Red October: Difference between revisions

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.

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, [[Meet the New Boss|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, [[World War II|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.

* [[Aristocrats Are Evil]]: You better believe it. Very common in Soviet films about the subject.

* [[Badass Bookworm]] / [[Badass Israeli|Badass Jew]]: For a guy with no previous military training, Lev Bronstein, AKA Leon Trotsky, proved to be a remarkably skilled military commander, leading the ragtag Red Army to victory at a time when everybody wanted the Bolsheviks dead.

* [[Historical Villain Upgrade]]:

*** [[Historical Hero Upgrade]]: As a result of his opposition to Stalin (combined with the fact that he, Trotsky, was a brilliant journalist and a one-man propaganda machine) Trotsky became the poster-boy for the anti-Stalinist Left who condemed the dictators atrocities and totalitarian regime. Even many non-Socialists thought that Trotsky represented the "democratic", "non-violent" Communist movement. But his behaviour in the Civil War was pretty appaling (even given how bad the other side could be) and he actually agreed with a lot more of what Stalin did than many seemed to realize, opposing him less out of any moral differences and more due to the belief that he was a front-man for an oligarchy of Bolshevik "Rightists" (and the whole "trying to kill me and my family" thing). He always favoured violent revolution and downplayed the atrocities he commited during the war, and remained unrepetant about his behaviour until the day he died. He was also not as competent a politician as he is remembered and he made a lot of foolish mistakes and tended to make enemies easily.