October Revolution
| October Revolution | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolutions of 1917–23 and the Russian Civil War | |||||||
.jpg) Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which took power in the October Revolution | |||||||
| |||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 Bolshevik Party Left SRs Red Guards 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets
|  Russian Republic (to November 7) Russian Provisional Government (to November 8) | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
| Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky Pavel Dybenko | Alexander Kerensky | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| 10,000 red sailors, 20,000-30,000 red guard soldiers | 500-1,000 volunteer soldiers, 1,000 soldiers of women's battalion | ||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| Few wounded red guard soldiers | All deserted | ||||||
Etymology
Initially, the event was referred as the October coup (Октябрьский переворот) or the Uprising of 25th, as seen in contemporary documents (for example, in the first editions of Lenin's complete works). With time, the term October Revolution came into use. It is also known as the "November Revolution" having occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar.
The Great October Socialist Revolution (Russian: Великая Октябрьская Социалистическая Революция, Velikaya Oktyabr'skaya sotsialisticheskaya revolyutsiya) was the official name for the October Revolution in the Soviet Union after the 10th anniversary of the Revolution in 1927.
Background
Nationwide crisis had developed in Russia affecting social, economic, and political relations. Disorder in industry and transport had intensified, and difficulties in obtaining provisions had increased. Gross industrial production in 1917 had decreased by over 36 percent from what it had been in 1916. In the autumn, as much as 50 percent of all enterprises were closed down in the Urals, the Donbas, and other industrial centers, leading to mass unemployment. At the same time, the cost of living increased sharply. The real wages of the workers fell about 50 percent from what they had been in 1913. Russia's national debt in October 1917 had risen to 50 billion rubles. Of this, debts to foreign governments constituted more than 11 billion rubles. The country faced the threat of financial bankruptcy.
In September and October 1917, there were strikes by the Moscow and Petrograd workers, the miners of the Donbas, the metalworkers of the Urals, the oil workers of Baku, the textile workers of the Central Industrial Region, and the railroad workers on 44 different railway lines. In these months alone more than a million workers took part in mass strike action. Workers established control over production and distribution in many factories and plants in a social revolution.
By October 1917 there had been over four thousand peasant uprisings against landowners. When the Provisional Government sent out punitive detachments it only enraged the peasants. The garrisons in Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities, the Northern and Western fronts, and the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in September openly declared through their elected representative body that they did not recognize the authority of the Provisional Government and would not carry out any of its commands.
In a diplomatic note of the 1 May, the minister of foreign affairs, Pavel Milyukov, expressed the Provisional Government's desire to carry the war against the Central Powers through "to a victorious conclusion", arousing broad indignation. On 1–4 May about 100,000 workers and soldiers of Petrograd, and after them the workers and soldiers of other cities, led by the Bolsheviks, demonstrated under banners reading "Down with the war!" and "all power to the soviets!" The mass demonstrations resulted in a crisis for the Provisional Government.
1 July saw more demonstrations, as about 500,000 workers and soldiers in Petrograd demonstrated, again demanding "all power to the soviets", "down with the war", and "down with the ten capitalist ministers". The Provisional Government opened an offensive against them on 1 July but it soon collapsed. The news of the offensive and its collapse intensified the struggle of the workers and the soldiers. A new crisis in the Provisional Government began on 15 July.
Events
The Spread of Soviet Power (Gregorian calendar)
7/11/1917: Petrograd, Minsk, Novgorod and Ivanovo-Voznesensk. 8/11/1917: Ufa, Kazan, Revel and Yekaterinburg. 9/11/1917: Vitebsk, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Samara and Izhevsk. 10/11/1917: Rostov, Tver and Nizhny Novgorod. 12/11/1917: Voronezh, Smolensk and Gomel. 13/11/1917: Tambov. 14/11/1917: Orel and Perm. 15/11/1917: Pskov, Moscow and Baku. 27/11/1917: Tsaritsyn 1/12/1917: Mogilev. 8/12/1917: Vyatka. 10/12/1917: Kishinev 11/12/1917: Kaluga. 14/12/1917: Novorossisk. 15/12/1917: Kostroma 20/12/1917: Tula. 24/12/1917: Kharkov. 29/12/1917: Sebastopol. 4/1/1918: Penza. 11/1/1917: Yekaterinoslav. 17/1/1918: Petrozavodsk. 19/1/1918: Poltava. 22/1/1918: Zhitomir. 26/1/1918: Simferopol. 27/1/1918: Nikolayev. 28/1/1918: Helsinki. 31/1/1918: Odessa and Orenburg. 7/2/1918: Astrakhan. 8/2/1918: Kiev and Vologda. 17/2/1918: Archangel. 25/2/1918: Novocherkassk.
