Revolutionary Russia, 1891 - 1991: A History

Once a rumour, however false, became the subject of common belief, it assumed the status of a political fact,

Rumours filled the lives of all inhabitants,’ recalled a resident of Petrograd. ‘They were believed more readily than the newspapers, which were censored. The public was desperate for information, for almost anything, on political subjects, and any rumour about the war or German intrigues was bound to spread like wildfire.’5 What gave these stories their revolutionary power and significance was how far they accorded with the ‘general mood’ (and with previous rumours that had shaped that mood). Once a rumour, however false, became the subject of common belief, it assumed the status of a political fact, informing the attitudes and actions of the public. All revolutions are based in part on myth.

The word ‘soviet’ means ‘council’ in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).

Here, then, were the roots of the monarchy’s collapse, not in peasant discontent or the labour movement, so long the preoccupation of Marxist and social historians, nor in the breakaway of nationalist movements on the empire’s periphery, but in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede or even understand its political demands.

The same rationale applied to the Red Army: there was almost no limit to the number of lives that the Stalinist regime was willing to expend to achieve its goals. That was the logic of a system built on revolutionary imperatives: the individual counted for nothing. In western armies strategic decisions were generally reached by calculating the gains to be made by a manoeuvre against the likely cost in casualties. In the Red Army no such calculations were ever really made.

This was one of the most revealing scenes of the whole revolution – one of those rare episodes when the hidden relations of power are illuminated on the surface of events and the broader course of history becomes clear.