The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.
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Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Moscow, March 1993 © Andrew Stuttaford
If nothing else, the Bolshevik Revolution was seen as an absolute break with the past. That is how it was planned, how it was hymned (“We’ll burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake,” wrote Vladimir Kirillov; he was shot twenty years later), and how many of its opponents understood it. With the exception of those realists who regarded it as a reversion to barbarism, Red October was perceived as something essentially modern, or, even, to some, as rather more than modern, a pathway, to borrow a pre-revolutionary phrase from Trotsky, towards a “radiant future.”
The imagining of that radiant future owed more to ancient fantasies than a Lenin or Trotsky would ever admit, even probably to themselves. But burrow through their verbiage, eliminate the preoccupations of time and place—czars and capital and imperialism— and it becomes obvious that the Bolsheviks, or at least their truest believers, were merely the latest generation of millennialist fanatics to bother our planet, even if they wanted to build rather more of Heaven here on earth (or “earths”—I’ll get to that) than their predecessors. “We are kindling a new eternity,” declaimed the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky shortly after the revolution—and a decade or so before his suicide.
Read the words that follow Trotsky’s reference to “a radiant future” and the breadth of his vision is impossible to miss: “Man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness.” Trotsky returned to this mirage just over twenty years later in some passages in Literature and Revolution (1924). The communist Heaven on earth was to be Promethean, with man moving “rivers and mountains.” Man himself would be its greatest project. “The most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training” would be used to “create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”
Trotsky clearly anticipated that his superman would be able to live a (very) long time, but he doesn’t seem to have expected him to be immortal. Compared with what the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) had in mind, Trotsky’s was a narrow, crabbed, shirker’s Prometheanism. Fedorov dreamed bigger dreams. He insisted that humanity’s (compulsory) “common task” should be not the postponement of death but its defeat, a demanding enough objective even without Fedorov’s typically maximalist twist. Immortality was not enough. All the dead must also be brought back to life. In a rare nod to practicality, Fedorov admitted that completing the common task would take a very long while. In the meantime, however, it would provide mankind with a great unifying purpose (under the direction, conveniently, of a Russian autocrat). It would also push our species into space, as we searched for the particles necessary to restore long-perished ancestors, many of whom would have to be re-engineered (in ways infinitely more extensive than anything envisaged by Trotsky) so that they could survive on some distant planet: all those Lazaruses, you see, would be too numerous for earth (by this time transformed into a spaceship, “a great electric boat”) to host.
An eccentric’s eccentric (slept on a trunk, vegetarian, librarian, odd views about sex, mistaken for a beggar in the street, impressed Tolstoy), Fedorov wrote reams and attracted a few devotees but published very little during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he became known as the father of “cosmism,” an ill-defined mishmash of beliefs, convictions, and delusions, not all of which he would have shared. Cosmism, or ideas that could be squeezed into that obligingly elastic pigeonhole, drew growing attention before the revolution, and considerably more in the decade of utopian hysteria that followed it, including, in every probability, from Trotsky. In his introduction to Russian Cosmism, a collection of writings by some of the better-known (in Russia at least; over here, well . . . ) cosmists published last year, the New York University professor Boris Groys observes how many cosmists took Trotsky’s side during his duel with Stalin.
Stalin, who had his own more downbeat take on the future, did not approve of cosmism and would not have been convinced by post-revolutionary efforts to strip it of its mystical baggage. He thought even less of those who sympathized with Trotsky. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that a number of cosmists were forced into the queue for resurrection earlier than they might have hoped. Others served long terms in the Gulag. But some “scientific cosmists” (cosmism is a tree with many branches), valuable to the regime in other respects, were tolerated so long as they kept their esoteric philosophizing mainly to themselves. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) may have been inspired by Fedorov’s visions of space travel, but he was also the father of Russian rocketry, and, despite official unease over some of his views, was supported by the Soviet state.
