#49 1914-1945 The Unforeseen Consequences: The Russian Revolution
The Unforeseen Consequences
Both the 1914-18 and the 1939-45 wars had many unforeseen and unintended consequences. The first war destroyed the world’s stable financial system based on the Gold Standard, under British jurisdiction, which had held the world’s trading nations together.
Over the next 5 blogs I examine the following five unintended consequences:
The revolution in Russia in 1917 then held the capitalist world in its sway for 65 years.
The rise of Hitler and Germany a second time, in the 1930s.
The demise of Britain as the world-leading power.
The second global war led directly to the USA consciously taking on the mantle as the world’s leading power. America immediately became the dominant world power. She set the stage in 1944 and 1945 with a set of global institutions that created a new global political and economic framework
The rise of Japan as a major new economic power in Asia
Europe was laid waste by the 1939-45 conflict; 350 years of colonisation came to an end.
The Russian Revolution
The revolution in 1917, like all the key events covered in these blogs, has been intensely analysed over the last 100 years. There are books galore published on these events, all attempting to persuade readers of their interpretation. This blog is not the opportunity to attempt a new synopsis. It is though appropriate to ask some interesting questions. How did the USSR manage to survive until 1989 when the society collapsed? From the time of the beginning of the revolution in 1917, the entire Capitalist world attempted to destroy the revolution. This is not a naïve question.
Armed soldiers carry a banner reading 'Communism', Nikolskaya street, Moscow, October 1917. Wikipedia Commons.
In 1917, Russia was an ancient sprawling empire across thousands of miles of land. Despite a sophisticated and wealthy Court in Moscow, her peasantry was some of the poorest in all of Europe. There were a few isolated western factories, but the population was illiterate and there was no education except for an elite. Yet despite the invasions in 1918-1920 and the intense poverty of the people, Russian forces were able, just 25 years later, to repel the German invasion in 1942. Russia sacrificed 25 million people in the process. Yet she managed to manufacture the tanks and rifles that in the end won the day.
“Peasant Girls” (1917), from Russia then and now, 1892-1917. Retrieved from the Internet Achieve via Flickr.
“Soviet soldiers running through trenches in the ruins of Stalingrad” 1942, retrieved from Wikipedia Commons.
One part of the problem is that we have all been fed a diet of half-truths about the USSR. Whatever one says or writes about the country is considered within the frame of ‘the enemy’. Yet if the Russians had not sacrificed their people against the forces of German invasion the war could likely have been lost.
Let us rewind for a moment to the Revolution in 1917. At the time, politicians among the Western powers, when confronted by the Revolution, had two opposing geopolitical motivations.
On the one hand, the English and French ruling elites feared above all else an alliance between Russia and Germany. The rationale here came from the ideas put forward by Sir Halford John Mackinder, a British geographer with his ‘Heartland Theory’ in The Geographical Pivot of History in 1904 (see previous blogs where we have discussed this theory in more depth). A Russian-German alliance was considered the major threat to British world hegemony.
Map of the "Heartland Theory", as published by Mackinder in 1904.
On the other hand, the same dominant world powers feared any new Nation that attacked private property, the central principle of the capitalist order. From the moment when Lenin had established the Russian Revolution, the almost single dominant global issue for the major powers was how to destroy the new socialist Russia.
These opposing motives and fears were keys elements of the geopolitical scene of the period. It was not until Britain had ceased to be a world power after 1945 did the full fury of the USA descend on the USSR, in what has since been called the Cold War. Over the period 1918 to 1939, the ambivalence in foreign policy was very real.
Socialism is seen by most adherents as an attempt by the people to humanise capital: to bring the benefits created by the industrialisation of new wealth to all the people. Socialist politics in the 20th century has taken two forms: revolutionaries who wished to overthrow the state; and democratic socialists who attempt to create a humane world through parliamentary votes. Both forms have broadly the same aims, that is to develop the economy for all the people.
In 1918, despite the exhaustion from the 1914-18 war, Western military forces invaded Russia in an attempt to overthrow the Revolution. Almost immediately, before Russia could recover from the war, a deep political and social crisis ensued, not least was famine. Simultaneously, the revolutionaries led by Lenin and Trotsky attempted to hold the old Russian empire together. Such a deep crisis turned what was at first a democratic revolution into autocracy and later, tyranny.
Lev (Leon) Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and Lev Kamenev, Moscow, 1919. Via Wikipedia Commons.
