The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin

Tsarist Russia was a country, or more properly an amalgam of nations, dizzyingly difficult to understand from this historical distance. It was a monarchy built on repression, presided over by an autocrat incapable of demonstrating authority. His court and the ruling establishment were riven by factional struggle and ideological confusion.

In the First World War authoritarian Russia was in alliance with liberal democratic France and Britain, but there was no consensus behind any course the tsar and his ministers set. There were reactionary nobles who believed their country should have sought an understanding with the similarly authoritarian empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary to avoid war and maintain a conservative order at home.

And they were opposed by self-described liberals who formed what was effectively a war party anxious to keep in with the western powers and defend the independence of small allies such as Serbia, even as they envisaged exerting stronger control over a greater Poland, which the tsar still ruled over. Yet at the same time there were economic modernisers who had sought to avert conflict to support what had been a formidable level of growth in the first decade of the century. Who were in turn at loggerheads with romantic pan-Slavists who saw in war the opportunity to support their brothers and co-religionists in the Balkans and also assert superiority over the Ottoman Turks and take control of the Black Sea.

So with pro-peace conservatives lining up alongside antiwar modernisers, facing aggressive nationalists who were on the same side as bellicose liberals, the Russian state’s ruling establishment hardly provided the tsar with a strong and stable foundation of power.

McMeekin is formidably skilled in navigating his way through these factions and especially good at showing how the shifting fortunes of war affected the balance of power in these elite circles.

Contrary to the established view that the Russian war effort was a shambolic exercise in bleeding the nation white, or indeed red, McMeekin demonstrates that the tsar’s armies were more effective, and successful, than their subsequent collapse in 1917 would have suggested. There were significant successes against the Austrians on the Galician front (in 1916, a year of stalemate on the western front, the Russians conquered in their Galician breakthrough 15,000 square miles, an area larger than Belgium) and spectacular gains at the expense of the Turks in the Caucasus.

However, the bravery of the Russian soldiers and the effective leadership of the best Russian generals, such as Brusilov, was undermined by internecine political manoeuvring at home.

McMeekin, an American historian at Bard College in New York, is good at explaining how an array of politicians in St Petersburg and Moscow sought to build on the tensions generated by war to create an atmosphere of crisis and advance their own claims on power. Allegations were circulated that the tsar was under the influence of a pro-German “black bloc”, a variegated galère of traitorous interests led by Rasputin and the German-born tsarina, who were intent on sabotaging the Russian war effort to advance the interests of their ultra-conservative friends in Berlin.

The leading liberal politician, Pavel Milyukov, made a speech in the Duma in 1916 about “occult forces fighting for the benefit of Germany”. They argued that power ought to be transferred from the tsar’s appointed ministers to them and their supporters in the Duma, the quasi-democratic parliament. Appealing to a patriotic desire to prosecute war more effectively and making a pitch to liberal sentiment that autocratic rule be reformed, these politicians were just seeking personal advantage from political turmoil. And in the process heaping up their own funeral pyre.

Because all the time these allegations were being made against the tsar and his entourage, the real pro-German threat to Russia lay elsewhere. In the ranks of the Bolsheviks. In the person of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The one-man embodiment of the will to power remembered by history as the Father of the Revolution — Lenin.

McMeekin painstakingly plots Lenin’s path to power and demonstrates that it was as much a triumph of Prussian militarist foreign policy as revolutionary Marxist ideology. “Lenin and the Bolsheviks played no role worth mentioning in the fall of the tsar,” McMeekin argues. It was the Germans, recognising that the manoeuvrings of Russia’s liberal politicians were weakening the state’s resilience, who introduced the virus of Bolshevism into the system.

Lenin was smuggled by the Germans out of exile and into St Petersburg. He was lavishly financially supported and shielded. He was given the money to fund an enormous propaganda effort and the means to escape from his enemies by scuttling into Finland at critical moments in 1917. “An out-of-touch Lenin would have had little impact on the political scene had he not been furnished with German funds to propagandize the Russian army,” says McMeekin. For instance, on Lenin’s return the Bolsheviks bought a private printing press for 250,000 roubles (equal to nearly £10 million today) allowing them to “print propaganda in virtually unlimited quantities”.

Lenin was also helped enormously by the intrigues and incompetence of his liberal opponents. The tsar was persuaded to abdicate in March 1917 to make way for an allegedly more democratic government determined to prosecute the war with renewed vigour. However, the leaders of the new provisional government, most prominently Alexander Kerensky, found it impossible to sustain a political course. They oscillated between siding with reactionary forces to neutralise the Bolshevik threat and turning on their conservative and military allies, with Bolshevik support.

Against such inconstancy and incoherence Lenin and his Bolsheviks had a brutally simple programme. They alone stood for an end to war, the return of soldiers from a conflict whose relevance to many seemed obscure at best, for the liberation of the peasantry from exploitation, for an end to food shortages and for power in the hands of directly elected workers’ and soldiers’ committees, the soviets, rather than distant elite parliaments. The promise of “peace, land and bread” and “All Power to the Soviets”, weaponised with German money and carried to the front by radicalised revolutionary cadres, swept all before it.

Lenin’s seizure of power was consolidated by a peace treaty with Germany that surrendered huge swathes of territory in return for a free hand to deploy brutal military force against his remaining domestic opponents. McMeekin chronicles the unfolding of the Russian civil war, and the pitilessly blood-soaked elimination of all opposition, with sympathy and skill.

At the end of his account it is impossible to feel anything other than gratitude that the dark power of Bolshevism is now a matter of historical study rather than a contemporary danger to be countered with all the force we can muster. Yet while history never repeats itself, it can still act as an echo chamber of horrors. And in a world menaced by new totalitarians, by political actors prepared to use conflict as a path to power, by states ready to use their money to suborn democracy elsewhere and by liberals often paralysed by in-fighting rather than united by principle, McMeekin’s magisterial study repays careful reading.
The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin, Profile, 478pp, £25