The Russian Revolution – Alan Moorehead, 1958 ★★½

Ooh, Those Russians

Every country gets its own kind of revolution. For the French, it was bloody and romantic. For the Americans, it was lucky and idealistic. For the Russians, well, it was very Russian.

That’s the take in this popular history that both tells a good tale and showcases a then-prevailing Western mindset regarding its Soviet rival.

Russia’s history, Alan Moorehead explains, is one of enormous sacrifices, protracted arguments over tiny differences, and a willingness to trade a bad boss for a worse one simply to make a point. Moorehead quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky to this end: “Nihilism was born in Russia.”

Very much in Cold War mode, Moorehead points out how the Russian Revolution didn’t work out well for nearly anyone. This could set the book back with readers wanting a neutral or Marxist take. But more of a tripwire may be Moorehead on the Russians themselves; what he calls “this Russian mania for extremism, for perfection and for martyrdom,” beginning with the land itself:

A human being is a midget in this boundless landscape. One can sympathize with the Russian’s desperate need to establish his own identity there, his desire, by some outcry, some act of defiance, to reassure himself that he is not nothing in the world.

In 1905, unarmed demonstrators were fired upon by Imperial guardsmen outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Moorehead notes how the inflexibility of the government contributed to its eventual fall. Image from http://estoriasdahistoria12.blogspot.com/2016/01/22-de-janeiro-de-1905-domingo-sangrento.html.

Whether or not this geo-psychological view of the Slavic soul carries real weight, it is a way of explaining something inexplicable. How did a country go from an extreme right-wing monarchy to an extreme left-wing police state with hardly a pause in-between?

Moorehead focuses on two men: Czar Nicholas II, the last emperor of the Russian Empire; and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later to be known as Lenin, who saw Nicholas’s overthrow as a step to world revolution.

“With Lenin you had to get used to the idea of never relaxing, of never diverting your attention from the great class struggle that lay ahead,” Moorehead writes. Even when he was sitting back in Switzerland and allowing the Russian Revolution to boil up without him, Lenin was a man who offered no compromise, no let up, and no mercy.

At least for Lenin, that worked.

Russia in 1917 was a nation at war, undergoing an existential crisis, and with no clear course for change. Reformists bickered bitterly over what was to be done. Even among aristocrats, there were hard feelings with the status quo of being ruled by a thick-witted czar, his mad wife, and their guest who wouldn’t leave, a reputed holy man named Rasputin.

Known as the "Mad Monk," Rasputin was neither monk nor priest. His influence over the Czar contributed to the misrule that fed the Revolution, though he was murdered (by aristocrats) weeks before the Czar was toppled. "He was a supreme example of the truth that the evil men do lives after them," Moorehead writes. Image from www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century.

Rasputin was a corrupt charlatan, but he did tell Czar Nicholas II war with Germany was a bad idea. By 1917 Moorehead notes Russian losses from World War I were incalculable and victory a hopeless chimera. Discontent with the Czar was growing to such levels that the British ambassador to Russia felt compelled to warn him about losing the confidence of his people.

Nicholas replied: “Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people, Mr. Ambassador, or that they are to regain my confidence?”

The story of the Russian Revolution involved millions of people, but Moorehead makes it a two-man affair, between Nicholas the blinkered autocrat and Lenin the Bolshevik zealot who saw in Russia’s destruction a chance to purify it according to Marxist dogma. The reality was surely not so simple, but Moorehead was writing in the dramatic style of his employer, Time/Life.

In a brief preface, Moorehead notes the germ of this book was a Life magazine article about then-recent discoveries in German archives about the role that country played in bringing Lenin out of his Swiss exile just as the Russian Revolution was heating up.

Moorehead pushes this point rather hard, even if the actual facts of Germany’s role in bringing Lenin to Russia are small beer. Germany naturally wanted to destabilize an opponent and focus on the Western Front, while Lenin was hardly secret in his objectives:

Lenin before a crowd. Image from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vladimir-Lenin.

“When the revolution is in danger, we cannot pay attention to silly bourgeois prejudices. If the German capitalists are so stupid as to take us over to Russia, it’s their own funeral. I accept the offer. I go.”

For Lenin, the Russian Revolution was just an opener. He imagined communists in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and everywhere else rallying to his red banner. But Germany would win the short game by pushing Russia to cry uncle and sign a disastrous treaty once Lenin took charge. Moorehead calls it a “crushing defeat”:

Russia lost one-third, or sixty-two millions, of her population, one-quarter of her territory, one-third of her crop lands, twenty-seven per cent of her income, and more than half her industries. She was left defenseless.

