Ld Trotsky in the Russian Revolution. What Trotsky did for Soviet Russia. Socialism in a separate country

Trotsky Lev Davidovich

Trotsky Lev Davidovich

L.D.TROTSKY

HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

VOLUME TWO

OCTOBER REVOLUTION

PART ONE

Preface

"July Days": preparation and beginning

"July Days": climax and defeat

Could the Bolsheviks have taken power in July?

The month of great slander

The counter-revolution is raising its head

Kerensky and Kornilov

State meeting in Moscow

Kerensky Conspiracy

Kornilov's rebellion

The bourgeoisie faces off against democracy

Masses under attack

Bolsheviks and Soviets

The Last Coalition

Notes

PREFACE

Russia made its bourgeois revolution so late that it was forced to turn it into a proletarian one. In other words: Russia has fallen so far behind other countries that it has had to, at least in certain areas, overtake them. This seems incongruous. Meanwhile, history is full of such paradoxes. Capitalist England was so ahead of other countries that it was forced to lag behind them. Pedants think that dialectics is an idle game of the mind. In fact, it only reproduces the process of development, which lives and moves through contradictions.

The first volume of this work was supposed to clarify why the historically belated democratic regime that replaced tsarism turned out to be completely unviable. This volume is dedicated to the Bolsheviks' rise to power. The basis of the presentation here is the narrative. The reader must find sufficient support for conclusions in the facts themselves.

The author does not mean by this that he avoids sociological generalizations. History would have no value if it taught us nothing. The powerful orderliness of the Russian revolution, the sequence of its stages (1), the irresistibility of the onslaught of the masses, the completeness of political groupings, the clarity of slogans - all this extremely facilitates the understanding of the revolution in general, and thereby of human society. For it can be considered proven by the entire course of history that a society torn apart by internal contradictions fully reveals not only its anatomy, but also its “soul” precisely in revolution.

More directly, this work should help to understand the character Soviet Union. The relevance of our topic is not that October Revolution happened before the eyes of the generation still alive today - of course, and this is of considerable significance - but the fact is that the regime that emerged from the coup lives, develops and poses new mysteries for humanity. All over the world, the question of the land of Soviets remains on the agenda. Meanwhile, it is impossible to comprehend what exists without first understanding how what exists came into being. Greater political assessments require historical perspective.

For the eight months of the revolution, from February to October 1917, two large volumes were needed. Criticism, according to general rule, did not accuse us of lengthy presentation. The scale of the work is explained rather by the approach to the material. You can give a photograph of your hand: it will take a page. But to present the results of microscopic examination of hand tissues, a volume is needed. The author does not give himself any illusions about the completeness and completeness of his research. But still, in many cases he had to use methods that are closer to a microscope than to a photographic apparatus.

In those moments when it seemed to us that we were abusing the reader’s patience, we generously crossed out the testimony of witnesses, confessions of participants, and minor episodes; but then they often restored much of what had been deleted. In this struggle for details, we were guided by the desire to show as concretely as possible the very process of the revolution. In particular, it was impossible not to try to fully exploit the advantage that this story was written from a living person.

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown annually into the market to present a new version of the personal novel, the tale of the hesitation of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. It takes Proust's heroine several exquisite pages to feel that she feels nothing. It seems that it is possible, at least on an equal footing, to demand attention to the collective historical dramas that raise hundreds of millions of human beings from oblivion, transform the character of nations and invade forever the life of mankind.

The accuracy of the references and quotations of the first volume has not been disputed by anyone so far: yes, it would not be easy to do. Opponents most often limit themselves to reasoning on the topic that personal bias can manifest itself in an artificial and one-sided selection of facts and texts. Indisputable in itself, this consideration says nothing about this work and even less about his scientific techniques. Meanwhile, we allow ourselves to resolutely insist that the coefficient of subjectivity is determined, limited and verified not so much by the historian’s temperament as by the nature of his method.

The purely psychological school, which views the fabric of events as an interweaving of the free activities of individual people or their groups, leaves the greatest scope for arbitrariness even with the best intentions of the researcher. The materialist method disciplines, obliging one to proceed from the ponderous facts of the social structure. Main forces historical process are classes for us; rely on them political parties; ideas and slogans act as bargaining chips of objective interests. The entire path of research leads from the objective to the subjective, from the social to the individual, from the capital to the opportunistic. This places strict limits on copyright arbitrariness.

If a mining engineer in an unexplored area discovers by drilling magnetic iron ore, you can always assume a happy accident: building a mine is not recommended. If the same engineer, based on, say, deviations of the magnetic needle, comes to the conclusion that there must be ore deposits hidden in the ground, and after that he actually gets to iron ore at different points in the region, then even the most picky skeptic will not dare to refer to chance. A system that subordinates the general and the particular is convincing.

Evidence of scientific objectivism must be sought not in the eyes of the historian and not in the intonations of his voice, but in the internal logic of the narrative itself: if the episodes, evidence, figures coincide with the general readings of the magnetic needle of social analysis, then the reader has the most serious guarantee of the scientific validity of the conclusions. More specifically: the author is faithful to objectivism to the extent that this book really reveals the inevitability of the October Revolution and the reasons for its victory.

The reader knows that in revolution we seek, first of all, direct intervention of the masses in the destinies of society. Behind the events we are trying to discover changes in collective consciousness. We reject sweeping references to the “spontaneity” of the movement, which in most cases do not explain anything and teach nothing. Revolutions are carried out according to known laws. This does not mean that the active masses are aware of the laws of the revolution; but this means that changes in mass consciousness are not accidental, but are subordinated to objective necessity, which lends itself to theoretical clarification and thereby creates the basis for foresight and leadership.

Some official Soviet historians they tried, unexpectedly, to criticize our concept as idealistic. Professor Pokrovsky insisted, for example, that we underestimated the objective factors of the revolution: “between February and October there was colossal economic devastation”; “during this time the peasantry... rebelled against the Provisional Government”; precisely in these “objective shifts”, and not in changeable mental processes must be seen driving force revolution. Thanks to the commendable sharpness in posing questions, Pokrovsky reveals in the best possible way the inconsistency of the vulgar economic explanation of history, often passed off as Marxism.

The radical upheavals that occur during the revolution are in fact caused not by those episodic economic upheavals that occur during the events themselves, but by those major changes that have accumulated in the very foundations of society throughout the entire previous era. That on the eve of the overthrow of the monarchy, as between February and October, the economic disintegration invariably deepened, feeding and spurring mass discontent, this is completely indisputable and has never been left unnoticed by us. But it would be a gross mistake to believe that the second revolution took place eight months after the first, due to the fact that the bread ration had decreased during this time from one and a half to three quarters of a pound. In the years immediately after the October revolution, the food situation of the masses continued to deteriorate continuously. Meanwhile, the hopes of counter-revolutionary politicians for a new coup were crushed every time. This circumstance can only seem mysterious to those who view the uprising of the masses as a “spontaneous”, i.e. herd, rebellion skillfully used by the leaders. In fact, the presence of deprivations alone is not enough for an uprising - otherwise the masses would always rebel; it is necessary that the finally discovered inconsistency of the social regime make these deprivations unbearable and that new conditions and new ideas open up the prospect of a revolutionary outcome. In the name of the great goal they have realized, the same masses are then able to endure double and triple hardships.

The reference to the peasant uprising as a second “objective factor” represents an even more obvious misunderstanding. For the proletariat, the peasant war was, of course, an objective circumstance, since in general the actions of one class become external impulses for the consciousness of another class. N...

History of the Russian Revolution volume 1

PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION

PREFACE

FEATURES OF RUSSIA DEVELOPMENT

TSAR RUSSIA AT WAR

PROLETARIAT AND PEASANTRY

KING AND QUEEN

THE IDEA OF A PALACE COUP

AGONY OF MONARCHY

FIVE DAYS

WHO LEADED THE FEBRUARY UPRISING?

PARADOX OF THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION

NEW POWER

DUAL POWER

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

ARMY AND WAR

RULERS AND WAR

BOLSHEVIKS AND LENIN

REARMAMENT OF THE PARTY

"APRIL DAYS"

FIRST COALITION

OFFENSIVE

PEASANTRY

SHIFT IN THE MASSES

SOVIET CONGRESS AND JUNE DEMONSTRATION

CONCLUSION

APPENDICES TO the chapter "Features of Russia's development"

To the chapter "Rearmament of the Party"

To the chapter "The Soviet Congress and the June Demonstration"

PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION

The February Revolution is considered a democratic revolution in the proper sense of the word. Politically, it developed under the leadership of two democratic parties: the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. A return to the “legacies” of the February Revolution is still the official dogma of the so-called democracy. All this seems to give reason to think that democratic ideologists should have hastened to sum up the historical and theoretical results of the February experience, to reveal the reasons for its collapse, to determine what its “testaments” actually consisted of and what the path to their implementation was. Both democratic parties have also enjoyed significant leisure for over thirteen years, and each of them has a staff of writers who, in any case, cannot be denied experience. And yet we do not have a single noteworthy work by democrats about democratic revolution. The leaders of the conciliatory parties clearly do not dare to restore the course of development of the February Revolution, in which they had the opportunity to play such a prominent role. Isn't it surprising? No, quite in order. The leaders of vulgar democracy are all the more wary of the actual February Revolution, the more boldly they swear by its ethereal precepts. The fact that they themselves occupied leadership positions for several months in 1917 is precisely what makes them turn their eyes away from the events of that time. For the deplorable role of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (how ironic this name sounds today!) reflected not just the personal weakness of the leaders, but the historical degeneration of vulgar democracy and the doom of the February Revolution as a democratic one.

The whole point is - and this is the main conclusion of this book - that the February Revolution was only a shell in which the core of the October Revolution was hidden. The history of the February Revolution is the history of how the October core freed itself from its conciliatory veils. If vulgar democrats dared to objectively present the course of events, they could no more call on anyone to return to February than one could call on an ear to return to the grain that gave birth to it. That is why the inspirers of the bastard February regime are now forced to turn a blind eye to their own historical culmination, which was the culmination of their failure.

