When Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd a century ago, the writers of this editorial column were in no doubt that a historic event had occurred in Russia. The capture of power “was completely successful”, announced the Manchester Guardian editorial on 9 November 1917. “We shall soon see whether they can hold the power they have seized, or hold it without civil war, and whether they will know what to do with it when they have got it. Hitherto they have been in the happy position of destructive critics. They will now, if Russia thinks fit, have a chance of showing what they can do.”
These were good questions. After 1917, history slowly yielded up its answers amid years, then decades, of blood, toil and tears. The Bolshevik revolution plunged Russia into a five-year civil war more terrible in its losses and effects than the first world war that had brought down the autocratic tsar; 10 million lives were lost, against two million during the war with Germany. But the infant Soviet state clung on in the face of domestic and international opposition, established itself with increasing ruthlessness, and showed what it could do, though not in the way that this paper thought might be possible in 1917.
For some, the Soviet Union was always beyond criticism – the cause transcended the crimes. For others, only revulsion and rejection were possible – the crimes were all. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union embarked on forced campaigns of agricultural collectivisation and mass industrialisation that terrorised and immiserated millions but helped to equip the Soviet Union to withstand the war with Hitler, at barely imaginable human cost – perhaps 27 million dead. After the war, the Soviet system atrophied. Though it built millions of houses and educated humblingly large numbers of its population to a high level, the Soviet system and its post-1945 empire failed to deliver materially for too many, while denying its people the freedoms that might threaten Communist rule.
The events of a century ago still have the power to inspire. The fundamental reason for this is that they show, however imperfectly, that at moments of crisis human beings can take control of their own destiny. The Russian Revolution was an inspiration because it told the world that things do not have to stay as they are – in society, in politics, in human relations and in the arts. In the end, however, the Russian Communist system failed for two insurmountable reasons. The system itself did not work – and the people in whose name it existed hated it. These were epochal failings and all socialists need to learn from them. Not all did so at the time. The Russian Revolution “was a deed well meant for humanity”, this newspaper wrote 90 years ago, after the Soviet regime’s first decade. But the revolution’s ultimate toll was intolerable. Muted centenary commemorations in Russia suggest Russian society struggles to confront its history with the honesty that modern Germany has achieved in confronting its own.
But there are exceptions. In Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, there is a scene in which two ageing Bolsheviks encounter one another as prisoners in one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1942. The younger Bolshevik, Abarchuk, remains a believer in the cause of 1917; he is convinced he has been sent to the gulag by mistake. His older mentor, Magar, understands better. When the two comrades snatch what turns out to be their final conversation, Magar looks at the camp and distils their years of revolutionary experience in words of terrible simplicity. “We made a mistake,” he tells Abarchuk. “And this is what our mistake has led to.”