Other cosmists’ encounters with science were less successful. Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), an early associate of Lenin and a revolutionary, doctor, science-fiction writer, and much more besides, recommended blood transfusions from the young to the old as a way of reversing aging. As the appearance of a “blood boy” in an episode of the television show Silicon Valley suggests, this theory is going through a revival, but it killed Bogdanov. He died after an exchange of blood with a student who had been written off by her doctors owing to malaria and tuberculosis. She, amazingly, recovered.
Interest in cosmism within Russia began to pick up again in the waning days of the Soviet Union and has gathered speed since. Anton Vaino, Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff since 2016, no less, has claimed to be the co-inventor of a “Nooscope,” a device designed as a technocratic tool to study humanity’s collective consciousness. This is a questionable proposition at many levels, but it was undoubtedly inspired by the thinking of Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), some sort of cosmist, but a good enough geologist to be awarded a Stalin Prize rather than a stint in the Gulag—or worse. Cosmism’s comeback in post-Soviet Russia is part of a much broader effort to reconnect with an intellectual heritage wrecked by the long communist ascendancy. It has also helped that Fedorov’s preference for autocracy and his belief in a uniquely Russian form of manifest destiny fits into attempts to cobble together an ideological structure for a Putin regime that no longer finds Western liberalism compatible with its ambitions.
Cosmism is a slippery, protean concept. Anyone hoping that Professor Groys’s book will offer anything approaching a precise definition of what cosmism was (and is) will inevitably be disappointed. To be sure, Groys’s introduction does include some useful clues, notably the contrast between the cosmists’ view that science could fulfill the millennialist hopes of the past and the Futurist conviction that the new technologies of the twentieth century represented a chance to start again from scratch. Groys also spells out how Fedorov’s ideas were (at least notionally) rooted in materialism: to Fedorov, the soul had no existence separate from the body, let alone any prospect of outlasting it. But because, as Groys summarizes it, everything was “material, physical, everything [was] technically manipulable,” a properly organized society—a requirement that aligned some initially unsympathetic cosmists with Soviet statism and, in some cases, totalitarianism—should, in the end, be able to bring back the dead. Indeed, it had a moral obligation to do so. Why should admission to Utopia be confined to the (currently) living?
Yes, this was nuts, but it was a nuttiness not so far removed from what some in the Bolshevik hierarchy were saying (Trotsky was not alone), and it was embraced with enthusiasm by zanier elements on the revolutionary fringe. The Biocosmists-Immortalists called for “immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation . . . and the freedom to move in cosmic space.” They were “daring,” one prominent Biocosmist conceded, but “optimists, not madmen.”
After his introduction, Groys throws the reader in at the deep end, leaving him to work his own way through a well-chosen selection of writings (many only recently republished in Russian, and never translated before into English) that are both of scholarly interest and an intriguing glimpse into a certain state of mind. They can be heavy going—“Here I present only sixteen theorems of life”—but are not without their highlights, among them weather control, intra-atomic energy, a worldwide labor army, homes in the ether, the colonization of space, a spot of eugenics, “happy atoms,” and a mad sci-fi story from Bogdanov: “Margarita Anche, a blossoming woman of seven hundred and fifty . . . ” But any newbies relying solely on Groys’s introduction for their understanding of cosmism will be left somewhat bewildered. This book is better read alongside works such as George M. Young’s The Russian Cosmists (2012) and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997), edited by Fordham University’s Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. The title of the latter is yet another much-needed reminder that Soviet history is not always what we have been led to believe.
With “Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution,” Hassan Malik has written a fascinating study of an overlooked topic—but not a book for emerging markets investors who like to sleep soundly at night. Mr. Malik chronicles the involvement of foreign capital in Russia before and up to the October Revolution. It ends expensively. Shortly after taking power in 1917, the Bolsheviks repudiated Russia’s debts. Adjusted for inflation, this remains the biggest sovereign default in history, made costlier by its completeness. No debts or obligations were “restructured”: With token exceptions, the money was gone for good.
