100 Years Since the October Revolution

100 Years Since the October Revolution Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik coup which brought them to power in Russia. If you have heard of the October Revolution, that was today. Yes, in November because Russia was still on the Julian calender and it was 14 days out of date by 1917. All this year, I have been following the time line of the Russian Revolution day by day. I’ve put up almost daily posts about the events on my Facebook page. I’m sure there are lots of articles about the revolution being published today, but since I’ve been following the 100th anniversary of the events all year I’ve had a long time to “watch” the way the whole Russian Revolution played out since the Tsar was first deposed back in March. I want to speak just a little bit about what I’ve learned and what lessons, if any, there might be for today.

I’ve asked myself over and over again; why were the Bolsheviks successful? They weren’t even the largest communist party in Russia and compared to the Russian population they were statistically insignificant. So, how did Lenin and Trotsky and all the rest pull off the coup? There is no doubt they were all committed revolutionaries willing to do anything. They were also very violent men who shed no tears for anyone who had to be killed to accomplish their goals. This doesn’t seem to be enough to explain the Revolution, though. There are committed, violent people who managed to make a mess or cause a scene all the time who are duly arrested and eliminated from polite society. Since the 1990s this has been the story in America over and over again. The bombers at Oklahoma City and Boston and those who attacked on 9/11 did not end America.

The thing I have seen over and over again by following the Russian Revolution day by day is that the structure of Russian civil society was so weak it had almost no resiliency at all. There were so few institutions other than the military and the Tsar’s bureaucracy. When moral was reduced to almost nothing by constant reversals in the Great War and the Tsar removed from power there were no other sources of authority for the Russian people to look to. I am thinking of the sort of people who regularly appear as talking heads on documentaries on news programs and on interview shows. Academics, sports figures, artists, politicians, entertainers, managers of charities; Russia had almost none of those kind of people nor the social institutions they represent.

Within the realm of government, after the abdication of the Tsar, the vacuum of power was filled by whomever could elbow their way in. The first new government formed by the politicians who had served under the Tsar was immediately opposed by a rival organization of political organizers who had been previously barred from politics altogether. Both of these groups had almost no experience with politics because Russia had only had politicians for twelve at that point. The two sides functioned as rival governments and were so hostile to each other the effect was for reasonable people on both sides to conclude they could do no good and left the stage. Each new vacuum was simply filled with progressively more oppositional leaders. I’m oversimplifying things quite a bit, but the pattern is clear. Those in power sought to accommodate a vocal minority, such compromises delegitimized those in power in the eyes of those opposed to compromise and they left the government, in effect growing the relative influence of the tiny minority. This happened over and over again until at the bottom of the barrel Lenin and the Bolsheviks were left as the only people who still wanted the job of leading the country. When the coup happened, those left to complain no longer had the power to do so.

Outside of government it seems everyone simply watched the power struggle unfold. The government had such little impact on the daily lives of people they concluded nothing happening in the capital would really impact them. It didn’t really impact them until the Bolsheviks won and began to spread their influence outside the capitol at the point of rifles. Again I am over-simplifying. The weakness of Russian institutions seems to have left the people of 1917 with the impression there wasn’t much worth fighting for. Not until soldiers showed up looking for the peasants’ grain did opposition to the Bolshevik regime really begin.

This year this story of the Russian Revolution has played out for me against the backdrop of the vitriolic political situation in America. It’s like watching one movie projected onto the front of a screen while another plays out projected against the back of the screen. Of course things don’t line up perfectly and there are certainly differences in degree. Yet there is some kind of harmony between them for me. There are lessons to learn. Every time I feel apathetic about the state of my nation’s politics I have to check myself. Apathy and fatigue more than anything else led to the victory of the Bolsheviks. It was more a slow, sad stepping away from power by all the other possible contenders than it was some glorious victory for the Bolsheviks.

That for me, then, is the lesson of the October Revolution 100 years later. Don’t give up on politics. Don’t give up on civil society. Don’t quit participating in the cultural institutions which make up a healthy society. We have something here which absolutely is worth fighting for.