Air University Review, January-February 1982

The Indecisive Russian Intelligentsia

In the preface to his latest book,* Adam Ulam states that he is seeking an answer to the question: "What was it that at decisive moments has frustrated or flawed the libertarian intentions of Russia’s revolutionaries and reformers?" In searching for that answer, Ulam surveys the whole revolutionary tradition in Russia from the inept attempt at revolt by some tsarist officers in 1825 down to the present feeble opposition to the Communist regime. Ulam does it with his usual flair for the apt expression, the vivid characterization, and with his rare ability to judge the actors in terms of their own time, not ours. Ulam’s theme throughout this narration of more than a century and a half of Russian history can be epitomized as the failure of the Russian intelligentsia¹ time after time to delineate achievable goals, let alone achieve a workable constitutional government. In their striving for change, they were afraid to afront those to the left and yet stayed in awe of the autocracy when the chips were down. In the one big chance that the liberal intelligentsia had to establish a constitutional government, namely during the period of the Provisional Government (March through October 1917), the intelligentsia of both left and right were outmaneuvered by a hard-nosed leftist, an autocrat in disguise, Vladimir Lenin.

*Adam B. Ulam, Russia's Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to Dissenters (New York: Basic Books, 1981, $18.95), 453 pages.

The story begins with the Decembrists, a group of young officers who had seen service in Western Europe against Napoleon and on their return to Russia expected immediate reforms. But Alexander I, although mouthing liberal ideas during the early years of his reign, had relapsed into mysticism and reaction after 1815. When he died, in 1825, there was some confusion as to which of his brothers, Constantine or Nicholas, should succeed. The Decembrists seized upon this confusion, and, on 14 December 1825, the officers of several regiments marched their men out to the square in front of the Winter Palace in an attempt to block the accession of Nicholas. It was not much of a revolution—most of the officers had only the vaguest concept of what they wanted, and their soldiers had been horn-swoggled into believing that Nicholas was a usurper. After standing about most of the day, the mutineers surrendered. But as Ulam pointed out in an earlier book, The Bolsheviks (1965), although the Decembrists were not, properly speaking, part of the Russian revolutionary tradition, one cannot grasp either the tradition or much of Russian history without understanding this early movement.² Few of the Decembrists had thought beyond the actual coup itself: some wanted a constitutional monarchy; others wanted to end the autocracy altogether. One, however, stood out, a bright, young officer named Paul Pestel, who, as Ulam points out, anticipated the mentality of Soviet communism in some ways. He advocated a species of socialism before the term came into use, he wanted a powerful secret police, and he even called for a dictatorship for ten years to get the new government under way.

The Decembrists in all probability would deserve only a modest footnote in history as another of the numerous abortive palace coups if Nicholas had not made martyrs of the lot, hanging some and exiling the rest to Siberia. Future revolutionaries almost to a man would hearken back to the glorious heroes of the December 14th Revolution. One of them, Alexander Odoyevsky, wrote a poem in which this line stood out: "Out of this spark will come a conflagration." And in 1900, Lenin and his fellow Marxists named their new revolutionary journal Iskra (The Spark).

The thirty years between the failure of the Decembrists and the disaster of the Crimean War were relatively free of revolutionary activities. Nicholas I, using his secret police, the Third Department, effectively choked off most libertarian buds long before they could bloom. There were a few exceptions such as Chernyshevski and Belinsky, the former ending up in Siberia and the latter camouflaging his radicalism under the cover of literary criticism. The voice of revolution in the last years of Nicholas’s reign and early years of Alexander II’s was that of Herzen, who, securely ensconced abroad, was able to have his paper, The Bell, smuggled into Russia. Ulam, in keeping with his search for why the libertarian intentions of the revolutionaries failed at decisive moments, concentrates on Chernyshevski, Herzen, and the less famous early "Land and Freedom" movement of the 1860s and gives only a bareboned account of better known Narodnichestvo (Populist) and "People’s Will" movements of the 1870s. There was little "libertarianism" in the latter movements.

