Why did the Bolsheviks take power in 1917?

Hello. My name is is doctor James Ryan.

I am reader in modern European history at Cardiff University.

My work focuses on violence and dictatorship in Soviet Russia

and the Soviet Union and their intellectual history.

In this lecture we will consider why the early Soviet

regime was so violent, so repressive, so dictatorial.

Our focus will be on the years when Vladimir Lenin was in power,

that is nineteen seventeen through to nineteen twenty

two-nineteen twenty three.

Lenin died in nineteen twenty four.

But what we talk about in this lecture will touch upon broader

themes in Soviet history because these first years of

Soviet power were formative.

They helped shape Soviet history as a whole.

First though, why did the Bolsheviks take power in Russia in late

nineteen seventeen?

What did they actually want power for?

This might seem a very basic question.

It is a very basic question. But it's really important.

It's sometimes overlooked.

And it really is foundational for understanding Soviet history.

So we need to spend some time on it.

And I think the answer to this question is two sided.

On the one hand, on the one side, there is Marxist theory or ideology.

Bolsheviks wanted to establish socialism which would lead

eventually to communism.

And I'll come back to those terms in a moment and explain

their difference.

The second side is more historical because it requires

us to place the Russian revolution within its context.

And what that means, perhaps above all,

is the context of the first world war and its violence.

So let's look first at theory.

This is important because Bolsheviks were unusually

theoretical politicians.

Basically theory, ideology really mattered to them.

The Soviet state was the world's first avowedly

socialist state.

Its ruling party, the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir

Lenin, was a Marxist party.

That is, this party was composed of followers of Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels,

two German philosophers living in Britain in the nineteenth century.

Marxism attempts to explain all of historical development,

and it lays out humanity's future direction towards socialism.

According to Marxism,

every stage of history has its own contradictions.

And historical development takes place when those

contradictions become so great that they become unsustainable.

And that leads to crisis, and crisis leads to revolution.

In modern history, according to Marxism, these crises will give

rise to two types of revolution.

The first is the so called democratic revolution, what

Marxists called the democratic revolution,

sometimes the bourgeois democratic revolution.

The classic historical example of a democratic revolution is

the French revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

This involved the overthrow of the absolute power of monarchy,

the creation of parliamentary democracy

and the flourishing of capitalism private capitalist enterprise.

But according to Marxists capitalism will not last.

Capitalism contained a major contradiction.

Wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a

small minority of owners.

And those owners exploited the vast majority of the people,

the working people,

the people who actually created the wealth in the first place.

Eventually, this contradiction, this major tension,

would erupt in another revolution.

And that revolution would be a socialist revolution.

And what that would mean is the majority of people, the working

people, would take power for themselves.

Now, they wouldn't all take power.

They would take power for themselves

through their true political representatives, socialists.

Now socialism can mean various things

but at the turn of the twentieth century Marxists

understood socialism to mean state or public control of

factories, industries, etc.

Socialism would be a more just society whereby wealth would

be distributed throughout society more evenly.

But again, Marxists did not think that socialism would last.

Under socialism people would learn to live together

peacefully, harmoniously, without conflict and crime,

without violence and war.

Eventually, socialism would drift or evolve

into something even better, even higher, communism.

The key difference between socialism and communism is

this: socialism meant and means transition.

Transition from capitalism to communism.

So socialism isn't the end point.

Under socialism, society, socialist society,

still needs to be held in check.

There would still be a lot of enemies of the revolution

and people would be learning to live under socialism.

So this is a time of adaptation.

People are learning to live under a new order.

But because they're learning, they're not there yet.

And there are threats. There is danger.

There are people who are opposed to revolution.

And for for these reasons, there would still need to be a

state and a strong socialist state that would keep people in

check, maintain order.

Communism by contrast means history's final destination.

Communism is a vision of a perfect society.

Under communism the interests of each individual

coincide perfectly with the interests of society.

And what I mean by that is there is no conflict.

There is no crime.

You don't need a police because there is no crime.

You don't really need a state anymore because people have

moved beyond the stage of transition.

They have learned how to live better, how to live together

harmoniously in society.

So Communism means in effect a vision of a perfect

human society.

Communism has never existed by the way.

Okay so that's theory.

Now we need to consider why exactly the Bolsheviks took

power in nineteen seventeen.

And a crucial part of this story is the first world war.

In fact, historians now typically speak of war and revolution in Russia

as a continuum of crisis.

