| abstract
| - The second Russian Revolution of 1917. The one that brought in the Commies. Not a submarine, or a hunt for said submarine. When the Romanov dynasty was overthrown in March of 1917 (the February Revolution, since the Russians used the Julian Calender it was still late February in Russia), it was replaced by a Provisional Government. This was intended to stay in power until the election of a Constituent Assembly. They actually tried to elect the Assembly, but the Bolsheviks took over before any votes could be cast to avoid the risk of their rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries (who had the greater popular support), from forming a legitimate majority government. After they proclaimed themselves in control in November 1917, the Bolsheviks permitted the elections to take place in January of 1918 (and sure enough, the Socialist Revolutionaries won the majority of the vote). However, the assembly was forcibly disbanded by the Bolsheviks, who announced that the people would be represented by the city soviets (where they had majorities). It was a big mistake for Emperor Nicholas II to enter WWI. The administration of the Empire was corrupt, the army badly equipped, the people angry and several revolutionary parties (not only the Dirty Communists) spouting anti-Tsarist rhetoric while organizing against the government. Instead of trying to heal the Empire, the Emperor aggravated the problems by throwing his country into the Great War. The corrupt intendants were making money by stealing from army shipments, the soldiers were freezing in trenches, Dying Like Animals and becoming even angrier at the Emperor and his government while the dissipated nobles and the unscrupulous merchants were still living luxurious lives - this all angered people further. Finally, they had enough and began to actually listen to the revolutionaries. And the shit hit the fan. Strikes, mutinies, mass fraggings of officers and peasant revolts broke out. Several high-ranking generals and public officials forced the Tsar to abdicate. That is how the Provisional Government came into power. They were going to elect the Constituent Assembly that was intended to decide the fate of post-Imperial Russia. But there were guys that had some other ideas. You guessed right, the Bolsheviks... Meanwhile the First World War was still going on and the provisional government couldn't decide how to end it. On the one hand it was extremely unpopular, on the other Germany was demanding extremely onerous terms since the Russians had no bargaining power. When Germany saw that the provisional government wasn't pulling Russia out of the war, they made a deal with Lenin, currently in exile in Switzerland. The Germans would let him pass through their territory in a sealed train (so he wouldn't try to foment revolution in Germany), in exchange he would get Russia out of the war. The Germans probably didn't expect him to actually succeed in consolidating power and were just hoping he would cause enough trouble that they could transfer troops to the Western Front. Actually, there were several revolutionary parties: the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (a hardline communist Bolshevik one and a social-democratic Menshevik one, RSDLP (b) and RSDLP (m) respectively, thanks to a split in 1905), the Socialist Revolutionaries, and many other smaller parties. The left Socialist Revolutionaries (Left S Rs) were allies of the Bolsheviks, but the other revolutionary parties were satisfied with the February revolution (except for the anarchists, but they were not really a party of course) and well represented in the Provisional Government. They, and the right-wing parties, formed a loose alliance that later became the White movement. The first White general was Kornilov, who tried to call dibs on power shortly before the Bolsheviks did it. Fearing a military coup, Kerensky, the moderate socialist Prime Minister and head of the Provisional Government, allowed Lenin to arm the Bolshevik Red Guards to help prevent this (previously anyone carrying arms without permission in Petrograd was a capital offense-the brief abolition of the death penalty didn't last long). He should have known better, since the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in the lead, had risen up in earlier that same year (1917) with the July Days, which troops of the Provisional Government put down. This, naturally, made the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties more popular while the Provisional Government became much less, particularly with the war still going on, people starving, the promised elections nowhere in sight, etc. The Bolsheviks, in alliance with the anarchists and Left Socialist Revolutionaries, launched another revolution in October (November according to the West, since Russia still went by the Julian Calendar, before the Bolsheviks changed it). The Provisional Government fell almost without firing a shot, and Kerensky