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"Democracy" in the Political Consciousness of the February Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii
Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii*
Affiliation:
Institute of Russian History (St. Petersburg branch) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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Extract

Historians of quite diverging orientations have interpreted the February revolution of 1917 in Russia as a “democratic” revolution. Several generations of Marxists of various stripes (tolk) have called it a “bourgeois-democratic revolution.” In the years of perestroika, the contrast between democratic February and Bolshevik October became an important part of the historical argument of the anticommunist movement. The February revolution was regarded as a dramatic, unsuccessful attempt at the modernization and westernization of Russia, as its democratization. Such a point of view was expressed even earlier in some historical works and in the memoirs of participants in the events—liberals and moderate socialists. For example, just such a description of the revolution is given by Aleksandr Kerenskii, whose last reminiscences are especially significant. Kerenskii thought that “the overwhelming majority of the Russian population…were wholeheartedly democratic in their beliefs.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 95 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

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23. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii, 229. Potresov linked Bolshevism to “revolutionary democracy” even in 1926; see S., Ivanov, A. N. Potresov: Opyt kul'turnopsikhologicheskogo portreta (Paris, 1938), 211.Google Scholar

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31. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, f. 2003, op. 1, d. 1494, 1. 14; Otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi Natsional'noi biblioteki (formerly Gosudarstvennaia Publichnaia biblioteka im. M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina), f. 152, op. 1, d. 98, 1. 34.

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34. The testimony of the eminent historian N. I. Kareev is significant in this regard. He spent the summer in the countryside, where a local blacksmith told him: “I would like … our republic to be socialist.” It turned out that the blacksmith, who had separated his farm from the commune, was in favor of a guarantee of private property and against a presidential form of governance. Kareev, N. I., Prozhitoe i perezhitoe (Leningrad, 1990), 268.Google Scholar

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36. Gosudarstvennyi muzei politicheskoi istorii Rossii (Sankt-Peterburg), f. 2, N. 10964; see also Kulegin, A. and Bobrov, V., “Istoriia bez kupiur,” Sovetskie muzei, 1990, no. 3: 5–6.Google Scholar

37. Richard Abraham, Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution (London, 1987), 200. It is interesting that Kerenskii himself gradually changed his image. At first he emphasized his democratism—handshakes, black jacket. As “the people's minister,” however, he demonstrated an imperial style—moving into the tsar's apartments, using the imperial automobiles, assuming the pose of Napoleon. This created the basis for many rumors connecting Kerenskii to the tsar's family.

38. On the “language of class,” see Diane P. Koenker, “Moscow in 1917: The View from Below,” in Kaiser, Daniel H., ed., The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), 91–.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. A similar conclusion was reached by William Rosenberg after studying another problem with different sources. See Rosenberg, “Sozdanie novogo gosudarstva v 1917 g.: Predstavleniia i deistvitel'nost',” Anatomiia revoliutsii: 1917 god v Rossii: Massy, partii, vlast' (St. Petersburg, 1994), 97.