The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 2, An Undemocratic Revolution

The February Revolution of 1917 developed its own rich political mythology. Untangling this from the realities of events is one of the key challenges facing History teachers instructing students in this topic today. This is the third of a string of three posts on the February Revolution that attempts to do so.

In my last post, I suggested that the February Revolution – often seen as a largely peaceful event – actually involved very significant violence.

In this post, I’ll propose another interpretation which I think has been underplayed and largely submerged beneath another myth. That myth is that the February Revolution was a fundamentally democratic moment in Russian history. By contrast, the interpretation I’ll propose is that February 1917 in many ways heralded a distinctly undemocratic series of developments, developments which, set against a standard of free, universal, and inclusive politics, fall considerably short of democratic ideals.

The Provisional Government of 1917, in its first iteration. "Elected by the revolution"? Credit: public domain, via Wikimedia commons.

The February Revolution Reconsidered: Part 1, A Violent Revolution

In my last post, I challenged two myths of Russia’s 1917 February Revolution which removed Tsar Nicholas II from power: that it was “spontaneous” and “leaderless”.

Over the next two posts, I’ll put forward two rather different interpretations. Both are commonly overlooked when teaching the Russian Revolution. Both, however, deserve serious attention.

In this first post, I’ll examine the case for the February Revolution being a violent event. This directly challenges a common myth that February was peaceful, especially when compared the previous outbreaks of revolutionary unrest, such as 1905’s Bloody Sunday massacre or the 1912 Lena Goldfields massacre.

In fact, February 1917 witnessed considerable violence. This took several forms, including killings of protestors; bloody reprisals against military officers and police; public disorder and mob justice; and iconoclasm.

The "Spontaneous" and "Leaderless" Revolution: Two Myths of February 1917

In a matter of days at the end of February 1917 (dated to the "old-style" Julian calendar), the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty was suddenly and spectacularly overthrown. The February Revolution set in motion a series of fundamental transformations which would shape Russian, European, and wider world history for decades to come. It would also develop its own mythology, key elements of which survive today in standard textbook retellings of the events.

Crowds in Petrograd burn the Tsarist royal insignia during the February Revolution. Credit: Karl Karlovitch Bulla (1853 - 1929), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Myths have their uses in History, in particular to reveal the biases and beliefs of the societies in which they are found. But myth telling (and retelling) itself rarely makes for good History.

This post examines and appraises two enduring myths of the 1917 February Revolution: that it was "spontaneous" and that it was "leaderless". Both have long pasts in different historiographical trends. Both contain a seed of truth. And both are fundamentally misleading as to the actual events of February 1917.

Representing the Jewish Revolution: Hopes, Fears, and Divisions

What did it mean to be Jewish in the revolution of 1917, and which groups could represent the complex reality of Jewish hopes, fears, and divisions in that year?

In my last post, I tried to make the case that representation of complex and diverse in History teaching is worthwhile but extremely complicated and carries a serious risk of both homogenising groups and misrepresenting many individuals’ and groups’ experiences of the past.

In this post, I’ll make the case that a rounded representation of complex and diverse groups from the past is nevertheless possible, but only if we embrace their inherent complexity and diversity. Using the example of Russia’s Jews during the 1917 revolution, I’ll try and demonstrate how this can be done by accepting and highlighting a group’s inherent divisions, as well as their common aspirations and anxieties.

We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.

Problematising Pogroms: Reassessing Antisemitic Agency in Russia, c. 1881-1921

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe. The hatred of Jews was manifested more violently and more frequently than anywhere else in the continent, through regular outbreaks of pogroms.

Why? While we might be tempted to blame an arch-reactionary, Jew-hating government under the last Tsars, we should also be wary of simplistic, monocausal explanations of Russian antisemitism and pogroms. On closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

The Life and Times of Anatoly Zhelezniakov: Part 2, the Russian Civil War

A couple of months ago, I posted about an anarchist sailor, Anatoly Zhelezniakov, whose story in 1917 exemplified the growing political divisions during the Russian Revolution.

His story would continue until July 1919, when he was killed fighting against White counter-revolutionaries.

In many ways, the end of the story is more remarkable than its first part, and has the ability to shed light on what might sometimes seem an impossibly tangled episode in Russia’s History: the Russian Civil War.

“Did the First World War lead to…?” Seeing War and Revolution in a Continuum

It’s straightforward to ascribe a causal significance to the First World War in leading to Russia’s revolution of 1917. Follow the steps: war led to food shortages; which led to protests; which led to revolution.

In the past 20 odd years, however, something rather strange has happened amongst some historians of the Russian Revolution. For these historians, 1917 stopped being the important date. Or rather, it stopped being the only important date. And it all has to do with war.

