The History Faculty

The Russian Provisional Government is discussed by historians as a failure. It is presented as not taking decisive action on a range of pressing issues. It therefore lost popular support and was easily removed from power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917. This talk gives a more sympathetic account of the range of problems confronting the Provisional Government, arguing that it was undermined largely by factors outside its control: the war, a revolution in the countryside, the lack of equilibrium in exchange between town and countryside; an urban economic crisis; the break-up of the late imperial state through national movements; a lack of international backing; and the unique environment of Petrograd. The main failing of the Provisional Government was during Kerensky’s leadership, most notably the disastrous Kornilov Affair. We should also note the great success of the Provisional Government – the fact that it did arrange elections to the Constituent Assembly in very trying and difficult conditions.

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Leon Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in August 1917 after many years of separation. He was nevertheless a key figure in the establishment and maintenance of Soviet power. It was Trotsky’s strategy by which the Bolsheviks came to power. As Commissar for Foreign Affairs, it was Trotsky’s ‘no peace, no war’ policy that in the debates about whether to sign a separate peace with Germany saved the Bolsheviks from splitting down the middle. In his next post, Commissar for War, there has been no historical agreement about the impact of Trotsky’ military strategy, but the Red Army was formed on Trotsky’s principles and it was Trotsky who protected the specialists that led the Red Army to victory. Undoubtedly Trotsky was a major propagandist for the Bolsheviks; his civil war train was a legend in its own time. Trotsky did not however establish a firm support base at the peak of the Bolshevik elite. Many leading Bolsheviks, especially Stalin, resented Trotsky as an anti-party figure. Trotsky’s economic policies and prognoses found little support. Devoid of Lenin’s backing nothing was more certain than Trotsky’s defeat in the power struggle to be the next leader of the Soviet state. There is no better illustration of Trotsky’s isolation than his decision not to return to Moscow for Lenin’s funeral, despite Stalin’s quick action to inform Trotsky in the expectation that Trotsky would wish to be at Lenin’s burial.

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Survival and Consolidation: When the Bolsheviks declared a new government in October 1917 many a commentator, including many Bolsheviks, thought that it could not survive as a one-party regime. It would have either to give way to the Constituent Assembly or to transform itself into a broad coalition of socialists of all types. This talk examines why of all the attempted communist revolutions in Europe of this time (Germany, Hungary, Slovakia etc.) only the Bolshevik regime in Russia survived. It also asks whether the price paid for survival – the consolidation of a one-party dictatorship meant that the ideal of socialism was lost.

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