Thoughts on the October Revolution

"The Russian Revolution is the most important event since the rise of Islam," wrote H. G. Wells. In this manner, the historians of the West have sought to show its place in history. To the Roman Catholic Professor Walsh in Washington, the October Revolution was the most significant event since the fall of the Roman Empire. To the eminent British publicist Harold Laski, it was "the most significant since the birth of Christ."

In keeping with the greatness of the Revolution is the immense number of books about it—not only in the languages of the Soviet Union but in a hundred other languages. A constant stream of them comes rolling from the printing presses of the West. And as people are always interested in beginnings—in the birth of the baby—large numbers of books are devoted to the early days of the October Revolution—the first great heroic blood-stirring days and weeks that shook the world.

In these books, you will find long and erudite expositions on the origins of the Revolution, the different parties of the Revolution, the programs of the Revolution, the economics of the Revolution, the leaders of the Revolution, and so on. But in one respect these books are for the most part singularly lacking in the main factor of the Revolution. In them, you find a great many things about the October Revolution—almost everything but the Revolution itself. For in these books, there is little or nothing about the people. And it is the people—the workers and the peasants—they were the Revolution.

To try to describe the Revolution and leave out the people is—as the English say—like trying to present the Shakespearean play "Hamlet" and leaving out Hamlet himself.

In 1917 the common people—no longer passive—moved out into the center of the stage. Sweeping aside their one-time rulers and their retainers, the people on the vast Eurasian plain extending from the Baltic to the Pacific brought their long latent abilities and energies into action.

Upon them, their adequacy to cope with the great historic task that history thrust upon them, Lenin staked the future of Russia and the Revolution. His supreme confidence sprang from his deep first-hand intimate knowledge of and belief in the people.

It was my good fortune, too, soon after coming to Russia in the spring of 1917, to gain this high respect and confidence in the power of the people—increased of course in later journeys to the Soviet Union. My insight came from first-hand contact with the people—from mingling with the workers in the factories of Petrograd and Nizhni Novgorod, from the soldiers in the barracks and from a long sojourn with that wise and saintly Bolshevik Yanishev, in a village of Vladimir. Out of this came a high respect for their endurance, tenacity, abilities, readiness for new ideas and skills, inventiveness—all of it convinced me of their future success.

Thus, at the very outset of the Revolution, I had an advantage over most of the so-called experts on Russia, journalists, publicists, historians. They might know the history of Russia, know the programs of the many parties and leaders, know the diplomats and foreign emissaries. But for the most part, they really did not know the people. And to repeat—it was the people who were the Revolution.

And so these so-called experts were over and over consistently wrong in their estimate of the Revolution constantly predicting its defeat, disaster and downfall.

After the Soviets established their government in October, they declared: “It will last a week, at most a month or two!” But knowing the Soviet people, I confidently declared that the Soviets would increasingly rally the masses to their government. As they had won the power, they would keep in power—they were here to stay.

When the first five-year plan was launched, it was derided abroad as “a statistician’s dream”, “a blueprint with astronomical figures”. But those with a real knowledge of the Soviet people confidently declared that, however colossal the projects, the Soviet people would be equal to the great challenge and would translate the dream into a reality.

When the 200 nazi divisions, flushed with victory in the West at the peak of their power, crossed over the Soviet border on that fateful day in June 1941, those so-called experts were boldly proclaiming that the nazis would go through the Red Army like a knife through butter—that in three or four weeks the swastika-flag would be fluttering from the towers of the Kremlin. But those of us who knew the Soviet people, knew better. On June 24, in response to a request from TASS, I sent a long cable expressing my conviction that the might of the Soviet people would prevail and in due time the red flag with the hammer and sickle would be flying over the Reichstag in Berlin.

In every crisis, the Soviet people have been magnificent, adequate to the demands made upon them.

I would not imply that all were devotees of the Revolution, ready to die for it. They had a due quota of slackers, malcontents, careerists and even renegades. But the overwhelming majority—and certainly, almost all the strong, vital, militant elements—were valiant, loyal makers and defenders of the Revolution.

The Party’s Central Organs; the opportunists were left in the minority and were called Mensheviks (from “menshinstvo”, the minority) ever since. At the Sixth (Prague) Conference of R.S.D.L.P. (1912) the opportunists were expelled from the Party.

Though they might not possess all domestic virtues, they did possess the qualities essential to the making of the Revolution: tenacity, toughness, endurance, devotion to a cause and readiness to sacrifice for it, to absorb new ideas and skills. To these we must add another quality—not usually counted as revolutionary, or associated with fighters for freedom. That is patience.

Unfortunately, obsessed by the spirit of the Revolution, by the spectacular, stormy blood-stirring events, we forget its quiescent, undramatic, wearisome aspects. Great spectacles, scenes at the Smolny and the storming of the Winter Palace—while outside in the bleak long dark boring dreary hours of vigil, the ill-clad workers guarded the streets of Petrograd night after night; after the July uprising, Lenin hiding in a haystack or waiting in exile in Finland; Bolshevik leaders sitting in jail.

After the October days, the people were watching the fuel and bread rations growing smaller and seeing the promised well-being the Revolution would bring being postponed from month to month. The ordeals of patience—cold, hunger, blood, sweat, tears—such was the lot of the revolutionists of 1917. But for all their hardships, we needn’t feel sorry for them. They certainly didn’t feel sorry for themselves. How many like Volodarsky felt a deep satisfaction, exaltation, joy in the Revolution. “Only one who has lived through a Revolution,” said Krupskaya, “knows the grandeur of it.”

