A People's Tragedy (77 page)

The Provisional Government was quite unable to contain this rise of labour militancy. It was misguided by the liberal industrial ethic of the War Industries Committees, of which its Minister of Trade and Industry, Konovalov, as well as its Minister of Finance, Tereshchenko, had been leading members. Central to this ethic was the (frankly rather bogus) notion of the government as the guardian of a 'neutral state', above party or class interests, whose role in industry was to mediate and conciliate between labour and capital. The important thing was to keep production going in the interests of the military campaign. The class war was to be stopped to win the war against Germany.

During the first weeks of Konovalov's rule there were some signs of this new spirit of industrial partnership. As part of the agreement on the eight-hour day brokered by Konovalov on 10 March, conciliation boards, composed equally of managers and workers, were established in many factories to resolve disputes without costly strikes.

The administration of the railways was handed over to local railway committees in which the workers participated alongside the

technicians and officials. Konovalov himself arbitrated many industrial disputes and leant on the employers to make concessions — often compensating them in other ways

— in the interests of the war economy. V G. Groman, the Menshevik economist, even began to draw up the outlines for a 'planned economy' in which the workers, technicians and employers would come together to regulate the economy under the tutelage of the Soviet and the state.26

Yet this armistice in the class war did not and could not last for very long. The government's would-be 'neutral' stance was itself a major reason for the resumption of hostilities. For each side suspected it of favouring the other. On the one hand, the workers were encouraged by their early gains — there were reports of some workers receiving a five-fold or six-fold pay increase — and this engendered unrealistic hopes of what it was possible to achieve by industrial action. Their expectations were further increased by the Mensheviks' entry into the government on 5 May (with Skobelev, a Menshevik, the Minister of Labour). It appeared to give them a green light for more strikes and an assurance that they had supporters in the government. Workers came out with new and often excessive strike demands, became disappointed when they lost, and accused the government of backing their employers. It was a disaster for the Mensheviks.

The employers, on the other hand, were becoming increasingly impatient with the workers' claims, and with the government's failure to contain them. They blamed the industrial crisis on the workers' inflationary pay rises, on the reduced length of the working day, and on the constant disruptions to production caused by strikes and factory meetings. They were alarmed by the Menshevik entry into the government: it seemed to signal more regulation and a swing towards the workers' point of
view.
From the start of May, they began to move away from Konovalov's path of industrial compromise. They closed ranks and began to resist the workers' strike demands, even at the cost of a lock-out and the closure of the factory. Whereas before strikes had been averted by negotiation, now both sides were more ready for a fight, and the resulting strikes were violent and protracted, since neither side could be leant on to back down.

The bitter strike at the huge Sormovo plant in Nizhnyi Novgorod, which brought chaos to the country's biggest defence producer throughout preparations for the offensive in June, was the first real sign of this new climate.27 It put an end to the liberal hopes of spring, and beckoned in a summer of industrial war.

* * * As the self-proclaimed guardians of the Russian state, the leaders of the Provisional Government were united on one thing: the need, for the time being, to preserve its imperial boundaries intact. It was, as they saw it, their primary duty to preserve the 'unity of the Russian state' until the conclusion of the war and the resolution of the Empire question by the Constituent Assembly. This did not rule out the possibility of conceding, as an interim measure, rights of local self-rule or cultural freedoms to the non-Russian territories. Indeed the liberals thought this was essential. They assumed that the grievances of the non-Russian peoples were essentially the result of tsarist discrimination and oppression, and that they could thus be satisfied with civil and religious equality. They collapsed the question of national rights into the question of individual rights; and believed that on this basis the Russian Empire could be kept together. But defending the 'unity of the Russian state' did rule out, as the Kadets put it, giving in to nationalist pressures that would lead to 'the division of the country into sovereign, independent units'. Even the SR and Menshevik Defensists, who as revolutionaries had declared their support for the principle of national self-determination, lined up behind the Kadet position once they joined them in the government during 1917. As socialists, they still supported federalism; but as patriots, they were reluctant to preside over the break-up of the state in the middle of a war. The SR leader, Mark Vishniak, speaking at the Third SR Congress in May, compared Russia to a huge Switzerland: a decentralized federation, in which the cantons, or republics, would have the maximum national rights (including the right to their own currencies), but with a single unified state.28

