The support of the Kone Foundation and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki enabled me to work in Finnish libraries and archives in 2013.
A grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the support of the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Tübingen gave me the opportunity to work for three months in German libraries in 2016.
I thank Irina Zhdanova and Anna Abashina, who edited this book, for their advice and comments.
I am constantly conscious of the support of my wife. ‘If my husband is looking out of the window, that does not mean he is not working,’ Katya will sometimes tell people. I am proud that, after some entirely understandable doubts, she has come to this view. Moreover, she has sought, if not always successfully, to defend my card indexes from the onslaught of our granddaughters, Faina and Taisia. I am, of course, gratified that the youngest members of my family are showing so much interest at such an early age in my old-fashioned research laboratory.
As my work on this book was nearing completion, my thoughts were constantly turning to Rafail Ganelin, who died in 2014. He was a most remarkable researcher and a wise person who did a great deal for generations of historians of Leningrad/St Petersburg. I am one of those he helped, and without his support my academic career would have been different. His advice saved me from many errors and blunders. I dedicate this book to the memory of Rafail Sholomovich Ganelin.
Introduction
George Buchanan, the British ambassador, heard a Russian soldier remark during the revolution, ‘Oh, yes, we must have a Republic, but we must have a good Tsar at the head.’ Buchanan regarded this pronouncement as an oxymoron and saw it as confirmation of the view he had formed of his host country’s curious political culture: ‘Russia is not ripe for a purely democratic form of government …’1
Analogous statements by simple people are quoted in the diaries of other foreigners.2 They are eager to present Russia as even more exotic than it was, and evidently the desire of its inhabitants for a democratic republic with a good tsar bolstered their case. Military censorship reports also quote soldiers’ letters along the same lines: ‘We want a democratic republic and a father-tsar for three years’; ‘It would be good if we were given a republic with a practical tsar’; ‘The tsar has been toppled from his throne, now there’s a new government, that’s all right, fine, no bother, and when they choose a new tsar, a good one, it will be even better.’ One censor concluded, ‘Almost all the letters of peasants express a desire to see a tsar leading Russia. Monarchy is evidently the only mode of governance they can imagine.’3
It is hardly likely that all these peasants and soldiers were staunch monarchists. They had said they wanted to limit the tsar’s term in office. They were anticipating he would have to seek re-election. Rather, we may suppose they saw the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘tsardom’ as synonymous. They struggled to picture a sovereign state without a sovereign, a strong head of state. Not a few soldiers refused to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government, because the very mention of ‘the state’ in the wording of the oath was regarded as endorsing monarchism. They shouted, ‘We don’t have a sovereign state, we have a republic.’4
We may, however, surmise that the soldiers aspiring to a democratic republic with a good tsar did in fact want to see a presidential republic established whose head of state would be endowed with extensive powers.
They could not give a precise formulation of their ideal system of government, for the simple reason that they lacked the necessary technical language. They did not know how to describe their ‘authoritarian republicanism’. It was not only poorly educated people who experienced difficulty in translating their ideals into the language of contemporary politics: the same was true of such groups as professional army officers who had cultivated an apolitical stance before the revolution. Indeed, even those who concerned themselves with politics could not always find the right vocabulary to characterize an unfamiliar and rapidly changing reality.5
These examples give a sense of just how complex was the situation in which the former subjects of the tsar, now citizens of a new Russia, found themselves. The political messages being targeted at them needed to be translated, and this led to the appearance of a host of ‘political dictionaries’, which were greatly in demand.
People might have had different emotions about the monarchy, but it had been familiar and had seemed comprehensible. The language for describing the tsarist regime, the standard attitudes towards the tsar himself, even the range of emotions he was expected to evoke were traditional and had been passed on down the generations.
The overthrow of the monarchy necessitated new vocabulary, new rituals, new prescribed political emotions. How were the legitimacy and the sacrosanct nature of the new government to be conveyed? How should the political leaders be addressed? To what extent was it permissible to view the new bearers of political power ironically? These were urgent questions. Different parties and organizations tried to take on the role of devising the new political language. This process of creating new words, rituals and symbols was taking place in the midst of an intense power struggle, with competing forces trying to establish their right to develop the authoritative, ‘correct’ political terminology and determine how it was interpreted.
All this has a direct bearing on the key issues involved in studying revolutions. Few people would seek to deny that power is an important issue in any revolution, and yet that is not quite enough. Power is an important issue in any political process, so what is of more interest is what it is about power that is specific to revolutionary, as opposed to non-revolutionary, eras.
Max Weber, in his ‘Politics as Vocation’, a lecture delivered in 1918 under the influence of the revolutionary upheavals of the time, quoted Leon Trotsky’s remark that ‘Every state is founded on force.’ Weber himself describes the state as a ‘human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.’ He continues, ‘The state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence.’6
If we adopt Weber’s formulations, a revolution is a particular political situation when the state’s ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ is under constant challenge. The demonopolization and monopolization of the right to use force is paralleled by a delegitimation and legitimation of that right. One of the most important issues in a revolution is the legitimizing of force. Accordingly, what historians of revolution should be studying is the political tactics and cultural forms of that legitimation.
Weber identifies three basic ‘legitimations of domination’, while noting that ‘the pure types are rarely found in reality.’ There is the authority of tradition, of the ‘eternal yesterday’, based, for example, on religion. Then there is the ‘authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma)’. Finally, there is domination by virtue of ‘legality’ based on rationally created rules.7
Different revolutions have had different attitudes to tradition. The leaders of the civil war in seventeenth-century England formulated their political ideas using the language of religion and talked about returning to an ‘interrupted’, ‘perverted’ tradition which needed to be revived after removing later accretions. This is an early meaning of the word ‘revolution’, taken from the language of astronomy and astrology: a return to an original state.8 Other revolutions were insistent on their absolute newness, declaring they were creating a new world completely different from the old order. In the Russian Revolution the dominant trend demanded a radical break with the epoch of the old regime. A resolute overcoming of the past was a source of legitimation for the revolutionaries.
The authority of ‘rationally based legality’ is open to challenge during revolutions: the state’s monopoly on lawmaking and how the law is applied is called into question, and multiple competing legal systems can appear.