There was no law and no order in the land, and while for, say, the SR, it was no more, and no less than business as usual, the Bolsheviks saw this anarchy and lawlessness not as a purpose achieved, but as their unique and unequaled opportunity to take the next radical step, saying, We are the new law, and we are the new order, and there was no one else out there to call their bluff.
Bolshevism As A Necessity.
Was Bolshevism an aberration in Russian history or a world-historical necessity? I think that this question has already been answered in ample quantities in favor of the latter, and the hand of destiny has been traced throughout that period of Russian history with a sufficient consistency to eschew all doubt.
There are a few points remaining to be made in that direction, however, and this is precisely what I intend to do in this entry.
Official Soviet accounts used to give a picture of the Bolshevik Revolution as a triumphant armed uprising in which Lenin’s revolutionary cohorts literally wrestled power in Russia from the reactionary Provisional Government. This picture has long been discredited, but its equally false alternative has survived without a challenge. Regrettably so, as this alternative picture has done more historical harm than the fairly harmless erstwhile hagiography half-heartedly provided by the Soviet government historians.
The alternative picture receives its first draft courtesy of the liberal constituency of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, which managed to find its way out of Soviet Russia during those dangerous years, and ended up in European and/or American emigration. Their account was at first falling on deaf ears, but later, when a preoccupation with freedom and democracy had taken root, particularly in post cold-war America, it started to ring like sweet music in the ears of the liberationist-democratizationist ideologues.
The original wishful-thinking Russian liberals liked to view the period between the abdication of the Czar in March 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik takeover, seven months later, as an authentic democratic episode in Russian history, cut short by the vandals. Ironically, both the Soviet official view and this one too, tended to imply that Russia’s Provisional Government, Kerensky and all, had indeed held political power in Russia, even if for a brief period of time.
This was not however how it was in reality, according to my sources, historians and eyewitnesses, regarding the role of the Provisional Government in Russian history. In their analysis, the one, which I both trust and agree with professionally, there was just an illusion of power held by the Provisional Government primarily in the Russian capital, but they insist that there was no legitimate authority in the land ever since the fall of the Romanov monarchy, precipitated by the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas II and the terrified refusal by Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich to pick up the broken pieces.
There remained of course the regular units of the Russian army, halfheartedly fighting the Germans and the Austrians on the fronts of the Great War, gradually beginning to realize the significance of having lost their Commander in Chief. As a result, insubordination and mass desertion were becoming daily occurrences. Of course, there were also other units, in reserve, sullenly waiting for orders from their direct superiors, whom they were now ready to massacre at the first opportunity.
But otherwise, the country was literally falling apart, and the new, unruly “administrative councils,” called the Soviets, only contributed to the general anarchy, with their ugly squabbles, bloody fist fights, and loud mutual denunciations.
The virtual demise of Russia in 1917 was a very poignant obsession among my Russian-nationalist friends, all united in the need for a satisfactory rationalization, and all agreeing in their acceptance of the Bolshevik Revolution as a necessity, rather than an aberration in Russia’s historical course. (This never prevent them, of course, from being acerbic grumbling critics of all too many aspects of the Soviet regime.)
With this view of the Bolshevik political triumph as a necessity, I could not agree more. Not only were the Bolsheviks brilliant in their own right, at playing the political game, but sheer good luck seemed to be with them every step of the way. For better or for worse, Lady History was definitely on their side, making their triumph even more a historical necessity than anything that human cleverness alone could deliver. For she is always on the side of historical necessity, and one cannot go wrong about that.
Interfering With The Enemy Destroying Himself.
His incredible luck notwithstanding, Lenin’s daring power grab was immediately challenged, and a bloody Civil War ensued, with terrible atrocities committed by both the Reds and the Whites. Surrounded from all sides within a relatively small enclave, which however had in it Russia’s both principal cities: Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks promptly moved their capital from the former to the latter site thereby fulfilling the cherished dream of all Russian ultra-nationalists, even if their ostensible reason for it was not what the latter had in mind, but the fear that Petrograd could be falling into enemy hands.