This position, like that of Gorbachev during
pemtroika, was
quite inadequate as a response to the growing pressures of nationalism after February 1917. True, not everywhere were the non-Russians bursting to break out of the Empire. Some of the more peasant-dominated peoples were barely aware of themselves as a 'nation' as opposed to an ethnic group (e.g. the Belorussians, the Lithuanians, the Azeris, and some might argue the Ukrainians). Others were by and large satisfied with civil and religious rights (e.g. the Jews). Others still combined their ethnic and social grievances in a single national-socialist revolution which looked towards Russia for the lead (e.g. Latvians and Georgians). Armenia, for purely nationalist considerations, looked to Russia for-protection against the Turks. Yet elsewhere — and in certain classes of these peoples —

the collapse of the tsarist system did result in the rise of mass-based nationalist movements which first demanded autonomy from Russia and then, when this was not granted, went on to call for independence.

The emergence of independence movements was partly the result of opportunity. The coercive power of the old state had collapsed; the persuasive power of the Provisional Government was, to say the least, extremely limited; while the Germans and the Austrians, whose armies occupied the western borderlands, were only too ready to help the nationalists set up mini-states they could control and use against Russia. Yet the nationalists were more than 'German agents', even in those countries (e.g. the Ukraine and Lithuania) where independence was achieved with a separate peace and at the price of a German puppet-state. Many of the nationalist parties achieved mass electoral support. In

the Ukraine, for example, 71 per cent of the rural vote went to the Ukrainian SRs and the All-Ukrainian Peasant Union during the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917. Socialist parties with a nationalist platform also gained the majority of votes in Estonia, Georgia, Finland and Armenia during elections in I9I7.29

To be sure, it is not at all clear — and this remains one of the biggest unanswered questions of the Russian Revolution — what this mass support at the ballot box really tells us about the national consciousness of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population in all these societies. As one would expect, the most active and conscious nationalists were drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie, the petit-intelligentsia and the most prosperous and literate peasants, the peasant soldiers in particular.* After all, as we have seen, the growth of a peasant national consciousness was dependent on the spread of rural institutions, such as schools and reading clubs, peasant unions and co-operatives, which exposed the peasants to the national culture of the urban-centred world; and it was among these literate peasant types that these institutions were most developed. In the traditional political culture of the Ukrainian or Georgian countryside one might well expect the mass of the peasants — and even more so the peasant women, who were voting for the first time — to follow the lead of these rural elites and cast their votes for the nationalists. This was one of the main reasons why the SRs did so well in the elections to the Constituent Assembly: many of the village elders had been involved with the SRs in the past and they often recommended that the whole village vote for the SR list; rather than split the village into two all the peasants agreed to vote for the SRs.

Second, all the most successful nationalist parties put forward programmes that combined nationalist with socialist demands, and it is not clear that the peasants were aware of the former separately. It is probable, as Ronald Suny has suggested in the case of the Ukraine, that while the peasantry had a 'cultural or ethnic awareness' and preferred 'leaders of their own ethnicity, people who could speak to them in their own language and promised to secure their local interests', they did not conceive of themselves 'as a single nationality' and were 'not yet moved by a passion for the nation'.30 In other words, they interpreted the nationalists' slogans in terms of their own parochial concerns — the defence of the village, its culture and its lands (against the foreign towns and landed elites) — rather than in the terms of a nation state.

