The 1917 Overture

HIM

By BERTRAM WOLFE

Fr FEE present year marks the fiftieth anniver- I sary of the fateful events in Russia in 1917 that opened the time of troubles in which we

still live. During the whole period we have been deluged by a continuous flood of memoirs and interpretations debating the causes, the responsi- bilities, the meanings, and the degrees of inevitability or accident in the Revolution or Revolutions of 1917. There is something about an interval of a half-century that is likely to increase still more the torrent of books. Yet, despite the huge volume of narratives and analyses, nothing has been really 'settled' beyond dispute. The very eye-witnesses and participants, setting down the events immediately after they occurred, confront us with obscurities and turn the events into myth and legend even as they participate in them.

Nor should this surprise us if we bear in mind that French historians are still debating the facts and the issues of the Great French Revolution that began more than a century earlier. In the case of the Russian Revolution, the problems are more complicated, for the regime that took over in the autumn of 1917 had all the resources of its total monopoly of the means of communi- cation and expression to bury even deeper under successive layers of legend the true outlines of the events. For that reason, all who work in the field of recent Russian history must apply archaeological methods to uncover under the layers of purposeful detritus the actual revolu- tionary events, as Schliemann and his successors did the true Homeric Troy.

With the present work,* Dr George Katkov, whose childhood and young manhood were spent in Russia and who is now a Research Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, has stolen a march on the many in his field who are preparing books for the great battles of the fiftieth anni- versary. He has done this not as an act of adroit journalistic timing but as a concerned and serious historian who has been wrestling for many years with documents, memoirs, partisan accounts, and the problems of the Russian Revolution. His book produces first of all upon the reader the impression of being the work of an upright man, deeply concerned with finding the truth in the maze of conflicting eye-witness, participant, and partisan reports. He possesses a kind of old-fashioned purity and modesty con- cerning his own opinions that enables him to touch calmly, simply, and truthfully on the most agitated questions.

He probes his own preconceptions as judi- ciously as those of all the contenders who, before they perished in the battles of the Civil War, in ignominious purges, or in exile far from their native land, strove to set down in memoirs their interpretations, and the justification of the roles they played. Thanks to his access to new docu- ments such as the German General Staff and Foreign Service documents captured after the *Ruswos 1917: THE FEBRUARY REvournott. By George ratkov. (Longmans, 63s.)

Second World War, and thanks to his quiet and unmalicious confrontation of testifying partici- pants with each other and with the contemporary press of their day, he really settles many ques- tions hitherto unsettled. Without rancour or fanfare, and without giving more than an occa- sional hint of his own view in a side remark, he reopens questions long treated as closed, throws new light on matters obscured by cherished legend.

What role, for example, did German money and German agents play in fomenting strikes, subsidising defeatist propagandists, spreading the false but explosive rumour that there was a 'pro-German' or 'separate peace' party at court? What role did the Jews of the Russian Pale of settlement play in the war when the Pale became the battleground over which the contending armies fought? What were their sympathies and what their sufferings? What role did the com- manding generals in the field and GHQ play by withholding their loyal troops from Petrograd at a moment when the existing order might yet have been maintained to prevent chaos and con- tinue the successful prosecution of the war? What were their motives in bringing pressure on the weak-willed Tsar to abdicate? Were they actual plotters against the monarchy and their own oath of loyalty, as some have maintained, or were they taken in by such plotters in the Duma and volunteer war-supply organisations as Guchkov, Lvov, Nekrasov, and Rodzyanko? What Nile did the patriotic volunteer organi- sations play in keeping the armies supplied, and, after September 1915, keeping the General Staff both ill-informed and morally compromised, and the troops demoralised by unjustified rumour?

And that peculiar lodge of freemasons that admitted women (Ekaterina Kuskova was one of its leading members) but omitted aprons, sym- bols, and rites—what role did it play in prepar- ing what it thought would be a palace revolution and in drawing up a slate for what was intended to be a 'Ministry of Popular Confidence' under a constitutional monarch, but ended up virtually unchanged as the provisional government which designated itself to rule the country after the Tsar unexpectedly fell? What role did the politi- cal freemason lodge play in designating the ill-qualified Lvov as Premier and Interior Minister, and the ill-qualified and generally un- known Tereshchenko to head the bankrupt treasury, though he was not even a member of the Duma and the Duma's natural nominee would have been the Constitutional Democrat, Shingarev, chairman of its Budget Committee? Even the leader of the Constitutional Demo- cratic party, Miliukov, who became Foreign Minister and dreamed of a premiership, con- fesses in his memoirs that when he read out the list of the new government to waiting crowds and they asked of Tereshchenko, 'Who is that? And who is he?'—he did not know the answer nor how this colleague came to be on the list he was reading.

