group organised assassinations and thereby satis-
fied the demand for immediate revolutionary
action. In the long run the revolution of the peas-
antry would occur. Other Socialist Revolutionaries,
acting as a reforming party, would press for liberal
constitutional reforms and laws to protect the peas-
ants. These liberal reforms would pave the way to
socialism later. The Socialist Revolutionary terror-
ist and party wings were never really coordinated.
The revolution of 1905 took the Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks by surprise. At the outset they
had only a small following among the workers,
the Bolsheviks probably only a few hundred.
Lenin did not affect its course. Nine years later,
the outbreak of the First World War appeared to
mark the end of international socialism as one
after the other the national socialist parties placed
their countries before the brotherhood of the
proletariat. Some socialists formed a pacifist wing;
with them Lenin had nothing in common. Only
a small band of revolutionaries gathered around
Lenin. He was briefly imprisoned as a Russian spy
in Austrian Poland at the outbreak of the war but
was released to rejoin the other socialist exiles in
Switzerland. The Social Democrat Party in Russia
had dwindled from its peak of some 150,000
members in 1907 to probably less than 50,000 in
1914 and only a small minority of them were
Bolsheviks. But Lenin’s supreme self-assurance
and confidence in Marx’s analysis enabled him to
survive disappointments and setbacks. For him
the conflict among the imperialists was the oppor-
tunity the socialists had been waiting for. He
hoped for the defeat of Russia and the exhaustion
of the imperialists. Then he would turn the war
between nations into a civil war that would end
with the mass of peoples united in their aim of
overthrowing their rulers and establishing the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Lenin’s view of the war and of the role of
the socialists did not persuade even the left wing
of the socialists who met in conferences in
Switzerland at Zimmerwald in 1915 and Kienthal
in the following year. The majority wished to
bring the war to a compromise end, with inter-
national friendship and no annexations, and so
espoused a pacifist stand. Lenin attracted only a
handful to his side, among them the brilliant and
fiery young Trotsky, who had inspired the
workers’ councils – the soviets – which had
sprung up during the 1905 revolution. Trotsky
believed in a ‘permanent revolution’. He forecast
that the bourgeois first stage would flow into
the socialist second stage. Lenin closely shared
Trotsky’s views, believing he would witness the
socialist revolution in his lifetime. When the rev-
olution did occur, however, in February 1917,
the events took him once more by surprise.
The overthrow of tsarism took place with startling
speed. For the army of 6.5 million men in the
field, 1916 had closed with hope for the future.
The Russian army, after suffering some 7 million
casualties, had nevertheless proved more than a
match for the Austrian army. Indeed, only the
great power of the German army had stood in the
way of total Habsburg disaster. The Germans
proved formidable foes, but they were now out-
numbered and the plans for a coordinated offen-
sive east, west and south on the Italian front held
out the promise that the central powers could be
overwhelmed in 1917. The severe problems of
weapons and munitions for the Russian army had
been largely overcome by a prodigious Russian
industrial effort during 1916. After the heavy
losses sustained in the third year of war, the rank
and file in the army viewed war with stoicism and
resignation rather than with the élan of the early
months. But it was not an army demoralised and
ready to abandon the front. The ‘home front’ was
the first to collapse.
The hardship suffered by the workers and
their families in the cities swollen in numbers
by the industrial demands of the war effort was,
in the winter of 1916–17, becoming insupport-
able. The ineffectual government was being
blamed. The tsar had assumed personal responsi-
bility for leading the armies and spent most of his
time after the summer of 1915 at army head-
quarters. He had left behind Empress Alexandra,
a narrow-minded, autocratic woman. The ‘minis-
ters’ entrusted with government were little more
than phantoms. The infamous Rasputin, on the
other hand, was full of energy until murdered in
December 1916 – an event greeted with much
public rejoicing.
1
WAR AND REVOLUTION IN THE EAST, 1917 103