One can, however, refer to the fact that liberalism, in the person of history professor Miliukov, nevertheless tried to settle scores with the “second Russian revolution.” But Miliukov does not at all hide the fact that he only endured February revolution. There is hardly any possibility of classifying a national-liberal monarchist as a democracy, even a vulgar one, - not on the same basis, indeed, that he reconciled himself with the republic when there was nothing else left? But even leaving political considerations aside, Miliukov’s work on the February Revolution cannot in any sense be considered a scientific work. The leader of liberalism appears in his “History” as a victim, as a plaintiff, but not as a historian. His three books read like a drawn-out editorial from Rech in the days of the collapse of the Kornilov revolt. Miliukov accuses all classes and all parties of not helping his class and his party concentrate power in their hands. Miliukov attacks the democrats because they did not want or were unable to be consistent national liberals. At the same time, he himself is forced to testify that the more the democrats approached national liberalism, the more they lost their support among the masses. In the end, he has no choice but to accuse the Russian people of committing a crime called revolution. Miliukov, while writing his three-volume editorial, was still trying to look for the instigators of the Russian unrest in Ludendorff's office. Cadet patriotism, as is known, consists in explaining the greatest events in the history of the Russian people through the direction of the Germans.

which agents, but strives in favor of the “Russian people” to take away Constantinople from the Turks. Miliukov's historical work worthily completes the political orbit of Russian national liberalism.

The revolution, like history in general, can only be understood as an objectively determined process. The development of peoples poses problems that cannot be solved by methods other than revolution. In certain eras these methods are imposed with such force that the entire nation is drawn into a tragic whirlpool. There is nothing more pathetic than moralizing about great social catastrophes! Spinoza’s rule is especially appropriate here: do not cry, do not laugh, but understand.

Problems of the economy, state, politics, law, but next to them there are also problems of family, personality, artistic creativity are put anew by the revolution and revised from bottom to top. There is not a single area of ​​human creativity in which truly national revolutions do not include great milestones. This alone, we note in passing, gives the most convincing expression to the monism of historical development. By exposing all the fabrics of society, the revolution throws a bright light on the main problems of sociology, that most unfortunate of sciences, which academic thought feeds with vinegar and kicks. Problems of the economy and the state, class and nation, party and class, individual and society are posed during great social upheavals with the utmost force of tension. If the revolution does not immediately resolve any of the issues that gave rise to it, creating only new prerequisites for their resolution, it exposes all the problems public life to end. And in sociology, more than anywhere else, the art of knowledge is the art of exposure.

There is no need to say that our work does not pretend to be complete. The reader has before him mainly the political history of the revolution. Economic issues are involved only insofar as they are necessary for understanding the political process. Problems of culture are completely left outside the scope of the study. We must not forget, however, that the process of revolution, that is, the direct struggle of classes for power, is, by its very essence, a political process.

Current page: 1 (book has 33 pages in total)

Leon Trotsky
February Revolution

PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION

The February Revolution is considered democratic a revolution in the proper sense of the word. Politically, it developed under the leadership of two democratic parties: the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. A return to the “legacies” of the February Revolution is still the official dogma of the so-called democracy. All this seems to give reason to think that democratic ideologists should have hastened to sum up the historical and theoretical results of the February experience, to reveal the reasons for its collapse, to determine what its “testaments” actually consisted of and what the path to their implementation was. Both democratic parties have also enjoyed significant leisure for over thirteen years, and each of them has a staff of writers who, in any case, cannot be denied experience. And yet we do not have a single noteworthy work by democrats on the democratic revolution. The leaders of the conciliatory parties clearly do not dare to restore the course of development of the February Revolution, in which they had the opportunity to play such a prominent role. Isn't it surprising? No, quite in order. The leaders of vulgar democracy are all the more wary of the actual February Revolution, the more boldly they swear by its ethereal precepts. The fact that they themselves occupied leadership positions for several months in 1917 is precisely what makes them turn their eyes away from the events of that time. For the deplorable role of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (how ironic this name sounds today!) reflected not just the personal weakness of the leaders, but the historical degeneration of vulgar democracy and the doom of the February Revolution as democratic.

The whole point is - and this is the main conclusion of this book - that the February Revolution was only a shell in which the core of the October Revolution was hidden. The history of the February Revolution is the history of how the October core freed itself from its conciliatory veils. If vulgar democrats dared to objectively present the course of events, they could no more call on anyone to return to February than one could call on an ear to return to the grain that gave birth to it. That is why the inspirers of the bastard February regime are now forced to turn a blind eye to their own historical culmination, which was the culmination of their failure.

One can, however, refer to the fact that liberalism, in the person of history professor Miliukov, nevertheless tried to settle scores with the “second Russian revolution.” But Miliukov does not at all hide the fact that he was only undergoing the February Revolution. There is hardly any possibility of classifying a national-liberal monarchist as a democracy, even a vulgar one, - not on the same basis, indeed, that he reconciled himself with the republic when there was nothing else left? But even leaving political considerations aside, Miliukov’s work on the February Revolution cannot in any sense be considered a scientific work. The leader of liberalism appears in his “History” as a victim, as a plaintiff, but not as a historian. His three books read like a drawn-out editorial from Rech in the days of the collapse of the Kornilov revolt. Miliukov accuses all classes and all parties of not helping his class and his party concentrate power in their hands. Miliukov attacks the democrats because they did not want or were unable to be consistent national liberals. At the same time, he himself is forced to testify that the more the democrats approached national liberalism, the more they lost their support among the masses. In the end, he has no choice but to accuse the Russian people of committing a crime called revolution. Miliukov, while writing his three-volume editorial, was still trying to look for the instigators of the Russian unrest in Ludendorff's office. Cadet patriotism, as is known, consists in explaining the greatest events in the history of the Russian people as directed by German agents, but but strives in favor of the “Russian people” to take Constantinople from the Turks. Miliukov's historical work worthily completes the political orbit of Russian national liberalism.

The revolution, like history in general, can only be understood as an objectively determined process. The development of peoples poses problems that cannot be solved by methods other than revolution. In certain eras these methods are imposed with such force that the entire nation is drawn into a tragic whirlpool. There is nothing more pathetic than moralizing about great social catastrophes! Spinoza’s rule is especially appropriate here: do not cry, do not laugh, but understand.

The problems of the economy, the state, politics, law, but next to them also the problems of the family, the individual, and artistic creativity are posed anew by the revolution and revised from bottom to top. There is not a single area of ​​human creativity in which truly national revolutions do not include great milestones. This alone, we note in passing, gives the most convincing expression to the monism of historical development. By exposing all the fabrics of society, the revolution throws a bright light on the main problems of sociology, that most unfortunate of sciences, which academic thought feeds with vinegar and kicks. Problems of the economy and the state, class and nation, party and class, individual and society are posed during great social upheavals with the utmost force of tension. Even if the revolution does not immediately resolve any of the issues that gave rise to it, creating only new preconditions for their resolution, it exposes all the problems of social life to the end. And in sociology, more than anywhere else, the art of knowledge is the art of exposure.

There is no need to say that our work does not pretend to be complete. The reader has before him mainly political history of the revolution. Economic issues are involved only insofar as they are necessary for understanding the political process. Problems of culture are completely left outside the scope of the study. We must not forget, however, that the process of revolution, that is, the direct struggle of classes for power, is, by its very essence, a political process.

The author hopes to publish the second volume of History, dedicated to the October Revolution, this fall.

L. Trotsky

PREFACE

In the first two months of 1917, Russia was still a Romanov monarchy. Eight months later, the Bolsheviks stood at the helm, about whom few people knew at the beginning of the year and whose leaders, at the very moment of coming to power, were still under charges of treason. You won’t find a second such sharp turn in history, especially if you don’t forget that we are talking about a nation of one and a half hundred million souls. It is clear that the events of 1917, no matter how you look at them, deserve study.

The history of the revolution, like any history, must first of all tell what happened and how. However, this is not enough. From the story itself it should become clear why it happened this way and not otherwise. Events can neither be considered as a chain of adventures, nor can they be strung on a thread of preconceived morality. They must obey their own law. The author sees his task in revealing it.

The most undeniable feature of revolution is the direct intervention of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, monarchical as well as democratic, rises above the nation; history is made by specialists in this field: monarchs, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those turning points, when the old order becomes further unbearable for the masses, they break down the barriers separating them from the political arena, overthrow their traditional representatives and, through their intervention, create the starting position for the new regime. Whether this is good or bad, we will leave it to moralists to judge. We ourselves take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of revolution is for us, first of all, the history of the violent invasion of the masses into the sphere of control of their own destinies.

In a revolution-ridden society, classes are fighting. It is quite obvious, however, that the changes that occur between the beginning of the revolution and the end of it, in the economic foundations of society and in the social substratum of classes, are completely insufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which, in a short period of time, overthrows age-old institutions, creates new ones and overthrows them again. . Dynamics of revolutionary events directly determined by rapid, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of the classes that had formed before the revolution.

The fact is that society does not change its institutions as needed, like a master updating his tools. On the contrary, practically it takes the institutions hanging over it as something given once and for all. For decades, opposition criticism has been only a safety valve for mass discontent and a condition for sustainability social order: criticism of social democracy, for example, has acquired such fundamental importance. We need completely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of individuals or parties, which break the shackles of conservatism from discontent and lead the masses to rebellion.

Rapid changes in mass views and sentiments in the era of revolution, therefore, do not stem from flexibility and mobility human psyche, but, on the contrary, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and attitudes from new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter befall people in the form of a catastrophe, gives rise during the revolution to a spasmodic movement of ideas and passions, which to the police heads seems to be a simple result of the activities of “demagogues.”

