Every revolution needs its myths.
The faithful must be inspired. Successive generations must be enthused.
The October Revolution was built atop a raft of economic and political myths that would take most of 70 years to sink.
But there were also more mundane myths about the events of the revolution. Some of these persist even now, 100 years later.
Myth: The Bolsheviks constantly alluded to the supposed femininity of the leader of the February Revolution, Alexander Kerensky. Among other things, they nicknamed him Alexandra Fyodorovna – the name of the last Russian empress. They also concocted a myth that Kerensky fled the Winter Palace disguised as a nun. The story was effectively retold in several Soviet films, and then made its way into school textbooks. And there were other versions: that he fled not from the Winter Palace, but from Gatchina Palace, another royal residence; that he fled from the Winter Palace through a secret exit, not necessarily dressed as a woman.
Reality: Kerensky openly fled the Winter Palace in his normal clothing. He left the palace for the Western front, in an open car, driving through the streets of Petrograd making no effort at disguise, though he did eventually escape the country dressed as a sailor (see page 20).
Myth: According to the canonical version, Vladimir Lenin endured many severe tests on his path to becoming the country’s leader. For example, he hid out from the Provisional Government by sleeping alone in a thatched hut on the banks of lake.
Reality: In July 1917, accused of being an agent of the German government, a disguised Lenin headed to Sestroretsky Razliv, where, when the police appeared in the city, he was required to hide out in a hut. In August, the rains began and it started to get cold, so the Party sent Lenin to Finland. An important distortion in the mythologized version is the idea that Lenin was alone. For the entire period of his exile, the Bolshevik leader was accompanied by his advisor – another famous revolutionary, Grigory Zinoviev.
Myth: Back in the days of the USSR, the best Leningrad students were inducted into the Pioneers on board the cruiser Aurora, which is docked on the banks of the Neva River, across from the Winter Palace. Students were told the tale of how a blank shot from this ship gave the signal for the storming of the palace, which was the start of the new era in which they were privileged to live. An important aspect of this mythology was the peaceful nature of the uprising: there was no bombardment, no destruction.
Reality: In actuality, the Bolsheviks did shoot at the Winter Palace, but there was no sense shooting at it from the Aurora. The ship was not in an ideal position vis-à-vis the target, and so bombardment ensued from the Peter and Paul Fortress, which sits on the opposite side of the river from the palace. It is true that the Aurora did merely fire blank shots at the start of the storming, but it was ready to fire live ammunition as well, should the need have arisen.
Myth: The storming of the Winter Palace, former seat of Romanov rule and the home, as well, of the Provisional Government, was a critical juncture in the victory of the revolution.
Reality: At the moment of the so-called storming, the Bolsheviks already held all the key cinch points of power in the city: Gosbank, the telegraph office, ministries, bridges, and train stations. They had even taken Peter and Paul Fortress. The Bolsheviks did not breach the walls of the palace and did not climb through the wrought iron window bars, as shown in one of the more dramatic scenes from Eisenstein’s film, October, still seen by many as a documentary chronicle of the revolution. Instead, the conspirators walked into the palace through a door that turned out to be unlocked. A few days later there occurred a second and less well-known phase of the taking of the palace: the sad decimation of its extensive wine cellar.
Myth: After the fall of the USSR, there was a revisionist impulse, and many concluded that “Great October” was basically a fiction, that a group of drunken sailors aboard the Aurora somehow mistakenly kicked the Provisional Government out of the palace and ended up in power.
Reality: Historian Boris Kolonitsky writes, “The event was, of course, not that well organized, but it was rather large in scale… Originally, there were several thousand people in the Winter Palace. These were cadets from various military schools, members of a women’s battalion, Cossacks, and artillery soldiers. But gradually the number of people who were ready to defend the government declined… Several guns were captured, and detachments departed, but one should not conclude from this that everything took place calmly and peacefully.”
Myth: Lenin disguised himself by wrapping a bandage over his face in order to walk unmolested to Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, a neoclassical building that formerly housed a school for girls of the nobility.