Certainly, the nationalists were most successful where they managed to

* The nationalist leadership was also largely derived from these groups. In the Ukraine, for example, the main leaders of the nationalist movement were Vinnichenko (the son of a peasant), Hrushevsky (the son of a minor official), Doroshenko (the son of a military vet), Konovalov and Naumenko (both the sons of teachers), Sadovsky, Efremov, Mikhnovsky, Chekhovsky and Boldo-chan (all the sons of priests).

persuade the peasants that national autonomy was the best guarantee of their revolution in the villages. Their policy of land nationalization was particularly successful. In many regions the struggle for the land was also the struggle of a native peasantry against a foreign landowning elite, so when the nationalists spoke of the need to 'nationalize the land' it made real and literal sense. In the northern provinces of the Ukraine, where the Ukrainian villages were closely intermingled with the Russian ones, the nationalists were able to mobilize the Ukrainian peasants around the defence of their traditions of hereditary land tenure against the threat of a Russian land reform based on the principles of communal tenure. Mykola Kovalevsky, the leader of the Ukrainian SRs, recalls how their propaganda worked:

The Russians want to impose a socialization of the land upon you, I said to the peasants, that is to transfer the ownership of the land to the village communes and, in this way, to abolish your private farms; you will no longer be the masters of your own land, but will be workers on communal land.

The nationalist campaign for native language rights was equally meaningful to the peasants: their expectations of social advancement were dependent on learning to read their native language and on being able to use it in public life. So was their movement (in Georgia and the Ukraine) for the nativization (autocephaly) of the Church hierarchy: with services conducted in the native language the priests would be brought closer to the peasants, and more peasants would enter the priesthood. Similarly, the establishment of national army units, the demand of military congresses held by nearly all the main non-Russian soldiers, would not only provide these would-be nation states with a ready-made national army but would also open the door for more non-Russians to rise up into the officer corps.31

Whatever its true nature or extent, the appeal of the nationalists was very much stronger than the leaders of the Provisional Government were prepared to allow for. Only in the case of Poland did they make a full retreat before the nationalists, declaring their support for Polish independence from as early as 16 March, and then only because, with Poland occupied by the Germans and the Austrians, there was nothing to be lost by such declarations and, on the contrary, the possibility of winning the support of the Polish population against the Central Powers. Even Brusilov, a Great Russian patriot fighting at that time on disputed Russian-Ukrainian-Polish soil, recognized that 'we had no other choice but to offer Poland its freedom'.32 But in the two other major conflicts — with the Finnish and Ukrainian nationalists — the Provisional Government refused to make any real concessions; and, largely as a result of this intransigency, these two movements both grew in their mass appeal and, as the government weakened visibly, turned from the demand for more autonomy to the demand for complete independence.

The Finnish problem stemmed from the doubtful basis of Russian rule in Finland after the collapse of the monarchy. The Finns argued, with some justification, that the Tsar had ruled over the Grand Duchy purely on the basis of his personal authority, as the Grand Duke of Finland, with the effect that after his downfall sovereignty should return to the Finnish parliament (Sejm). But in its Manifesto of 7 March the Provisional Government declared itself the full legal inheritor of the Tsar's authority in Finland and, while it restored the Finnish constitution, thereby ending thirteen years of direct Russian rule, it continued to insist that the government in Helsingfors should remain responsible to the Russian Governor-General, rather than the Sejm, until the future status of Finland had been resolved by the Constituent Assembly.

This was the start of a long and complex constitutional wrangle between the Finns (who refused to recognize the sovereignty of the Provisional Government) and the Russians (who refused to recognize the authority of the Sejm). Tokoi's coalition government in Helsingfors, a mixture of federal-minded socialists and liberal-minded nationalists, was based on the policy of negotiating a compromise solution, whereby Finland would gain full internal autonomy in exchange for a Russian veto over its foreign and military policy. Had level heads prevailed, the Provisional Government might have recognized this as a feasible temporary settlement of the conflict. But since the proposal entailed a smaller Finnish army for the Russian military campaign, it feared that this would prove to be the first step towards Finland's departure from the war, and it blocked the progress of the negotiations.