The multivocality of democracy during and after the Russian Revolution
Democracy meant many different things to many different groups in the tumultuous time during and after the Russian Revolution. In this excerpt from Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921, Laura Engelstein looks at some of the various groups and their differing expectations of what democracy would look like in the future.
The desire for democracy was not, of course, easily adapted to the tensions within Russian imperial society which had set the revolution in motion to begin with. The desire for liberation in 1917 took different forms, not all of them easily reconciled. Workers and peasants imagined release from subordination, the power to act as communities and collectivities in governing their own lives. The ubiquitous assault on hierarchy, focused on the tsar and the army officers representing his authority, reflected not only the demand for dignity and equal standing but a levelling impulse that was economic as well as social. The generic discourse of socialism, though propagated by educated outsiders, conformed to this vision of an equitable social order. By contrast, urban and provincial property-owners and professionals, who had resented the limits on civic life and political power under the old regime, imagined freedom on the Western liberal model — a system of rights, laws, and political representation.
The collectivist model of social and economic equality was thus at odds with the “bourgeois,” constitutionalist model of a society and state based on private property, economic and cultural hierarchy, and the primacy of the individual person.
“Democracy” (demokratiia) was another term with wide resonance, which also meant different things to different people. It was often used to designate the laboring masses and their allies, as opposed to those with economic and cultural privilege. In this sense, the Petrograd Soviet formed simultaneously with the Provisional Government was said to represent “the Democracy” against the “bourgeois” ministers. But “democracy” in a looser sense is a good term with which to describe the political aspirations of many classes of the population, whatever their other differences. “Democracy” also meant representation — participation in a political process capable of expressing and adjudicating conflicting social interests. If industrialists and professors wanted a parliament and a constitution, workers wanted soviets — that is, councils of elected representatives. Even peasants — not all, but a considerable number — joined unions and sent delegates to meetings.
The Constituent Assembly, for which so many had voted, remained a potent symbol, even after its dispersal and despite the fact that no popular protest followed. The failure of the moderate socialists in the soviets to take power in mid-1917 — ever since chided by historians for their refusal to bite the bullet and block the slide to extremism that swept the Bolsheviks to their goal — had something to do with a belief in democracy, a reluctance to preempt the will of the people, however that was divined. Socialist ideology has been blamed for its hostility to the formal attributes of political democracy, yet much of the appeal of socialism inhered in its vision of a deeper, higher democracy — Social Democracy.
Had the Constituent Assembly been allowed to function, it might have established a political system capable of expressing and managing the conflicting interests and aspirations that emanate from any complex society. It might have failed, but the attempt was nipped in the bud by radicals whose concept of the revolution was fundamentally anti-democratic. Yet the Bolsheviks belonged to the broad socialist brotherhood. They shared the discourse of social and economic justice. They called themselves Social Democrats, at least at the start. Lenin was astute in waving the banner of Soviet power — the shared socialist endeavor — to camouflage the party’s monopolistic advance. This was the banner to which the people rallied.
But the Bolsheviks diverged from the socialist ethos in crucial ways. When they knocked out the “bourgeois” ministers, as the Soviet leaders had not dared or wanted to do, their socialist colleagues protested loudly. Protests arose even within the party, from some who saw the move as unwise and unprincipled. Unprincipled it was — on purpose. Lenin rejected the kind of democracy represented by the soviets, though he used them as cover; he rejected democracy altogether.
It took until the end of the Civil War for uniformity and compliance to be imposed inside the party itself, but conformity was the goal. Leninism, in short, was an authoritarian version of socialism, as critics such as the Menshevik Iulii Martov realized all along.
This was the version that triumphed in the end, defeating the democratic promise of the revolution, as a great social groundswell, embracing masses of the population whose clashing interests were not easily reconciled but whose desire to escape the constraints of the old regime propelled them to collective action.
Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University, where she served as chair of the History Department, and Professor Emerita at Princeton.
