(ebook) Trotsky, Leon - History of the Russian Revolution, Vol 3

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The History of the Russian Revolution

Leon Trotsky Volume Three

Contents

Notes on the Text i

1 THE PEASANTRY BEFORE OCTOBER 1

2 THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALITIES 25

3 WITHDRAWAL FROM THE PRE -PARLIAMENT AND STRUGGLE FOR

THE SOVIET CONGRESS 46

4 THE MILITARY-REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE 66

5 LENIN SUMMONS TO INSURRECTION 93

6 THE ART OF INSURRECTION 125

7 THE CONQUEST OF THE CAPITAL 149

8 THE CAPTURE OF THE WINTER PALACE 178

9 THE OCTOBER INSURRECTION 205

10 THE CONGRESS OF THE SOVIET DICTATORSHIP 224

11 CONCLUSION 255

NOTE TO THE APPENDICES (AND APPENDIX NO. 1) 260

3 CONTENTS

SOCIALISM IN A SEPARATE COUNTRY 283

HISTORIC REFERENCES ON THE THEORY OF “PERMANENT REVOLU-

TION” 319

4 CONTENTS

Notes on the Text

The History of the Russian Revolution

Volume Two

Leon Trotsky

First published: 1930

This edition: 2000 by Chris Russell for Marxists Internet Archive

Please note: The text may make reference to page numbers within this document. These

page numbers were maintained during the transcription process to remain faithful to the

original edition and not this version and, therefore, are likely to be inaccurate. This statement

applies only to the text itself and not any indices or tables of contents which have been

reproduced for this edition.

ii Notes on the Text

CHAPTER 1

THE PEASANTRY BEFORE OCTOBER

Civilization has made the peasantry its pack animal. The bourgeoisie in the long run only

changed the form of the pack. Barely tolerated on the threshold of the national life, the

peasant stands essentially outside the threshold of science. The historian is ordinarily as

little interested in him as the dramatic critic is in those gray ﬁgures who shift the scenery,

carrying the heavens and earth on their backs, and scrub the dressing-rooms of the actors.

The part played by the peasantry in past revolutions remains hardly cleared up to this day.

“The French bourgeoisie began by liberating the peasantry,” wrote Marx in 1848. “With

the help of the peasantry they conquered Europe. The Prussian bourgeoisie was so blinded

by its own narrow and close-by interests that it lost even this ally, and turned it into a

weapon in the hands of the feudal counter-revolution.” In this contrast what relates to the

German bourgeoisie is true; but the assertion that “the French bourgeoisie began by liberat-

ing the peasantry” is an echo of that ofﬁcial French legend which exercised an inﬂuence in

its day even upon Marx. In reality the bourgeoisie, in the proper sense of the term, opposed

the peasant revolution with all the power it had. Even from the rural instructions of 1789

the local readers of the Third Estate threw out, under the guise of editing, the keenest and

most bold demands. The famous decision of August 4, adopted by the National Assembly

amid the glow of rural conﬂagrations, long remained a pathetic formula without content.

The peasants who would not reconcile themselves to this deceit were adjured by the Con-

stituent Assembly to “return to the fulﬁllment of their duties and have the proper respect for

[feudal] property.” The civil guard tried more than once to put down the peasantry in the

country. But the city workers, taking the side of those in revolt, met the bourgeois punitive

expeditions with stones and broken tile.

Throughout ﬁve years the French peasantry rose at every critical moment of the revo-

lution, preventing a deal between the feudal and bourgeois property-holders. The Parisian

2 THE PEASANTRY BEFORE OCTOBER

Sans-culottes, pouring out their blood for the republic, liberated the peasant from his feudal

chains. The French republic of 1792 marked a new social r´

egime – in contradistinction to

the German republic of 1918. or the Spanish republic of 1931, which mean only the old

r´

egime minus the dynasty. At the bottom of this difference it is not hard to ﬁnd the agrarian

question.