The masses enter the revolution not with a ready-made plan for social reconstruction, but with a keen sense of the impossibility of tolerating the old. Only the leading layer of the class has a political program, which, however, still needs verification of events and approval of the masses. The main political process of the revolution consists in the comprehension by the class of the tasks arising from the social crisis, in the active orientation of the masses using the method of successive approximations. Individual stages revolutionary process, consolidated by the replacement of some parties by others, more and more extreme, express the increasing pressure of the masses to the left, until the scope of the movement rests against objective obstacles. Then the reaction begins: disappointment of certain layers of the revolutionary class, growth of indifference and thereby strengthening of the positions of counter-revolutionary forces. This, at least, is the pattern of old revolutions.

Only by studying the political processes within the masses themselves can we understand the role of parties and leaders, whom we are least inclined to ignore. They constitute, although not an independent, but very important element of the process. Without a leading organization, the energy of the masses would dissipate, like steam not enclosed in a cylinder with a piston. But it is not the cylinder or the piston that moves, it is the steam that moves.

The difficulties that stand in the way of studying changes in mass consciousness during the era of revolution are completely obvious. The oppressed classes make history in factories, in barracks, in villages, on city streets. At the same time, they are least accustomed to writing it down. Periods of highest tension of social passions generally leave little room for contemplation and reflection. All muses, even the plebeian muse of journalism, despite her strong sides, have a hard time during the revolution. And yet the historian’s position is by no means hopeless. Records are incomplete, scattered, random. But in the light of the events themselves, these fragments often make it possible to guess the direction and rhythm of the underlying process. For better or worse, the revolutionary party bases its tactics on taking into account changes in mass consciousness. The historical path of Bolshevism testifies that such an account, at least in its rough outlines, is feasible. Why can’t what is accessible to a revolutionary politician in the whirlpool of struggle be accessible to a historian in hindsight?

However, the processes occurring in the consciousness of the masses are neither self-sufficient nor independent. No matter how angry idealists and eclectics may be, consciousness is still determined by being. In the historical conditions of the formation of Russia, its economy, its classes, its state, in the influence of other states on it, the prerequisites for the February Revolution and its successor, the October Revolution, should have been laid. Since the most mysterious thing still seems to be the fact that a backward country first put the proletariat in power, we have to look for the solution to this fact in advance in originality of this backward country, that is, in its differences from other countries.

The historical features of Russia and their share are characterized by us in the first chapters of the book, concluding short essay development of Russian society and its internal forces. We would hope that the inevitable sketchiness of these chapters will not discourage the reader. Throughout the rest of the book, he will encounter the same social forces in live action.

This work is in no way based on personal memories. The fact that the author was a participant in the events did not relieve him of the obligation to base his presentation on strictly verified documents. The author of the book speaks about himself, as he is forced to do so by the course of events, in the third person. And this is not a simple literary form: the subjective tone that is inevitable in an autobiography or memoir would be unacceptable in a historical work.

However, the fact that the author was a participant in the struggle naturally makes it easier for him to understand not only psychology characters, individual and collective, but also the internal connection of events. This advantage can give positive results if one condition is met: do not rely on the testimony of your memory, not only in small things, but also in large things, not only in relation to facts, but also in relation to motives or moods. The author believes that, as far as it depended on him, he complied with this condition.

The question remains about the political position of the author, who, as a historian, stands at the same point of view that he stood at as a participant in the events. The reader, of course, is not obliged to share the author's political views, which the latter has no reason to hide. But the reader has the right to demand that historical work should not be an apology for a political position, but an internally substantiated depiction of the real process of the revolution. Historical work only fully meets its purpose when events unfold on its pages in all their natural compulsion.

Is so-called historical “impartiality” necessary for this? No one has yet clearly explained what it should consist of. Clemenceau's oft-quoted words that the revolution must be accepted en bloc, as a whole, represent at best a witty subterfuge: how can one declare oneself a supporter of a whole whose essence lies in schism? Clemenceau’s aphorism was dictated partly by embarrassment for his overly decisive ancestors, and partly by the awkwardness of a descendant in front of their shadows.

One of the reactionary and therefore fashionable historians of modern France, L. Madeleine, who so salonally slandered the Great Revolution, i.e., the birth of the French nation, argues that “a historian must stand on the wall of a threatened city and at the same time see both the besiegers and the besieged”: This is the only way to achieve “reconciliatory justice.” However, the works of Madeleine himself indicate that if he climbs the wall separating the two camps, it is only as a spy for the reaction. It is good that in this case we are talking about the camps of the past: during the revolution, staying on the wall is fraught with great dangers. However, in anxious moments, the priests of “reconciling justice” usually sit within four walls, waiting to see which side will win.

What the serious and critical reader needs is not treacherous impartiality, which presents him with a cup of reconciliation with the well-settled poison of reactionary hatred at the bottom, but scientific conscientiousness, which, for its likes and dislikes, open, undisguised, seeks support in an honest study of facts, in establishing their real connection , in detecting the pattern of their movement. This is the only possible historical objectivism, and, moreover, it is quite sufficient, for it is tested and verified not by the good intentions of the historian, for which he himself vouches, but by the regularity of the historical process itself discovered by him.

* * *

The sources of this book are numerous periodicals, newspapers and magazines, memoirs, protocols and other materials, partly handwritten, but mainly published by the Institute for the History of the Revolution in Moscow and Leningrad. We considered it unnecessary to make references to individual publications in the text, as this would only confuse the reader. Of the books that have the nature of consolidated historical works, we used, in particular, the two-volume “Essays on the History of the October Revolution” (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927). Written by different authors, the components of these “Essays” have unequal value, but contain, in any case, abundant factual material.

The chronological dates of our book are indicated everywhere according to the old style, that is, they lag behind the world calendar, including the current Soviet calendar, by 13 days. The author was forced to use the calendar that was in force during the revolution. It would, however, not be difficult to convert the dates to the new style. But such an operation, while eliminating some difficulties, would give rise to others, more significant. The overthrow of the monarchy went down in history under the name of the February Revolution. According to the Western calendar, it occurred, however, in March. The armed demonstration against the imperialist policy of the Provisional Government went down in history under the name of “April days”, meanwhile, according to the Western calendar, it took place in May. Without dwelling on other intermediate events and dates, we also note that the October Revolution occurred, according to European reckoning, in November. The calendar itself, as we see, is colored by events, and the historian cannot deal with the revolutionary chronology using simple arithmetic operations. The reader is only pleased to remember that before overturning the Byzantine calendar, the revolution had to overthrow the institutions that held onto it.

L. Trotsky

FEATURES OF RUSSIA DEVELOPMENT

The main, most stable feature of the history of Russia is the slow nature of its development, with the consequent economic backwardness, primitiveness of social forms, and low level of culture.

The population of the gigantic and harsh plain, open to the eastern winds and Asian immigrants, was doomed by nature itself to a long lag. The fight against the nomads lasted almost until the end of the 17th century. The fight against the winds that bring cold in winter and drought in summer has not ended even now. Agriculture- the basis of all development - advanced along extensive paths: forests were cut down and burned in the North, virgin steppes were exploded in the South; mastery of nature went in breadth, not in depth.

While the Western barbarians settled on the ruins of Roman culture, where many old stones became for them building material, the Slavs of the East did not find any inheritance on the bleak plain: their predecessors stood at an even lower level than themselves. Western European peoples, soon running up against their natural borders, created economic and cultural clusters of industrial cities. The population of the eastern plain, at the first signs of crowding, went deeper into the forests or went to the outskirts, into the steppe. The most proactive and enterprising elements of the peasantry became townspeople, artisans, and merchants in the West. Active and courageous elements in the East became partly traders, and more – Cossacks, border guards, and colonialists. The process of social differentiation, intense in the West, was delayed and eroded in the East by the process of expansion. “The Tsar of Muscovy, although Christian, rules over people of a lazy mind,” wrote Vico, a contemporary of Peter I. The “lazy mind” of the Muscovites reflected the slow pace of economic development, the shapelessness of class relations, and the poverty of internal history.

The ancient civilizations of Egypt, India and China had a fairly self-sufficient character and had sufficient time to, despite their low productive forces, bring their social relations almost to the same detailed finish to which the artisans of these countries brought their products. Russia stood not only geographically between Europe and Asia, but also socially and historically. It was different from the European West, but also different from the Asian East, approaching one or the other in different periods with different features. The East gave rise to the Tatar yoke, which became an important element in the structure of the Russian state. The West was an even more formidable enemy, but at the same time a teacher. Russia did not have the opportunity to develop into the forms of the East, because it always had to adapt to the military and economic pressure of the West.

The existence of feudal relations in Russia, denied by previous historians, can be considered unconditionally proven by later research. Moreover: the basic elements of Russian feudalism were the same as in the West. But the very fact that feudal era had to be established through long scientific disputes, sufficiently testifies to the immaturity of Russian feudalism, its shapelessness, and the poverty of its cultural monuments.

A backward country assimilates the material and ideological gains of advanced countries. But this does not mean that she slavishly follows them, reproducing all stages of their past. The theory of recurrence of historical cycles - Vico and his later followers - is based on observations of the orbits of old, pre-capitalist cultures, partly the first experiences of capitalist development. The provinciality and episodic nature of the whole process was indeed associated with a certain recurrence of cultural stages in new and new centers. Capitalism, however, means overcoming these conditions. He prepared and, in a sense, realized the universality and permanence of human development. This excludes the possibility of repetition of the forms of development of individual nations. Forced to follow the lead of advanced countries, a backward country does not respect queues: the privilege of historical belatedness - and such a privilege exists - allows, or rather forces, to assimilate what is ready ahead of schedule, jumping over a number of intermediate stages. Savages exchange a bow for a rifle immediately, without going through the path that ran between these weapons in the past. European colonists in America did not start history over again. The fact that Germany or the United States are economically ahead of England is due precisely to the belatedness of their capitalist development. On the contrary, the conservative anarchy in the British coal industry, as in the minds of Macdonald and his friends, is a reckoning for the past, when England played the role of capitalist hegemon for too long. The development of a historically belated nation leads, of necessity, to a peculiar combination of different stages of the historical process. The orbit as a whole acquires an unplanned, complex combined character.

