John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Workers like Rodionova did not wait for the vanguard and did not require its direction. As Trotsky himself conceded, “The fact is that the February Revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat–the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives”. 12For the first time demonstrators carried banners that read “Down with the war!” and “Down with the Tsar!” On 24th February, as 200,000 workers took to the streets to protest, the government sent Cossacks to beat them back. Although policemen fired from rooftops to disperse the strikers, the hitherto loyal Cossacks refused to charge the marchers. Two days later the soldiers of the Pavlovsky Regiment in St Petersburg (unpaid, maltreated and housed in barracks built for far smaller numbers) announced they would not fire on protestors. On 27th February, when ordered out of their barracks to do precisely that, they shot their commander and joined the strikers.

Bolshevik and Menshevik leaders were in exile or prison. In any case, they were not required, for “the street generated its own leaders–students, workers, cadets and NCOs, socialists whose names have never made it into history books”. 13The Bolsheviks joined in later but there is no evidence to support Trotsky’s assertion (which contradicts his own analysis of how February began) that the February Revolution was “led by conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin”. 14The militant workers were as likely to be Mensheviks as Bolsheviks. The soldiers, as “peasants in uniform”, inclined to the SRs and Trudoviks. Most were non-ideological, impelled by the simmering grievances of the army, instinctive solidarity with protesting workers and the passions of the moment.

On 26th February, infuriated by its relentless criticism of the government, the Tsar dissolved the Duma. The deputies refused to leave the building and began to organise the structure of a government without a Tsar, forming a “Provisional Committee” to run the country with the help of the ministries and Zemstvos. Rodzianko sent Nicholas a last message. He wrote, “The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed. Transport and the supply of food and fuel have become completely disrupted. General discontent is growing. There must be no delay. Any procrastination is tantamount to death”. Rodzianko made clear to the Tsar that the writ of the government in the capital no longer ran, and the only means to arrest revolution was to concede fundamental reforms immediately. “Tomorrow will be too late”, Rodzianko finished.

Tomorrow was too late. On 27th February the tide turned decisively against the government when sailors of the Kronstadt garrison in the Gulf of Finland rose in armed mutiny. Long treated as uniformed serfs by their aristocratic officers, they rounded up and executed many of them on the spot. Militant sailors then crossed to the city and joined forces with disaffected soldiers. They stormed the Arsenal and liberated 40,000 rifles and 30,000 revolvers. With these arms they took over the telephone exchange and the railway stations. Soldiers and sailors fought pitched battles in the streets with the regime’s last bastion, the police, who fired on the crowds from rooftops. Armed cars with red flags drove about the streets returning fire, but the only way to dislodge the police was to fight through to the rooftops and dispose of them there.

The crowds then turned on the most flagrant symbols of the dying regime–police stations, courts and prisons. Many of these were raided, ransacked and burnt down. The ultimate symbol of the old autocracy, the Peter and Paul Fortress which had held the old revolutionaries of the People’s Will, was stormed by a vast crowd. When the red flag was raised over the Fortress a great cheer went out.

The eruption of mass rebellion and the speed with which the autocracy was overthrown prefigured the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2010 and 2011. The regime of Tunisian President Ben Ali was notoriously corrupt, a broker for the neoliberal economic agenda of the imf and World Bank and a keen privatiser of Tunisia’s national resources. In November 2010 WikiLeaks released secret us State Department cables revealing wide-spread corruption amongst Ben Ali’s junta. A month later the “Jasmine revolution” began after the self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouzizi as a desperate protest against police brutality. Bouzizi’s suicide, the footage of which went viral, kickstarted protests and riots in his home town of Sidi Bouzid, 40 miles south of Tunis.

Vital to the revolt was “the existence of an internet culture made up of bloggers, social networks and cyberactivism” 15that could quickly access and disseminate the WikiLeaks cables and the film of Bouzizi’s death. This was followed by other symbolic suicides and riots throughout the country. On 27th December, 2010 independent trade unions organised protests in Sidi Bouzid, which resulted in the Tunisian Federation of Labour Unions supporting nationwide strikes. As with the refusal of the Pavlovsky Regiment to fire on strikers in February 1917, the turning point came on 11th January, 2011, when the Chief of Staff of the Tunisian Armed Forces refused to open fire on protestors. Three days later Ben Ali, the Tunisian Tsar, fled the country with his family.

The conventional wisdom of the Western political class was that this was a one-off. After the fall of Ben Ali, Harvard Professor of International Relations Stephen M. Walt explained to the readership of Foreign Policy magazine “Why the Tunisian Revolution Won’t Spread”. 16Within weeks it had spread to Egypt. Like the influential Tunisian blogging group Naawat.org, crucial to the dissemination of anti-Ben Ali messages during December 2010 and January 2011, Egyptian bloggers and social media ignited and escalated the Egyptian revolution, particularly the occupation of Tahrir Square. In Paul Mason’s view, it was “a revolution planned on Facebook, organised on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube”. 17

On 29th January the occupation and scattered other protests led to the withdrawal of the riot police from the streets, and with army units again refusing to open fire on protestors–more echoes of February 1917–there was a power vacuum on the streets of Cairo. This led to neighbourhoods setting up their own vigilante committees to defend themselves against the baltagiya , paid thugs employed by the Mubarek regime. At the same time Egyptian trade unions such as the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers and Suez Canal Port Authority Workers took illegal strike action to support protestors in Tahrir Square. Faced with this expression of mass solidarity, the army accepted the inevitable and swiftly expelled Mubarek.

Like Tunisia before, and Libya and Syria later, it was the struggle for power after the fall of the autocrat that really mattered. The army was an obvious power-broker, its effectiveness dependent on the extent to which it could maintain discipline and cohesion. In Egypt, the fall of Mubarek led to the emergence on the streets of the Egyptian trade unions and a fierce battle to determine the post-Mubarek regime. The urgent need was to create an organisational alliance between the young “networked individuals” who had led the initial protests–the 20 to 35 age group in Cairo, Alexandria and other urban centres, especially women, who wanted more from the revolution than simply the removal of Mubarek–and the traditional Egyptian working class.

Failure to build that alliance led to the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood and the fracturing of the democratic front that had brought down a dictator. It need not have been that way. Castells’ analysis of the revolution finds that “The Egyptian Revolution was not and is not an Islamic revolution, even if it may have created the conditions for a democratic way towards an Islamic-dominated polity in the country”. 18