Sixty percent of the book is devoted to the dozen years in which the 1905, February, and October revolutions occurred. It was during that period that Russia had its only chance to shed authoritarian rule and acquire a more democratic government. The events of 1905-06 were, as Trotsky so aptly put it, a dress rehearsal for the later revolutions. The tsar gave in and allowed the creation of the Duma, a "parliament" without power, and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was formed, a body that was destined to play a disastrous role in the period between the February and October revolutions of 1917. As Ulam points out time and time again, the decade between the election of the first Duma and the fall of the monarchy in 1917 was a golden opportunity for Nicholas II to institute a responsible government. Instead, he insisted on appointing extremely stupid ministers; and he listened dutifully to his silly wife, who in turn was influenced by the likes of Rasputin —it almost looked as if Nicholas and Alexandra were plotting the end of the Romanov dynasty.

When the end came, it was "not with a bang but a whimper," to borrow from T. S. Eliot. No one planned the February Revolution; it began with bread riots in Petrograd and, then, like Topsy, it "just growed." Nobody had any idea of what to do. The Duma leadership formed a government of sorts, the Provisional Government, more by default than design, and the Soviet was reinstituted. In Russia’s Failed Revolutions, Ulam really berates the Russian liberal who revealed his ". . . fatal weakness, his lack of self-assurance and his sense of guilt about his moderation, which repeatedly made him yield and at the decisive moment rendered him helpless before the left. . . [It] was another manifestation of the original sin of Russian liberalism: its fear of political power." (pp. 156, 244) The Soviet of Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies, claiming to represent the "people," refused to rule, although it probably had the power to do so, but neither would it let the Provisional Government rule. For eight months there was a dual government, half of it ruling ineffectively, the other half keeping it from ruling.

In the midst of all this confusion, enter Lenin from Switzerland. He knew what he wanted, had definite plans of how to attain power, and was relentless and audacious in going about getting it. According to Ulam, Lenin’s ". . . calculations hinged on subverting the Russian soldier" and "the main thrust of his policies would be to destroy all elements of social, economic, and political stability and to plunge the country into complete anarchy. It was only as heirs to anarchy that his Bolsheviks could come to power." (pp. 334-35) This single-minded devotion to the seizure of power plus Lenin’s mastery of the art of vituperation, the ability to pin false labels on his opponents (which, as Ulam comments, has remained a Kremlin art to this day) made Lenin a dangerous competitor of both the Provisional Government and the Soviet.

The Bolsheviks gained followers at the expense of the more moderate socialists, proceeded in their task of undermining military discipline at the front, and carried on their unrelenting vituperation against the Provisional Government and the moderate elements of the Soviet. In early July, however, an abortive coup by the Bolsheviks temporarily united both halves of the dual power against them, and Lenin went into hiding. Ulam rises to new heights of sarcasm in describing how half-heartedly the authorities were in seeking out the scarcely concealed Bolsheviks. Again, how could there really be a "danger from the left"; the right had a monopoly on the threat to the revolution! Ulam claims that some socialists who saw through Lenin’s game still would not push for his arrest.

Lenin, from his hiding places in Finland and later in Petrograd, badgered his colleagues unmercifully to make an immediate bid for power. The time was ripe, and, according to Ulam’s diagnosis of the state of health of the nation in the following striking passage, Lenin was right:

On its institutional side, Russian politics came to resemble a junkyard: various prerevolutionary bodies in different states of disrepair lying side by side with brand new pieces of government machinery produced since February 1917, but not functioning properly. (p. 377)

And strike they did on the night of 24 October (6 November New Style); the opposition was just about nonexistent, and on the next day Lenin presented the All-Russian Congress of Soviets with a new government made up of Bolsheviks.

Ulam is very harsh on Lenin. To achieve his goal of world revolution, according to Ulam, Lenin would resort to every chicanery in the political book and some original ones of his own. The great passion of Lenin’s life ". . . was his hatred of the intelligentsia. It runs like a thread through his personal and public life, and provides much if not most of the emotional intensity behind the revolutionary strivings. Phrases such as ‘the intelligentsia scum,’ ‘the scoundrelly intellectuals,’ ‘that riffraff,’ run continually through his writings."³ Ulam also describes Lenin as "a great strategist, but not a tactician of revolution . . . He preached constantly the importance of organization, yet he himself was not a good party manager, having no head for details." (p. 351) Ulam has Trotsky as the designer and field commander of the October seizure of power. It was he who suggested synchronizing the coup with the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets so that the Bolsheviks could claim that the power grab was in the name of the Soviets. He also was able to manipulate the troops in Petrograd through his control of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.

