“The Revenge of the Servants” wants to go beyond moral considerations to explain the contradictions and complexity of the crises that Russia suffered from 1914 to 1921, with the two revolutions of 1917 that are commemorated throughout this year.
“The Revenge of the Servants” wants to go beyond moral considerations to explain the contradictions and complexity of the crises that Russia suffered from 1914 to 1921, with the two revolutions of 1917 that are commemorated throughout this year.
During this 2017, works are being carried out to commemorate the Russian Revolution of a century ago, which would so profoundly mark the imminent destiny of the gigantic country and even that of part of the continent. A few dates ago, Catherine Merridale, with «Lenin’s train. The origins of the Russian revolution» (Crítica editorial), followed in the footsteps of the exiled Bolshevik leader in Switzerland when the revolutionary reaction became effective and he was able to return on a train journey, already legendary, which would be surrounded by dangers and political intrigues . Thus, “before the end of the year, he would become the lord and master of a new revolutionary state” making a set of thoughts written forty years ago by Karl Marx all “government ideology. He created a Soviet system that would run the country on behalf of the working class, establishing the redistribution of wealth and promoting various equally radical transformations in both the field of culture and social relations. These changes would go beyond its borders since, converted into a political ideology with the name of Leninism, they would become a political guide for the revolutionary parties of the world, from China to Vietnam, from the Caribbean to the Indian subcontinent.
In that year, Europe was waging a fratricidal war while the Russia of the tsars was dying; everything explodes in February, with large mobilizations in the capital, Petrograd; the Tsar abdicates, the country is transformed into a republic, the exiles rush to return, and jubilation seizes the popular classes. The nobility that controlled the country not only has its days numbered, but also puts its life in danger by remaining there, as could be read in the also recent “The decline of the Russian aristocracy” (Tusquets publishing house), by Douglas Smith, in which The experiences of two aristocratic families that ended in ostracism and ruin were recorded. Thus, the book revealed how feudal Russia full of peasants in situations of slavery under the orders and exploitation of the rich went through the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the so-called Red Terror of 1918 against the “enemies of the people”. The solution was clear: put an end to all those who had crushed the proletariat, which would end at the root a highly hierarchical society in which, suddenly, those who fled and dispossessed of everything they had were the rich. Those who had been the servants before had taken revenge. And that is what the title of the latest book by Julián Casanova, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza, refers to: «The revenge of the serfs. Russia 1917» (Critical editorial). The study opens with an epigraph from Prince Lvov, head of the Provisional Government, in June 1917.
The state building falls
Some words that sounded like great regret, aware of having abused the population and not having had the cunning to deal with it as in other advanced countries: “If Russia had been blessed with a true landed aristocracy, like that of England, which had the human decency to treat peasants like people instead of dogs…then maybe things could have been different.’ But they were not, as an avalanche of publications has been showing, seeking to understand how that critical period of such a powerful nation was founded and developed.
In fact, Casanova, very prolific as a writer on historical issues both in Spain and internationally – his latest books are «Europa contra Europa, 1914-1945» (Crítica, 2011) and «A Short History of the Spanish Civil War», published in 2012 in London–, has proposed «to capture and synthesize, in just two hundred pages, the tens of thousands, essential, that have been written by different specialists. This is what this book tries to incorporate and combine my research and teachings, my intellectual debts with renowned historians”, and in this way provide the reader in Spanish with historiographical visions inaccessible to him. “The Revenge of the Serfs” begins with a Nicholas II who did not expect to have to abdicate, thus ending the rule of the Romanov dynasty, which had begun three hundred years earlier. “Suddenly, the entire building of the Russian state collapsed.” Likewise, the author reviews how the decline of tsarism was something that had been brewing since the mid-nineteenth century, with military defeats and ill-advised economic management, and points out the crux of the matter: a reform that was not completely, because with the The abolition of serfdom in 1861, in a stagnant and medieval Russia, did not put an end to that slave system that kept twenty-three million people equally as slaves, because there was a definitive nuance: with that law they were emancipated, but not freed.
The seed of rebellion
That is why Casanova speaks of two Russias and of the tensions and traumas that the most disadvantaged were going to experience in the face of the privileges of a nobility that even had to receive payment for the plot of land that its peasants worked and also received financial incentives from the Condition. It was the “official and peasant Russia, that of the landlords, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the imperial bureaucracy, facing the great mass of the population, illiterate and impoverished”, as the socialist Herzen had actually already explained. It is a country in which the peasantry seeks to achieve a more favorable way of life in the cities and a true industrial bourgeoisie has not developed, where the proletariat does not even have permission to strike, so that the protests were an initiative as disorganized as it was desperate within workers who lived “in dire conditions, with widespread alcoholism and with epidemics, such as cholera” (not to mention the famine of 1891-1892, which cost the lives of almost half a million people). Such a breeding ground, based on repression and the absence of freedoms and civil rights, would lead to a radical opposition to the tsarist system, made up “of intellectuals, the educated elites, what was called “intelligentsia” in Russian, students, writers, professionals , a kind of subculture outside official Russia, trying to exploit any trace of popular discontent to seize power. like cholera” (not to mention the famine of 1891-1892, which cost the lives of almost half a million people). Such a breeding ground, based on repression and the absence of freedoms and civil rights, would lead to a radical opposition to the tsarist system, made up “of intellectuals, the educated elites, what was called “intelligentsia” in Russian, students, writers, professionals , a kind of subculture outside official Russia, trying to exploit any trace of popular discontent to seize power. like cholera” (not to mention the famine of 1891-1892, which cost the lives of almost half a million people). Such a breeding ground, based on repression and the absence of freedoms and civil rights, would lead to a radical opposition to the tsarist system, made up “of intellectuals, the educated elites, what was called “intelligentsia” in Russian, students, writers, professionals , a kind of subculture outside official Russia, trying to exploit any trace of popular discontent to seize power.
Such an amalgamation of cultured citizens would have more echo than could be suspected in that violent and extremely poor era. Casanova affirms that “it was they who established a tradition of revolutionary ideas, propaganda and agitation, before, at the turn of the century, all this materialized in the creation of different socialist parties that later dominated the political scene in 1917.” A community that was distanced from both political and peasant Russia and which, according to some historians, had a negative influence on events by transforming concrete grievances into an outright rejection of the sociopolitical and economic order. For those freethinkers the only way out was revolution, and their fanaticism would ultimately bear fruit. This book shows and clarifies them, and makes vivid.
