A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

928 Ch. 23 • Revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union

provisional government. Russia withdrew from the Great War. The “dicta­
torship of the proletariat” became that of Vladimir Lenin’s Communist
Party. Upon Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin consolidated his personal
authority in the Soviet Union, ruthlessly establishing state socialism (see
Chapter 25).
The Russian Revolution of 1917, like that of 1905, was not the kind of
revolution that the Russian populists or anarchists had predicted—massive
uprisings of the peasant masses against lords and imperial officials—
although peasant rebellion was an essential ingredient in both revolutions.
Nor did it correspond to Karl Marx’s prediction that a successful bourgeois
revolution would be followed by a revolution undertaken by an industrial
proletariat. War played a catalytic role in the Russian Revolution of 1917:
Russia’s shocking defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and,
above all, the horror of the Great War created hardships that increasingly
undermined the legitimacy of the tsarist regime.

War and Revolution

Reformers were still biding their time when Russia went to war in 1914.

However, Lenin (see Chapter 18) was dumbfounded when most socialists in

other countries supported their nation’s mobilization for war. Among Rus­

sian socialists, “defensists” (Mensheviks and most Socialist Revolutionaries)

argued that Russian workers should defend their country against German

attack. “Internationalists” (including Bolsheviks) opposed the war, viewing it

as a struggle between capitalist powers in which workers were but pawns.

Lenin took the war as a sign that capitalism might be ripe for what he

thought was its inevitable fall. “Imperialism is the last stage,” he wrote, “in

the development of capitalism when it has reached the point of dividing

up the whole world, and two gigantic groups have fallen into mortal strug­

gle.” He believed that if revolution were to break out in several countries,

the fall of Russian autocracy and capitalism could be near, even without

the true “bourgeois revolution” Marx had predicted. Even if the Russian

working class was less developed than those of Western nations, the corre­

sponding weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie could facilitate a successful

revolution. This revolution would be followed by the establishment of a

dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, by a mobilized working class led by

its most dedicated elements, his party, the Bolsheviks. The revolution

would then spread to other countries, where the working classes would fol­

low the example of the first successful socialist revolution.

Russia at War

The Great War became a catalyst for demands for reform within Russia,

first in the management of the war itself, and then in Russian political life.