REFLECTIONS ON THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was not an event or even a process, but a sequence of disruptive and
violent acts that occurred more or less concurrently but involved actors with differing and in some
measure contradictory objectives. It began as a revolt of the most conservative elements in Russian
society, disgusted by the Crown's familiarity with Rasputin and the mismanagement of the war effort.
From the conservatives the revolt spread to the liberals, who challenged the monarchy from fear that
if it remained in office, revolution would become inevitable. Initially, the assault on the monarchy was
undertaken not, as widely believed, from fatigue with the war, but from a desire to pursue the war
more effectively: not to make revolution but to avert one. In February 1917, when the Petrograd
garrison refused to fire on civilian crowds, the generals, in agreement with parliamentary politicians,
hoping to prevent the mutiny from spreading to the front, convinced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. The
abdication, made for the sake of military victory, brought down the whole edifice of Russian
statehood.
Although initially neither social discontent nor the agitation of the radical intelligentsia played any
significant role in these events, both moved to the forefront the instant imperial authority collapsed.
In the spring and summer of 1917, peasants began to seize and distribute among themselves
noncommunal properties. Next, the rebellion spread to frontline troops, who deserted in droves to
share in the spoils; to workers, who took control of industrial enterprises; and to ethnic minorities,
who wanted greater self-rule. Each group pursued its own objectives, but the cumulative effect of their
assault on the country's social and economic structure by the autumn of 1917 created in Russia a state
of anarchy.
The events of 1917 demonstrated that for all its immense territory and claim to great power status, the
Russian empire was a fragile, artificial structure, held together not by organic bonds connecting rulers
and ruled, but by mechanical links provided by the bureaucracy, police, and army. Its 150 million
inhabitants were bound neither by strong economic interests nor by a sense of national identity.
Centuries of autocratic rule in a country with a predominantly natural economy had prevented the
formation of strong lateral ties: Imperial Russia was mostly warp with little woof. This fact was noted
at the time by one of Russia's leading historians and political figures, Paul Miliukov:
To make you understand [the] special character of the Russian Revolution, I must draw your
attention to [the] peculiar features, made our own by the whole process of Russia's history. To my
mind, all these features converge into one. The fundamental difference which distinguishes Russia's
social structure from that of other civilized countries, can be characterized as a certain weakness or
lack of a strong cohesion or cementation of elements which form a social compound. You can
observe that lack of consolidation in the Russian social aggregate in every aspect of civilized life:
political, social, mental and national.
From the political point of view, the Russian State institutions lacked cohesion and amalgamation
with the popular masses over which they ruled...As a consequence of their later appearance, the
State institutions in Eastern Europe necessarily assumed certain forms which were different from
those in the West. The State in the East had no time to originate from within, in a process of organic
evolution. It was brought to the East from outside.
Once these factors are taken into consideration, it becomes apparent that the Marxist notion that
revolution always results from social ("class") discontent cannot be sustained. Although such
discontent did exist in Imperial Russia, as it does everywhere, the decisive and immediate factors
making for the regime's fall and the resultant turmoil were overwhelmingly political.
Was the Revolution inevitable? It is natural to believe that whatever happens has to happen, and there
are historians who rationalize this primitive faith with pseudoscientific arguments: they would be
more convincing if they could predict the future as unerringly as they claim to predict the past.

Paraphrasing a familiar legal maxim, one might say that psychologically speaking, occurrence
provides nine-tenths of historical justification.
Edmund Burke was in his day widely regarded as a madman for questioning the French Revolution:
seventy years later, according to Matthew Arnold, his ideas were still considered "superannuated and
conjured by events" - so ingrained is the belief in the rationality, and therefore the inevitability, of
historical events. The grander they are and the more weighty their consequences the more they appear
part of the natural order of things which it is quixotic to question.