The possibility of jumping over intermediate steps is, of course, not absolute; its size is determined, in the end, by the economic and cultural capacity of the country. A backward nation, moreover, often reduces the ready-made achievements it borrows from outside by adapting them to its more primitive culture. The process of assimilation itself takes on a contradictory character. Thus, the introduction of elements of Western technology and training, primarily military and manufacturing, under Peter I led to the worsening of serfdom as the main form of labor organization. European arms and European loans - both are indisputable products of more high culture, - led to the strengthening of tsarism, which, in turn, hampered the development of the country.

Historical regularity has nothing to do with pedantic schematism. Unevenness, the most general law of the historical process, is revealed most sharply and most complexly in the fate of belated countries. Under the whip of external necessity, backwardness is forced to make leaps. From the universal law of unevenness follows another law, which, for lack of a more suitable name, can be called the law combined development, in the sense of bringing together different stages of the path, a combination of individual stages, an amalgam of archaic forms with the most modern. Without this law, taken, of course, in all its material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, as well as all countries in general of the second, third and tenth cultural call.

Under pressure more rich Europe the state absorbed a much larger relative share of the people's wealth in Russia than in the West, and thereby not only doomed the masses to double poverty, but also weakened the foundations of the propertied classes. Needing at the same time the support of the latter, it forced and regulated their formation. As a result, the bureaucratized privileged classes could never rise to their full height, and the state in Russia came ever closer to Asian despotism.

The Byzantine autocracy, officially adopted by the Moscow tsars from the beginning of the 16th century, humbled the feudal boyars with the help of the nobility and subjugated the nobility, enslaving the peasantry to it, in order to turn on this basis into St. Petersburg imperial absolutism. The belated nature of the whole process is sufficiently characterized by the fact that serfdom, having originated at the end of the 16th century, developed in the 17th century, reached its peak in the 18th century and was legally abolished only in 1861.

The clergy, following the nobility, played a significant role in the formation of the tsarist autocracy, but it was entirely a service role. The Church never rose in Russia to the same commanding heights as in the Catholic West: it was satisfied with the place of spiritual servants under the autocracy and attributed this to its humility. Bishops and metropolitans had power only as proteges of secular power. Patriarchs were replaced along with kings. During the St. Petersburg period, the dependence of the church on the state became even more slavish. The 200 thousand priests and monks were essentially part of the bureaucracy, a kind of religious police. To compensate for this, a monopoly Orthodox clergy in matters of faith, his lands and income were protected by the general police.

Slavophilism, the messianism of backwardness, built its philosophy on the fact that the Russian people and their church are thoroughly democratic, and official Russia is a German bureaucracy implanted by Peter. Marx remarked on this matter: “In the same way, the Teutonic asses blame the despotism of Frederick II, etc., on the French, as if backward slaves do not always need civilized slaves in order to undergo the necessary training.” This brief remark exhausts to the bottom not only the old philosophy of the Slavophiles, but also the newest revelations of the “racists”.

The poverty of not only Russian feudalism, but also of the entire old Russian history, found its most depressing expression in the absence of real medieval cities as craft and trade centers6. Crafts did not have time to separate from agriculture in Russia and retained the character of handicrafts. Old Russian cities were commercial, administrative, military and landowner cities, therefore consuming rather than producing centers. Even Novgorod, close to the Hansa and not knowing Tatar yoke, was only a commercial and not an industrial city. True, the dispersion of peasant industries across different regions created the need for trade intermediation on a large scale. But nomadic traders could in no way occupy in public life the place that in the West belonged to the craft-guild and commercial-industrial petty and middle bourgeoisie, inextricably linked with its peasant periphery. The main routes of Russian trade also led abroad, providing guidance for foreign trading capital from distant centuries and giving a semi-colonial character to the entire turnover in which the Russian merchant was an intermediary between Western cities and the Russian countryside. This kind economic relations received further development in the era of Russian capitalism and found its extreme expression in the imperialist war.

The insignificance of Russian cities, which most contributed to the development of the Asian type of state, excluded, in particular, the possibility of reformation, that is, the replacement of feudal-bureaucratic Orthodoxy with some modernized version of Christianity, adapted to the needs of bourgeois society. The struggle against the state church did not rise above the peasant sects, including the most powerful of them, the Old Believer schism.

A decade and a half before the Great french revolution In Russia, a movement of Cossacks, peasants and serf Ural workers broke out, known as the Pugachevshchina. What was missing from this formidable popular uprising to turn into a revolution? Third Estate. Without the industrial democracy of the cities, the peasant war could not develop into a revolution, just as the peasant sects could not rise to the reformation. The result of Pugachevism was, on the contrary, the strengthening of bureaucratic absolutism as a guardian of noble interests, which again justified itself in difficult times.

The Europeanization of the country, which formally began under Peter, increasingly became over the next century the need of the ruling class itself, that is, the nobility. In 1825, the noble intelligentsia, politically generalizing this need, came to a military conspiracy to limit the autocracy. Under the pressure of European bourgeois development, the advanced nobility therefore tried to replace the missing third estate. But it still wanted to combine the liberal regime with the foundations of its class rule and therefore was most afraid of raising up the peasants. It is not surprising if the conspiracy remained the enterprise of a brilliant but isolated officer, who broke their own heads almost without a fight. This is the meaning of the Decembrist uprising.

Landowners who owned factories were the first among their class to begin to lean in favor of replacing serf labor with civilian labor. The increasing export of Russian grain abroad also pushed in this direction. In 1861, the noble bureaucracy, relying on liberal landowners, carried out its peasant reform. Powerless bourgeois liberalism served as a submissive chorus during this operation. There is no need to say that tsarism resolved the main problem of Russia, i.e., the agrarian question, even more stingily and thievingly than the Prussian monarchy, over the next decade, resolved the main problem of Germany, i.e., its national unification. Solving problems of one class with the help of another is one of the combined methods characteristic of backward countries.

Current page: 1 (book has 32 pages total) [available reading passage: 18 pages]

Lev Davidovich Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution
Volume 1. February Revolution

N. A. Vasetsky. The prophet who was mistaken by half a century

The 20th century, which radically changed the face of civilization, the mentality of the inhabitants of the planet, which for the first time acutely raised the question of the survival of mankind, goes into the past.

In the process of rethinking the accumulated experience, which is inevitable in times of transition, the question also arises about our attitude to the October Revolution. The older generation has become accustomed to the idea that this is the main event of the 20th century, a logical result of the development of Russian society. Indeed, October did what none of the previous revolutions could do; he awakened the gigantic creative energy of millions of humiliated, exploited people who realized that it was their work, talent and patience that formed the basis of world civilization. Thanks to this revolution, on a planetary scale, it was possible to overcome the most terrible curse of an exploitative society - the alienation of the ordinary worker from politics, advanced culture, and a decent, prosperous life.

But the revolution also had a side, destructive significance. It split the world into two opposing socio-economic systems and aggravated social antagonisms in all parts of the Earth to the limit.

Opponents of October are still trying to cross out its main, creative content, to defame the experience of building a new society born of the October Revolution. It existed for almost three quarters of a century. Taking into account historical path of humanity is an insignificantly small period of time: half a day in the life of an individual. But what has been done over three quarters of a century will forever remain in the memory of peoples. Their fates are inseparable from the history of the Great October Revolution.

The author of this book was one of the staunch defenders of the October Revolution, participation in which he considered the most important work of his life. He defends the revolution from its obvious and hidden enemies, including those who in post-revolutionary Russia tried to push the country off the path it had chosen in 1917. Many Soviet historians at one time condemned Trotsky for his criticism of Stalin and other leaders of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) who came to power after Lenin’s death. But now it is clear that this criticism was largely fair, because it was Stalin and his entourage who laid the foundation for the coming degeneration of the leadership of the ruling party.

Trotsky connected his life with the revolution from a young age. He looked at it as the work of millions of people, the highest manifestation of their social activity and initiative. He saw how, after Lenin, the gains of the October Revolution were treated in Russia, but he never called for abandonment of them, for change political system created in the fire of revolution. Until the end of his life he remained a supporter Soviet power, ideas of proletarian internationalism, bowed to the names of Marx, Engels, highly valued other authorities of Marxism and especially Lenin after his death.

Few of Trotsky's critics questioned his revolutionary conviction, faith in the triumph of the ideas of social justice, and his recognition of the real successes of the Soviet Union. At the same time, this literature analyzes Trotsky’s political attitudes and actions, which objectively contributed to the discrediting and weakening of the USSR and the entire international communist movement. Of course, the work offered to the reader is not indisputable in everything. Its value lies in the fact that it was written by an active participant in the events covered, who knows them not only from documents. In this sense, the book, published for the first time in Russia, will occupy a prominent place in the domestic literature about October.

But the value of the book is also great because it was written not only by a memoirist and publicist (such as D. Reed, A. Shlyapnikov, N. Sukhanov, A. Denikin, etc.), but also by a researcher who sought to give a scientifically objective, as he imagined, the picture greatest event XX century based on Marxist methodology. He was the first of the prominent participants in the revolution to create (dictate during breaks between negotiations in Brest-Litovsk) a historical essay about the October Revolution, and he actually completed the comprehension of its lessons undertaken by active participants in the revolutionary events of 1917. Almost all of them by this time either repeated official historical concepts or remained silent due to various reasons. Trotsky managed to say what he wanted to say. And not a single historian of October can write its history without referring to the work of Trotsky.

Of course, the book being published is not free from overexposures and omissions made to please the political situation: Trotsky hated Stalin, did not hide this hatred, and, perhaps more than anyone, dreamed of deposing and discrediting the leader of the CPSU(b). However, against the background of what was said in the world after Trotsky about the October Revolution and its leaders, the book can be considered completely objective. But echoes of long-standing political disputes are still felt in it. The modern reader may not notice them. Therefore, let us allow ourselves to analyze the very historical concept that Trotsky used as the basis for his work.

