The Russian Revolutionary Constitution and Pamphlet Literature in the 1917 Russian Revolution

Abstract

This essay examines how Russia’s constitutional status was discussed in pamphlet literature in the 1917 Russian revolution. Taken as a discreet source, the pamphlet literature offered detailed and accessible arguments that were crucial to comprehending what sort of Russian revolution contemporaries thought they were engaged in. To a considerable degree, historical studies of 1917 have been determined by its outcome, with a voluminous literature on the Bolsheviks. The pamphlets examined here provide an alternative, non-Bolshevik, promotion of a constitution of rights that sought to create a political culture that would frame and underpin a republican democratic revolutionary settlement. This was the dominant script and predominant expectation of 1917 that the victorious October Revolution managed not only to suppress, but to render historically obscure.

Notes

¹ It was also suggested that the Constituent Assembly should draw up a constitution that should then be put to a referendum. This was the surest means to guarantee national approval and consent. See Magaziner (1917, pp. 39–40).

² Pamphlets have been under-utilised as a source, with historians of 1917 focusing largely on newspapers, party documents, conference proceedings, government papers, and memoirs. In the context of the Russian revolution there has been no study to rival the use of pamphlets in explorations of the English revolution in, for example, Hill (1972). For an illustration of the usefulness of the pamphlet as source see, for example, Thatcher (2011).

³ See, for example, the brief acknowledgement of pamphlet publications in Rendle (2010, p. 97), and a short discussion of two pamphlets, one of which is included in our survey, in Wade (1969, pp. 66–7).

⁴ For a good example of an analysis of how republicanism was celebrated in songs and in festivals, see Figes and Kolonitskii (1999, pp. 30–70).

⁵ The pamphlets were collected over many years from libraries and archives outside Russia. Here special thanks are due to the collections held in the IISG, Amsterdam; of the National Library, Helsinki; and at the Hoover Institute, California. Unfortunately our authors left no biographical information and, in the main, their life stories are inaccessible.

⁶ The Kadets did explain the sudden volte face in party policy in 1917 from a parliamentary monarchy to a republic. The former was agreed in 1906 as the best transitional form of rule from autocracy to the final goal of republicanism. However, between 1906 and 1917 several important changes had occurred that rendered a parliamentary monarchy obsolete. Chiefly ordinary Russians had acquired a sense of statehood that was independent of the tsar, and the autocracy had killed the attraction of monarchy by its disgraceful performance in the world war; see Kokoshkin (1917, pp. 8–11), Rosenberg (1974, pp. 85–7). The relative absence of Kadet party pamphlets on a democratic republic is puzzling, especially given the party’s commitment to inculcating ‘the broad masses with principles of a new democratic order’ (Rosenberg 1974, p. 64). The reluctance of groups to the right of the Kadets to support the monarchy is noted in Rendle (2010, p. 3).

⁷ See, for example, the concerns about backwardness (the mob, dark people) expressed in various contexts in Browder and Kerensky (1961, pp. 491, 570, 630, 669, 682, 700, 707, 715, 787, 817, 892, 908, 910, 914, 916–17, 941, 954, 955, 957–58, 965, 981, 985, 1011, 1015–16, 1032, 1086), Gor’kii (1917, pp. 305–8).

⁸ The dangers of a lose commitment to republicanism on instrumental grounds is evident in Magaziner (1917, p. 39).

⁹ There was also an economic context to pamphlet production in 1917. The pamphlets of 1917 stand as poor country cousins to the pamphlets of 1905. There are thus no richly illustrated pamphlets in 1917 that drew upon revolutionary republican iconography as in the post-1905 period. The 1917 pamphlets lack a tirazh, and with the Okhrana’s rapid disintegration there are no police reports, but it is unlikely that they were printed and distributed in the numbers characteristic of 1905. In the First Russian Revolution it has been noted that Kadet pamphlet print runs ranged from 80,000 to 300,000 (Rosenberg 1974, p. 25).

¹⁰ The notion of the dignity of free citizens compared to the indignity of slaves was important to the passionate polemics of 1917. The most famous example of this was when Alexander Kerensky as Minister of War tried to shame soldiers into battle by accusing them of being ‘rebellious slaves’. See his speech at The Convention of Delegates from the Front (Petrograd, 10 May 1017) in Sack (1918, pp. 287–90).

¹¹ That Nicholas II ruled Russia with outdated methods is now well-established in the historiography. See, for example, Kennan (1968, pp. 6–8), Trotsky (1977, p. 81), Gooding (1996, pp. 86, 89).

¹² It has been pointed out in other contexts that peasant women could use the view of them as intellectually inferior to their, and to the peasant community’s, advantage. See, for example, Viola (1996, pp. 181–204).

¹³ See also Lavrent’ev (1917, p. 12).

¹⁴ See also Bertliev (1917, pp. 4, 16).

¹⁵ This is not to say that republicanism was not promoted to the soldiers by other means. See Rendle (2010, pp. 117–19).

¹⁶ As one recent study claims, the Kornilov Affair was a ‘complete game-changer’ (Read 2013, p. 92).