A key function of propaganda has always been to demoralize the opposition. From the perspective of the propagandists, it is important to always give the impression that their side is the side of the majority, and the most popular. We have witnessed this in action in recent years with the rise of censorship designed to “combat misinformation.” By suppressing dissident viewpoints, the regime lessens access to “unorthodox” ideas, but there is an important secondary function: suppressing dissenting speech also gives the impression that the dissidents are less numerous and more isolated than they really are. By ensuring that certain voices dominate the public square, propagandists help to create a sense of inevitability of the regime’s program. This facilitates greater public acceptance of the propagandists’ inescapable victory. After all, why bother resisting if the other side is so popular, and your side is but a small minority?
Socialists and their allies have long been very adept at using these methods, and few had a greater mastery of it than V.I. Lenin. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin’s successors employed his methods, successfully portraying the spread of socialist regimes as the inevitable outcome of enormous communist mass movements. The modern post-Soviet Left still employs similar tactics, portraying itself as being on “the right side of history” and as the legitimate majority position.
Nonetheless, the extent to which many of these twentieth-century “revolutions” were truly revolutions has always been in question. Many of these socialist regime changes could far more accurately be described as a coup d’état in which a small minority seized control of the state without majority support or any bottom-up revolutionary mass movements.
For example, the so-called “October Revolution” in Russia was not a revolution, but was a coup carried out by a small minority. In the socialist version of history, the October Revolution was a bottom up “people’s movement” devoted to helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks topple the provisional social-democratic government. This narrative has been key in establishing the legitimacy of the Lenin regime. In this view, Lenin was merely giving “the people” what they wanted. The portrayal of the October coup as a revolution of the masses also gives the impression that the turn to communism was the inevitable and desired result of unfolding and intractable historical trends. Naturally, this view of history encourages socialists while demoralizing their opponents.
Yet, the historical facts tell us that socialism’s greatest political victory—the creation of the Soviet Union—was neither inevitable nor a response to the demands of a revolutionary majority.
Coup or Revolution?
For decades following the installation of Lenin’s soviet regime, historians and pundits generally and obediently employed the term “October Revolution” to describe the change in regime. In more recent decades, however, many historians have taken a less credulous approach toward the chosen terminology.
By the 1970s, even many Soviet historians denied that the Russian Revolution was a legitimate manifestation of a mass movement. In her historiography of the debate over the use of the term “revolution,” Nina Bogdan notes that a number of exiled and dissident historians in this period took to contradicting the “simplistic myth of the 1917 Revolution” that was the generally accepted view. She writes that these historians doubted the official history and subsequently came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks seized power through illegitimate means, referring to the event in October of 1917 as a “seizure of power,” “coup d’état,” “mutiny,” or “take-over.”
Historian Orlando Figes, moreover—author of A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924—refers to the event as a “coup.” Moreover, according to Figes, a coup was Lenin’s preferred tactic since it allowed him to do an end run around the new Soviet Congress. At the time, the Congress enjoyed some degree of true popular support but was under the influence of a variety of competing factions not loyal to Lenin.
Similarly, Richard Pipes, in his book The Russian Revolution, consistently employs the terms “October coup” or “Bolshevik coup” to describe the event and notes how Lenin’s cadre actively worked against the broader and more popular coalitions in order to seize power via a small, but well organized and well armed, personal militia. As Ralph Raico puts it, “[T]he so-called October Revolution—what the communists for decades called Great October or Red October—was simply a coup d’état by a few thousand Red Guards.”
A “Revolution” of a Small Minority
If Lenin lacked the support of the majority, how did he carry out this “revolution”? The answer lies in how Lenin used a combination of propaganda, secrecy, and political organization in an environment where no regime had securely established legitimacy.