The French peasant did not think directly of a republic; he wanted to throw off the

landlord. The Parisian republicans ordinarily forgot all about the country. But it was only

the peasant pressure upon the landlord which guaranteed the creation of a republic, clearing

the feudal rubbish out of its road. A republic with a nobility is not a republic. This was

excellently understood by the old man Machiavelli, who in his Florentine exile 400 years

before the presidency of Ebert, between hunting thrushes and playing at tric-trac with the

butcher, generalized the experience of democratic revolutions. “Who ever wants to found

a republic in a country where there are many nobles, can only do this if to begin with he

exterminates them all. The Russian Muzhiks were essentially of the same opinion, and they

revealed this openly without any ”Machiavellianism.“

While Petrograd and Moscow played the main role in the movement of the workers

and soldiers, the ﬁrst place in the peasant movement must be accorded to the backward

Great Russian agricultural centre, and the middle region of the Volga. Here the relics of

serfdom had especially deep roots; the nobles’ proprietorship in the land was most parasitic

in character; the differentiation of the peasantry was far behind and the poverty of the

village thus more nakedly revealed. Bursting out in this region as early as March, the

movement had been immediately adorned with acts of terror. Through the efforts of the

dominant parties it was soon switched, however, into the channel of compromise politics.

In the industrially backward Ukraine, agriculture, carried on for export, had acquired a

far more progressive and consequently more capitalistic character. Here the stratiﬁcation of

the peasantry had gone considerably farther than in Great Russia. The struggle for national

liberation moreover inevitably delayed, at least for the time being, other forms of social

straggle. But the variation in regional, and even national, conditions expressed itself in the

long run only in a difference of dates. By autumn the territory of the peasant struggle had

become almost the whole country. Out of the 624 counties constituting old Russia, 482, or

77 per cent., were involved in the movement. And omitting the borderlands, distinguished

by special agrarian conditions – the northern district, the Trans-Caucasus, the region of the

steppes, and Siberia – out of 481 counties, 439, or 91 per cent., were drawn into the peasant

revolt.

The methods of struggle differ according to whether it is a question of ploughed land,

forest, pasture, of rentals or of hired labor. The struggle changed its forms and methods,

too, at various stages of the revolution. But in general the movement of the villages passed,

3 THE PEASANTRY BEFORE OCTOBER

with inevitable delay, through the same two great stages as the movement of the cities. In

the ﬁrst stage the peasants were still accommodating themselves to the new r´

egime , and

trying to solve their problems by means of the new institutions. Even here, however, it was

more a matter of form than substance. The Moscow liberal newspaper – tinted before the

revolution with a Narodnik hue – expressed with admirable directness the state of mind of

the landlord circles in the summer of 1917. ”The muzhik is glancing round, he is not doing

anything yet, but look in his eyes – his eyes will tell you that all the land lying around him

is his land.“ A perfect key to this ”peaceful“ policy of the peasantry, is a telegram sent in

April by one of the Tomboy villages to the Provisional Government:

”We desire to keep the peace in the interests of the freedom won. But for this reason,

forbid the sale of the landlords’ land until the Constituent Assembly. Otherwise we will

shed blood, but we will not let anyone else plough the land.“

The muzhik found it easy to maintain a tone of respectful threat, because in bringing his

pressure to bear against historic rights, he hardly had to come into direct conﬂict with the

state at all. Organs of the governmental power were lacking in the localities. The village

committees controlled the militia, the courts were disorganized, the local commissars were

powerless, ”We elected you,“ the peasants would shout at them, ”and we will kick you

out.“

During the summer the peasants, developing the struggle of the preceding months, came

nearer and nearer to civil war, and their left wing even stepped over its threshold. According

to a report of the landed proprietors of the Taganrog district, the peasants on their own

initiative seized the hay crop, took possession of the land, hindered the ploughing, named

arbitrary rental prices, and removed proprietors and overseers. According to a report of the

Nizhegorod commissar, violent activities and seizures of land and forest in his province

were multiplying. The county commissars were afraid of seeming to the peasants like

defenders of the big landlords. The rural militia were not to be relied on. ”There have

been cases when ofﬁcers of the militia took part in violence together with the mob.“ In

Schliasselburg county a local committee prevented the landlords from cutting their own

forest. The thought of the peasants was simple: No Constituent Assembly can resurrect

the trees that are cut down. The commissar of the Ministry of the Court complains of the

seizure of hay: We have had to buy hay for the court horses In Kursk province the peasants

divided among themselves the fertilized fallow land of Tereshchenko. The proprietor was

Minister of Foreign Affairs. The peasants declared to Schneider, a horse breeder of Orlov

province, that they would not only cut the clover on his estate, but him too they might

”send into the army.“ The village committee directed the overseer of Rodzianko’s estate to

surrender the hay to the peasants: ’If you don’t listen to this land committee, you II get

treated differently, you’ll get arrested Signed and sealed.