By temperament, Trotsky is a man of revolutionary action. Revolution for him is not only a subject of study, but above all an arena of political struggle. He cannot forgive Stalin that, on his orders, Soviet historians deprived the picture of the October Revolution of many of the features of revolutionary radicalism dear to Trotsky. For him, any revolution is good, even unprepared, immature and therefore doomed to defeat. Both the scope and pace of the revolution should be determined not by the capabilities of the social forces carrying it out, but by the mindset of the avant-garde, its readiness for decisive action, and, in extreme cases, for death. Reproaches for the lack of decisiveness and courage among the leaders of the revolution are the leitmotif of Trotsky’s vivid presentation of the events of the past. The emphasis on decisive actions bordering on extremism and on running ahead has been and remains characteristic feature Trotskyist revolutionary romanticism. Some called him the "demon of the revolution." But it would be more correct to recognize Trotsky as the prophet of revolutionary violence, revolutionary destruction. If for Lenin the famous line of A. Kots “We will destroy the whole world of violence” is just a poetic metaphor, then Trotsky considered it necessary to destroy everything: the pre-October system, the pre-October culture, the pre-October economy, and ultimately historical Russia itself.

It cannot be said that he did not love Russia, but he saw it only as he saw it. And why she and the party chose “the most outstanding mediocrity”, i.e. Stalin, over him, a European-educated politician, he never understood.

The author’s subjectivist approach to assessing phenomena real life, unfortunately, is present in a number of cases in this book. He was one of the first to see the closeness of the socialist perspective for Russia in 1917. But if Lenin proceeded from an assessment of the state of class forces in the country, from an analysis of its place in the system of international relations, then Trotsky was pushed to this conclusion by the “original”, in Lenin’s words, theory of “permanent revolution”. Following this theory, the author of the book interprets the events of 1917. The April crisis for Lenin - important stage struggle to attract the masses to the side of the revolutionary vanguard. For Trotsky, this is a missed opportunity for the workers and peasants to seize power. The same thing, in his opinion, was repeated in June and July. And only in October Lenin, with the support of Trotsky, broke the resistance of the “strikebreakers” and allegedly forced the party to “make” a revolution. In the same way, by pushing from without and from within, according to Trotsky, the world revolution should have been accomplished.

Now, thanks to the works of L.N. Gumilyov, the concept of “passionarity” came into scientific use. Each nation in its development goes through successive cycles of rise, decline, and new revival. The peak is a state of passionarity (from French word“passion”), i.e., maximum disclosure of the creative powers of the people. For Russia, these high points of approximately hundred-year cycles were the Battle of Kulikovo, liberation from the Horde yoke, the end of the Time of Troubles, Peter's reforms, the War of 1812 and, finally, the October Revolution, and after it the Great Patriotic War. Will the state of Russia become passionary at the beginning of the next century?

Russian passionarity during the times of three revolutions gave birth to a galaxy of extraordinary personalities, whose names will forever remain in history. Among them is Trotsky, a passionate advocate of universal social reconstruction.

Until recently, any novice historian in the USSR adopted the point of view that this figure is an irreconcilable enemy of Leninism, a de facto ally of world imperialism, a falsifier of the history of the CPSU. Moreover, Trotsky’s works, hidden in special storage facilities, were judged, as a rule, by counter-propaganda literature, published to expose everyone whose views did not fit into the canons of official historiography. Today, when it is possible to publish any publication, the book market still suffers from a lack of fundamental literature, including on October topics. This work of Trotsky is also not on book shelves. Therefore, the first Russian edition of Trotsky’s largest work is an event that will undoubtedly be noted by the reading public, especially in the year of the 80th anniversary of the February and October revolutions.

Now there are many common, usually superficial, judgments about these historical events, and above all about the October Revolution, which was at first cursed by the bourgeois world, then was recognized as a natural phenomenon, albeit within the framework of Russia alone, and is now again presented as the starting point of its fall at the end of the 20th century.

However, no matter how you replay the past in a modern way, it will not become “smarter” or “stupid”, and therefore, more understandable. Unlike the present and the future, the past has already happened. His history, of course, can be found in Once again rewrite without regard to anything. But this will not be history, but a surrogate politicized for the sake of new trends. And no more.

But the revolution, with all the ideological and political struggle around it yesterday and today, was and will remain an integral part of our history, which cannot be brushed aside, otherwise history itself cannot be understood.

Of course, from the height of modern scientific knowledge, many provisions of Trotsky’s work look obviously controversial. But there can be no full-fledged historiography without returning to it forgotten and half-forgotten ideas, accepted or rejected, true or false, if they had supporters, if they were discussed, if they were argued about.

There is no doubt that the History of the Russian Revolution contains such ideas. Many of them found themselves at the center of the internal party struggle of the 20s and 30s. Trotsky, who was defeated in it, wanted to bring the past back, as it were, to replay or complete what had already been done (or not done) in the corresponding period of time.

Acute mental pain (he could have, but he didn’t!) haunted Trotsky while working on “History...” and excited his imagination. Therefore, the question arises: how reliable is what Trotsky wrote? The author of a three-volume biography of Trotsky, I. Deutscher, well-known in the West, believed that in “History ... “he deliberately belittled his role in the revolution and emphasized Lenin’s role in it. According to Deutscher, Trotsky looked clearly more significant on the pages of Pravda, in anti-Bolshevik newspapers and in the reports of the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the RSDLP(b) itself, than on the pages of the book he wrote. 1
Deutscher I. Trotsky in exile. M., 1991. P. 304.

One can hardly agree with this. Trotsky writes about Lenin in the same way as was already customary in the October Leninian movement, which was created with the participation of Trotsky himself. But at the same time, he uses Lenin’s material to justify the identity of his position with Lenin’s in 1917.

A minimal acquaintance with what Trotsky wrote about Lenin before “History...” is enough to come to an unambiguous conclusion: while working on the October theme, Trotsky tried to correct his pre-October assessments and conclusions, so to speak, to “Leninize” them as much as possible. This was done in order to “take refuge” in the shadow of Lenin, to bring Leninism closer to Trotskyism and to remove the latter from the fire of criticism.

A similar technique, first used by Trotsky in the early 1920s, was noticed during the literary discussion of his “Lessons of October”. In this brochure, as well as in the works “About Lenin”, “ New course"(1924) in Trotsky you can find any amount of evidence of how, while pronouncing Lenin’s praises, he essentially interpreted Lenin’s views and actions in such a way that Lenin began to resemble a completely different person... Trotsky himself. For example, in the New Course, after briefly mentioning Lenin’s (truly outstanding) ability to make theoretical generalizations about the politics of sharp turns - Trotsky’s favorite use of words - he gave the following definition: “Leninism, as a system of revolutionary action, presupposes a revolutionary instinct, trained by reflection and experience, which in the social sphere is the same as muscular sensation in physical labor.” 2
Trotsky L.D. TO history of the Russian revolution. M., 1990. P. 191.

In “Lessons of October,” Trotsky, although he did not use the word “intuition,” made it clear that in 1917 it was thanks to this instinct that Lenin was able to move to the position of the theory of “permanent revolution,” taking the only “right” step in those extremely confusing circumstances .

Of course, Lenin in 1917 listened to the opinion of Trotsky (as well as other comrades-in-arms) and took him into account. But in matters of principle, he was unbending, firmly and sometimes very harshly defended his position, based on a brilliant mastery of the Marxist method. Lenin was one of the breed of political “wolfhounds”. And in the real situation of 1917, it was not Lenin who studied with Trotsky, but Trotsky with him (though not always successfully). Without this, there would not have been the alliance that formed on the eve of October between two politicians who had recently treated each other with great distrust, and even hostility.

Objecting to Deutscher, it should be noted that Trotsky used his historical works not to belittle his own role, but, on the contrary, to highlight it, or even exaggerate it. This especially applies to the period of immediate preparation for the uprising. In this respect, he is the direct opposite of Lenin. Vladimir Ilyich does not have a single overexposure in assessing his role in the revolution: everywhere in the foreground is the party, its Central Committee, the activists, the masses. For Trotsky, it’s the other way around: the masses are the background, the party is the instrument. Moreover, the activists often make mistakes, the Central Committee interferes, Lenin is isolated. And yet the revolution wins. The quick-witted reader should have understood why, but for the slow-witted, remarks are scattered throughout the book: Trotsky called, Trotsky foresaw, Trotsky was ahead of the lengthy memoirs and biographical evidence: where he was, with whom he talked, what position he held.

And one more preliminary consideration. During the first three years of the third emigration, Trotsky wrote two volumes of “My Life”, “Permanent Revolution”, three books of “History of the Russian Revolution”, a dozen issues of the “Bulletin of the Opposition” were published, each with a volume of 6-8 printed sheets, 90-95 percent of which filled with texts from Trotsky himself. Of course, many themes and plots in these printed publications overlapped and were repeated. But it’s still a huge amount of work. How strong is it for one person? Moreover, what he wrote at that time was several times larger in volume than everything that came from his pen during the ten years of his second emigration. But then Trotsky was much younger, practically did not experience the attacks of epilepsy that tormented him in the 30s.

Let us assume that during this period Trotsky had more literary experience and the time necessary for creativity. He worked on “History...” while in a secluded villa, bought for a pittance from one of the impoverished Turkish pashas, ​​in the remote village of Biyuk Ada on the island of Prinkipo, located an hour and a half sailing along the Sea of ​​Marmara from Constantinople. There were no cinemas or other public institutions here that could occupy the time of Trotsky, so greedy for external impressions. Even cars were prohibited from driving around the village. But still, the answer, in all likelihood, should be sought not in this, but in the author’s environment. He was the first among Soviet leaders who began to use a wide staff of employees of his apparatus, and then volunteer assistants in the person of young Trotskyists from different countries world, which later formed the backbone of the Trotskyist movement. Without their help, and often actual co-authorship, Trotsky would not have been able to create even a tenth of what he wrote in the post-October period.