fled. Incidentally, the Bolsheviks took, on Lenin's insistence, popular slogans used by anarchists like "All power to the Soviets (elected workers councils)", which led to Lenin himself being denounced by fellow Bolsheviks as an anarchist. The Bolsheviks had actually opposed the February Revolution, as they did the Revolution and Soviets of 1905, seeking to control both. Lenin had learned after these experiences. He and the Bolsheviks quickly set about seizing total power in Russia and the other parts of the former empire. They set up the Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which they delegated to a secondary role, meeting once a year while they made most decisions, with full legislative powers, their acts simply ratified by the Congress (this was a model for later legislatures such as the Supreme Soviet with no real power, acting merely as rubber-stamp parliaments, also typical of socialist states in general.) The Revolution grew into the Russian Civil War. After Kornilov's rebellion was suppressed, other White generals appeared: Admiral Kolchak, generals Denikin, Yudenich and Wrangel, who were gathering armies to stop Bolshevism. Among the Sovnarkom's first acts was to create a secret police with the acronym CHEKA and start imprisoning everyone opposing them. Old Imperial prisons were soon filled up with political prisoners once again. The factory committee movement, which began when the striking workers seized their workplaces or forced owners into allowing them a say in management, was sidelined and destroyed slowly by the Bolshevik leadership, who appointed managers with dictatorial powers, often the same ones from before. An All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees, which aimed to federate the entire network into a democratic control of the national economy, was closed down when it tried to meet. The Sovnarkom nationalized all land and industry, along with other sweeping decrees giving the Bolshevik government control over the whole of life. Elections for The Constituent Assembly occurred that December, with the Socialist Revolutionaries winning most seats, the Bolsheviks only a much smaller second. When it attempted to meet in January 1918, the Red Guards closed down the Constituent Assembly with force. The Bolsheviks rationalized this as the Soviets were more democratic, representative bodies (as the SRs were popular in the peasantry, still the majority of population, and so won the election, while the Bolsheviks as Marxists believed the industrial proletariat in the cities would spearhead revolution, which of course they would lead). Coincidentally, they had a majority with most Soviets. Even this grew into a problem, so Bolshevik force increasingly overthrew results of elections that went against them, shut down presses, closed opposition meeting places, jailed opponents, etc. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers was signed in March 1918, giving up the Baltic States (Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia) along with Ukraine (none of these not-yet-countries were consulted). This outraged not only nationalists there but also other socialists and former Tsarist officers who had sacrificed much in the war fighting Germany. The German ambassador was assassinated by Left SRs in hopes of preventing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk from coming to fruition, but it went ahead despite this. In April CHEKA gunmen raided numerous anarchist centers in Moscow and Petrograd, with dozens killed, hundreds arrested. Increasingly the Bolsheviks squelched all opposition by force. Even dissidents within the Bolsheviks, such as Nikolai Bukharin, denounced such acts. The other factions banded together in the White movement, issuing a manifesto which denounced the Bolsheviks, calling them German agents, in July of 1918 and starting a revolt against them. It is a popular misconception that the White movement was about monarchism: actual monarchists were a minority among the Whites, the majority were of democratic and or socialist persuasion, but on the practical side, they were creating naught more than military dictatorship in the territories they held, because they did not have time to run elections or even to decide on their political course, which would have been difficult given the diverse viewpoints anyway. That's why the Whites never created a common political ideology or a single confederacy of states, and it was their undoing. They DID acknowledge a single provisional head-of-state and a single commander-in-chief (Kolchak, later Denikin, after that, Wrangel), but in practice, every major White leader was his own man. Finland had already broken away, as had Poland. While the Bolsheviks supported national autonomy in theory, they had set up puppet Bolshevik governments in the countries controlled by the former Russian Empire, regardless of what people desired. In August Lenin was nearly assassinated by a young Left SR