4 THE PEASANTRY BEFORE OCTOBER

From all corners of the country complaints and wails poured in – from victims, from

local authorities, from noble-minded observers. The telegrams of the landowners consti-

tute a most brilliant refutation of the crude theory of class struggle. These titled nobles,

lords of the latifundia, spiritual and temporal rulers, are worrying exclusively about the

public weal. Their enemy is not the peasants, but the Bolsheviks – sometimes the anar-

chists, Their own property engages the landlord’s interest solely from the point of view

of the welfare of the fatherland. 300 members of the Kadet Party in Chernigov province

declare that the peasants, incited by Bolsheviks, are removing the war prisoners from work

and themselves independently reaping the harvest. As a result, they cry, we are threatened

with ”inability to pay the taxes.“ The very meaning of existence for these liberal landlords

lay in supporting the national treasury! The Podolsk branch of the State Bank complains

of the -arbitrary actions of village committees, ”whose presidents are often Austrian pris-

oners.“ Here it is injured patriotism that speaks. In Vladimir province, in the manor of a

registrar of deeds, Odintsov, the peasants took away building materials that had been ”made

ready for philanthropic institutions.“ Public ofﬁcials live only for the love of mankind! A

bishop from Podolsk reports the arbitrary seizure of a forest belonging to the house of the

Archbishop. The procurator complains of the seizure of meadowlands from the Alexandro-

Neysky Monastery. The Mother Superior of the Kizliarsk Convent calls down thunder and

lightning upon the members of the local committee. They are interfering in the affairs

of the convent, conﬁscating rentals for their own use, ”inciting the nuns against their su-

periors.“ In all these cases the spiritual needs of the church are directly affected. Count

Tolstoi, one of the sons of Leo Tolstoi, reports in the name of the League of Agricultur-

ists of Uﬁmsk province that the transfer of land to the local committees ”without waiting

for a decision of the Constituent Assembly . . . is causing an outburst of dissatisfaction

among the peasant proprietors, of whom there are more than 200,000 in the province“ The

hereditary lord is troubled exclusively about his lesser brothers. Senator Belgardt, a propri-

etor of Tver province, is ready to reconcile himself to cuttings in the forest, but is grieved

and offended that the peasants ”will not submit to the bourgeois government.“ A Tomboy

landlord, Veliaminop, demands the rescue of two estates which ”are serving the needs of

the army.“ By accident these two estates happened to belong to him. For the philosophy

of idealism these landlord telegrams of 1917 are verily a treasure. A materialist will rather

see in them a display of the various models of cynicism. He will add perhaps that great

revolutions deprive the property-holders even of the privilege of digniﬁed hypocrisy.

The appeals of the Victims to the county and provincial authorities, to the Minister of

the Interior, to the President of the Council of Ministers, brought as a general rule no result.

From whom then shall we ask aid? From Rodzianko, president of the State Duma! Between

the July Days and the Kornilov insurrection, the Lord Chamberlain again felt himself an

inﬂuential ﬁgure: much was done at a ring from his telephone.

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TheHistoryoftheRussianRevolutionLeonTrotskyVolumeThreeContentsNotesontheTexti1THEPEASANTRYBEFOREOCTOBER12THEPROBLEMOFNATIONALITIES253WITHDRAWALFROMTHEPRE-PARLIAMENTANDSTRUGGLEFORTHESOVIETCONGRESS464THEMILITARY-REVOLUTIONARYCOMMITTEE665LENINSUMMONSTOINSURRECTION936THEARTOFINSURRECTION1257THECONQUESTO...

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