Actually, he himself did not hide the participation of many people in the creation of his works, expressing gratitude in the prefaces to N. Lenzner, M. Glazman, Y. Blyumkin, N. Sermuks and many other assistants. And not only for editorial or technical work. Many ideas came from them, which were then developed in detail either by themselves or, as a rule, by the already nameless “second rank” of Trotsky’s entourage, materialized in dozens of reports, articles, brochures, books published under his name.

I am sure that when in 1938 Trotsky wrote an obituary on the death of his eldest son Lev Sedov, a gifted, educated and efficient man, he did not just pay tribute to the memory of his loved one, one of the best comrades in the third emigration. There is something much more here. No wonder Trotsky wrote that without the materials, archival and library research supplied to him by his son, “none of the works I have written over the last ten years would have been possible, in particular “The History of the Russian Revolution”... Almost all my books since 1929 had to It would be fair to write my son’s name next to my name.” 3
Opposition Bulletin. 1938. March. No. 64 S. 4.

In fact, Trotsky managed to organize an entire scientific institute for the production of their new works and the republication of already published ones. It is no coincidence that, say, when in 1933 he found himself in France, and then in Norway and Mexico, deprived of the help of his comrades, especially from Russia, his creative potential decreased significantly. But, of course, the main thing in his works is what was conceived, thought out, and formulated by the author himself. And in this sense, “History...” is Trotsky’s personal and undoubtedly best work on historical topics.

The sum of ideas formulated in “History...” deserves special analysis. First of all, this concerns the theory of “permanent revolution”. Today, this seemingly clear question has become unexpectedly complicated. A number of researchers, including such prominent ones as V.I. Startsev, V.V. Shelokhaev and others, directly or indirectly began to revise the point of view established in historical literature about the difference between the Leninist and Trotskyist concepts of revolution. At the same time, they borrow arguments from the second copy of the (unsigned) typewritten text of Trotsky’s article “Permanent Revolution and Lenin’s Line” preserved in the archive.

This copy was sent by Trotsky in October 1928 from Alma-Ata to K. Radek, who was in exile in the Urals. In the margins of the text there are numerous and, as a rule, disapproving notes from Radek. The dispute between them did not arise by chance. Under the influence of events, Trotsky’s former allies in the united “left” opposition began writing letters of repentance en masse. Some of them made an attempt to revise the very basis of the opposition movement - the theory of “permanent revolution”. E. Preobrazhensky directly stated: “We, the old Bolsheviks in the opposition, must dissociate ourselves from Trotsky on the issue of permanent revolution.” 4
Quote By: Deutscher J. Trotsky. Le Prophete ctesarme. Paris, 1965. Vol. 2. P. 568.

Radek supported Preobrazhensky. In the opinion of both, the Chinese revolution of 1926–1927, although it was defeated, confirmed the validity of Lenin’s theory of the “stages of revolution”: its development from bourgeois-democratic to socialist, and not the Trotskyist theory of “permanent revolution” with a focus on the immediate establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China . Trotsky was forced to get involved in polemics with former like-minded people.

How could this affect the mindset of the opposition? What was at stake was the main thing that the “left” opposition was invariably proud of - the most holistic, as it seemed to them, revolutionary ideology, and therefore the very future of the opposition movement. But Trotsky understood that if he alienated people like Preobrazhensky and Radek, then who would he be left with?

Therefore, Trotsky chooses the only form of polemic justified under the circumstances. He does not directly criticize any of his opponents, but simply seeks to infuriate his own position. Moreover, comparing it with Lenin’s theory of the development of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one.

One of Trotsky’s main arguments was that the misunderstanding between him and Lenin regarding the theory of “permanent revolution” arose solely due to the fact that Lenin simply “forgot to read” his pamphlet “Results and Prospects” (1905), which set out the initial positions of Trotskyist theory. But even if this is so, Lenin was well aware of dozens of other publications of his opponent, which in one way or another substantiated the main thing in Trotskyism - the theory of “permanent revolution”.

Trotsky also put forward the thesis that his differences with Lenin on issues of the theory of revolution ended by the spring of 1917. In the appendix to the first volume of “History...” Trotsky claims that, while in New York in the spring of 1917, in “American articles” he substantiated “the same view of the development of the revolution that was reflected in Lenin’s theses on April 4.” 5
See present. ed. T. 1.S. 452.

American articles by Trotsky - “Revolution in Russia”, “Two Faces (Internal Forces of the Russian Revolution)”, “Growing Conflict”, “War or Peace?”, “From whom and how to protect the revolution?”, “Who are the traitors?” – were published from March 16 to 22 in the New York newspaper “New World”. Later they were reproduced by him in the book “War and Revolution”. This includes his article “1905–1917 (Immediate tasks of the current revolution),” which appeared in April 1917 in the magazine “Zukunft,” published by the left circles of the Jewish labor movement in New York.

Regarding these articles, in the afterword to “Lessons of October,” Trotsky wrote: “The first stage of the revolution and its prospects are illuminated in articles written in America. I think that in all essentials they are quite consistent with the analysis of the revolution given by Lenin in his “Letters from Afar.” 6
Trotsky L. Essays. T. 3, part 1. P. LXV.

Unfortunately, neither in “Lessons of October”, nor in “History...” Trotsky did not specify what he and Lenin fully agreed with. This was done by Lenzner, the editor of Trotsky’s collected works.

In the notes to the first part of the 3rd volume of Trotsky’s collected works, which was published in 1924, Lenzner wrote: “Letters from afar,” like the real articles (i.e., Trotsky’s articles in Novy Mir. - N.V.), They see in the creation of the Provisional Government only the first stage of the revolution. Based on the premise of the presence of three political forces: the tsarist reaction, the bourgeois-landowner elements and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, the "Letters" also paint the prospect of the future civil war, as a result of which power will pass to the Government of the Soviets. In “Letters from Afar” it is not yet clear, but in Comrade Lenin’s theses “On the tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution” the question is more clearly raised not about a parliamentary republic and not even about a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, but about the Soviet Republic, i.e. ... dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of the socialist revolution: “Who says Now only about the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, he is behind the times, and because of this moved in fact, to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle, he must be handed over to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary rarities (one can call it: the archive of the “old Bolsheviks”) (Collected Works of V. Lenin, volume XIV part I, p. 29).” 7
Cm.: Lenin V.I. Poly. collection Op. T. 31 P. 134.

Lenzner, following Trotsky, believed that Lenin's and Trotsky's answers to the fundamental questions of the revolution were identical. “Articles by L.D. Trotsky, written in America, almost entirely anticipated the political tactics of revolutionary social democracy, he wrote in his notes. The main conclusions of these articles coincide almost to detail with the political perspectives that were developed by Lenin in his famous “Letters from Afar.”

Of course, Lenzner had certain grounds for such a statement. Indeed, both Lenin and Trotsky believed that the Provisional Government was not able to solve any of the key issues of the current moment: to give the country peace, the working people - bread, the peasants - land, the peoples and nations of the outskirts - the right to self-determination. Therefore, both considered it necessary to refuse support for the Provisional Government.

Both Lenin and Trotsky sought to ensure that the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, being an organ of democracy, took into its own hands the fullness of state power or, more precisely, returned what it voluntarily, under the influence of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, gave to the bourgeoisie.

Both Lenin and Trotsky saw the peasantry as a reliable ally of the proletariat. Both proposed as a key demand the confiscation of landowners' lands and their transfer to the peasantry. “If they take the land,” Lenin said about the peasants, “rest assured that they will not give it to you, they will not ask us.” 8
Cm.: Lenin V.I. Poly. collection Op. T. 31 P. 110.

Trotsky was of the same opinion: “If the revolution transfers to the Russian peasants the land belonging to the tsar and the landowners, then the peasants will defend their property with all their might against the monarchist counter-revolution.” 9
Trotsky L. Essays. T, 3, part 1. P. 28.

But, seeing in the peasantry an ally of the revolutionary proletariat, he was still extremely skeptical about the prospects of such a union and was inclined to view it as a purely temporary measure, born of the expectation of socialist revolutions in industrialized countries. Therefore, he believed that the proletariat should not make any concessions to the peasantry. “It would be a crime,” he wrote, “to solve this problem (of winning the peasant masses to the side of the proletariat. - N.V.) by adapting our policy to the national-patriotic limitations of the countryside..." 10
Trotsky L.

Finally, both Lenin and Trotsky assumed that the revolution in Russia would give impetus to the revolution in Europe, so they called for a stronger alliance with the proletariat of other countries. “If the Russian peasant does not decide the revolution,” Lenin wrote, “the German worker will decide it.” 11
Lenin V.I. Full collection Op. T. 31. P. 110.

Trotsky interpreted this connection in an even more strictly determined manner, actually making the success of the Russian revolution directly dependent on its support by the proletariat of other states. “...The Russian worker would commit suicide, paying for his connection with the peasant at the cost of breaking his connection with the European proletariat.” 12
Trotsky L. Essays. T. 3, part 1. P. 18.

It is striking, however, when comparing these approaches that Lenin and Trotsky imagined the ways and methods of implementing the tasks facing the country, the timing and order of their implementation, and finally, those specific social and political forces that were capable of carrying out their plans. -different.

Lenin proceeded from the uniqueness of the current moment, which consisted in the development of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one, the transition from the first stage of the revolution to the second, and therefore his approach was distinguished by realism, the desire to ensure the maximum possible under given conditions and with a given alignment of class forces. “The uniqueness of the current moment in Russia consists in transition from the first stage of the revolution, which gave power to the bourgeoisie due to the insufficient consciousness and organization of the proletariat, wrote Lenin, to the second its stage, which should give power into the hands of the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry.” 13
Lenin V.I. Full collection Op. T. 31. P. 114.