Mr. Malik’s meticulous, forensic account reveals why late Romanov Russia—for a few years the world’s largest oil producer—had been so successful in attracting funding from abroad. Mr. Malik, an investment strategist and financial historian, is more skeptical than many about the contribution made by Sergei Witte, who was Russian finance minister between 1892 and 1903 (before rising higher still). But the surge in Russia’s economic development during those years is beyond dispute. Net national product grew at an estimated compound annual rate of nearly 5%, “very high” for the time, according to Mr. Malik. Other numbers tell a similar tale.
That Russia turned to foreign bond markets during a wave of financial globalization was not “particularly remarkable,” the author notes. That it would become “the largest net international borrower in the world” was, he believes, a different matter. Given the pace of Russian growth, however, and bankers’ perennially Pavlovian response to the whiff of profit, I am not so sure.
There was also the perception at the time that, for all its faults, Russia was “a responsible member of the European family of civilized nations.” As such, the czar’s government was rewarded with more trust than it probably deserved. In 1906 Russia secured a massive loan despite troubling finances, an economic slowdown, a shaky currency, recent military defeat by the Japanese, and something close to outright revolution. More foreign money followed, drawn in by a return to growth. Nevertheless, Mr. Malik argues that late imperial Russia was more fragile than understood then (and now). Debt was piling up and the political system was unstable. It took a huge build-up in defense spending—the silver lining of a cloud about to burst—to revive an economy that was again faltering.
If the attitude of foreign financiers toward Russia up to 1914 can be defended, their behavior afterward is rather harder to explain. By early 1917 Russia was losing World War I, its finances were crumbling, the economy was buckling and the political climate was deteriorating. Despite this, Mr. Malik notes, “the risk premiums on Russian debt relative to Western benchmarks approached multiyear lows.” Wartime politics played their part, and so did moral hazard, thanks to Russian government guarantees (and vague support from its allies). The liberal revolution that overthrew the czar in early 1917 was broadly welcomed as another step in a transformation in which, as Mr. Malik observes, international financiers considered they had long been participating. Maintaining or increasing their presence in a newly liberal Russia would be a “logical continuation” of that role, so that’s what they did.
What ensued, unfortunately, was not the next stage in a benign evolutionary process, but an abrupt break with the past. Foreign investors anticipated radical change, maintains Mr. Malik, but not the direction it took. This was a mistake more forgivable than he implies: There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik triumph that fall. The author is right to highlight the probability that, even if the liberals had held on to power, “a fairly significant default” was on the cards. But a default by a liberal regime would have borne no comparison to the Bolshevik default.
Even had the Bolsheviks been able to honor the debt, they would not have done so. This was a matter of principle (why, asked Lenin, repay lenders who financed “the Cossack whip and sword”?) as well as strategy. Debt repudiation was a weapon in the class war, intended to dismantle the economic strength of the bourgeoisie at home and to foment trouble abroad—specifically in France, where investment in Russian securities had spread a long way down the social scale.
Mr. Malik records the insouciance or even optimism of foreign financiers in the face of late 1917’s political turmoil. This may have peaked with “in hindsight . . . one of the most bizarre business decisions in American banking history”—no mean feat: The forerunner of Citibank opened its Moscow branch “nearly three weeks after the Bolshevik takeover.” This was an extreme example of the consequences of some financiers’ misreading of Lenin’s new order, a phenomenon Mr. Malik handles well. Precedent (Russia had never defaulted) suggested the new regime would see reason, as did a conventional understanding of morality and self-interest. Yet bankers and Bolsheviks defined reason, morality and self-interest in very different ways. Lenin’s oddball sect wanted to remake Russia (and the world). If that meant cutting itself off from international capital, too bad.