But there was no coordination among the vastly superior anti-Bolshevik (White) forces, nor a commonness of purpose. Some were seeking the restoration of the monarchy. Others were vehemently opposed to it, but mostly wanted to rid Russia of the Bolshevik usurpers of power. Kerensky was practically the only one left who was trying to have his Prime Minister’s job back, but momentarily joining forces with the Cossacks of General Krasnov, he quickly discovered that his helpers had no interest in his return, and their reluctance to assist the man they did not want soured their own effort, which then fizzled out. Thus saved by yet another stroke of good fortune, the Bolsheviks were, however, far from being out of the woods, as the odds against them were still overwhelming.
In the meantime, the Bolsheviks signed, as promised, a separate peace with Germany, and promptly found Russia’s former allies, the Entente Powers, on the other side of the fence. It was then that Lenin seemed to have found yet another deadly gambit (one is tempted to call it a “Russian Roulette with a purpose”), which would once again allow him to beat the odds.
Historians writing about the so-called mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps, which started in March 1918, have somehow overlooked the clearly manufactured nature of their revolt. Having just signed the infamous Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, the Bolsheviks were required by that treaty to release all enemy soldiers kept as prisoners of war inside Russia, and to have them transported by rail to their appropriate destinations. In the course of this release, a violent confrontation took place between the Czechs and the Hungarians, the former having been disarmed by the Bolshevik authorities, while the latter were not. As a result, the Czechs took offence and revolted, quickly finding themselves enough weapons to become armed to the teeth.
There were several apparent inconsistencies and absurdities in how that risky situation had been created. I do not have in my possession the smoking gun as to what really happened there, but from what I know, and from Lenin’s wild delight on receiving the otherwise dreadful news that foreign troops were now fighting against the Russians on Russian soil (presumably, aiding the White movement, in the expectation that, once the Bolsheviks had been defeated, Russia would be going back into the war against their common enemy), one could easily surmise that the Czech mutiny may indeed have been provoked for that very reason. Either that, or that Lady History, once again on the side of historical necessity, had confounded the Bolsheviks into making that strangely absurd, but, ultimately, their best winning move.
Napoleon wisely observed, “You must not interfere with your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.” His guideline was shockingly disregarded in this case by the Entente Powers, who one might think should have known better, counting the French among their ranks; and indeed, had they not interfered in the Russian civil war, the Bolshevik victory in it might not have been so complete, and so decisive. But as soon as foreigners had landed on Russian soil, for most patriotic Russian officers of the White movement, it was no longer a question of some usurpers snatching power in the Russian capital. It was every Russian’s sacred duty to resist and repel a foreign invasion and, in the process, support and obey even the most reprehensible national authority, as long as it was their native, as opposed to foreign, authority.
The national opposition to the Entente invasion of Russia did not stop the civil war right away, but, by and large, it certainly determined its outcome. A closer look at the details of the civil war’s history reveals that in all instances where the White movement was the strongest and might have achieved a victory or at least a reasonable standoff against the Reds, the foreign intervention factor would then dramatically interfere in the situation on the ground and virtually tie the hands of the Russian White commanders, be it Admiral Kolchak or Generals Yudenich, Denikin or Wrangel, depriving them all of an otherwise possible propitious outcome. Curiously, as just a single example, modern Russian historical analysis has established that in the interaction between Kolchak and the Entente commanders, which was quite reluctant on Kolchak’s part, to begin with, the foreigners wished to secure the gold and treasures in the Admiral’s possession, but were firmly rebuffed, and to show their extreme disappointment with the stubborn White Russian commander, they, in effect, delivered him into the hands of the Bolsheviks, to be swiftly tried and predictably executed.
(Kerensky stops Kornilov, but allows… Lenin.)