woman, Fanny Kaplan, while touring Moscow factories. His health never completely recovered. She was later shot by the CHEKA in the autumn of that year. The Bolsheviks became even more despotic, openly saying a party dictatorship was good and increasing dictatorial measures they already began before the war, that now had this as a greater excuse (Leon Trotsky, for instance, while People's Commissar for Army and Navy Affairs in early 1918 had abolished election of officers in the Army, something that occurred after soldiers mutinied (often shooting their commanders), reinstituting old privileges of rank, such as separate quarters, special forms of address, saluting, along with the death penalty for desertion under fire). The Bolsheviks banned all other parties, the free press, freedom of speech, assembly, etc. sometimes "temporarily" for the war. Freedom of speech, press, assembly and street processions were reinstated eventually (Article 125 of the 1936 Union constitution), but they were dead letters, with dissent prohibited in practice. (In 1921 the last free assembly was allowed-a march at the funeral of the anarchist thinker Pyotr Kropotkin. The next one would come in 1987, with Glasnost). Enter the Allies! At the same time, between 1917 and 1922, the Entente nations--France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Romania, Serbia, the United Kingdom, the United States and new nations like Finland and Poland, which had both just gained independence from Russia--intervened in the civil war, resulting in a fairly unpopular invasion of what came to be known as the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), on behalf of the White Army, ostensibly to secure lost matériel at Russian ports, the Russian ports themselves, rescue separated Entente forces, and re-open the Eastern Front against Germany. It ended very poorly for everyone involved, and predictably raised suspicions of the Western and Eastern capitalist states (such as Japan) among the Reds and the increasingly-invaded Russian people as a whole. This only made the Bolsheviks popular as they fought the foreigners. However it has been obscured to an extent by the next western invasion, Operation Barbarossa. That's why the unified, fanatical Reds smashed the loose White military states, at first with the help of the Left SRs and the Revolutionary Insurrection Army from Ukraine (or the Maknovist movement, after its leader Nestor Makhno). It was also known as the Black Army since they were anarchist, in contrast to the Red and White Armies. Local groups attempted to fight off all sides, dubbed the "Green" Army, although they were never unified. Additionally was the Blue Army, peasants who fought the Reds in the Tambov Rebellion. Some historians have determined that the Black Army saved the entire war from the Whites at several points, such as stopping Deniken from taking Petrograd. However, they were betrayed three separate times by the Bolsheviks and defeated finally when they could turn their full force onto them. Makhno fled to exile in France. After the Whites were defeated in fall of 1921, one last revolt occurred at Kronstadt, with mutinous sailors (the same ones who rose up in February 1917, not, as the Bolsheviks claimed, reactionary replacements) calling for free soviets, civil liberties and worker self-management again, as with the factory committees the Bolsheviks smashed. They were massacred by the Red Army under Trotsky. At the same time strikes were occurring in Moscow and Petrograd, also brutally put down. By 1924, all Russia along with most shards of the Empire (with the exception of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, who managed to stay independent) were under Bolshevik control. The Civil War-era Russia was a popular setting for later Soviet action movies. These movies were very similar to American Westerns: just take a Western, replace the Injuns or Mexicans with Basmaches (Muslim anti-Bolshevik fighters in Central Asia), the Blue with the Red and the Gray with the White, the prairies with the deserts of Turkestan or steppes of Ukraine, the Peacemakers with Nagant Gas-Seals and Mauser Broomhandles, the Winchesters with Mosin-Nagant rifles, the Gatlings with Maxims, the horses... well, let the horses be horses, and you'll get an Ostern (or "Eastern", as they are known in Russia proper). The most popular Osterns were White Sun of the Desert, about a former Red Army Soldier turned gunslinger who travelled homewards through Basmach-infested Turkestan deserts, At Home Amongst The Strangers, A Stranger Amongst Friends in which a framed CHEKA agent must infiltrate a band of marauders and retrieve several millions in gold, and The Elusive Avengers, about four young guns opposing the anarchist bandit ataman Burnash and his gang. The concept itself became popular enough to be recognized in a parody where Winchester and Colt as they are coexists with a kolkhoz .
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