Sheila Fitzpatrick Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, was one of the most brutal and destructive power struggles in modern history. Recently, historians have started to reconsider the intent of the Bolsheviks leaders who led the revolution. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a respected modern Russian historian, formulates an argument that soon after the revolution started Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party led the revolution astray to benefit themselves. Much of the decisions the party undertook were once believed to be vehicles of the proletariat revolution, but Fitzpatrick contends that the Bolshevik Party was power hungry and used the popular uprising as an opportunity to claim power. In her book The Russian Revolution, Sheila Fitzpatrick displays how

the Bolshevik Party was focused on power instead of ideology through its party ideals, its system of war communism, and its suppression of opposition and resistance.
The Bolshevik Party was a very different party from the other Marxist and socialist parties in Russia during the early twentieth centuries.

As Fitzpatrick states, “Lenin differed from many other Russian Marxists in seeming actively to desire a proletarian revolution rather than simply predicting that one would ultimately occur.” Lenin was confident that a proletariat revolution would happen, but he believed it would need to have revolutionary leaders and would never happen organically. Consequently, Fitzpatrick asserts that Lenin “saw the party not only as the vanguard of proletarian revolution but also in a sense as its creator.” In a sense, revolutionary leaders forming the party core sounds like a great way to mobilize a revolution, but Fitzpatrick shows how the limited party membership offers a bleak foreshadow into the future of the revolution. Despite making a proletariat revolution more likely, the Bolshevik Vanguard Party became a center for corruption and power hunger. Thus, Sheila Fitzpatrick indicates that Lenin’s party structure and the party’s ideals foreshadow the Bolshevik’s future missteps and focus on maintaining

power.
Once the Bolshevik party is examined, Fitzpatrick begins to display how the policies of War Communism defy the ideological tenets the Bolsheviks were founded upon. Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks found out that their beliefs did not always align with the most practical approaches to maintain order in the country. Hence, the Bolsheviks started to forsake the proletariat workers who were supposed to be the backbone of the revolution. Fitzpatrick declares the Bolshevik handling of factories to be one of the most dramatic shifts away from the original Bolshevik ideology. Marxist philosophy would dictate worker control of the factories, but Fitzpatrick indicates that Bolsheviks preferred appointed leaders, which contradicts the party’s decree of “workers’ control” in 1917. Ultimately, War Communism led to, “Some factories continued to be run by elected workers’ committees. Others were run by an appointed director…) The shift from worker leadership to party control of factories exhibits a monumental transformation of Bolshevik beliefs. Regardless of if party control of the factories helped keep the country functioning, the Bolshevik abandonment of worker control demonstrates a crucial example of the Bolshevik’s deviating away from their ideology of workers’ advancement, to the ideology of power maintenance of the party.
Another critical policy of War Communism was the forcible procurements of food and grain from the peasant class.

Realistically, the Bolsheviks needed to get food for their citizens and the Red Army, but the method they chose to collect food was a terrible approach. Fitzpatrick asserts, “The Bolsheviks adopted a policy of grain requisitioning, sending workers’ and soldiers’ brigades—usually armed, and if possible provided with goods for barter—to get the hoarded grain out of peasants’ barns.” Perhaps the most intriguing part of the requisitioning is the lack of regular repayment to the peasants. With the policy of grain requisitioning, the Bolsheviks display the behavior of a government that has little regard for the well-being of their citizens and that is focused on defending its

power.
In addition to grain requisitioning, the Bolsheviks alienated the peasant population by trying to mobilize poorer peasants against more well-off peasants. Fitzpatrick articulates that the Bolsheviks, “began to organize village Committees of the Poor, and encouraged them to cooperate with Soviet authorities in extracting grain from the barns of richer peasants.” Albeit, the concept of poorer groups revolting against richer groups sounds Marxist, the policy failed dramatically because there wasn’t a huge divide between the peasant groups. Furthermore, Fitzpatrick explains that peasants were far more likely to obtain their own land, rather than manipulate the lives of richer peasants. Overall, Bolshevik policy toward the peasants was generally focused on advancing the party rather than strengthening the populist, which violates the founding tenets of any Marxist regime