Obviously, nothing could have been worse for

the new government than to have as its Premier a poor administrator, as its Minister of a bank- rupt Treasury a man totally 10: scai knowledge, and, as the Minister of e erior

in a government facing attacks from both right and left, a man who proved totally incapable of setting up a security system. Moreover, there is dynamite in the very raising of such questions as Dr Katkov examines. Thus I know of writers and historians well versed in the history of the Russian Revolution who refused even to look at the manuscript or an advance copy of the book when they saw that it contained a chapter en- titled 'The Jews and the Revolution' and another on 'Russian Political Freemasonry.' Was not the historian Katkov, they asked, serving up one more warmed-over version of the old reactionary legend of the 'Jewish-Masonic conspiracy' as offered in such ill-famed concoctions as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Yet the brief chapter on the Jews and the Revolution is one of the best-documented and most compassionate chapters in this book, while the sections on politi- cal freemasonry and on the role of the German Foreign Office and General Staff in fomenting strikes, spreading separate peace legends, and aiding revolutionary defeatists, are the best and most authoritative statements on these touchy and long-hidden matters that have appeared.

On the German government's activities in Russia during the First World War, Dr Katkov broke ground some years ago when he published in the April 1956 issue of International Affairs, the quarterly of Chatham House, his 'German Foreign Office Documents on Finan- cial Support to the Bolsheviks in 1917.' On the part played by the peculiar lodge of Russian political freemasons in preparing a palace coup, the going was more difficult. Those who belonged to the lodge in question, like Kerensky, Kuskova, Nekrasov, and Guchkov, kept silent when ques- tioned, or denied that their Masonic lodge had played any part. Some seemed to put their Masonic oath of inviolate secrecy above their duty to historical fact, cir asserted that to tell what they knew would endanger the lives of former members of the lodge, still alive in Russia. Men like Melgunov, Valentinov and Aronson gradually put together little pieces of the puzzle, Kuskova gave tantalising bits of information to Valentinov and Lydia Dan, and finally Kuskova and Kerensky declared that they were setting it all down to be published 'after thirty years.' In the present work, Dr Katkov has laboriously put all the fragments together, and added reason- able and justifiable conjecture based on the evi- dence. Until Kerensky's and Kuskova's secret archives are published a quarter of a century or so from now, this will most likely remain the best treatment of the subject.

Indeed, the more difficult and the more deeply buried the true outlines are of some hitherto hidden matter, the more this judicious and in- tellectually exciting work arouses the admiration of the specialist, as it will no doubt the interests of the general literate reader. If there are errors in the book, they are in the fields that the author is less interested in and does not properly ex- plore. Thus he speaks of 'the dictatorship of the Provisional Government.' No terms could be less appropriate than 'dictatorship' for a govern- ment which failed to construct a police force or an administrative apparatus, which used exhor- tation as its chief instrument of rule, which failed to see any danger on the left. guarding only against the possibility of attempts of restoration from the right, and which Lenin him- self four times during 1917 ref t- the 'freest war-time government i Moreover, the term 'dictatorship' is absurd in connection with a government which had the grace to proclaim itself 'provisional,' i.e., a pre- legitimate government whose first concern was to hold free and democratic elections to a con- stituent assembly that would write a new constitu- tion and create a new democratic legitimacy to take the place of the monarchical legitimacy that was ruptured by the sudden fall of the Tsar. This is the acid test of a government arising out of revolution, a test which the Bolshevik dic- tatorship has not been willing to submit itself to in a half-century.

The book is weak, too, in its sketchy treat- ment of the Russian Socialist movement and the stand of its various factions on the war. Thus Dr Katkov lumps those calling themselves inter- nationalists with those who, like Lenin, were openly defeatist. For him, anyone who was not for the defence of the country was helping to bring about its defeat. To the Socialists them- selves, the distinction between defencists, inter- nationalists and defeatists were all-important. Perhaps the author might have made a case for the thesis that those calling themselves inter- nationalists 'objectively' helped those who sought to bring about revolution in the defeat of their fatherland, but he does not make the attempt, rather taking the identity of internationalists and defeatists for granted. This leads him to con- jecture that Plekhanov and Chernov could collaborate in a manifesto on the war and to mention Plekhanov, the ardent defencist, as

an editor of the Russian internationalist journal in Paris, Nashe Slovo, a wartime journal to which Martov, Trotsky, and some former and future Bolsheviks contributed, but which could not conceivably have published anything by the pro-war Plekhanov. However, it is precisely the disputes and divisions in the Socialist movement of Russia that have been most studied, and it is not to Dr Katkov that one would look for further light.

But if one seeks fresh light on the changing moods of the literate public, the Duma activists, and the volunteer war industry committee leaders during the period from September 1915 to February 1917; if one wishes to understand the role of the arch-plotter for a palace revolution, Guchkov; the ambiguous part played by the General Staff at Headquarters; the secret chan- nels of German Revolutionierungspolitik; the activities of political freemasonry; the forma- tion of the Petrograd Soviet and the first pro- visional government; and, above all, if one wishes to get a feeling for the strange dream-like character of so many of the deeds and fantasies of the principal actors in the drama of the February Revolution, this is the best general work that a half-century of historical writing has produced. And it may well prove to be the best and most thoughtful study of the February upheaval that we shall get in this year of the fiftieth anniversary of events that began to turn into legends even at the moment when they were occurring.