…Having saved Lenin’s skin in the last entry, Kerensky was not done yet with his run of historical blunders. His next blunder was to personally hand power to the man whom he had just declared a traitor to Russia, on a silver platter.
In July 1917, after a series of disastrous defeats of the Russian army on the fields of The Great War (as the First World War had been called before there was a Second), Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky chose to appoint as the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army a great Russian patriot and a military commander of genius General Lavr Kornilov. Charged with the mission of defending Russia from her enemies, General Kornilov saw his main task in restoring the collapsed law and order in Russia’s capital of Peterburg and in suppressing the mischief-making Bolsheviks, who, as he correctly judged, were sabotaging the Russian war effort and aggravating the chaos which had engulfed the nation ever since Tsar Nicholas II had signed his abdication.
Consequently, Kornilov summoned a body of troops and began his march on the Russian capital, which was immediately interpreted by the poor democrat Mr. Kerensky as a coup d’état in progress. Realizing his own powerlessness under the circumstances, but determined to stop this threat to Russian democracy at any cost, Kerensky made the fatal decision of appealing to his enemies the Bolsheviks for help, and, furthermore, he allowed the Bolsheviks to arm their cohorts of factory workers and mischievous troublemakers to the teeth, so that they would be able to stop the Kornilov mutiny!!! In the meantime, he issued an order for Kornilov’s arrest, and General Kornilov was indeed arrested and imprisoned, as he was, in turn, betrayed by his noble-born army generals, who had long been filled with resentment for this commoner, born of a Cossack father and a peasant Tatar mother. Taking orders from him used to be marginally tolerable for them, when he was himself under orders from the Imperial Russian government, but to support him as a renegade officer turned rebel was totally out of the question. (The rest of the Kornilov story is rather sad. Escaping from his prison, he was just about ready to fight the Bolsheviks at the head of the White movement, as his former detractors found out to their horror that it had been their refusal to support Kornilov, that had allowed the Bolsheviks to take power in Russia in the first place, and now greeted Kornilov back as their natural leader and a savior of Russia, when a single grenade thrown into his living quarters in early 1918 was enough to end his life.)
…And as for Kerensky, how many horrific nightmares must he have suffered throughout the rest of his long and unimaginably tragic life as a humbled refugee in exile abroad, all amounting to the same heart-rending scream, to this effect: What have I done, with my own hand stopping the only man who could save Russia from the Bolshevik menace, while with my other hand delivering the power to depose both me and my dear Russian democracy to my worst enemies?!
The rest of the Kerensky story is rather predictable, but sad, nevertheless. He fled the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in Paris, where he wrote three books with loud titles, but disingenuously uninformative contents. (The Prelude to Bolshevism, 1919; The Catastrophe, 1927; and the Crucifixion of Liberty, 1934.) Too bad that he was not forthcoming in any of them, and never told the real story. (Although, perhaps, his publishers would have turned him down, in case he had?) After Nazi Germany had occupied France, he moved to the United States, where, with a short exception, he was to spend the rest of his life. (His 1965 American book, Russia and History’s Turning Point, was no less disingenuous than the three previous ones.) After he died, in 1970, the Russian Orthodox Church in America (unaffiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR, of course) refused to give him burial (blaming him personally for the Bolshevik Revolution), and his body was finally transferred to London, where it was buried in a non-denominational cemetery…
…But now that Kerensky is long dead, let him rest in peace. It is true that he had made a terrible “choice,” by choosing democracy over dictatorship. But it wasn’t really Kerensky, of course, who had handed to the Bolsheviks the power over Russia. In fact, at no time did Kerensky have such power in his hands, to begin with. It was our old friend, la forza del destino, all along!
David Among Goliaths.
In that strange year 1917 there were three major political parties in Russia, although some would say four, and if you have ventured your guess about the fourth, you were probably wrong.