Mr. Malik criticizes foreign investors for not grasping “the political dimension” of financial support for the czar’s sometimes savagely repressive rule. But their unpopularity with the opposition was somewhat ironic: It overlooked the way in which “apolitical” foreign financing contributed to a modernization that, however unintentionally, subverted the ancien régime. And investors may have paid too much attention to politics later on. One element in the seemingly complacent reaction of international financiers to the February Revolution was a desire to help the liberal reformers. This may have been too much of a gamble but, given what was to come, it was worth taking. Russia’s tragedy was not that it ran out of money, but that it ran out of time.
The poet Vladimir Kirillov vowed to ‘burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake’ but didn’t say what would come next. The Bolsheviks’ was a supremely didactic revolution, intended to produce a new kind of man. Artists were ready to help out. Even before the revolution, painters such as Kazimir Malevich had taken abstraction to new extremes, pursuing what he called the ‘zero of form’—a rejection of everything that had gone before and a timely anticipation, it might be thought, of the Bolshevik ‘year zero’ that lay just ahead.
‘Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932’ (Royal Academy Publications, 320 pages, $65) is a beautifully illustrated account of art that followed upon, but was ultimately discarded by, the revolution. It closes with a 1932 exhibition commemorating the artists of the new order’s first 15 years, a swan song for an avant-garde rapidly being eclipsed by the inspiring banality of Socialist Realism.
While “Revolution” focuses on painting, the lavishly produced ‘Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test’ (Art Institute of Chicago, 324 pages, $65)takes a broader approach with regard to types of artistic expression, documenting theater productions, posters, periodicals and other ephemera as well as painting, photography and design. The works are often of remarkable quality, raising uncomfortable questions about how we are to regard great art that was the accomplice of totalitarianism.
The earlier part of ‘Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992’ (Yale, 278 pages, $55) highlights the debate between those who pushed art’s frontiers forward toward Utopia and those who believed that the masses needed something more easily understood. Stalin, no Utopian, took the latter side, to the delight of artists such as Evgeny Katsman: After a meeting in 1933 to discuss this controversy with the Soviet leader, Katsman rhapsodized in his diary over Stalin’s ‘sweet face’—a vision that only a Socialist Realist could see.
‘Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium,” writes Yuri Slezkine in “The House of Government” (Princeton, 1,104 pages, $39.95), a brilliant retelling of, mainly, the first two decades of the Soviet era in a sprawling saga centered around a famous and infamous Moscow apartment building created for the new elite. The Bolsheviks were a millenarian sect if ever there was one, as Mr. Slezkine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates. And, even if the millennium proved elusive, they were able to set off an apocalypse in Petrograd, then Russia’s capital, almost exactly a century ago.
That old-time millenarian ardor smolders away in “October” (Verso, 369 pages, $26.95), China Miéville’s history of what he calls the “ultimately inspiring” Russian Revolution: “This was Russia’s revolution,” he writes, “but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.” It is? After the hecatombs created in communism’s name, such a call to arms is evidence of a faith untroubled when prophecy fails again and again.
Mr. Miéville is a respected Britain-based writer of science fiction but also a man of the far left, and “October” is deftly written but so skewed that the book risks tipping over into alternative history. “I am partisan,” writes Mr. Miéville, a confession that comes as no surprise; but “I have striven to be fair,” which does. Mr. Miéville’s narrative is at times—how to put this—selective. On occasion, he’s careless with facts, not least when it concerns the Bolsheviks’ January 1918 suppression of the Constituent Assembly (Russia’s last democratically elected “parliament” until the Yeltsin years): It is misleading to maintain that its membership was “chosen” before the Bolshevik coup.
That “October” is written from a sympathetic perspective is an unsettling reminder of the persistence of ideas—with roots long predating Marx—which can never safely be consigned (to appropriate Trotsky’s words) to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless this book is worth reading for its emphasis on the bitter debates within Russia’s revolutionary left over how to take advantage of the opportunity it had been given by the fall of the czar—and by the fragility of the regime that replaced him in early 1917.
