1917 and the revisionists

National Interest, The, Spring, 1993 by Richard Pipes

It may be added that in conversations with foreigners, for example the German Ambassador to Soviet Russia, von Mirbach, and Bertrand Russell, Lenin did not attribute his success to popular support. He explained it, first and foremost, by the disunity of his rivals and the superiority of Communist propaganda.

As for Trotsky, the man who actually directed the October coup, he estimated that the numbers involved in Petrograd were "at most" 25,000 to 30,000 persons.(11) Given that the capital city at that time had 400,000 industrial workers and a garrison of over 200,000 soldiers, this figure means that the Bolshevik power seizure was actively backed by at most 5 percent of the two groups in whose name it was carried out--hardly an overwhelming majority but rather the "better organized, more conscious, better armed minority" on which Lenin counted to "conquer" the majority.

In sum, the central argument of the revisionist school does not hold up on the evidence supplied by the very leaders of the October 1917 events. It is no more than a rehash of the interpretation inflicted on the Soviet historical profession by the Communist Party. It adds nothing to the commonplace theme of countless Communist accounts, of which the following is a fair example:

The great victory in October 1917 was

won, first of all, by the heroic working class of

Petrograd, which, acting under the leadership

of the Bolshevik Party headed by its leader,

V.I. Lenin, carried with it, in the struggle

against the rule of the bourgeoisie, the broad

mass of soldiers and sailors.... The struggle of

Petrograd workers revealed with immense

force and clarity the role of the working class

as the main, vanguard force of the liberational

movement of all exploited and oppressed

against the rule of the bourgeoisie... The work-

ers of Petrograd gave an example of skilful

application of Bolshevik tactics, which

demands great flexibility in the choice of meth-

ods and forms of the class struggle.(12)

These words were published in the USSR in 1965, eleven years before Professor Rabinowitch arrived at a similar conclusion and presented it to Western readers as a discovery.

THE REVISIONISTS, like the Communist historians, assign the leading role in the events of October to industrial workers.

They and their doctoral students turn out, year in, year out, weighty monographs laden with tables and footnotes, on the workers of Petrograd, the workers of Moscow, factory committees, industrial strikes, worker Red Guards, and such like. The heroes of these studies, however, never come to life: the reader has the impression that the authors have never met a real, flesh and blood, factory worker. They appear as pallid abstractions, like the noble savages of eighteenth-century philosophes, and, like them, unexceptionally noble. The revisionists seem to assume a very unfair distribution of virtue among the classes, with all goodness concentrated in the working class. It took courage for a young historian to break ranks recently by pointing out that Russian industrial labor had a penchant for violence and played a prominent role in pogroms of Jews.(13) It is symptomatic of the revisionists' lack of interest in live human beings that they have not bothered to write a biography of a truly revolutionary worker like Alexander Shliapnikov, the head of the pro-Bolshevik Metallurgical Union, Lenin's principal agent in Petrograd during World War I and his first Commissar of Labor. This neglect contrasts vividly with the attention which they lavish on Bolshevik intellectuals like Alexandra Kollontai, Shliapnikov's mistress, a feminist writer from an affluent family, who is the subject of no fewer than three lives in English alone.