One of these was the KD, or Kah-Deh, commonly known as the Cadets, an acronym for the Constitutional Democrats, the party that had so much shocked the Tsarist Russian Government back in 1905 when it had won national prominence by its domination of the first Duma, that fledgling Russian Parliament. In 1917, however, it was seen by others as the right wing of Russian politics, and many had gone so far as to brand the Cadets, quite unfairly, as the downright reactionaries, representing the outdated legacy of Tsarism. The Cadets mostly consisted of liberal Russian nobility and British-style-democracy-loving intellectuals. They talked a lot, but had no understanding of where Russia was going, nor how to play hardball politics, either. None of them were monarchists however, as the latter, although numerous, were disinclined to engage in the democratic process, and did not form a party of their own.
The second large party, to the left of the Cadets, but only slightly to the left, comparatively speaking, were the SD, Social Democrats, whom Western historians have astonishingly labeled as Mensheviks, following Lenin’s false cue, and the subsequent Soviet Propaganda. Lenin, of course, had used this word derogatorily, but the West has accepted it with a straight face. It would have been much fairer and more sensible to call them Social Democrats, the term well familiar to all Europe, and signifying essentially the same thing.
The third, and most populous party, by far, were the SR, Socialist Revolutionaries, still farther to the left. It was their extreme left wing, the Left SR, who were the bona fide heirs of Nechayev, the notorious nihilists, Russia’s professional terrorists and trouble-makers, on a scale much greater than the Bolsheviks, because of their huge numbers across Russia, who were often referred to as the fourth party, certainly deserving such honor, on account of being quite distinctive in their activity, and also far more numerous than all the other parties put together.
Then, there was the Trudovik Party, claiming to represent Russia’s labor force. It was, however, too small to account for anything, even though Kerensky himself had chosen to belong to it for a while, in the course of his notoriously habitual party-switching.
Where does all of this leave the Bolsheviks?, one may ask. The Bolsheviks were indeed a ridiculously tiny bunch, and they were not even considered a party by most, but as some rabid inflamed appendix inside the body of the SD. And yet at the end this minuscule David would make a short shrift of all those Goliaths and end up not even as a “first among many,” but, literally, as “the one and only.” How could such a thing at all become possible?
Democracy was a new thing to Russia, a rara exotic avis, brought in from overseas, which nobody seemed to know how to handle, except for the Bolsheviks, who knew only too well how to mishandle it.
The Cadets and the SD were both fairly respectable, and would have thrived in a British-style democracy, had such a thing been possible in Russia. Well, it was not, as the events did not tarry to prove.
The SR were mainly passionately dedicated, but undisciplined anarchists, who knew how to do their job of throwing bombs and shooting guns at close range, but had no political skills whatsoever. It was, therefore, up to the Bolsheviks to prove the overwhelming advantage of Lenin’s Party Principle (I am tempted to call it the ParteiPrinzip) over the vastly superior numbers of everybody else, no matter how much respect and/or popularity those others were capable of mustering for their claim to power in Russia.
The Bolsheviks understood how it was possible for a handful of aggressive agitators to sway large crowds, using the Archimedes’ lever technique, that is, by finding a clever fulcrum, such as, in their case, was their populist slogan “land to the peasants, peace to the nations, bread to the hungry” (none of which promises they intended to keep, at least, in the short run). Cheap demagoguery, vicious invective, intimidation, and direct terrorization of their political opponents and of all who might find themselves in their way--- all these tactics turned out to be immensely effective against their pathetically ineffectual competition, but the most effective of all was their unscrupulous Wille zur Macht, an overpowering sense of purpose and unflinching readiness for immediate and extremely radical action.
They broke their word just as easily as they gave it. They refined the Divide et Impera rule to perfection. It was their time to take Russia by a perfect storm, and they were handily up to the task.