In writing as I have about the Russian people, all the time I have been writing about Lenin. In mind and temper they are almost identical; for Lenin personified those outstanding Russian human qualities and characteristics—sympathy for the oppressed, hatred and anger at the oppressor, a passionate search for truth—in him they were developed to the highest degree, to the nth power, and lifted him into the ranks of genius. That word, “genius”, is applied to him by almost every foreigner who came into close contact with him, who felt the impact of his personality.

In this regard, pre-eminent among the Americans was Raymond Robins, a man of learning and wealth gained by digging gold in Alaska.

Out of the long conversations and dealings with Lenin came such high regard for him that on Robins’s return to America he planted a live oak on his great estate in Florida, named it the Lenin Tree. As it grew—so over the years steadily grew his respect and admiration for Lenin. A religious man, every Sunday on his estate Robins held services for his friends and the workers—white and colored. No matter how his services began, they almost always ended with an eloquent tribute to the wisdom and genius of Lenin. Happily these sermons or discourses have been recorded.

The first drafts of my books were written on an island in the Golden Horn Bay at Vladivostok. There, I was marooned, as the Japanese refused to give me a visa to permit me to pass through their country on my way home to America. Then suddenly the interventionists seized Vladivostok, and the counter-revolutionists came rushing into my room. I lost my manuscripts. But I didn’t lose my life in the melee, thanks to friends, who gave me shelter at night.

The American Consul hastened my departure from Vladivostok.

A year later (back in America) I began writing the books all over again in John Reed's little cottage high up in the wooded hills above the Hudson River. I was suffering from acute sciatic pains, and Jack—playing the part of a therapist—would run a hot flat iron up and down my ailing spine and leg. With his ever keen sense of the ludicrous, he would exclaim: “If Lenin could only see us now!”

Between speeches and debates on the Revolution in the chief cities of America, I finished the writing of my books; they were translated into many languages, with, incidentally, for some strange reason, the largest circulation of them in Japan. Aside from the correction of a few obvious errors, they are here reprinted as they were written when the Revolution was fresh and vivid in my memory.

On my return to Russia in 1922, I brought these books with me. It would have been easy to take them out to Vladimir Ilyich, who was then resting at Gorki. But a peculiar diffidence and reluctance to disturb him when he was ill inhibited me. However, I could have given them to Krupskaya whom I knew and in all likelihood she would have read them aloud to Lenin, and gotten the stamp of his approval for the “People in the Russian Revolution”. So I often regret that I did not put my books in Lenin’s hands when he was resting out at Gorki.

However, in July 1959, on a visit to Gorki—as our competent guide, V. Boorova, was showing us through the rooms of the villa, we came to Lenin’s upstairs working table, and there amidst a vast array of pamphlets and books in paper-covers preserved under glass was an English cloth-bound copy of my book “Lenin: the Man and His Work”. A great surprise and very gratifying—at any rate Vladimir Ilyich must have had a look at the book before his untimely decease.

Passing through the grounds, we came to a favourite spot of Lenin’s. The white-columned open-air arbour looking out across a tree-covered valley to the village of Gorki. As I sat on Lenin’s bench, it flashed into my mind—as it so often does—that sentence which Lenin let fall from his lips at the Smolny on the night of November 8—the most momentous epoch-making sentence of the century. As he stepped up to the podium at the Smolny, he was greeted by a thundering applause. Stilling it with a wave of his hand, he said: “Comrades! We will now take up the building of Socialism!”

This was spoken in a simple matter-of-fact manner and for the moment few in that tense assembly grasped the full import of those words. But, sitting by my side, John Reed—always alert to the crucial and the dramatic—hastily jotted them down in his notebook and heavily underscored them. He rightly discerned that in that sentence there was dynamite enough to shake the world, and—we may add—to continue to shake it to this day.

It declared that the Socialist order for which generations had toiled and fought and died was henceforth the objective of the peoples of a sixth part of the earth.

A stupendous undertaking at any time, in any country. In backward, ravaged Russia it was the height of audacity. Everywhere hunger and cold. Typhus and sabotage. The army disintegrating. The Germans advancing. Transport paralyzed. Factories at a standstill. On top of all these and a hundred other grievous problems confronting the new-formed government was one still more crucial and formidable—the building of a new society on an entirely new basis.

How remarkable that amidst this chaos Lenin and the Soviets committed themselves so completely and unreservedly to the creation of the grand society of peace; justice and plenty for all.

But not less remarkable is that the Soviets, over all the years, have clung so tenaciously to that commitment. Most revolutions and great movements in course of time grow tired and lose their momentum, and as their watchwords fade from their banners they fade likewise in the minds and hearts of the new generation.

The October Revolution, however, in spite of all ordeals and sacrifices, in spite of all temptations to compromise, in spite of all the slackers, saboteurs and renegades, has never faltered in its forward drive towards its declared objective—the building of Communism.

Despite all the prosperity and comforts of the Soviet Union today, it is not greatly different from those heroic exciting days of that first October. It is still October, working with new devices, instruments and strategy—but with much the same spirit and feeling of 1917. With the Soviet people today making peace for all the people of the world the first item on their program as did Premier Lenin in the first days of the Revolution. With thrilling reports of victories from the different fronts—steel, electric, cattle, education—as then were coming from the Denikin and Kolchak fronts. With all the resources of the vast country mobilised under the leadership of the powerful Communist Party dedicated to that same objective to which it was committed on that first October—the creation of the good society of peace, justice and plenty—to the building of Communism.

But there is one difference between now and then—and very great too.

Then there was not even a blueprint of the coming society of Communism. It was a hope and aspiration, something in the far-off future—at the end of the rainbow.

Today it is a very real and tangible reality. Its foundations already laid strong and deep in the Socialist structure. Its contours clearly visible to the eye.

Albert Rhys Williams

1959