When the year began, Nicholas II was clinging to his throne, Lenin was an exile in Zurich and the Bolsheviks were just one faction in a fissiparous revolutionary underground. Less than 12 months later, they were running the country—or enough of it to count. The czar was overthrown in a revolution in February (dates given are according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia). Food shortages, wider economic difficulties and general war weariness (World War I had entered its fourth year) had all reinforced the feeling shared by many Russians—even some among the ruling elite—that Romanov absolutism had had its day.
There was a wide agreement that the monarchy should go, but no consensus about what should come next. The new liberal “provisional government” had emerged out of a Duma committee during the crisis. Lacking much democratic legitimacy, it was well-intentioned, weak and well-named. A caretaker more naive than negligent, it threw open the door, but (to borrow a phrase from Engels), the hangman stood waiting outside. Dark forces poured through, including Lenin, who returned from Zurich in April, with assistance from Germany.
Russians, Lenin conceded, now enjoyed “a maximum of legally recognized rights,” but he claimed this was a capitalist con. Bolshevism was required, whether the masses realized it or not. That, eventually, was what the second, October, revolution gave them.
The excellent “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914- 1921” (Oxford, 823 pages, $39.95), by Yale’s Laura Engelstein, is a considerably more objective account than Mr. Miéville’s. It covers not just the two revolutions and their prelude, but also the civil war that ensued—a civil war that the Bolsheviks, Ms. Englestein argues, did what they could to foment. Lenin calculated that a great sorting, a “process of clarification,” as she terms it, would leave the Bolsheviks alone on top. The war turned out to be more terrible than even Lenin envisaged, but he was proved right in the end.
Lenin often was, but one interesting aspect of Ms. Engelstein’s discussion of 1917 itself is the degree to which she depicts the Bolsheviks as storm-chasers, struggling to keep pace with events they could not yet control. The successive iterations of the provisional government, the best known of which was led by the charismatic if not particularly effective Alexander Kerensky, were actually caught up in the storm.
They failed to feed the cities. They could not satisfy the demand by workers and peasants (and the soldiers recruited from those classes) for a system—collectivist and profoundly antihierarchical—very different from the liberal order they had in mind. They could—and should—have ended Russia’s unpopular, perilous participation in World War I, but didn’t. Meanwhile, democratic principles and a justified fear of both ends of the political spectrum kept Kerensky from gambling on a more authoritarian turn until it was too late.
It was a while before the Bolsheviks could take the helm. April, June and July all saw eruptions of popular discontent, which Ms. Engelstein maintains were beyond “the capacity of any political leadership to contain or direct.” The philosopher Fedor Stepun observed that Lenin’s post-exile speeches were merely “sails to catch the crazed winds of the revolution.” The Bolsheviks, writes Ms. Engelstein, were “on the margins of political life [but] . . . the margins were a good place to be.” Amid mounting disorder, “those at the center of authority, tenuous as it was, were in the process of exhausting their political credit.”
According to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov (the somewhat more moderate Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks had split in 1903), “Lenin’s group was not directly aiming at the seizure of power [in June 1917] but . . . was ready to seize it in favorable circumstances, which it was taking steps to create.” Ms. Engelstein explains how the Bolsheviks built their base, patiently gathering support among the military and in factories. They then mobilized this “relatively disciplined mass” in a manner designed to increase disorder and topple the flailing provisional government while acting as a “force for order” poised to step in when the moment came. In October, it did.
Contrary to those who assert that the workers and peasants lacked an agenda of their own, Ms. Engelstein believes they genuinely wanted social revolution—though not a Bolshevik dictatorship. But only the Bolsheviks were able “to create the architecture needed to run the successor to the autocratic state and transform the excitement of liberty into a new kind of discipline and power.” The result was totalitarian rule, in which the only “excitement” was the manipulated fervor of a cult on the march.
“Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd” (Harvard, 351 pages, $29.95) is an innovative study that’s about more than its title would suggest. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, formerly a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, shows how the social breakdown that followed the February Revolution triggered a surge in crime that the provisional government could not reverse. It may be too much to argue, as Mr. Hasegawa does, that “the Bolsheviks rode a crime wave to power,” but the chaos did make it easier for them to exploit the growing vacuum in authority. The provisional government faded from shadow to ghost, essentially finished off in late October by the capture of a few buildings, a coup at first barely noticed by many in an exhausted Petrograd. Russia’s new Bolshevik rulers initially did not bother too much about crime, until devastating alcohol-fueled mayhem forced their hand, “inadvertently provoking,” claims Mr. Hasegawa, “the establishment of a new kind of police state”—one, I suspect, that was already on the way.
Helen Rappaport’s “Caught in the Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 430 pages, $27.99) is an account of 1917 as witnessed by Petrograd’s expatriate community, which was itself threatened by the lawlessness Mr. Hasegawa chronicles. A lively if sporadically florid book (“Petrograd was a brooding, beleaguered city that last desperate winter before the revolution broke”), Ms. Rappaport’s account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it. Many of these were relatively privileged (“the servants are beginning to get stuck up with this new-born freedom”), but their observations (“I see Russia going to hell, as a country never went before”) have aged rather better than those of the enthusiasts who welcomed October’s false dawn. Rhapsodizing over workers rallying at the Bolshevik headquarters, American journalist and fellow traveler Albert Rhys Williams wrote that they were “dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men.” Visiting the same place a few weeks later, a less easily impressed Frenchwoman saw “dead, doctrinaire eyes.”
Despite its title, the worthwhile “Revolution! Writings From Russia, 1917” (Pegasus, 364 pages, $27.95) features surprisingly little from the revolutionary year itself—editor Pete Ayrton includes nothing, say, from Nikolai Sukhanov or from the diaries of the novelist Ivan Bunin, a harsh critic of Bolshevism. This is only partly compensated for by Leon Trotsky’s vivid report of October 24, the “deciding night” of the Bolshevik coup—complete with the complaint, as revealing as it was dishonest, that “the Revolution is still too trusting, too generous, optimistic and light-hearted.” The next morning Lenin announced that the provisional government was no more.
The inevitable extract from John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” is a gung-ho depiction of the taking of the Winter Palace on the evening of the 25th. Somerset Maugham makes a rather less-expected appearance with a short story from “Ashenden,” a volume of tales based on his experiences as a British spy. It’s good enough, if not up to the standard set by three sentences from the book’s preface: “In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success.”
Finally, “1917: Stories and Poems From the Russian Revolution” (Pushkin Press, 236 pages, $14.95) is an anthology of literary responses to Bunin’s “damn year.” Neatly chosen by Boris Dralyuk, with room for the familiar (such as Boris Pasternak) and those known less well (the sardonic Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, who wrote as Teffi), the volume is reasonably well balanced between the October revolution’s supporters and those appalled by it. Vladimir Mayakovsky catches the millenarian mood (“We’ll cleanse all the cities . . . with a flood even greater than Noah’s”) while in “The Twelve” Alexander Blok opts for a warmer purge: “We’ll . . . set the world on fire . . . give us Your blessing, Lord!”
History made fools of the cheerleaders of revolution, but the words of those who opposed it still haunt. Anna Akhmatova resolves to stay with her “nation, suicidal” and does so, her great chronicling of Stalinist terror still to come. Marina Tsvetaeva writes of the wine flowing down “every gutter” and a “Tsar’s statue—razed, black night in its place.” Zinaida Gippius mourns the death of long longed-for liberty: “The Bride appeared. And then the soldiers / drove bayonets through both her eyes . . . The royal axe and noose were cleaner / than these apes’ bloodied hands . . . Can’t live like this! Can’t live like this!” Both Gippius and Tsvetaeva went into exile. Tsvetaeva later returned to her homeland. She hanged herself in 1941.