Part 5: Russia 1914-17

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Germany declared war on Kussia on August 1st, 1914. This war was not only to hatter the lives of millions of forkers who died in uniform • foreign battlefields, but Iso broke the back of all the kl, non-revolutionary ways of truggle in the workers' lovement.

On August 4th the German ocial- Democratic party voted in be Reichstag to support the war #l over night transformed the ¡ternational exchange of omradely greetings into the deadly change of bullets.

The Social-Democratic parties of e Second International had carly found an alliance with their wn' national employers easier and ore fundamental, than a common riggle alongside workers over the prder against the employers and sir war.

But while the Second iternational had collapsed, as it done so it had given birth at same time to a truly volutionary, edership for the working class and ne that, though small and weak hen it was born, was to grow to lunty and seize state power only vo and a hail years later.

By all standards, Russian uticipation revealed the absurdity : the war in full. Russia was an aler-developed country and a assive part of her productive roes were in the hands of foreign Tners - western countries owned of all stock capita heavy of all stock capital, , and lustry.

PAYING PRICE

Thus Russia was out of her pth in that bloody struggle for ord domination, but was paying • price for the right to be a ivileged colony of the Allies, and i oppress and rob Turkey, Galatia menia and even more backward untries.

Her army was a serious force in lack only against such peoples, id in defence only with the help yast spaces, sparse population d impassable roads.

The wat brought only lastrophe and disgrace. Out of 15 ¡lion men mobilised, 2½ million me killed (about 40% of all Allied bes) and another 3 million sunded or taken prisoner for no mard but the right to call foreign perialists friends.

The terrible burden of war ded another twist to the already mining antagonisms of Russian diety. The mighty forces of the asantry and the working class te caught up by the war and together against the imbling walls of a mediaeval ite.

Power rested in the hands of the er and his appointed Cabinet of stocrats, while the bourgeoisie, in urge of advanced and swiftly *eloping capitalist industry, were mesented only in the Duma (the sian Parliament) which was stively recent, and (more portant) completely powerless.

AUTOCRATIC The autocratic rule of the Csar I not been overthrown in favour the parliament, as accomlished in tain by Cromwell in 1640, pause the bourgeoisie in Russia tod a large and hostile working on one hand, while their ince with the landlords meant y could not use the support of i peasantry on the other: thus ly dreaded any shake-up of perty relations. Their paralysis this contradiction was only led by their overturn.

What then was this agrarian em that only a revolution del sohe. Essentially it was that colare remained at the archaic is Droductive level of the Russian prisoners under guard industry in technique and capitalist structure outstripped even advanced countries. As Trotsky says: *an advanced money economy ... made demands upon the wooden plough that could only be met by a tractor"

The peasant could not jump straight to advanced cultivation but first tried to solve the problem of under-production and a rural excess population by increasing his land above the traditional three fields. This could only be done at the expense of the landlords, 30,000 of whom owned about 190 million acres, enough for 10 million peasant families.

After 1905 the landlords started selling their estates and a law of November 1906 allowed the ownership of sections of the communal land - this in order to create a stratum of capitalist farmers OI. 'kulaks' for their Csar Nicholas But by 1914 a million peasants had sold land they could not live on, adding five million to a rural working class. Millions of others could only hang on to their tiny, hungry allotments.

The new rural bourgeoisie was as hostile to the peasants as the old landlords, so that the peasant movement, which died down after I9U5, revived in armed conflicts over the seizing of communal land against their will. In addition the war carried away some 10 million rural workers and 2 million horses, so many peasants (even the middle rich) could not now sow their fields. Thus peasant hostility to the war started even before soldiers brought back tales of the front to the villages. and he peasant after defeat at Tannenberg revolution. In Britain the problem was solved by the bourgeoisie grasping power through Cromwell in the civil war, enabling them to liquidate the independent peasant long before the working class awoke.

But in Russia serfdom was only abolished in 1861 (4½ centuries after Britain) and the forced development of capitalism gave the agrarian problem to the social revolution to solve.

Thus the peasant found his leadership for the first time in history in the person of the worker.

in his turn found in the mighty support for the of his class.

MODERN

What then was the background of the Russian working class? Industry in Russia was modern, organised on a base of giant enterprises - in 1914, industries employing over 1,000 workers accounted for 41% of the working population as opposed to 18% in America. This may seem surprising but is explained by the late arrival of capitalism in Russia, in accordance with the law of combined development as formulated by Trotsky. This he briefly stated as follows:

"The privilege of historic backwardness - and such a privilege exists - permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specitied date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past."

This meant that the working class was small in numbers in relation to the total population but for the same reasons was very advanced politically.

