The Russian Revolution -- Fifty Years After: Its Nature and Consequences

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, October 1967

George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He was later a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In March 1917, in the third year of the Great War, the political system that had prevailed in Russia for several centuries -- namely the Tsarist autocracy -- suddenly collapsed. Signs of its disintegration had been mounting ominously for a year or two; the likelihood of its early demise had been widely sensed; yet no one expected it to come just at that moment. For a century in the past, its overthrow had been the dream of liberal and radical oppositionists, some of whom had schemed, worked, even suffered martyrdom, to bring it about. Yet its collapse, when it came, was not the immediate result of any such efforts. It fell because the strains of conducting a prolonged major war, superimposed on more basic weaknesses and problems of adjustment, were simply too much for it.

The trouble began when irregularities in the food supply led to street disorders in the capital city. Compared to ones that had occurred in the past, these disorders were not of an unusual or particularly dangerous nature. Nevertheless, the régime proved incapable of controlling them and restoring order. The war had taken its toll of the best units of the old army, with their relatively high morale and good discipline. The garrisons in the neighborhood of the capital, to which appeal had to be taken in the effort to restore order, were now manned by raw and semi-demoralized recruits. They refused their collaboration, disobeyed orders, fraternized with the unruly crowds and declined to support the police. In this development, the hollowness of the authority of the régime was at once revealed. It suddenly became apparent to everyone that "the king was naked" -- naked, in this instance, of effective support from any quarter. In the short space of a few days, the monarchy, lacking effective defenders, fell of its own weight.

Even today, a half-century later, it is difficult to assess the meaning of this collapse. Was the Tsarist autocracy so largely an anachronism, were its weaknesses and failures of such gravity, that it was bound to fall in any case at an early date, and did the war merely hasten its end? Or was it Russia's participation in the war that destroyed what would otherwise have been, for the régime, a reasonable chance of adjustment, of adaptation, of survival into another age?

The question is hypothetical. There can of course be no authoritative answer. But it will be useful to glance at some of the background circumstances and, in the first instance, at certain of the more basic weaknesses of the régime.

Russia, at the outset of this century, was still predominantly an agricultural country; yet the agrarian system was unsuitable and inadequate to the needs of the modern age. The régime was well along, by 1914, in the implementation of an extensive program of modernization, designed to shift the weight of agricultural production from the landed estate and the village commune to the small, independent farmer-proprietor. There are many who feel that this was the most promising approach ever taken to the great problems of rural land ownership and of the organization of agricultural production that confronted Russia as the legacy of serfdom. But in 1914 this program was still only partially completed in the physical sense. And what had been accomplished here had scarcely begun to affect as yet the most dangerous aspect of the problem, which was the state of mind of the peasant himself: bitter, skeptical, withdrawn, frighteningly alienated not only from the régime itself but from the entire educated Russian society out of which that régime -- or any conceivable Russian régime -- had to be recruited.

No less disturbing were the deficiencies of the political system. In 1906 the effort had been undertaken by the Tsar, under heavy pressure, to modernize the political institutions of the country by adding to them a representative legislative branch in the form of the State Duma. The Duma survived formally as an institution down to 1917; but restrictions on the franchise, evoked by a combination of the Tsar's timidity and the provocative and defiant behavior of many of the deputies in some of the initial sessions (1906 and 1907), had so narrowed its representative quality as to render it incapable of functioning as a really effective bond between people and government. In earlier times the need of such a parliamentary bond had not been great. Now, with the rise of literacy and particularly with the growth of a large professional and technical intelligentsia, its absence was keenly and dangerously felt.

Closely connected with this imperfection of the political system was a situation that might well be viewed as the most deep-seated and ominous of all the weaknesses of the autocracy. This was the extensive alienation from its spirit and purposes of large parts of the intelligentsia generally, and of the student youth in particular. This situation was not of recent origin. The disaffection of these elements had been a prominent feature of Russian political life for at least a half-century. From the standpoint of the prospects for survival of the autocracy, its importance could scarcely be exaggerated. It worked nefariously in two ways. It operated on the one hand to enrich the ranks of the revolutionary opposition. But by the same token it served to impoverish the bureaucracy -- to impoverish it in talent, in intelligence, in imagination. Had the talents and enthusiasms of those many brilliant youths who early found their way into the revolutionary movement been enlisted in the constructive undertakings of the régime, instead of being rejected, the achievements of the Tsarist government might have been of a decisively different order.

Closely connected with this problem of the alienation of the intelligentsia was the problem of national minorities. It is obvious that the romantic nationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so closely linked to language, tended to disintegrate the great multilingual empires, particularly the Austrian and the Russian, just as it tended to unite peoples of a common tongue. In Russia the effect of this nationalism was felt, again, in two directions. Among the Great Russians it. stimulated cultural chauvinism, anti-Semitism and demands for the forceful russification of the national minorities. Among the minority peoples it provoked precisely those feelings, sensitivities and ambitions most calculated to make them resent such pressures and to demand cultural and political autonomy.

The extent to which this national unrest fed the revolutionary movement may be judged from the fact that a majority in the Social-Democratic Labor Party, out of which the Bolshevik faction emerged, was made up of members of the national-minority groups. At a time when nationalism was rapidly becoming the dominant political emotion of the age, and in a country where the majority or near majority of the population (depending on how you classified the Ukrainians) was made up of national-minority elements, no government could expect to have an easy time of it. But the Tsar's government, showing itself in the final decades of its power disgracefully receptive to all manner of chauvinistic and anti-Semitic influences, seriously disqualified itself for the promulgation of any hopeful approach to this problem.

To all these weaknesses there must be added the personal failings of the Tsar, Nicholas II. How long Fate would have given it to him to continue to bear the crown, had the vicissitudes of the war not intervened, one cannot know. But to have had favorable chances for survival, war or no war, the system of the autocracy could not have waited long for a more capable autocrat -- one better educated, wider in outlook, more seriously motivated and, above all, more fortunately married. Nicholas had his virtues, and the clearer light of historical distance reveals him as a pathetic rather than a sinister character. But one could not run a great empire on tact, charm and good manners alone. His limitations, fatal under the stress of a great war, were such as to constitute a danger to the dynasty even in time of peace.