Still, there have been few such total miracles in the history of the world, and, under normal circumstances, Lenin’s crowd would not have stood a chance, but these were not normal circumstances. There was no law and no order in the land, and while for, say, the SR, it was no more, and no less than business as usual, the Bolsheviks saw this anarchy and lawlessness not as a purpose achieved, but as their unique and unequaled opportunity to take the next radical step, saying, We are the new law, and we are the new order, and there was no one else out there to call their bluff.
Bolshevism As A Necessity.
Was Bolshevism an aberration in Russian history or a world-historical necessity? I think that this question has already been answered in ample quantities in favor of the latter, and the hand of destiny has been traced throughout that period of Russian history with a sufficient consistency to eschew all doubt.
There are a few points remaining to be made in that direction, however, and this is precisely what I intend to do in this entry.
Official Soviet accounts used to give a picture of the Bolshevik Revolution as a triumphant armed uprising in which Lenin’s revolutionary cohorts literally wrestled power in Russia from the reactionary Provisional Government. This picture has long been discredited, but its equally false alternative has survived without a challenge. Regrettably so, as this alternative picture has done more historical harm than the fairly harmless erstwhile hagiography half-heartedly provided by the Soviet government historians.
The alternative picture receives its first draft courtesy of the liberal constituency of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, which managed to find its way out of Soviet Russia during those dangerous years, and ended up in European and/or American emigration. Their account was at first falling on deaf ears, but later, when a preoccupation with freedom and democracy had taken root, particularly in post cold-war America, it started to ring like sweet music in the ears of the liberationist-democratizationist ideologues.
The original wishful-thinking Russian liberals liked to view the period between the abdication of the Czar in March 1917 and the subsequent Bolshevik takeover, seven months later, as an authentic democratic episode in Russian history, cut short by the vandals. Ironically, both the Soviet official view and this one too, tended to imply that Russia’s Provisional Government, Kerensky and all, had indeed held political power in Russia, even if for a brief period of time.
This was not however how it was in reality, according to my sources, historians and eyewitnesses, regarding the role of the Provisional Government in Russian history. In their analysis, the one, which I both trust and agree with professionally, there was just an illusion of power held by the Provisional Government primarily in the Russian capital, but they insist that there was no legitimate authority in the land ever since the fall of the Romanov monarchy, precipitated by the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas II and the terrified refusal by Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich to pick up the broken pieces.
There remained of course the regular units of the Russian army, halfheartedly fighting the Germans and the Austrians on the fronts of the Great War, gradually beginning to realize the significance of having lost their Commander in Chief. As a result, insubordination and mass desertion were becoming daily occurrences. Of course, there were also other units, in reserve, sullenly waiting for orders from their direct superiors, whom they were now ready to massacre at the first opportunity.
But otherwise, the country was literally falling apart, and the new, unruly “administrative councils,” called the Soviets, only contributed to the general anarchy, with their ugly squabbles, bloody fist fights, and loud mutual denunciations.
The virtual demise of Russia in 1917 was a very poignant obsession among my Russian-nationalist friends, all united in the need for a satisfactory rationalization, and all agreeing in their acceptance of the Bolshevik Revolution as a necessity, rather than an aberration in Russia’s historical course. (This never prevent them, of course, from being acerbic grumbling critics of all too many aspects of the Soviet regime.)
With this view of the Bolshevik political triumph as a necessity, I could not agree more. Not only were the Bolsheviks brilliant in their own right, at playing the political game, but sheer good luck seemed to be with them every step of the way. For better or for worse, Lady History was definitely on their side, making their triumph even more a historical necessity than anything that human cleverness alone could deliver. For she is always on the side of historical necessity, and one cannot go wrong about that.
Interfering With The Enemy Destroying Himself.
His incredible luck notwithstanding, Lenin’s daring power grab was immediately challenged, and a bloody Civil War ensued, with terrible atrocities committed by both the Reds and the Whites. Surrounded from all sides within a relatively small enclave, which however had in it Russia’s both principal cities: Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks promptly moved their capital from the former to the latter site thereby fulfilling the cherished dream of all Russian ultra-nationalists, even if their ostensible reason for it was not what the latter had in mind, but the fear that Petrograd could be falling into enemy hands.
