The Russian Revolution

The first account is the winner's, and it starts with a number. Russia's industrial working class was three point six million people in a country of one hundred and seventy million, packed into enormous factories. The Putilov Works in Petrograd alone employed thirty thousand workers.

Those factories worked like political schools. Strike committees became soviets. The Bolsheviks grew from twenty four thousand members in February to two hundred thousand by August, in this account, because their program of peace, land, bread, and all power to the soviets matched what workers already wanted.

Lenin's own case for seizing power, made before it happened, was blunt.

The Decrees on Peace, Land, and Workers' Control that followed were not ideology handed down from above. They ratified what the base of the revolution had already started doing for itself.

The second account starts with a number the winners do not like to say. Russia in nineteen thirteen was the world's fifth largest economy. Stolypin's reforms had created a class of independent peasant farmers, and the Trans Siberian Railway, finished in nineteen sixteen, was the longest railway in the world.

What this account mourns is not a political system. It is, in its own word, a civilization, destroyed not by inevitable historical force but by the weakness of one Tsar and the ruthlessness of one party.

The Constituent Assembly election of November nineteen seventeen proves the point, in this telling. The Bolsheviks won twenty four per cent of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries won forty. Lenin dissolved the Assembly after one day.

Patriarch Tikhon, addressing that same defeat, put it to his own side.

The third account has the least to do with any party's program. In nineteen fourteen a pound of bread cost twelve kopecks. By January nineteen seventeen it cost thirty two kopecks, when it could be found at all, and workers' wives spent entire nights in the bread lines.

The women who walked out of the Vyborg mills were not carrying a revolutionary program. In this account, they wanted bread, and their own words survive.

From April onward, village communes began seizing gentry land on their own, cutting timber, dividing fields, redistributing by household. By October, much of European Russia's farmland had already changed hands by peasant action, and the Decree on Land mostly ratified what had already happened.

Fifteen million men had been mobilized, roughly half the male agricultural workforce. Desertion rose from about thirty four thousand a month in nineteen sixteen to two hundred thousand a month by September. A soldier who deserted went home to his village, and usually brought his rifle.

The fourth account starts with what Russia's exit from the war cost the Allies. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk, in March nineteen eighteen, handed Germany Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Finland, about a third of Russia's farmland and eighty per cent of its coal and iron. Germany moved fifty divisions west, enabling a Spring Offensive that nearly broke the Allied line before the Americans arrived.

The Allied intervention that followed could not agree on its own purpose. Britain sent forty thousand troops. Japan landed seventy two thousand in Vladivostok, the largest contingent of anyone, and stayed on in Siberia pursuing its own territorial aims. The United States sent thirteen thousand, and two hundred and thirty five Americans died fighting Bolshevik forces near Archangel that winter.

It failed on every count the account names. The White armies collapsed, the war material was mostly lost, and the intervention handed the Bolsheviks a propaganda story about capitalist encirclement that outlasted every man who ordered it.

Winston Churchill, the most aggressive advocate for that intervention, wrote afterward what the Allies had tried and failed to do.

The fifth account, built decades later by historians reading factory minutes and village records instead of party manifestos, asks a different question. What did ordinary people actually do, and how much of the outcome did any party truly control.

Petrograd's metalworkers, two hundred and fifty thousand of them in a city of two point four million, radicalized in stages. In February they wanted bread and an end to the war. By April they wanted the right to inspect the books and veto firings. By September, many had concluded that only the soviets taking power could guarantee it.

The Kornilov Affair, in this account, is the hinge nobody planned. Railway workers refused to move his trains, his own troops were talked into disobeying him, and the collapse handed the Bolsheviks forty thousand rifles and, within weeks, majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Without it, October might not have happened at all.

Orlando Figes gave the account its harshest line about the party it studies.