Week 14: Revolution and Counter revolution

Lecture Outline:

  1. WW1 and Socialist revolution

  2. Marxist in Russia

  3. Bolshevik Seizure of Power

  4. Aftermath of War and Revolution

  5. Conclusions

WW1 and Socialist revolution:

  • WW1 drives forwards polarisation of society - catalyst for tensions that predate the war

    • Ends moral legitimacy and political authority of the imperial states

    • Centrifugal dynamics of nationalism and socialism

    • Russia was the first but not the only empire to buckle under stress

  • Socialist revolutions

    • 1917: Russia

    • 1918: Germany

    • 1918: Hungary

    • 1919-20: Italy

2. Marxist in Russia

What did Marxism mean in 1917:

  • Anti-capitalist; anti-individualist, anti-private property.

  • Marxism as a form of policial software that was forged in WW1

  • Articulated and reshaped the tensions that had arisen within the Russian Empire over the preceding decades

  • Revolution popular understood as the inversion of privilege

    • Redistribution of social and economic goods and the destruction the old world order

Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet

  • Offers blueprint for revolutionary vanguard

  • Based on centralisation of party and discipline

  • More of a militarised discipline of Marxism. War time practises and experiences are used during peace time.

February to October 1917:

  • Dual power system - Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government

  • Growing radicalisation of both the front and home

  • Mounting disillusionment among educated Russians

  • However October revolution can be seen as a coup that went unopposed

April Theses

  • 3rd April - Lenin arrives in Petrograd -upsets the equilibrium of the dual power system

Changed Nature of the Bolshevik Party:

  • Meteoric growth in Party - 20,000 at the start of 1917 - 1.3 million by 1921

  • Legitimation of tools of warfare for use in the restructuring of societies

  • Cultures of struggle/siege mentality now embedded into party ideology

  • Purging of party cadres

The aftermath of War and Revolution:

  • By the end of the Communist revolution: Moscow is the specger haunting Europe made flesh

  • Middle-classes, property-owning peasantry and lower middle classes invested to varying degrees in the status quo

  • Social structure proves key determinant in the convulsions of 1917-1921

  • Tools of warfare also celebrated