Outcomes
Historiography
Few events in historical research have been as conditioned by political influences as the October Revolution. The historiography of the Revolution generally divides into three camps: the Soviet-Marxist view, the Western-Totalitarian view, and the Revisionist view.
Soviet Historiography: The Marxist View
Soviet historiography of the October Revolution is intertwined with Soviet historical development. Many of the initial Soviet interpreters of the Revolution were themselves Bolshevik revolutionaries. (For example, the revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a major narrative of the October Revolution.) After the initial wave of revolutionary narratives, Soviet historians worked within “narrow guidelines” defined by the Soviet government. The rigidity of interpretive possibilities reached its height under Stalin.
Soviet historians of the October Revolution interpreted the Revolution so as to establish the legitimacy of Marxist ideology, and also the Bolshevik regime. To establish the accuracy of Marxist ideology, Soviet historians generally described the Revolution as the product of class struggle. They maintained that the Revolution was the supreme event in a world history governed by historical laws. The Bolshevik Party is placed at the center of the Revolution, exposing the errors of both the moderate Provisional Government and the spurious “socialist” Mensheviks in the Petrograd Soviet. Guided by Vladimir Lenin’s leadership and his firm grasp of scientific Marxist theory, the Party led the “logically predetermined” events of the October Revolution from beginning to end. The events were, according to these historians, logically predetermined because of the socio-economic development of Russia, where the monopoly industrial capitalism alienated the masses. In this view, the Bolshevik party took the leading role in organizing these alienated industrial workers, and thereby established the construction of the first socialist state.
Although Soviet historiography of the October Revolution stayed relatively constant until 1991, it did undergo some changes. Following Stalin’s death, historians (like E.N. Burdzhalov and P.V. Volobuev) published historical research that deviated significantly from the party line in refining the doctrine that the Bolshevik victory “was predetermined by the state of Russia’s socio-economic development.” These historians, who comprised the “New Directions Group,” posited that the complex nature of the October Revolution “could only be explained by a multi-causal analysis, not by recourse to the mono-causality of monopoly capitalism.” For them, the central actor is still the Bolshevik party, but this party triumphed “because it alone could solve the preponderance of ‘general democratic’ tasks the country faced” (such as the struggle for peace, the exploitation of landlords, and so on.)
During the late Soviet period, the opening of select Soviet archives during glasnost sparked innovative research that broke away from some aspects of Marxism-Leninism, though the key features of the orthodox Soviet view remained intact.
Western Historiography: the Totalitarian View
During the Cold War, Western historiography of the October Revolution developed in direct response to the assertions of the Soviet view. The Soviet Marxist-Leninist version of the October Revolution conditioned historical interpretations in the U.S. and the West. As a result, these Western historians exposed what they considered flaws in the Soviet view, thereby undermining the Bolshevik’s original legitimacy, as well as the precepts of Marxism.
Far from being inevitable according the historical laws of Marxism, these Western historians presented the revolution as the result of a chain of contingent accidents. Examples of these accidental and contingent factors that precipitated the Revolution include World War I’s timing, chance, and the poor leadership of Tsar Nicholas II as well as liberal and moderate socialists. According to this historical interpretation, it was not popular support, but rather Bolshevik manipulation of the masses and the organization’s ruthlessness and superior structure which enabled it to survive. For these historians, the Bolsheviks’ defeat in the Constituent Assembly elections of November-December 1917 demonstrated popular opposition to the Bolsheviks’ coup, as did the scale and breadth of the Civil War.
These historians saw the organization of the Bolshevik party as proto-totalitarian. Their interpretation of the October Revolution as a violent coup organized by a proto-totalitarian party reinforced the idea that totalitarianism is an inherent part of Soviet history. For them, Stalinist totalitarianism developed as a natural progression from Leninism and the Bolshevik party’s tactics and organization.