WESTERN CAPITALISM Firstly, this was because capital for industrial development had to come from the west, and under pressure from richer Europe, the Russian state swallowed up a far greater part of the people's wealth than in the west, enforcing twofold poverty and weakening the foundations of the possessing Classes.

The concentration of industry also sharply divided the capitalist leaders from the working classes, and the foreign owners who bought political influence through investment, opposed any struggle for democracy in Russia. For all these reasons the bourgeoisie was isolated and unpopular.

Secondly, the very sudden origin of these huge enternrices esnerialiv coal-mining south, took place in the thinly populated steppes among peasants who had lived in economic backwardness and religious prejudice. Trotsky explains:

"Capital ruthlessly seized the peasant lad or youth by the scruff of the neck and at once flung into the cauldron of factory life. The change in his conditions took place catastrophically. When the young peasant felt. the blast of the factory's steam he at once began to think about who he was and where he was. At that stage the revolutionary party caught up with him and began to explain to him what and where he was. It gained ascendancy over him all the more easily because he had no conservative ideas: the old village notions did not fit at all"

SUPPRESSED

Under the absolute monarchy the workers' movement was ruthlessly suppressed. Hours of work were long, income • levels a tenth of those in the United States, and trade unions and strikes illegal. Socialists and workers' leaders were either in exile, like Lenin and Trotsky, or serving long sentences in prison or in Siberia.

Under these conditions resistance was i forced into underground circles, street demonstrations and often bloody encounters with police and troops. Persecution of the young, fresh and impulsive working class led to the adoption of the political strike as its fundamental weapon.

The great defeat of 1905 discouraged workers for a long time worsened by the industrial slump of 1908-11. But with the industrial boom that followed, the struggle revived: in 1910 only 4,000 workers had engaged in political strikes, but the first half alone of 1914 saw over a million workers striking.

The outbreak of war gave this resurgent process a backward movement at first, since together with the wreck of the Second International it disorientated the working class politically and gave patriotism a big stick with which to beat, often • literally the revolutionary workers.

PENALTIES

Severe penalties were imposed for striking, workers' papers were hunted out of existence, and revolutionary elements in the factories were sent to the front.

Bowing to the mood, not one of the Bolshevik groups OI organisations took • the openly defeatist position of Lenin abroad, who argued for civil war against the bourgeoisie. When the Bolsheviks began to develop agitation against the war their organisation, heavily penetrated by secret Service spies, was broken up, and in November 1914 the Bolshevik deputies to the Duma were arrested.

After the trial in February 1915, 10 38 3: • *-399133022x= firm support to cling to, but then undermines it. In Russia the interruption of war held back the recovery of the workers movement, only to accelerate it more powerfully as the full meaning of the war broke through.

How then did the fighting affect Russia, a country with all the contradictions of a nation which still had its bourgeois revolution to accomplish?

INADEQUATE

The army reflected the country: the peasant-soldiers were hopelessly inadequate to the demands of the modern military technique and the commanding staff showed an ignorance, lightmindedness and thievery corresponding to that of of the ruling classes from which they came.

The demands of war revealed the bankruptcy of industry and transport: the troops soon turned out to have neither weapons nor even shoes.

The lack of munitions, the small number of factories for their production, the sparseness of railway lines for their transport soon translated the backwardness of Russia into the familiar language of defeat.

"The first days of war were the first days of disgrace. After a series of partial catastrophes, in the spring of 1915 came the general retreat. The generals took out their own criminal incapacity on the peaceful population. Enormous tracts of land were violently laid waste. Clouds of human locusts were driven to the rear with whips. The external rout was completed with an internal one.

In answer to alarmed questions from his colleagues as the situation at the front, the War Minister Polivanoy answered in these words: I place my trust in the impenetrable spaces, impassable mud, and the mercy of Saint Nicholas Mirlikisky, Protector of Holy Russia' (Session of August 4th, 1915). A week later General Kuszky confessed to the same ministers: "The present-day demands of military technique are beyond us. At any rate we can't keep up with the Germans.' "

BLAME

Everyone looked for someone to blame: the Jews were accused of espionage, the staff and the Duma accused the Car's Court of friendliness with the Germans. The Allies were envied and hated by all: the French command spared its army by using Russian soldiers.

"In the drawing-rooms of Petrograd and the headquarters at the front they geutly joked: "England has sworn to fight to the last drop of blood ... of the Russian soldier'. These jokes seeped down and reached the tranches. "Everything for the war!' said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. "Yes', the soldier began to think of the trenches, 'they are all ready to fight to the last drop.. ...of my blood". "

The soldiers gathered the increasingly bitter experiences of lower ranks who are ignorantly commanded. They measured the

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confusion of the generals by the number of purposeless manoeuvres on sole-less shoes, the number of dinners not eaten. The number of deserters kept increasing even in the face of more rigid discipline, including flogging for the most trivial offences.

