Achieving a capitalist Russia in the Twentieth century wouldn’t have taken very much actually, and none of the changes required rely on 20/20 hindsight. These changes each simply keep Russia was going down the path it was on in early 1917 and have one goal: to put the Socialists firmly in control.
The first two critical changes involve the drama taking place in opposite wings of the Tauride Palace in Petrograd on the 27th and 28th of February 1917, before Nicholas II’s formal abdication. In the left wing of the palace, the self-appointed ‘Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Worker’s Deputies’ had established itself and had announced public elections for worker’s representatives to the Soviet for the evening of the 27th. Because of the speed with which the election took place, and the fact that Petrograd was in a state of utter chaos, very few people heard about the voting in time to take part; most of the city’s workers and soldiers were milling around, enjoying the carnival atmosphere of the revolution in central Petrograd, or getting drunk and shooting up buildings and looting shops. The result was that the fifty voting delegates elected to this initial soviet were almost exclusively socialist intellectuals; there were few of the workers and none of the soldiers that would later dominate the Petrograd Soviet. This initial soviet then elected an Executive Committee dominated by the Mensheviks, but with two members each from the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) and Bolshevik parties, as well as a number of non-party intellectuals. This new Executive Committee, less than an hour old, then committed the fatal error of putting the cart before the horse: they called for larger elections for the very next day.
The city was in a state of nearly total chaos, with transport and communications at a standstill, fighting taking place in several parts of the city, and much of the rest of the city totally lawless. It didn’t need an election; it needed someone to establish some semblance of order in which an election could then be held. This should have been obvious to the members of the Executive, all of whom had been thinking and writing about democracy for well over a decade while living in within the frustrating strait-jacket of Nicholas’s autocracy; they all should have realised that if a vote was called in a rush, without any thought put into methodology or supervision, then the result could hardly be expected to be democratic. Nor was anyone pressuring the Executive to rush; the people in the streets wanted the Tsar and his government gone, beyond that, they really didn’t care at that stage. The mobs in the street surrounding the Tauride, including the mutinying soldiers of the Petrograd garrison, were quick to support the Petrograd Soviet and respond to orders issued in its name, so it was seen as legitimate without the need for a further vote. So the body most essential for the establishment of a democratic and capitalist Russia, had been established by the evening of February 27th, but committed the fatal error of calling an election for the very next day.
This is not to say that the larger Soviet of Workers and Soldier’s Deputies elected on the 28th was inherently disloyal to the Provisional government, or to democracy in general; throughout the period of the Provisional government, the Petrograd Soviet, dominated as it was by the SR and Mensheviks, remained faithful to the government, rejecting the Bolshevik inspired attempted putsch on July 4th. (Although the 4th of July was inspired by Bolshevik agitators, it was not organised by the Bolshevik Central Committee and caught Lenin as much by surprise as everyone else. When Lenin finally did make his move in October, he did so using the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, but was in fact seized power from the Soviet.) The problem with the larger Soviet wasn’t that it was disloyal - even most of its Bolshevik members were initially willing to work within the broad socialist coalition in the Soviet. It was that, with 600 members, it was just too large and unwieldy. Also, most of its members, although mostly SR and Mensheviks, had very little education and virtually none in politics or ideology; as a result they were constantly passing populist resolutions that had disastrous results, one of the earliest and most disastrous being Soviet Order No. 1 to the Russian military; it was this order, more than anything else, that destroyed discipline in the Russian army. (Recognising what they had done, the Soviet released Order No. 2, which sought countermand most of the more radicle items of the first order, but the damage was done and few paid it any attention.) For Russia to have had any real hope, the Petrograd Soviet needed to remain small, manageable, and in the hands of people who, although inexperienced with actual governing, were well educated in political theory.
Meanwhile, in the other wing of the Tauride Palace, another critical, although lesser, error took place on the 27th. The first change might seem minor, but its effect would have been significant . There the last Duma of Tsarist Russia was trying to form the first government of post-Tsarist Russia. One of their very first acts was to announce that they were the Provisional Government; it was a serious error, undermining their own authority with the masses. It was an unnecessary piece of legalistic nuance that went completely over the heads of most of the Russian people; all they grasped was that this wasn’t a real government and left them looking elsewhere for authority and challenging any instructions from the Provisional Government.
Although it was a serious mistake, it was not calamitous as long as the Petrograd Soviet remained loyal and did nothing to further undermine the legitimacy of the government; with the smaller soviet elected on the 27th not being expanded into the unwieldy mass of 600, then Order No 1 would never have been released, at least, not in the form that so destroyed discipline in the army and undermined the legitimacy of the new government.
Even without the ad hoc election on the 28th, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet would still have had to expand, much as it did, to include representatives from the other major socialist parties – the Trudoviks, the Popular Socialists, the Jewish Bund and the Inter-District Group of the Social Democrats. So by the start of March 1917 a broad left coalition would be occupying the left wing of the Tauride, while the new Government of the Russian Republic, a coalition of parties from right dominated by the Kadets, would occupy the right wing of the same palace. (The leftist coalition meeting in the left wing of the Tauride while the centre right government met in the right wasn’t symbolic of anything; the Duma was simply resident in the right wing anyway and the Soviet set up next door because it was suitably furnished, available and conveniently located.)