Revisionist Historiography
Western historians in the U.S. and Europe originally developed the Revisionist view of the October Revolution. Inspired by the social movements and civil of the 1960s, and further fueled by the opening of some Soviet archives during glasnost, Revisionist historians attempted to reconstruct the actions and aspirations of the masses. These historians were not bound by a common philosophy of history, nor did they agree upon every aspect of their dissent from the two traditional views. However, their willingness to probe, criticize, and reject traditional assumptions distinguish these historians from the other two tendencies. Additionally, the revisionist view heralded the use of “detailed and meticulous specialist research" that aimed to be free from political and ideological influences in carrying out historical analysis.
Reflecting the growing influence of social history in the West, these historians began to shift the focus of the revolution away from high-ranking politicians like Nicholas II, Alexander Kernesky, and Lenin, and to look instead at the experience and aspirations of the workers, soldiers, and peasants. In doing so, these historians challenged both the Soviet and the Western accounts of the revolution. For revisionists, the success of Bolshevism during 1917 does not reflect the party's centralization, unity, and discipline, “but rather its relatively open, flexible and democratic nature." Moreover, these historians held that to understand the October Revolution, it is essential to grasp the social, political, and economic conditions in the Russian Empire that had generated mass discontent. This mass discontent was transformed into support for the Bolshevik party, which the tsarist regime could not constrain. In this view, “it was because Bolshevism articulated mass aspirations so well that the party attracted the support it did and seized power with such ease in October.”
Support for the Revisionist camp of historical interpretation grew and by the 1980s, this view was endorsed by many Western historians, and was also attracting several sympathetic, though limited, reviews from outspoken Soviet historians.
Impact of the Dissolution of the USSR on Historical Research
The dissolution of the USSR had an impact on historical interpretations of the October Revolution. Since 1991, increasing access to large amounts of Soviet archival materials made it possible to re-examine the October Revolution. Though both Western and Russian historians now have access to many of these archives, the impact of the dissolution of the USSR can be seen most clearly in the work of historians in the former USSR. While the disintegration essentially helped solidify the Western and Revisionist views, post-USSR Russian historians largely repudiated the former Soviet historical interpretation of the Revolution. In other words, the established Soviet view of the October Revolution has been challenged, and consequently “Russian historians’ outlook has come closer to that of their Western conferes.” As Stephen Kotkin argues, 1991 prompted “a return to political history and the apparent resurrection of totalitarianism, the interpretive view that, in different ways…revisionists sought to bury.” In other words, after 1991, there has been the revival among some historians of the “continuity thesis,” the idea that there was an uncomplicated, natural evolution from the October Revolution’s organizational structure to Stalin’s Gulags.
Soviet in memoriam of the event
The term "Red October" (Красный Октябрь, Krasnyy Oktyabr) has also been used to describe the events of the month. This name has in turn been lent to a steel factory made notable by the Battle of Stalingrad, a Moscow sweets factory that is well-known in Russia, and a fictional Soviet submarine.
Sergei Eisenstein's film October: Ten Days That Shook the World describes and glorifies the revolution and was commissioned to commemorate the event.
7 November, the anniversary of the October Revolution, was an official holiday in the Soviet Union from 1918 onward and still is in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan.
The October revolution of 1917 also marks the inception of the first communist government in Russia, and thus the first large-scale socialist state in world history. After this Russia became the Russian SFSR and later part of the USSR, which dissolved in late 1991. The Russian SFSR still exists, but in 1991—1993 it was transformed from a Soviet socialist republic into the current Russian Federation of today.
See also
Notes
References
- Acton, Edward (1997). Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution.
- Beckett, Ian F.W. (2007). The Great war (2 ed.). Longman. ISBN 1405812524. http://books.google.com/books?id=CMYbKgcAW88C.
- Mandel, David (1984). The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet seizure of power. London: MacMillan.
- Richard Pipes (27 May 1997). Three "whys" of the Russian Revolution. Vintage Books. ISBN 9780679776468. http://books.google.com/books?id=mdqtQgAACAAJ. Retrieved 8 September 2010.
- Read, Christopher (1996). From Tsars to Soviets.
- Robert Service (2005). A history of modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674018013. http://books.google.com/books?id=eseDgCQK9UkC. Retrieved 1 September 2010.
- Service, Robert (1998). A history of twentieth-century Russia. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-40347-9.
- Figes, Orlando (1996). A People's Tragedy. Pimlico.
External links
Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=October_Revolution&oldid=463778274
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