Everyone wanted peace at any cost, and the growth of discontent brought the revolutionary elements, at first drowned in the army without a trace, to the surface. The sending of striking workers to the front as a punishment increased the ranks of the agitators, and the retreat gave them a favourable audience.

"The Gendarme Administration of the Petrograd province declares in October 1916 that 'the mood in the army is alarming, the relation between officers and soldiers is extremely tense, even bloody encounters are taking place. Deserters are to be met everywhere by the thousands. Everyone who comes near the army must carry away a complete and convincing impression of the utter moral disintegration of the troops'... In a few months all these gentlemen.. ..• will nevertheless assert that the revolution Killed patriotism in the army, and that the Bolsheviks snatched a sure victory out of their hands"

Meanwhile the representatives of the bourgeoisie in the Constitutional Democrat Party, or Kadets, had greeted the war as their war. A • Special Conference was called in the spring of 1915 to recruit private industry to work for the army, and Military-Industrial Committees were set up.

These organisations encouraged the bourgeoisie to struggle against the monarchy for power, a struggle it had given up after 1905.

From the Conference billions of roubles flowed out to irrigate private industry and since the influx of raw labour to the factories and the scramble for war profits organising centre of the movement in its most dangerous form"

After the arrests the Bolsheviks had no centralised party organisation at all, only scattered groups and individuals, but in the growing strike movement their underground work revived. The Police Department wrote:

"The Leninists have ... been issuing in considerable numbers revolutionary appeals with demand to stop the war, overthrow the existing government, and found a republic. And this work has had its palpable result in workers' strikes and disorders"

September 1915 meant paralysis for the bourgeoisie faced with the Czar's obstinate clinging to power, but held a great step forward for the leadership of the workers movement. The conference of socialists at Zimmerwald in Switzerland gave a powerful impetus to the development of the anti-war Russian soldiers committee meets the Czar's government increased, the government banning the speeches of the Duma and thereby ensuring that they circulated by the million.

CONSPIRACY

Conspiracy against the Czar hung in the air as a mood of the upper circles of Petrograd; a confused idea of salvation or a slogan of despair. The conspirators did not dare remove the chief actor of the monarchy, but the Grand Dukes decided to remove its prompter - Rasputin.

The more isolated the monarchy became, and the less shelter the Czar felt, the more this mediaeyal utocrat had turned for help from the "other world"

Rasputin had first met the Czar in 1905, and by 1916 had enormous power over state sppointments and royal policy, although in his private life he was a drunkard and a womanizer.

The Czarina would write to the Czar "I am firm, but listen to me ie. this means Our Friend, and trust us in everything." The Friend was Gregory Rasputin.

On the night of 16-17th December 1916 Rasputin was murdered in a Prince's maisonette. The ruling classes greeted it as an act of salvation. People talked about it everywhere, saying that even the aristocracy had no other solution.

It was a sign that the antagonisms of society had reached their highest pre-revolutionary tension, unbearable even for the classes of the old society which Trotsky called the "rank-and-file nobility"

The forces were now maturing that would, ten weeks later, sweep away the Czar and all his court for good. Prices were rising by leaps and bounds. Shortages cut down consumption by a half.

"In October the struggle enters its decisive phase, uniting all forms of discontent in one. Petrograd draws back for the February leap. A wave of meetings runs through the factories. The topics: food supplies, high cost of living, war, government. Bolshevik leaflets are distributed; political strikes begin; improvised demonstrations occur at factory gates; cases of fraternisation between certain factories and the soldiers are observed; a stormy protest-strike flares up over the trial of the revolutionary sailors of the Baltic Fleet."

The Government refused to give concessions and abolished the Duma. It proposed a government of autocrats, martial law in Petrograd and Moscow, and preparation of forces to put down the rebellion.

GENERAL STRIKE

The slogan of the general strike was reviving, the first two months of 1917 showing 575,000 workers out on political strikes. On January 9th, the anniversary of the march on the Winter Palace, 150,000 struck in Petrograd.

Workers felt no retreat was possible, organisation was forming, most often around the Bolsheviks, in the factories. Strikes and meetings went on throughout the first two weeks of February.

On the 16th bread cards were introduced in Petrograd, but the powder had been lit and on the 19th crowds gathered round the food shops, demanding bread. Next day bakeries were sacked all over the city. This was the lightning of the revolutionary storm.