Continuum of crisis is a term coined by the American

historian Peter Holquist and we all tend to use it.

In other words we cannot really understand the Russian

Revolution without understanding how the First

World War unsettled Russian society.

So we now think of the Russian Revolution as a process.

A process that lasted several years beginning in the war,

beginning with the First World War,

and a process that lasted until at least the 1920s.

So again this is process rather than just the dramatic

events of nineteen seventeen.

Process means it's long term, it lasts over a period of

years, the events of nineteen seventeen were more immediate.

We think of process rather than simply events.

The story of the Russian Revolution is about the

collapse of the imperial tsarist state,

which eventually happened in nineteen seventeen.

And the story of the Russian Revolution is about the ability

of Lenin's Bolsheviks to take control of the situation,

to take control of the power vacuum that that was created by

the collapse of the imperial Tsarist state in nineteen seventeen.

But the story of the Russian Revolution is also about what happened next.

It's about the ability of Lenin's Bolsheviks to fight and

win a brutal civil war and then to create a state of their own.

And that process lasted at least into the 1920s,

and some historians would say into the 1930s.

Russia entered into war in nineteen fourteen on the side

of the Entente Alliance.

But the Russian Empire buckled under the weight of waging total war.

The Russian Empire was not the only empire to collapse as a

consequence of the First World War.

Three other empires collapsed also.

So in total four empires collapsed.

The Russian, the Habsburg, the German or Hohenzollern Empire,

and the Ottoman Empire.

But the Russian empire fell first.

The scale of loss and scarcity in Russia was really quite

dramatic and really quite devastating.

Let me throw some figures at you.

By nineteen seventeen there were seven million or

approximately seven million total military casualties in

Russia and about the same number of people had been

converted into refugees.

Over the next five years, that is by nineteen twenty two,

fifteen million people, approximately fifteen million

people, would lose their lives.

As a consequence of the military battles of the Russian

civil war, as a consequence of political violence and terror,

and especially because of the spread of deadly

disease and famine.

But let me go back to the World War itself

because the World War was not only the context of the

Bolshevik Revolution in nineteen seventeen

and it was that, it was the crucial context,

But I would suggest to you that the World War was also very

much part of the reason the Bolshevik revolution took place at all.

For Lenin and his Bolsheviks in nineteen seventeen,

the devastation of the First World War made it necessary,

made it imperative that they take power and take power immediately,

not wait for some time in the future, but to act

now.

Like many other socialists at the time,

Bolsheviks thought that the war, the first world war,

was the inevitable consequence of capitalism.

It wasn't a mistake.

It wasn't an accident, it was baked into the very logic of capitalism.

Because capitalism, by nineteen fourteen, had

evolved into a new and higher stage called imperialism.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail as to what

imperialism meant,

but what I think you need to understand is that from the

perspective of many socialists during the First World War,

imperialism meant that the capitalist system had become more aggressive.

Imperial powers in Europe, like Britain and France and Germany,

were looking for overseas territories,

especially in Africa, for cheap resources,

for cheap labor.

And their search for overseas territory brought them into

conflict, and that's what brought the war about.

That was the socialist reading of the situation.

And so shortly after nineteen fourteen, shortly after the war

began, Lenin wrote, and let me quote to you,

this war will soon be followed by others,

by other wars,

unless there are a series of successful revolutions.

And he meant socialist revolutions.

And so fast forward to nineteen seventeen.

One of the famous expressions that we have from nineteen

seventeen is Lenin telling his party, telling the Bolsheviks,

and I quote, 'history will not forgive us if we do not

seize power now'.

What did he mean?

What he was doing with these words was expressing a

conviction, a very genuine conviction,

that humanity as a whole was at a crossroads.

It was at a moment of extreme and serious crisis.

Either things would stay the same and that would mean more

wars in the future,

more millions of innocent people being sent to the front

to be slaughtered.

Or there would be radical change involving violent

socialist revolutions to bring an end to capitalism,

to bring an end to imperialism,

to bring an end to war itself.

So, let me conclude this module by answering the question.

Why did the Bolsheviks take power in nineteen seventeen?

It's not because they just wanted power.

Yes, they wanted power, but not just power in itself.

Not power for the sake of power.

Bolsheviks wanted to liberate Russia

and humanity as a whole from the very possibility of war,

from the very possibility of exploitation in the future.

They wanted to transform humanity as a whole throughout

the globe fundamentally

through socialism.