As Peter Holquist phrased it in his enormously influential Making War, Forging Revolution, “war and revolution […] were not two discreet events but rather points along a common continuum.” War began for Russia in the summer of 1914 with the Great War. It didn’t end until at least 1921 with the end of the Russian Civil War. The revolutionary year 1917 was nestled within, and part of, that continued period of war.

This joined-up approach to war and revolution doesn’t just call on us to rethink where each is positioned in time. It also demands we reconsider the causal relationship between war and revolution. In this post, I’ll raise three observations historians have made about the “continuum of crisis” and how it not just led to, but shaped key aspects of, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War.

Conveying the Emotion of Revolution through Song

There’s an intangible challenge to teaching History that seems distant and unrelatable today. We can give students the facts, assess and test them for knowledge, and ask them about their causes, consequences, significance, etc.

But when all’s said and done, do they know what it was really “like” at the time?

“The First Love of the Russian Revolution”: Alexander Kerensky and the Cult of Personality

In his recent book, Dictators (2019), Frank Dikötter places the “cult of personality at the heart of tyranny”. The phrase, “cult of personality”, invoked by Nikita Khrushchev during his 1956 Secret Speech, has been most obviously associated with Stalin. Yet the cult of personality in revolutionary Russia goes back all the way to 1917 and one man, in particular: Alexander Kerensky.

The life and times of Anatoly Zhelezniakov: Mapping 1917 through a story (that isn’t Lenin’s)

In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II’s government was replaced in power by a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists. In October 1917, that coalition was replaced by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

There’s a very simple narrative that’s tempting to give to students. 1917 was a story of Lenin’s growing power and the Bolshevisation of revolutionary politics. Yet many historians are now less sure about this narrative than they were before. For one, it was by no means clear in the spring of 1917 that Lenin and the Bolsheviks could have much influence over the revolution. For another, even as their power grew, they remained part of a wider constellation of left-wing groups that sought to overthrow the Provisional Government and replace it with… well, something (even if people couldn’t really agree).

This story obviously can’t be told without Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be told exclusively through them, either.

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of Russia’s changing political climate in 1917, using the story of an anarchist sailor, Anatoly Zhelezniakov.

"Ordinary People" in 1917

Revolutions are by nature popular events – typically marked by mass uprisings, protests, movements, etc. – yet portraying the “ordinary people” behind them is a complicated business. Firstly, there is the sheer scale of diversity: historians of the 1917 revolution have sought to complicate broad encompassing categories such as “worker”, “peasant”, and “soldier”, even if these may dominate textbook accounts. Secondly, there is the fact taking part in a revolution isn’t really very “ordinary” at all (something argued by historian Yanni Kotsonis in 2011)! 

Yanni Kotsonis, “Ordinary People in Russian and Soviet History”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Soviet History 12, no. 3 (2011): 739-754

The issue [of ‘ordinary people’] becomes ticklish as soon as one thinks about it – and one should – because ‘ordinary’ is neither historical nor precise. Saddled with the concept of ordinary, we risk losing sight of the category’s usefulness: to show that the people we term ordinary are in fact extraordinary when viewed through the right lens and with creative imagination on the part of the historian.

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of the Russian people and their actions and aspirations in 1917.

Party on through revolution? Politics in 1917 beyond Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs

Political parties are usually given a prominent role in narratives of the Russian Revolution. The textbook I started planning my A-Level lessons from talks of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist-Revolutionaries, presenting a rather straightforward narrative of political contest in which the Bolsheviks ran out eventual winners.

This is, certainly, part of the story of politics in 1917 - but it is only a part. In this post, I’ll present three models for approaching party politics in 1917. Each one takes us a little bit further past the basic textbook model.

"Lost in the vermicelli"? How power really looked in 1917

According to one recommended textbook for our A-Level course, after the February Revolution of 1917 Russia experienced a period of dual power, “whereby Russia was governed by an alliance of the Provisional Government and the [Petrograd] Soviet.” This completely reasonable assessment, which echoes decades of historiographical orthodoxy, has just one problem – power in 1917 just didn’t look like this for most people.

In reality, power was shared across the Russian Empire by baffling configurations of seemingly endless councils, associations, committees, militias, unions, and so on which were rapidly established (or reconfigured) after Tsar Nicholas II and his government were overthrown, particularly outside the capital city, Petrograd.

I vividly remember a conference marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution where the brilliant Michael Hickey, an expert on the western Russian city of Smolensk, presented a paper entitled: “Lost in the vermicelli?” The title is a reflection of the frustration and confusion local government officials and activists felt at the seemingly labyrinthine structures of power during this time.

How might this confusing picture be conveyed to students, and what are the risks of doing so (when the exam board insists on sticking to an orthodox “dual power” framework)?

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of “dual power” and its corollary, “multiple power”.