But there was no coordination among the vastly superior anti-Bolshevik (White) forces, nor a commonness of purpose. Some were seeking the restoration of the monarchy. Others were vehemently opposed to it, but mostly wanted to rid Russia of the Bolshevik usurpers of power. Kerensky was practically the only one left who was trying to have his Prime Minister’s job back, but momentarily joining forces with the Cossacks of General Krasnov, he quickly discovered that his helpers had no interest in his return, and their reluctance to assist the man they did not want soured their own effort, which then fizzled out. Thus saved by yet another stroke of good fortune, the Bolsheviks were, however, far from being out of the woods, as the odds against them were still overwhelming.
In the meantime, the Bolsheviks signed, as promised, a separate peace with Germany, and promptly found Russia’s former allies, the Entente Powers, on the other side of the fence. It was then that Lenin seemed to have found yet another deadly gambit (one is tempted to call it a “Russian Roulette with a purpose”), which would once again allow him to beat the odds.
Historians writing about the so-called mutiny of the Czechoslovak corps, which started in March 1918, have somehow overlooked the clearly manufactured nature of their revolt. Having just signed the infamous Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, the Bolsheviks were required by that treaty to release all enemy soldiers kept as prisoners of war inside Russia, and to have them transported by rail to their appropriate destinations. In the course of this release, a violent confrontation took place between the Czechs and the Hungarians, the former having been disarmed by the Bolshevik authorities, while the latter were not. As a result, the Czechs took offence and revolted, quickly finding themselves enough weapons to become armed to the teeth.
There were several apparent inconsistencies and absurdities in how that risky situation had been created. I do not have in my possession the smoking gun as to what really happened there, but from what I know, and from Lenin’s wild delight on receiving the otherwise dreadful news that foreign troops were now fighting against the Russians on Russian soil (presumably, aiding the White movement, in the expectation that, once the Bolsheviks had been defeated, Russia would be going back into the war against their common enemy), one could easily surmise that the Czech mutiny may indeed have been provoked for that very reason. Either that, or that Lady History, once again on the side of historical necessity, had confounded the Bolsheviks into making that strangely absurd, but, ultimately, their best winning move.
Napoleon wisely observed, “You must not interfere with your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.” His guideline was shockingly disregarded in this case by the Entente Powers, who one might think should have known better, counting the French among their ranks; and indeed, had they not interfered in the Russian civil war, the Bolshevik victory in it might not have been so complete, and so decisive. But as soon as foreigners had landed on Russian soil, for most patriotic Russian officers of the White movement, it was no longer a question of some usurpers snatching power in the Russian capital. It was every Russian’s sacred duty to resist and repel a foreign invasion and, in the process, support and obey even the most reprehensible national authority, as long as it was their native, as opposed to foreign, authority.
The national opposition to the Entente invasion of Russia did not stop the civil war right away, but, by and large, it certainly determined its outcome. A closer look at the details of the civil war’s history reveals that in all instances where the White movement was the strongest and might have achieved a victory or at least a reasonable standoff against the Reds, the foreign intervention factor would then dramatically interfere in the situation on the ground and virtually tie the hands of the Russian White commanders, be it Admiral Kolchak or Generals Yudenich, Denikin or Wrangel, depriving them all of an otherwise possible propitious outcome. Curiously, as just a single example, modern Russian historical analysis has established that in the interaction between Kolchak and the Entente commanders, which was quite reluctant on Kolchak’s part, to begin with, the foreigners wished to secure the gold and treasures in the Admiral’s possession, but were firmly rebuffed, and to show their extreme disappointment with the stubborn White Russian commander, they, in effect, delivered him into the hands of the Bolsheviks, to be swiftly tried and predictably executed.
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