Vladimir Lenin and His Ambiguous Mandate
Viktor Chernov, now a footnote in political history, should have been the leader of Russia. He was at the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which vastly outperformed the Bolshevik Party in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1917. Yet Chernov would serve in elected office for a mere 13 hours, on just one evening in January of 1918, before the assembly he chaired was dissolved and declared illegal by Vladimir Lenin.
By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks had consolidated power throughout the nation and instituted an authoritarian dictatorship. They claimed to represent the interests of the Russian underclass, despite having lost the only election where that underclass had freely voted. Yet Lenin’s party may actually have had a legitimate claim to the Russian government.
To know whether the underclass, the “masses,” genuinely supported the new leadership, we must first divide those masses into two categories, and then examine the details of the Constituent Assembly elections.
Because the Bolsheviks called themselves a Marxist group, we should briefly identify the Marxist definition of “masses” — and how Lenin’s views diverged from it — before proceeding to analysis. In Marx’s terms, “revolutionary masses” refers to the proletariat, an explicitly designated class of factory workers, the evolution of medieval peasant into the backbone of a corporate-industrial complex. The proletariat is directly opposed to the bourgeoisie, a “master class” which controls production and output while reaping profit from the proletariat. Take the following excerpt from Marx and Engels’ 1848 Manifesto:
Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character. … Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. … Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.
The Manifesto goes on to dispute the viability of other classes as “revolutionary”:
The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. … The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative.
Marx and Engels plainly define the ideal society for communist revolution. Russia in 1917 did not fit this model. Heavily agrarian, with a growing but still tiny middle class, thousands of poorly connected villages, and only a nascent industrial network, the condition of Russia’s geography and demographics made a communist revolution (seemingly) unlikely. Only 1.5 percent of Russia’s population could be described as “proletariat” in the Marxist connotation.
To reconcile Marx’s standards with Russia’s class structure, Lenin was forced to expand “Russian socialism” to encompass a broader range of classes, notably agrarian peasants. Consider the following portion of a June 1918 speech delivered to a Moscow trade conference: “[We] must pass through an incredibly difficult time … we representatives of the working masses, we workers, we class-conscious workers, in all our agitation and propaganda, in every speech we deliver, in every appeal we issue, in our talks at the factories and at every meeting with peasants …” Lenin delineates two brands of laborers, those at the factories and those in the fields.
Having identified the two types of Russian “masses,” we may now examine the extent of their respective support for the Bolsheviks. National elections to the newly-established Constituent Assembly in 1917 offer a reasonably transparent breakdown of backing for various contenders. Approximately 41.7 million citizens voted, a turnout of 48.4 percent. In the final count, Bolsheviks received a total of 23.5 percent of the vote; their support came overwhelmingly from cities, winning majorities in Vitebsk, Smolensk, and Minsk and wide pluralities in Petrograd and Moscow. The party did particularly well among urban workers, carrying that group by a decisive 86.5 percent.
However, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party received a more substantial plurality of 41 percent overall, drawing votes from peasants in rural areas. Had the election results been properly realized, Viktor Chernov would have been Russia’s duly elected leader. An angered and disappointed Lenin, who de facto controlled the government and who had allowed the elections in hope of validating Bolshevik rule, disbanded the Constituent Assembly and eliminated competing parties by early 1918. This precipitated the dictatorship that would dominate Russia for most of the century.
If we view “support” for the Bolsheviks in terms of pure numbers, then it is clear that the Bolshevik base did not come anywhere near to a national majority: Lenin’s party was resoundingly second-place. Yet practical support in this environment had a more nuanced character.
In the revolutionary era of 1917, it was more advantageous to garner the support of urban centers than of rural regions. The “masses” that brought about the Bolshevik takeover in the weeks prior to the 1917 election were predominantly of the variety that Marx had anticipated. Cities, especially Petrograd and Moscow, housed key government institutions, administrative offices, and concentrations of political thought. Residents of cities were simply better equipped to influence events than were provincial peoples, on account of being nearer to nuclei of power and having a greater awareness of political currents. Indeed, Trotsky estimated that no more than 30,000 Petrograd citizens, most of them factory workers, brought about the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks successfully recruited the particular brand of masses that were in a position to put one party in power over another.
Another detail to consider is that while less than a quarter of individuals cast votes for the Bolsheviks, a considerable majority cast votes for some kind of socialist party. The combined percentage of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks amounted to nearly 70 percent of the millions who voted. Socialism was unmistakably in favor. Bolshevism, the specific variant that attained power, may not itself have represented the bulk of popular will, but there is a case to be made that it more closely reflected the form of government desired by Russian voters than did, say, the tsar.
Did Bolshevism have the support of the masses? If we speak in Marxist terms, then yes, Bolshevism was in fact a popular movement. The two hearts of Bolshevik power, Petrograd and Moscow, voted in favor of Lenin, as did other cities. These urban locales may be viewed, in a sense, as having been separate from the rest of Russia: they were isolated areas where Marx’s conditions applied. The “masses” of these regions, Russia’s closest approximation to Marx’s prototype of the “revolutionary worker,” were on Lenin’s side. Yet if we speak in terms specific to Russia’s rural areas, then no, Bolshevism was not a popular movement. Peasants gravitated toward a less radical version of Marxism embodied in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Beyond a sheer numbers approach — which does not account for vast imbalances in influence between urban and rural voters — it is probably impossible to combine the convictions of two fundamentally different types of workers into a single yes-or-no answer. In this light, we can make the following conclusion: metropolitan Russia supported the Bolsheviks, while rural Russia did not; both segments of the population favored socialism. The final government that emerged from the events of 1917 was unambiguously dictatorial — Viktor Chernov was its unlucky victim — but it enjoyed some validation.