Reality: Today, the traditional image of a grimacing Lenin headed toward Smolny has the ring of Soviet textbook mythology, and your average Russian might be inclined to doubt its veracity. Yet… “Here Soviet filmmakers did not lie,” says historian and television journalist Nikolai Svanidze. “Lenin did in fact disguise himself by tying a rag around his cheek. He got on a tram and chatted with the driver. When he discovered that the driver had leftist inclinations, he began to explain to her how the revolution had to be carried out. When Lenin was walking along Shpalernaya ulitsa, he came face-to-face with a mounted patrol of cadets coming from the opposite direction. If they had stopped Lenin, history would have taken a different turn. But the patrol passed him by, and Lenin made it to Smolny.”
Myth: When it talks about the revolution, even now Russian propaganda always gives full credit to the Bolsheviks. In other words, it overstates their significance in history the same way the Bolsheviks themselves used to. As a result, one gets the impression that the revolution was merely an explosion that happened over several days in October and that the February revolution was nothing of great significance.
Reality: The entire point of October was to seize power from those who took it in February. Thus, the Russian Revolution is a far lengthier event than just those famous 10 days that shook the world. And part of the revolution was certainly the July and August crises, and, even more significantly, the events that followed October, namely the Civil War. Thus, many historians feel that the revolution really did not “end” until the 1920s.
Myth: Traditionally, the Civil War, as part of the revolutionary process, is presented as a conflict between Whites and Reds. And, due to inertia, it continues to be presented that way to this day.
Reality: First, the line between Whites and Reds was never as clear as the Bolsheviks would have had us believe. A significant number of tsarist officers opted to serve in the Red Army and, in essence, it was these experienced military men who helped create and organize it. At the time, there was a famous joke: “The Red Army is like a radish: red on the outside but white inside.”
Aside from this, the situation was far from a dualist Red-White dichotomy. The latest research underscores the fact that a wide array of political forces were cobbled into alliances throughout the different regions. And Whites and Reds were just one part of the rather complex conflict that raged for several years.
Myth: Soviet propaganda painted Lenin as a zealous, scholarly laborer, a wunderkind and polyglot. And the anti-Soviet storyline was rather similar, portraying him as a genius whose diabolical logic enabled him to seize power in such a huge country.
By way of example, Lenin’s phrase, “Study, study, and study some more,” is so famous that it has been turned into a meme and fodder for various jokes. For example:
“Study, study, and study some more, because there’s no work to be found.”
“Study, study, and study some more, and study, study, and study some more – this is the computer virus LENIN.”
“Study, study, and study some more, but leave the admin in peace.”
Reality: As a child, Lenin was a late bloomer, and his parents never counted on him, their fourth child, to be a success. As to foreign languages, the future leader of the world revolution spoke English and German, but his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote in her memoirs that they left Paris because her husband could not master French.
Myth: The revolution was the result of a conspiracy crafted by enemies of tsarist Russia, whether Germans, the English, Jews, American Jews, or even Old Believers. But conspiratorial theories are not always the exclusive province of Russian propaganda. Thus, some Western historians feel that the October uprising, the putsch, was skillfully organized via the support of a limited number of soldiers who did not have deep connections with the people.
Reality: The truth is far more mundane, because the Provisional Government in October was weak, ineffectual, and unable to defend itself. Even Lenin admitted that power simply lay at his feet for the taking. The only question was who would be the first to pick it up.
Myth: Rare is the visualization of the events of 1917 that does not employ Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. Enemies of the painting say that it is the face of the evil that overtook Russia, while adepts see in it the ideal symbol of the destruction of outdated traditions.
Reality: Malevich created his painting two years before the revolution and did not intend for it to depict political events. He wrote, in fact, that Black Square was the cosmos – a screen that has a thousand meanings, none of them concrete. In contrast with Mayakovsky, Eisenstein and many others, Malevich did not put his avant garde discoveries to the service of propaganda. And this explains the rapidity with which Suprematism fell out of favor and the artist’s career came to an end under the Bolsheviks.
Myth: Empress Alexandra had a love affair with the village priest and healer Grigory Rasputin, who had inexplicable powers that enabled him to stop the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei’s bleeding. Through this influence, he imperiled the Russian state, duped the weak Tsar Nicholas, and single-handedly brought about the ruin of Russia.