Trotsky was guided by the scheme of continuity, without stages of the revolution. He compared the February Revolution with the French late XVIII century. In France, the main driving force was, in his opinion, the urban petty bourgeoisie, which held the influence of the peasant masses. In Russia, the urban petty bourgeoisie played an insignificant role, since its economic position in society was extremely weak. Russian capitalism, Trotsky believed, acquired from the very beginning high degree concentration and centralization, and this was especially true in relation to the military industry, which belonged to the state. The Russian proletariat opposed the Russian bourgeoisie as class to class even on the threshold of the first Russian revolution in 1905. From this they drew the conclusion that the revolution that began in Russia, by its nature, should immediately be a proletarian revolution, without any transitional forms or intermediate steps.

Trotsky defended this point of view virtually until the end of his life. Even in “The History of the Russian Revolution,” which he wrote with a significant correction of his views taking into account Lenin’s works, he, wondering why the Petrograd Soviet in the person of Chkheidze, Tsereteli and other compromisers voluntarily transferred power to the Provisional Government, characterized this fact as the paradox of February. There really was a paradox. But not in the sense in which Trotsky understood it: they say, if the Soviet had not given power to the bourgeoisie, there would have been not a bourgeois, but a proletarian revolution. This voluntary surrender of positions by the Soviet spoke of a paradox of another kind - about the deep gap between the doctrine of Menshevism, the meaning of which was reduced to a dogmatic, monochromatic interpretation of the revolutionary process (since the revolution is bourgeois, it means that the bourgeoisie must lead it), and reality, which testified to the conservatism of the Russian bourgeoisie and the emergence of the proletariat into the role of hegemon already at the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution.

True, in the above-mentioned article, which became the subject of his polemics with Radek, he wrote: “Permanent revolution did not at all mean for me political activity jumping over the democratic stage of the revolution, as well as through its more particular stages... I formulated the tasks of the next stages of the revolution in the same way as Lenin..." 14
RCKHIDNI. F. 325. Op.1. D. 368. L 4.

But literally two years later, in the book “Permanent Revolution,” he stated otherwise: “Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik government, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is and cannot be anything in between, that is, no democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants.” 15
Trotsky L. D. To the history of the Russian revolution. M., 199 °C 285.

A year earlier, in one of the first program documents of the “internationalist left” opposition, “The struggle of the Bolsheviks-Leninists (opposition) in the USSR. Against capitulation,” Trotsky insisted on the same thing: “Between the regime of Kerensky and Chiang Kai-shek, on the one hand, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other, there is and cannot be any middle, intermediate revolutionary regime, and whoever puts forward its bare formula is shamefully deceives the workers of the East, preparing new catastrophes.” 16
Opposition Bulletin. 1929. September. No. 3 4 P. 9.

The History of the Russian Revolution can be considered Trotsky's central work in terms of volume, strength of presentation and completeness of expression of Trotsky's ideas about the revolution. As a story about the revolution of one of the main characters, this work is unique in world literature - this is how the famous Western historian I. Deutscher assessed this book. Nevertheless, it was never published either in the USSR or in Russia and is only now being offered to the Russian reader. The first volume is dedicated political history February revolution.

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The given introductory fragment of the book History of the Russian Revolution. Volume I (L. D. Trotsky) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

FIVE DAYS

February 23 was International Women's Day. It was supposed to be celebrated in Social Democratic circles in the general manner: meetings, speeches, leaflets. The day before, it never occurred to anyone that Women’s Day could become the first day of the revolution. None of the organizations called for strikes that day. Moreover, even the Bolshevik organization, and the most militant one at that: the Vyborg District Committee, which was all workers, kept them from strikes. The mood of the masses, as evidenced by Kayurov, one of the worker leaders of the region, was very tense, each strike threatened to turn into an open clash. And since the committee believed that the time had not come for military action: the party was not strong enough, and the workers had few connections with the soldiers, it decided not to call for strikes, but to prepare for revolutionary uprisings in the uncertain future. This was the line the committee pursued on the eve of February 23, and it seemed that everyone accepted it. But the next morning, contrary to all directives, textile workers from several factories went on strike and sent delegates to the metalworkers with an appeal to support the strike. “Reluctantly,” writes Kayurov, the Bolsheviks agreed to this, followed by the workers - the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. But since there is a mass strike, then we need to call everyone into the streets and become the leader ourselves: Kayurov made this decision, and the Vyborg Committee had to approve. “The idea of ​​an action had long been ripening among the workers, only at that moment no one imagined what it would lead to.” Let us remember this testimony of the participant, which is very important for understanding the mechanics of events.

It was considered certain in advance that, in the event of a demonstration, the soldiers would be taken out of the barracks into the streets, against the workers. Where it leads? It's wartime, the authorities are not inclined to joke. But, on the other hand, a “reserve” wartime soldier is not an old regular army soldier. Is he really that formidable? There was a lot of discussion on this topic in revolutionary circles, but rather abstractly, because no one, absolutely no one - this can be categorically stated on the basis of all the materials - thought at that time that the day of February 23 would be the beginning of a decisive attack on absolutism. It was a demonstration with uncertain, but in any case limited, prospects.

The fact, therefore, is that the February Revolution began from below, overcoming the opposition of their own revolutionary organizations, and the initiative was voluntarily taken by the most oppressed and oppressed part of the proletariat - textile workers, among them, presumably, many soldiers' wives. The final impetus was the increase in grain tails. About 90 thousand women and workers went on strike that day. The fighting spirit resulted in demonstrations, rallies and clashes with the police. The movement developed in the Vyborg region, with its large enterprises, and from there spread to the St. Petersburg side. In other parts of the city, according to the secret police, there were no strikes or demonstrations. On this day, military units, apparently not numerous, were called to help the police, but there were no clashes with them. A mass of women, and not only workers, went to the City Duma demanding bread. It was the same as demanding milk from a goat. Appeared in different parts the cities had red banners, and the inscriptions on them testified that the working people wanted bread, but did not want either autocracy or war. Women's Day was a success, with excitement and no casualties. But even by evening no one had any idea what he was hiding within himself.

The next day, the movement not only did not fall, but doubled: about half of the industrial workers of Petrograd went on strike on February 24. Workers show up at the factories in the morning without starting work, open rallies, and then begin marches to the center. New areas and new population groups are being drawn into the movement. The slogan: “Bread” is pushed aside or blocked by the slogans: “Down with autocracy” and “Down with war.” Continuous demonstrations on Nevsky Prospekt: ​​first, compact masses of workers, singing revolutionary songs, later a motley city crowd, wearing blue student caps. “The walking public treated us sympathetically, and from some of the infirmaries the soldiers greeted us with whatever wave they could.” How many realized what this sympathetic waving of sick soldiers at the demonstrators brings with it? But the Cossacks continuously, albeit without bitterness, attacked the crowd, their horses were in soap; the demonstrators dispersed and closed in again. There was no fear in the crowd. “The Cossacks promise not to shoot,” it was passed from mouth to mouth. Obviously, the workers had conversations with individual Cossacks. Later, however, half-drunk dragoons appeared cursing, crashed into the crowd, and began beating them on the heads with pikes. The demonstrators held on with all their might without running away. "They won't shoot." Indeed, they didn’t shoot.

The liberal senator observed dead trams on the streets - or was it the next day, and his memory failed him? - some with broken windows, and others sideways on the ground near the rails, and recalled the July days of 1914, on the eve of the war: “It seemed that the old attempt was being renewed.” The senator's eye did not deceive him - the continuity was obvious: history picked up the ends of the revolutionary thread broken by the war and tied them in a knot.

Throughout the day, crowds of people flowed from one part of the city to another, were intensively dispersed by the police, detained and pushed back by cavalry and partly infantry units. Along with shouting “down with the police!” “Hurray!” was heard more and more often. at the address of the Cossacks. It was significant. The crowd showed ferocious hatred towards the police. Mounted policemen were driven away with whistles, stones, and ice shards. The workers approached the soldiers in a completely different way. Around the barracks, near the sentries, patrols and chains, groups of men and women stood and exchanged friendly words with them. It was new stage, which arose from the growth of the strike and from the confrontation between the workers and the army. This stage is inevitable in every revolution. But it always seems new and is really presented in a new way every time: people who read and wrote about it do not recognize it by sight.

In the State Duma on that day it was said that a huge mass of people completely flooded the entire Znamenskaya Square, the entire Nevsky Prospekt and all the adjacent streets, and that a completely unprecedented phenomenon was observed: the Cossacks and regiments with music were seen off by a revolutionary, not patriotic crowd with the cry of “Hurray” . When asked what all this meant, the first person they met answered the deputy: “The policeman hit the woman with a whip, the Cossacks stood up and drove the police away.” Whether it really happened this way or otherwise, no one can verify this. But the crowd believed that it was so, that it was possible. This faith did not fall from the sky, it arose from previous experience and therefore should have become the key to victory.

Workers of Erickson, one of the leading factories in the Vyborg region, after a morning meeting, the entire mass of 2,500 people went out onto Sampsonievsky Prospekt and at a bottleneck came across the Cossacks. The officers were the first to crash into the crowd, breaking through the road with the chests of their horses. Cossacks gallop behind them across the entire width of the avenue. Decisive moment! But the horsemen rode carefully, in a long ribbon, through the corridor the officers had just laid out. “Some of them smiled,” recalls Kayurov, “and one gave the workers a nice wink.” It was not for nothing that the Cossack winked. The workers became bolder with a courage that was friendly, and not hostile, to the Cossacks and slightly infected the latter with it. The wink found imitators. Despite new attempts by the officers, the Cossacks, without openly violating discipline, did not forcefully disperse the crowd, but flowed through it. This was repeated three or four times, and this brought both sides even closer. The Cossacks began to answer the workers’ questions one by one and even engage in casual conversations. What remained of discipline was the thinnest and most transparent shell, which threatened to break through. The officers hastened to tear the crossing away from the crowd and, abandoning the idea of ​​dispersing the workers, placed the Cossacks across the street as a barrier to prevent the demonstrators from getting to the center. And this did not help: standing still honorably, the Cossacks did not, however, prevent the workers from “diving” under the horses. The revolution does not arbitrarily choose its paths: in its first steps it advanced towards victory under the belly of a Cossack horse. Wonderful episode! And the narrator’s eye is remarkable, capturing all the twists and turns of the process. No wonder, the narrator was a leader, there were over two thousand people behind him: the eye of the commander, who is afraid of enemy whips or bullets, looks vigilantly.