No one outside Russia would argue that the role of Trotsky in the October Revolution and in the subsequent Civil War has been reduced to naught, or even made counterproductive, by Soviet historians, while Lenin has been endowed with almost godlike omnipotence. Ulam, however, seems to be overcompensating Trotsky and undervaluing Lenin. The man who thought out and put into practice "democratic centralism" as the organizational basis for his party had every right to preach "the importance of organization." As for the tactics of the October Revolution, there is no doubt that these were left up to Trotsky, but it was Lenin’s obduracy, his unrelenting advocacy of revolution now, that galvanized his somewhat reluctant comrades into action.

Professor Ulam also has harsh things to say about the Russian intelligentsia’s inability to govern when circumstances were propitious in the period between the revolutions in 1917. For example, in describing Kerenski and his fellow ministers, Ulam says sarcastically: "Most revolutionary dramas unfold to the accompaniment of effusive oratory, but the February revolution is the only one which literally talked itself to death." (p. 378) It just may be that the Russian intelligentsia were embarked upon a mission impossible in attempting to create a democratic government in the war-torn, chaotic Russia of 1917. The country had never known anything but authoritarian rule, and Lenin’s authoritarian concepts were more in line with the national tradition than the untried parliamentarianism of the intelligentsia. The democratic aims of the latter were not attainable under the prevailing conditions.

In his final chapter, Ulam sums up the fate of the dissenting intelligentsia during the 63 years of Soviet rule, and he does this in fewer than 40 pages or less than 10 percent of his book. He describes how Lenin went beyond mere authoritarianism to the use of terror as a deliberate state policy to ensure the "cult of power," i.e., the Communist state. Stalin in turn increased the use of terror far beyond anything visualized by the Bolsheviks. In the early 1930s he launched "a pogrom of the intelligentsia," and that pogrom spread to all levels of Soviet society in the late thirties. Even the mildest criticism of the Stalinist regime inevitably landed the critic in a Gulag in Siberia or immediate execution by the NKVD. The role of the intelligentsia as the voice of society pointing out the excesses of the authoritarian ruler was liquidated under Stalin, who not only forbade criticism but also insisted on the intelligentsias’ praising him. Even conformity did not ensure safety. In an earlier work, Ulam argued that ". . . terror was necessary not only to keep men obedient, but even more to make them believe. Without terror, who would have failed to notice the patent absurdity of Stalin’s rule----. . .?⁴

During Khrushchev’s tenure in power (1954-64), the intelligentsia were allowed some freedom of expression, especially if they directed their fire at the late vozhd’ (dictator), for Nikita, from 1956 on, was on an anti-Stalin crusade. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem "Stalin’s Heirs" seem to indicate an open season on Stalin. But with the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964, the dissenting intelligentsia came under fire again—the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime closely resembled Stalinism without the excesses of terrorism. The new leaders used more subtle techniques such as phony trials, incarceration in "psychiatric" clinics, and expulsion from Russia with a concomitant revocation of citizenship. The dissenting intelligentsia were forced to push their ideas in illegal ways such as through samizdat, a Russian term meaning "self-publishing." But over the last few years, the number of dissenters has been whittled down drastically. As Ulam suggested several years ago, ". . . in spirit Soviet Russia of today is still much more Stalin’s than Lenin’s."⁵ And he might have added, far less free than under the tsars in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Scholarly, but wearing its erudition lightly, Russia’s Failed Revolutions is an excellent piece of work. Furthermore, in an age teeming with collections of articles by a dozen or more authors crammed into slim volumes, it is a pleasure to have a volume by a single author, obviously the product .of a great deal of research, much thought, and one that reflects some deep insights. It is also a relief to read an author who writes not only smoothly but also interestingly. For anyone with a desire to understand what makes the Russian intellectual tick, this book should go far toward satisfying that curiosity.

1. The Russian term intelligentsia is a hard one to define. It usually refers to the educated class that had an intellectual interest in social-political problems and wanted either to restrict or even abolish the monarchy.

2. Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), p. 21.

3. Ibid., p. 210.

4. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York, 1973), pp. 740-41.

5. Ibid., p. 741.

Dr. Kenneth R. Whiting (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Director of the Documentary Research Division, Air University Library, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. A frequent contributor to Air University Review, he is the author of The Soviet Union Today: A Concise Handbook (1962) and of numerous monographs on Russian and Asian subjects. Dr. Whiting formerly taught Russian history at Tufts University and is fluent in the Russian language.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor