This is, by my count, Robert Service’s 12th book that touches on the Russian Revolution, either substantively or tangentially. So far, we’ve had a biographical triptych on Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin; a trilogy on the last; two broad surveys of modern Russia; a monograph on the last tsar and another on the Bolsheviks; and a general account for students. By now, he could churn out another history on autopilot. He is, thankfully, too clever for that. What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.
Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, he offers none of the flights of literary imagination that make, say, Isaac Deutscher’s triple-decker life of Trotsky such a gripping yarn. By contrast, Service is a one-man anti-hagiography factory. A Stakhanovite among stylists, he desultorily, Englishly, files away episode after episode. On the positive side, he has little time for the starving cannibals and sozzled soldiers of Orlando Figes’s revolutionary tragedy.But why a new history of the revolution? Service invokes the need to survey the scene “from below”. Accordingly, he has mined a dozen diaries for contemporaneous reactions to the events. These can have a rather predictable quality. We meet, for instance, a man recoiling in horror at the “lawlessness” unleashed by the Bolsheviks; perhaps the nationalisation of his dacha had something to do with his response. Similarly, we encounter a British nurse having to endure middle-class hardships: “Domestic servants have ceased to exist.” Or take the entrepreneurial, conservative farmer, who decided that the Bolsheviks were a “disgusting party”.
No, the real draw here isn’t the worm’s-eye view but rather the high-octane, high-political drama. A third of the narrative is given over to the late tsarist period, another third to the months between the February and October revolutions, and the last part to the civil war that ensued. Clearing so much space for the inter-revolutionary interlude is unusual, but entirely fitting for Service’s purposes. The aim here, evidently, is to rehabilitate the “bourgeois” provisional government that preceded the Bolshevik takeover.
But before we get to that, we are treated to a reconstruction of Russia under the Romanovs. Service argues that Russia on the eve of the first world war wasn’t a society crying out for revolution. Reforms were well under way, even if Nicholas II was no liberal himself. Here was a ruler who took The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the bible of antisemites – at its word, a ruler whose chief moderniser was a chap so ruthless that they called the hangman’s noose “Stolypin’s necktie”. At the same time, more calories were being consumed, and more rail lines laid. The dumas and zemstvos oversaw a welfare state of sorts. Tsarist Russia wasn’t the oppressive police state of received wisdom; “liberal Britain” had seven times as many policemen a head. Huge swathes of land had been transferred into peasant hands since the failed revolution of 1905. Then it all went awry. Coveting Constantinople, Nicholas cack-handedly brigaded his empire into the Great War. Some 47% of men under 43 were drafted to do battle with Germans and lice. Russians succumbed to both in staggering numbers. Pogroms against the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Jews won the tsar no love in the borderlands. Martial law likewise alienated civilian governors in cities, who were forced to play second fiddle to the military. Nicholas II’s hangers-on, from the narcoleptic Boris Stürmer to Rasputin, didn’t inspire confidence either.
By February 1917, the tsar had a motley coalition of generals, republicans and constitutional monarchists lined up against him, with the coup de grâce delivered by protesting factory workers in Petrograd.
When the curtain came down on Romanov rule the provisional government wrested power in a largely orderly fashion. Indeed, the February revolution scarcely claimed 1,500 lives – almost bloodless by Soviet standards. October would prove more gruesome. “I tell you, heads must roll,” Trotsky would declare during that later revolutionary outing. “The strength of the French Revolution was in the machine that made the enemies of the people shorter by a head.”
If there’s a hero in Blood on the Snow, it’s the provisional government’s leader, the Socialist Revolutionary party’s Alexander Kerensky. This puts Service in the company of the teenage Ayn Rand, though I imagine he doesn’t have posters of him plastered all over his bedroom walls as she did. Rescuing this ephemeral regime from the condescension of posterity, Service chronicles its achievements: inter alia women’s enfranchisement; free speech; the right to strike; enabling Jews to move freely in Russia; the nationalisation of Orthodox schools. Half the job was done before the Bolsheviks showed up. All this, moreover, in the face of immense adversity, what with the collapse of the rouble and severed supply chains.
But Kerensky had an achilles heel, Service tells us: “his reluctance to use violence”. He didn’t level his rifle at his opponents, it is true, but he did cling to the war aims of the tsar. To the average Russian he came across as a bit of a warmonger, in hock to the allies. Kerensky had his reasons – Russia very simply needed the loans that JP Morgan and others were advancing on condition of continued fighting. Yet soldiers, peasants and workers recognised the arrangement for what it was: blood money. The fact remains that Kerensky failed to deliver the three basic desiderata that constituted the Bolshevik pitch: “peace, land, and bread”.
“All power to the Soviets,” in Lenin’s phrase, made eminent sense under the circumstances. When this actually happened in October, however, it quickly came to mean “all power to the Bolsheviks” – and the exclusion of the other left parties. There had always been a tension in the Soviet programme between centralised authoritarianism and mass democratism, Service argues, and with the start of the civil war – in which Britain played a particularly sordid role, bankrolling the antisemitic and counter-revolutionary White Army – it was ultimately settled in the former’s favour. By 1922, democracy had been snuffed out, and the pesky peasants and workers shown their place. Two years later, Lenin was dead, and, in good time, the authoritarian project fell to Stalin.
Service ends on a note of bathos. “Communism has died off,” he writes, for anyone who might think otherwise. For a more rousing conclusion, one must look further afield. As Eric Hobsbawm had it, the Russian Revolution changed the lives of a good third of humanity, for better or worse. I would say two-thirds. We would hardly have had welfare states within the Atlantic alliance had it not been for the mortal fear the Bolsheviks instilled among western governments. It is no accident that ours was created under the shadow of communism. We owe our NHS, after a fashion, to their revolution.
• Pratinav Anil is a lecturer in history at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924 by Robert Service is published by Picador (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