The turning point in the army seemed to take place primarily in the Cossacks, the original pacifiers and punitive forces. This does not mean, however, that the Cossacks were more revolutionary than others. On the contrary, these strong owners, riding their horses, valuing their Cossack characteristics, disdainful of simple peasants, distrustful of workers, contained many elements of conservatism. But that is precisely why the changes caused by the war were more clearly visible to them. And besides, it was they who were pulled in all directions, they were sent, they were brought face to face with the people, they were nervous and were the first to be tested. They were tired of all this, they wanted to go home and winked: do it, if you can, we won’t interfere. However, all these were just significant symptoms. An army is still an army, it is bound by discipline, and the main threads are in the hands of the monarchy. The working masses are unarmed. The leaders are not even thinking about the decisive outcome.

On this day, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, among other issues, the issue of unrest in the capital was raised. Strike? Demonstrations? Not for the first time. Everything has been provided for, orders have been given. Easy transition to the next task.

What are the orders? Despite the fact that during the 23rd and 24th, 28 policemen were beaten, the accuracy of the count is captivating! - the commander of the district troops, General Khabalov, almost a dictator, has not yet resorted to shooting. Not out of good nature: everything was provided for and marked out in advance, and there was a time for shooting.

The revolution took us by surprise only in the sense of the moment. But, generally speaking, both poles, the revolutionary and the governmental, carefully prepared for it, prepared for many years, always prepared. As for the Bolsheviks, all their activities after 1905 were nothing more than preparation for the second revolution. But a huge portion of the government’s activities were preparations for the suppression of a new revolution. This area of ​​government work took on a particularly systematic character in the fall of 1916. By mid-January 1917, the commission chaired by Khabalov had completed a very thorough development of a plan for defeating the new uprising. The city was divided into six police departments, which were divided into districts. The commander of the guards reserve units, General Chebykin, was placed at the head of all armed forces. The regiments were assigned by region. In each of the six police departments, the police, gendarmerie and troops were united under the command of special headquarters officers. The Cossack cavalry remained at the disposal of Chebykin himself for operations on a larger scale. The order of reprisals was outlined as follows: first, only the police act, then Cossacks with whips appear on the stage and, only in case of real need, troops with rifles and machine guns are used. It was this plan, which represented the development of the experience of 1905, that was put into practice in the February days. The trouble lay not in the lack of foresight or in the defects of the plan itself, but in the human material. There was a big misfire here.

Formally, the plan relied on the entire garrison, numbering one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers; but in reality, only about ten thousand were included in the calculation: in addition to the policemen, of whom there were 3 1/2 thousand, there was also strong hope in training teams. This is explained by the nature of the Petrograd garrison at that time, which consisted almost exclusively of reserve units, primarily 14 reserve battalions of the guards regiments located at the front. In addition, the garrison included: one reserve infantry regiment, a reserve scooter battalion, a reserve armored division, small sapper and artillery units and two Don Cossack regiments. It was a lot, too much. The swollen spare parts consisted of human mass, either barely subjected to processing, or having managed to free itself from it. But this was, in essence, the whole army.

Khabalov carefully adhered to the plan he had developed. On the first day, the 23rd, exclusively the police fought; on the 24th, mainly the cavalry was brought out into the streets, but only to use the whip and pike. The use of infantry and the use of fire depended on further development events. But events were not long in coming.

On the 25th the strike spread even wider. According to government data, 240 thousand workers took part in it that day. The more backward layers are catching up with the vanguard, a significant number of small enterprises are already on strike, trams are stopped, and commercial establishments are closed. Throughout the day, students from higher education also joined the strike. educational institutions. Tens of thousands of people flock to the Kazan Cathedral and the streets adjacent to it by noon. Attempts are being made to organize street rallies, and a number of armed clashes with the police occur. At the monument Alexander III speakers are speaking. Mounted police open fire. One speaker falls wounded. Shots from the crowd killed the bailiff, wounded the police chief and several other policemen. Bottles, firecrackers and hand grenades are thrown at the gendarmes. The war taught this art. Soldiers show passivity and sometimes hostility towards the police. The crowd excitedly reported that when the police started shooting at the crowd near the monument to Alexander III, the Cossacks fired a volley at the mounted pharaohs (this is the nickname of the policemen), and they were forced to gallop away. This, apparently, is not a legend put into circulation to raise one’s own spirit, since the episode, albeit in different ways, is confirmed from different sides.

The Bolshevik worker Kayurov, one of the true leaders these days, tells how the demonstrators fled in one place under the whips of mounted police, in full view of the Cossack patrol, and how he. Kayurov, and several other workers with him, did not follow those who fled, but, taking off their hats, approached the Cossacks with the words: “Brother Cossacks, help the workers in the fight for their peaceful demands, you see how the pharaohs deal with us, the hungry workers. Help!" This deliberately lowered tone, these hats in the hands - what an apt psychological calculation, an inimitable gesture! The entire history of street battles and revolutionary victories is teeming with such improvisations. But they drown without a trace in the abyss of big events - historians are left with the husk of commonplaces. “The Cossacks looked at each other in a special way,” continues Kayurov, “and before we had time to move away, we rushed into the ongoing chaos.” And a few minutes later, at the station gates, the crowd rocks in the arms of a Cossack, who before their eyes hacked to death a police bailiff with a saber.

The police soon completely disappeared, that is, they began to act on the sly. But soldiers appeared with guns at the ready. The workers ask them alarmingly: “Really, comrades, have you come to help the police?” The response was a rude “come on in.” A new attempt to speak ends the same way. The soldiers are gloomy, they are gnawed by a worm, and they cannot bear it when a question falls into the very center of their anxiety.

Meanwhile, the disarmament of the pharaohs becomes a common slogan. The police are a fierce, implacable, hated and hateful enemy. There can be no talk of winning her over to your side. Policemen are beaten or killed. The army is completely different: the crowd does its best to avoid hostile clashes with them, on the contrary, it seeks ways to win them over, convince them, attract them, make them related, merge them with itself. Despite favorable rumors about the behavior of the Cossacks, perhaps slightly exaggerated, the crowd is still wary of the cavalry. The cavalryman rises high above the crowd, his soul separated from the demonstrator's by the horse's four legs. A figure that you have to look up to always seems more significant and menacing. The infantry is right there, nearby, on the pavement, closer and more accessible. The crowd tries to come close to her, look into her eyes, and shower her with their hot breath. Women workers play a major role in the relationship between workers and soldiers. They are bolder than men, stepping on the soldiers’ chain, grabbing their rifles with their hands, begging, almost ordering: “Take away your bayonets, join us.” The soldiers are worried, ashamed, they look at each other anxiously, hesitate, someone makes up their mind first, and - bayonets rise guiltily over the shoulders of the attackers, the outpost opens, a joyful and grateful "hurray" shakes the air, the soldiers are surrounded, everywhere there are disputes, reproaches, calls - the revolution is making one more step forward.

Nikolai sent a telegraph order from headquarters to Khabalov to stop the riots “tomorrow.” The will of the tsar coincided with the further link of Khabalov’s “plan”, so the telegram served only as an additional impetus. Tomorrow the troops will have to speak. Is it too late? It's impossible to say yet. The question has been raised, but is far from resolved. The pushes from the Cossacks, the hesitations of individual infantry outposts are just promising episodes, repeated a thousand times by the echo of a sensitive street. This is enough to inspire the revolutionary crowd, but not enough to win. Moreover, there are episodes of the opposite nature. In the afternoon, a platoon of dragoons, as if in response to revolver shots from the crowd, for the first time opened fire on demonstrators near Gostiny Dvor: according to Khabalov’s report to headquarters, three were killed and ten were wounded. Serious warning! At the same time, Khabalov threatened that all workers registered as conscripts would be sent to the front if they did not start work by the 28th. The general presented a three-day ultimatum, i.e., he gave the revolution more time than it would need to overthrow Khabalov and the monarchy to boot. But this will become known only after the victory. And on the evening of the 25th, no one yet knew what tomorrow carried in its belly.

Let's try to imagine the internal logic of movement more clearly. Under the banner of “Women’s Day” on February 23, the long-ripening and long-restrained uprising of the Petrograd working masses began. The first stage of the uprising was a strike. Within three days it spread and became almost universal. This alone gave the masses confidence and carried them forward. The strike, taking on an increasingly offensive character, was combined with demonstrations that pitted the revolutionary masses against the troops. This raised the task as a whole to a higher plane, where the issue was resolved by armed force. The first days brought a number of individual successes, but of a more symptomatic than material nature. A revolutionary uprising, which lasts for several days, can develop victoriously only if it rises from stage to stage and celebrates new and new successes. Stopping the development of success is dangerous; standing still for a long time is disastrous. But even successes in themselves are not enough; the masses must learn about them in a timely manner and have time to evaluate them. You can miss victory even at a moment when it is enough to stretch out your hand to take it. This has happened in history.

The first three days were days of continuous increase and intensification of the struggle. But precisely for this reason the movement reached a level where symptomatic successes were no longer sufficient. The entire active mass took to the streets. She dealt with the police successfully and without difficulty. In the last two days, the troops were already drawn into the events: on the second day - only cavalry, on the third - also infantry. They pushed back and blocked, sometimes condoned, but almost did not resort to firearms. Those from above were in no hurry to violate the plan, partly underestimating what was happening - the error of vision of the reaction symmetrically complemented the error of the leaders of the revolution - partly not being confident in the troops. But just the third day, by the force of the development of the struggle, as well as by the force of the tsar’s order, made it inevitable for the government to use the troops for real. The workers understood this, especially the advanced layer, especially since the dragoons had already fired the day before.

End of introductory fragment.