Russia in 1917 was still predominantly an agricultural and feudal society. Territorially, the land area was huge. Russia had been an ancient empire where many different peoples, religions, and ethnicities all lived under a centrally organised monarchy. The feudal monarchy was surrounded by a wealthy court, which was typical of such empires. Like both the Ottomans and Austria Hungarian empires, it had made significant efforts to 'modernise'. In the second half of the 19th century, they had introduced new armaments into their military forces, started some industrial factories, and gone some way to lessen the bonds of the serfs who tilled the land.
Geographically, Russia stretched from northern Europe all the way east to the China sea and south to the Caspian Sea. Unlike all the other ancient empires which collapsed into small single ethnic states, or were colonised, the Russian Revolution created the conditions for the old empire to remain together and even expand for a short while after 1945.
Lenin and his comrades had, like their Japanese counterparts, studied the new capitalist world and fully realised the need to transform Russian society from top to bottom. Lenin came out of the Marxist tradition. All the new Russian leaders had studied Marx’s writings. Whatever the views of readers of Karl Marx, his writings were about the workings and history of the new western Capitalist order. The new leaders of Russia, therefore, had a solid background in the type of society they intended to create. Unlike Japan, Lenin was not provided with a small, integrated, relatively educated and rich society. The task that faced the new Russian socialist leaders was to rapidly industrialise a society that was still made up of 90% of small peasant farmers. This was nothing short of a mammoth and ambitious task.
Bolshevik political cartoon poster from 1920, showing Lenin sweeping away monarchs, clergy, and capitalists; the caption reads, "Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth". Retrieved from Wikipedia Commons.
From the start, the Russian Bolshevik leaders faced deep opposition from within Russia and violent opposition from outside. To legitimatise itself, the new Russian state, renamed itself the USSR, the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Inside Russia after the death of Lenin in 1926, Stalin took over the reins of power. There followed much internal disagreement among the revolutionaries themselves. By 1930, Stalin was leading; he portrayed the Revolution as benign and progressive, which many socialists outside the USSR wished to believe as fact.
In this White (anti-Bolshevik) poster, caricatures of the Bolshevik leadership (Uritzky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Lunacharsky, Lenin, Patrovsky, Trotsky, Kamenev, and Radek) sacrifice an allegorical figure representing Russia to the idol of internationalism resembling Karl Marx. In the background, Alexander Kerensky (who had been Prime Minister of the Provisional Government at the time of the Bolshevik coup in November 1917) looks on impotently. In the foreground are racial and class stereotypes of a Jew with thirty pieces of silver, Asiatic Red Army soldiers with booty, and a sailor symbolising the battleship Aurora's role in the 1917 Revolution. Retrieved from the V&A Museum.
The Bolshevik by Boris Kustodiev, 1920. The Tretyakov Gallery via Wikipedia Commons.
Today we know the USSR was a very different country than the one she portrayed herself to the rest of the world. Stalin was intent on industrialising the ancient kingdom of Russia in the shortest possible time.
How did Stalin manage to industrialise the USSR in two decades or less? Western Europe had taken two hundred years, used slaves, and colonial plunder to provide the scarce resources. The USA had taken 200 years and slavery on an industrial scale to achieve the same results. Under Stalin, the USSR industrialised in a mere 20 years. Stalin was well aware of the scale required to ‘transform’ the USSR. At the First Conference of Workers in 1931, Stalin delivered a passionate speech where he commanded workers to play a crucial role in industrialisation. He said:
“We are fifty or hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us”
He was correct of course. Like Mao who attempted something similar 30 years later, there were catastrophic costs. In 1931, Gareth Jones’ Famine Diaries documented his personal experiences ( see the Evening Standard March 1931, and the London Times Famine rules Russia) Gareth Jones had managed to gain entrance to the Ukraine, where he documented the famine from first-hand reporting.
Inside the USSR, autocracy and tyranny reigned as the society moved rapidly to industrialise itself. The Soviet leadership realised there was no outside support; all their efforts had to come from within. Many leaders lost their lives in the 1930s as Stalin strove to maintain his leadership. He knew that sooner or later the Western industrialised powers would want to see the Soviet Revolution overthrown: that to maintain and develop, Russia needed a fully self-sufficient industrialised society.
Can we now argue with Stalin’s perspective, can we argue he should not have undertaken this stupendous task? One of the key perspectives of these blogs has been and will continue to be that human costs of industrialisation has always been enormous. The Americans industrialised off the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples, and African slavery. Britain industrialised off the backs of African slavery and the colonisation of India, not to mention the poverty of its own working class in the 19th century. China industrialised through Mao’s reforms and his Great Leap Forward. The Soviets were no different, they indistrialised off the backs of their own people under Stalin. I summarise these stupendous events, so readers stop using ‘blame’ and better understand what was at stake.
The story of the growth of the USSR during their first 25 years of Soviet existence confronts readers with many dilemmas to this day.
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Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.