Suchergebnisse

L. Haimson, The Mensheviks and the October Revolution. The extraordinary Party Congress of the RSDRP (November-December 1917).
This article is devoted to an examination of the deliberations of the Extraordinary Congress of the RSDRP(o) in November-December 1917, in the broader context of the evolution of political attitudes in various factions of the Menshevik Party after the Bolshevik seizure of power. The extraordinary Congress was the first congress of the Menshevik Party held after the October Revolution, as well as the first dominated by its new Internationalist majority. The article examines the major debates between this new party majority and its Defensist opponents on the crucial issues that now divided them : the posture to be adopted toward the Soviet regime— and specifically the character of the government that should be installed to replace it, the issue of the war, and the policies to be adopted toward the Constituent Assembly, the democratic organs of local self-government, and the central and local organs of Soviets. The article examines the reasons for the sense of paralysis felt by most factions within the Menshevik Party at this time, as well as the factors that caused them — temporarily — to attenuate if not bury their differences.

When a student of the origins of 1917 looks back through the literature that appeared on the subject during the 1920's and early 1930's, he is likely to be struck by the degree of consensus in Soviet and Western treatments of the problem on two major assumptions. The first of these, then almost as widely entertained by Western as by Soviet historians, was that, just like other "classical" revolutions, the Revolution of 1917 had to be viewed, not as a historical accident or even as the product of immediate historical circumstances, but as the culmination of a long historical process–stretching back to the abolition of serfdom, if not to the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The second, balancing, assumption, which even Soviet historians were then still usually prepared to accept, was that, notwithstanding its deep historical roots, this revolutionary process had been substantially accelerated by the additional strains imposed on the Russian body politic by the First World War.

The object of this article is to revisit the themes originally explored in this journal thirty-five years ago in a discussion somewhat misleadingly entitled, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917."' As older readers of the Slavic Review may recall, this discussion set off heated debates centered on the theses presented in this article about the dual processes of polarization that I distinguished in the dynamics of the political and social crisis in urban Russia even before the outbreak of war: polarization between the industrial workers employed in Russia's urban centers and the well-to-do strata of urban "society," including those of the professional intelligentsia; and polarization between both the upper and lower strata of Russia's urban centers and the bureaucratic circles that sought to represent the interests and will of the sovereign.

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of "The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia" (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.