Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924
Robert Service, Picador, £30
 

REFERENCES abound to similarities between the current geopolitical context — a combustible mixture of warmongering by corrupt elites, resentful nationalism, and brooding popular discontent — and circumstances on the eve of WWI.

Bellicose politicians today banging the war drums as a distraction would, therefore, do well to revisit the starkest lesson to emerge from a period during which a gasping Europe was drowned in a cauldron of blood.

The defining event of that era was not the Treaty of Versailles, but the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk — the separate peace agreed between the new Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.

Brest-Litovsk was the crystallisation of a catalytic reaction that had sparked the Russian Revolution — the country’s disastrous participation in a war waged on the personal whim of an autocratic, imperious monarch.

The military setbacks, food shortages, disorder and instability fomented by Tsar Nicholas II in the prosecution of this conflict were the raw material for the creation of both the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma provisional committee, which together ousted the dynasty in February 1917.

But it was the prolongation of combat after that February Revolution under the then war minister Kerensky — soon to head the provisional government — that turned the growing self-discovery of the “masses” into a proletarian juggernaut that would plough through the 20th century.

By mid-1917, Mother Russia had sacrificed more than five million officers and troops, either killed or wounded, since 1914. Defeat led to mass desertions, and by autumn 1917 two million more had absconded from the disintegrating battle front.

What arguably distinguished the Bolsheviks from their more influential Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary rivals in this critical period was growing party discipline, characterised by uncompromising positions towards the war and Kerensky’s government. Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin insisted that only they could bring about peace by replacing the illegitimate rulers who had brought Russia to its knees with a socialist administration.

Robert Service’s history of this period provides eloquent explanations for the party’s growing appeal in a context of widespread yearning for radical solutions to Russia’s problems.

As Service writes: “The party became a catch-all — or catch-nearly-all — organisation for those on the political left who were impatient for an end to the war and to Kerensky’s rule.” 

And join they did: from a few thousand members at the time of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party had grown to 240,000 by late July. 

It was this growth and the single-mindedness of leaders such as Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev that helps to explain why, following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were able to outmanoeuvre their competitors to sweep away the remnants of the provisional government. 

Service writes: “A more extraordinary outcome was hardly imaginable. A party that had been a poorly coordinated faction with unclear policies, a divided leadership and only a few thousand members had risen to authority in the world’s biggest land empire.”

It was less surprising that the very first act of Sovnarkom, the new revolutionary regime, would be to issue a peace decree demanding an immediate end to the Great War.

Lenin’s calculation was that this would spark a chain reaction of uprisings in Berlin and Vienna, and despite Allied resistance, within two weeks armistice talks with the Central Powers were under way.

If the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a humiliating and universally detested capitulation for the nascent Soviet Russia, it did provide what Lenin termed “breathing space” for the revolution. 

It also initiated cynical Western Allied support for the counter-revolution, the precursor to a civil war that would empower the Bolshevik leadership to consolidate the centralised dictatorship through a Jacobin terror that, Service argues, Lenin had always cherished. 

The rest is history, and therein lies the lesson: Bolshevism hitched a ride on pervasive opposition to capitalist warmongering.

By building his chronicle upon the first-hand testimony in diaries of Russians across the social spectrum, Service has compiled a uniquely nuanced people’s history of the revolutionary period, told from below. 

In the author’s candid interpretation, Lenin’s ascent was never foretold, and was messy, precarious and, in the final analysis, harshly authoritarian by design.

But its origins in a catastrophic European war championed by decadent, detached ruling classes which profited from the suffering of their disenfranchised peoples are indisputable.