Reality: Rasputin’s influence on the empress, and through her upon the emperor, was unquestionably high, in particular as regards Nicholas’ ill-advised staffing selections, which ended up making the tsar less and less popular. Yet Rasputin was not Alexandra’s lover, and furthermore, he also gave the tsar some good advice. For example it is well-known that he was against Russia’s participation in World War I.
In fact, the one who suffered most from the myth of the secret sorcerer finagling himself into the imperial bedchambers, and thence upending the Fate of Russia, was Rasputin himself. Conspirators murdered him, believing that this was the only way to save Russia. As we know, they did not succeed.
Myth: As every Soviet Pioneer knew, this phrase was uttered by the 17-year-old Lenin after his older brother was condemned to death by tsarist authorities.
Reality: True enough, Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, was in 1887 sentenced to death for his participation in the assassination of Emperor Alexander III. But the phrase only appeared in the 1920s, in a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.”
This myth was very important for pinpointing the sources of Bolshevism. It was impossible not to sympathize with the young Lenin, who had lost his brother, and who decided that one needed to change the means of struggle and destroy the phenomenon that was “tsarism.”
Myth: Simply mention the Stalinist Terror and horrors come to mind; all other periods in history pale in comparison as practically harmless. It even seems as if what happened is that, at the end of the 1920s, some bad Bolsheviks showed up and demolished the achievements of the good Bolsheviks. It is a case of cynics vs. romantics, totalitarianism vs. revolution, Stalin vs. Lenin.
Reality: The violence against enemies, real and imagined, began soon after the Bolsheviks stole power. The Cheka was created in December 1917; the decree “On the Red Terror” was issued in 1918; and the first political prison, on Solovetsky Island, was created in 1921 – all under Lenin.
Lenin wrote several times about the necessity for mass terror. Stalin merely put the ideas into practice.
Myth: The project known as the USSR was all about leftist ideals, and so that project’s failure is a discrediting of such ideals.
Reality: The Bolsheviks only took advantage of the terminology of Marxism, and created not a socialist state, but a dictatorship. The country where a “hegemonical proletariat” was declared was actually a country of millions of absolutely disenfranchised individuals. Modern Marxists debate whether Soviet power really sought to put the German thinker’s ideas into practice, and, if so, at what stage it failed, having put an oppressive authoritarian bureaucratic apparatus in place.
Myth: Russia was overcome by spy mania throughout the First World War, and White officers were certain that Lenin was simply carrying out a mission assigned to him by the country’s military enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm. This opinion has been put forward in many memoirs and is popular to this day.
Reality: It has been proven that Germany gave money “for a Russian Revolution” and that part of that money ended up in the hands of the Bolsheviks, but through what channels and in what quantity that money arrived is not entirely clear. Certainly the sealed train on which Lenin traveled through Germany, enabling him to get from his Swiss exile to Scandinavia and then to Russia, was enabled by German sponsorship and financing. But the specific fate of Germany and working for Kaiser Wilhelm held no interest for Lenin, because he was gripped by the idea of world revolution, and the idea that Russia would become the powder keg that started that conflagration.
Myth: Commissar Vasily Yakovlev, who transferred the tsarist family from Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg, where they were later executed as White forces closed in on the city, originally was supposed to take them to Omsk, and then on to Moscow. This has generated discussions about attempts to save the unlucky family (see Shay McNeal, The Plots to Rescue the Tsar). In Russia, people frequently discuss whether the last emperor and his family could have met a less tragic fate if, say, Yakovlev and the family had been captured en route. Some even speculate that Yakovlev himself was plotting to free the royals.
Reality: The fact is that Lenin and his advisers were always in favor of “settling scores” with Nicholas. The only question was how and under what conditions this should be done. As concerns Commissar Yakovlev, he only changed his route because he received orders to deliver the “baggage” alive, while others accompanying the baggage with him wanted to carry out the sentence on the road.
Once the Bolsheviks seized power, the tsarist family had no chance of survival whatsoever.
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