The main parties of the Petrograd Soviet, the Mensheviks, SR, Trudoviks and Bund, were all socialist, with most based on Marx or at least heavily influenced by his writing. And in March 1917 they were all in agreement that what Russia now needed was a bourgeois democratic government to allow a capitalist economy to develop in Russia. Even the Bolsheviks who were members of the Soviet in March believed this; Lenin was still in Switzerland, while Trotsky was still a Menshevik and was still in New York, where he was annoying waiters be refusing to tip them. Russia was just too backwards and unready for a socialist revolution to succeed, it had to go through a ‘bourgeois phase’ which would then give the proletariat the opportunity to gain power through political means.
The Petrograd Soviet had the broad support and loyalty of the masses, the government lacked the support of the masses, but retained nominal control of executive government and included people experienced in managing those large institutions. Both needed the other if any sort of order was to be established. They also knew that this dual body approach couldn’t last and needed to be replaced by a single elected body would have both political and legal legitimacy derived from its elected makeup: Russia needed to elect a Constituent Assembly, which leads us to the most critical error of 1917.
The government knew that they needed hold elections for a Constituent Assembly, and one of their first announcements was that they would do so at the earliest opportunity. But the government was dominated by the Kadets who, knowing they would lose, kept delaying the election. This delay was a godsend to Lenin; not because it allowed him to become more popular (the Bolsheviks were never popular and when the elections were held in November Lenin’s party won less than a quarter of the seats, the majority going to the SR), but because it gave him time to organise his coup with no real organised opposition. So the most critical change of 1917 is that the elections for the Assembly have to take place at the earliest reasonable opportunity, which would have been in May or June.
Fixing a firm election date in May or June really isn’t that hard to achieve, not with the leaner Petrograd Soviet of 50 voting members. This smaller, more educated body would have been able to remain much more focused and, knowing that they actually had more de facto power than the government, could have demanded a set date for elections as the price of their support. Nor would opposition to an early election have been all that hard to overcome; the government was led by Georgy Lvov, a liberal of no real party loyalty, who had achieved national fame and popularity from his work in the zemstvos organising famine relief in 1891 and how was dedicated, above all else, to the good of Russia as a whole and largely indifferent to politics. Beneath him, initially as Minister of Justice then as Minister for War, was Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky had a foot in both camps; he was an elected member of the Duma, and also of the Petrograd Soviet and, in the early days of the revolution, the standout personality in both. Kerensky was popular with the masses and was one of the few men sitting at the cabinet table who could be confident that he would still have a job after the election. In the early days of the revolution his presence in cabinet was seen as essential to legitimise the government; had he threatened to resign in March unless an election date was set, then undoubtedly he would have had his way and a date in May or June would have been set. This would have allowed enough time to re-establish a reasonable degree of order across the empire, and given the parties time to campaign, but been soon enough that the masses, impatient for change, would not have become embittered.
The so-far unmentioned elephant in the room is of course the war. 1917 was the year that broke armies; the Russian army, at least initially, was no different. The French army saw major mutinies with the troops going ‘on strike’ and refusing to attack the enemy (although they were still willing to defend), the Italians broke completely at Caporetto in October, and the British and Australians also experienced unrest. The general collapse in discipline in the Russian Army was in response to Soviet Order No. 1; prior to that, the mood was one of anger at the way the war was being run and a feeling that the soldier’s lives were being thrown away in futile offensives, it was not initially anger at the continuation of the war; the people and mutinying soldiers who filled the streets of Petrograd in February sang the Marseillaise, not the Internationale, and SR and Mensheviks still supported Revolutionary Defensism even while calling for ‘Peace without Indemnities or Annexations’.
Russia could have remained in the war, but spent 1917 on the defensive, taking the time to address the worst of the soldier’s grievances, improving their conditions behind the lines, and re-establishing discipline. Even the introduction of Soldiers Committees and Commissars would have worked in their favour once the Constituent Assembly had been elected; Bolsheviks infiltration would have been much less successful without a ‘Provisional’ Government they could present as foreign agents and the demand for ‘All Power to the Soviets’ hardly works when the soviets already hold all the power in the form of the new Assembly.
The Army went on the offensive for the same reason that the elections were delayed - because the provisional government wanted a military success to provide them with some political success. But if the elections were held in May or June then there would have been no time for an offensive before the election; afterwards the new government, dominated by the SR, would have had no reason to go on the offensive and every reason to listen to General Brusilov when he advised against one.
This all still leaves Lenin; back in Russia and hungry for power. But when Lenin arrived back in Russia in April, he didn’t even have the full support of the Bolshevik party’s central committee; many of them saw him as completely out of touch with the realities of Russia. It took time for Lenin to win over the party, and much of his persuasiveness that a Bolshevik putsch was even possible was based on the very obvious weaknesses of the Provisional Government/Petrograd Soviet relationship and its lack of authority on the streets. (Even Lenin himself, despite believing that World-wide revolution was imminent as a result of the First World War, wasn’t initially all that confident that the time had come in Russia itself; he did not support the Kronstadt sailors in their 4th of July putsch, despite the ease with which they took over central Petrograd and surrounded the Tauride Palace.)
Lenin was single-minded, ruthless, and an excellent planner, but he still relied very much on circumstances presenting him with the opportunity to seize power and, as demonstrated by events in July, he was also very cautious, likely to let an opportunity slip by if there was the slightest element of doubt; faced with a newly elected Constituent Assembly and a government that enjoyed the support of the people and the army, he might have hesitated indefinitely.
More to follow…