Lenin’s villainy is a constant theme of Moorehead’s book. Even though I agree with that premise, I felt it got pushed a lot.

Nicholas II after abdicating. Moorehead concludes: "It is an odd spectacle of stubborn minds moving toward their own undoing; and in a wager as to whether the Czar or the Bolsheviks fostered the greater scoundrels in their entourage no detached observer would confidently risk a penny." Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/abdication-nicholas-ii-left-russia-without-tsar-first-time-300-years-180962503/.

It’s not merely a matter of Lenin’s politics; Moorehead notes how Lenin hung back in peaceful Zurich while a range of more moderate revolutionaries worked out the fall of the Czar in March 1917. Lenin was no coward but rather a consummate opportunist, skilled in bridge-burning debates and determined never to let a crisis go to waste:

His promise of shared wealth and freedom to the underdog was bound to have tremendous force and the masses were in the mood for continued rebellion against authority. He was out for destruction, for the looting of the last traces of the Czarist past, and this appeared to the crowd to be a great deal more attractive than the work of trying to build up law and order again.

Moorehead suggests the other revolutionaries, by being more moderate in their aims and more encompassing in their objectives, alienated a population that simply wanted blood. It’s back to the Russians-are-crazy thesis with which we began.

As history, this is weak stuff, but as a book, it’s highly readable. I found The Russian Revolution worthwhile at least as much for what it said about the world of 1958 as it does about the world of 1917.

While the Revolution raged on in 1917, many Russians who could have helped stop the Bolsheviks were fighting Germans instead, dying in droves, and looking for anyone who would let them return home. Image from https://www.rbth.com/history/329472-russia-in-world-war-i.

How can a political order so steeped in death and treachery nevertheless command decades-long fealty from one of the world’s great nations? “To the devoted Communist, the ‘October revolution’ means almost as much as the resurrection of Christ means to the Christian,” he offers.

Many twists and turns in the Russian Revolution are briefly recorded by Moorehead. For much of 1917, the socialist Mensheviks under Alexander Kerensky held sway, and briefly a centrist group under General Lavr Kornilov had its moment before falling hard.

All the time Lenin worked ruthlessly at his objective of total Bolshevik rule, secure in the knowledge his demand for peace with the Germans at any price enjoyed popular support. Moorehead explains:

Then, outside these two political groups…there remained the illiterate mass of the Russian people themselves, the real material of the revolution, and in a confused and irresponsible way they were very much further to the left. They wanted peace and they wanted it immediately.

What Russia gave up in exchange for peace: Even hardened Bolsheviks like Leon Trotsky were left aghast by the terms of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Image from https://kallahistory12.weebly.com/treaty-of-brest-litovsk-1918.html.

A better history would avoid this Les Misérables construct of a large mass of people singing out in unison about their anger and woe. Clearly Lenin and the Bolsheviks were master strategists, but they were also aided by tremendous miscalculations by everyone else.

The closest Moorehead gets to real explanation is when he moves off Lenin to write about his deputy, Leon Trotsky, presented at the center of many arguments with more moderate opponents while Vladimir stands back and glowers. Trotsky, who would go into exile after Lenin was succeeded as Russia’s leader by Joseph Stalin, clearly commands the author’s respect for his organizational skills and his fiery oratory.

But for the most part, Moorehead’s Revolution is a case of victory by default: “A kind of trance seems to have fallen upon the opposition parties, and by the time they recovered from their bewilderment it was too late,” he concludes.

As for Nicholas, Moorehead returns late in the book to present his grisly fate, being gunned down with his family in a country palace where they were held under Bolshevik arrest. Moorehead actually absolves Lenin of this crime; records showing Lenin indeed responsible didn’t come to Western light until the fall of the Soviet Union many decades later.

A 1945 portrait of Lenin conferring with the man who succeeded him in 1922, Joseph Stalin. Many claimed Stalin pushed Russia into a cult of personality; Moorehead's book argues Soviet strongman tactics began with Lenin. Drawing by Pietr Vassilyev from www.alamy.com.

Like Lenin, Nicholas was intensely stubborn, but while Lenin’s willpower earned him victory, the Czar’s brought only death to himself and all he loved, including the Imperial State itself, which Moorehead notes could have been a better place had it been given a fair chance:

By 1916, six million two hundred thousand peasant families were settled on their own property. By 1917, when the Bolsheviks were parading the slogan “All Land to the Peasants,” the peasants under the [Czar-backed] Stolypin plan already had three-quarters of it.

Moorehead’s chagrin for the Russia that could have been is a palpable subtheme in this book; one only wonders what he would have made of the country today, no longer Bolshevik but ever-autocratic. Probably he would have reached for his Dostoevsky.