To understand this, we need to keep in mind that by late 1917, the monarchy had already been overthrown during the February Revolution. This was followed by the official proclamation of a republic in September. The monarchy had already made itself extremely unpopular by prolonging Russia’s involvement in the First World War. The population—numbering approximately 125 million at the time—endured more than 1.2 million war deaths and more than seven million casualties overall. Unfortunately, the provisional government—which could have obtained popular acclaim by ending Russian involvement in the war—refused to exit the war. This allowed the Bolsheviks to later win some degree of support from much of the population by promising to sue for peace.
It was in this environment that Lenin and the Bolsheviks designed their coup.
There is little evidence that the general public in Saint Petersburg or Moscow was clamoring for a violent seizure of power by the Leninists. Rather, as Pipes puts it, It was Lenin’s lieutenant Leon Trotsky who “[w]ith supreme mastery of the techniques of the modern coup d’etat, of which he was arguably the inventor, ... led the Bolsheviks to victory.”
Chief among these techniques was propagandizing the regime’s main source of coercive power, the military garrisons:
the Bolsheviks expended great efforts in propagandizing the soldiers in the garrisons in Petrograd as soon as the February Revolution occurred, and discouraged them from returning to the front so that, by October, it was the soldiers who were in the forefront to lead any military actions in support of the Bolsheviks, not the workers.
In contrast, “the workers” and the general population were kept in the dark as to the plans of the Bolsheviks. Lenin even hid his coup plans from the Soviet Congress. Simultaneously, Lenin claimed to be working with orders from the Congress in an effort to gain support from socialists of all parties.
Instead, according to Pipes, “Because the coup was unauthorized [by the Second Congress of Soviets] and so quietly carried out, the population of Petrograd had no reason” to suspect something momentous had happened. ...”No one except a handful of principles knew what had happened: that the capital city was in the iron grip of armed Bolsheviks and that nothing would ever be the same again. Lenin later said that starting the world revolution in Russia was as easy as ‘picking up a feather.’”
Even among the propagandized military garrisons, participation in favor of the Bolsheviks was very limited. Nikolai Sukhanov estimates that “out of the garrison of 200,000 scarcely a tenth went into action, probably much fewer.” On the other hand, because the provisional government was so unpopular, many within the garrison were uninterested in doing much to stop the Bolsheviks.
The real story of the October “revolution” is not one of a popular uprising, but of resigned acquiescence from a population desperate for an end to the devastating war. The Bolsheviks promised peace to both key military personnel and to the public at large.
Once the Bolsheviks had control of the state’s bureaucratic machinery, the party was then able to employ the full panoply of government jobs and “free” handouts to supporters willing to fight against the remnants of the old regimes.
The Battle of Ideas
Even with this power—and with the power to vastly expand propaganda efforts—Lenin’s new regime was forced to spend five years fighting dissenters in the Russian Civil War. This is because, as Ludwig von Mises observed, “In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.” Thus, not even the brilliant tactics of Lenin and Trotsky were sufficient to void the need for Bolshevik victories in the battle of ideas. Even with an initial tactical victory via the coup, the Bolsheviks still needed to secure broader political support in order to definitively put down the resistance. This was made possible by aggressive regime-supported “education” efforts. This “education”—more accurately described as propaganda—was funded and promulgated by a vast array of government institutions, including state-controlled media. The propaganda served to both create true believers and pacify skeptics. The propaganda reduced the masses of active opponents to numbers that could be more easily “liquidated” in the Gulag.
Leninist propaganda was also helped along by the nature of longstanding ideological leanings among the Russian population itself. Since industrialization was so relatively limited in the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century, the Empire lacked a sizable population of bourgeois liberals with the means and inclination to oppose the Bolsheviks in substantial numbers. Moreover, in 1917 Russia, the general public had long been trained to simply endure despotism and palace coups. With the coups of 1907 and February 1917 still fresh in their minds, many ordinary Russians may have assumed (wrongly) that the October coup was simply more of the same.
Public indifference and ambivalence, however, is a long way from the “popular uprising” the socialist Left has long claimed drove the Bolshevik seizure of power. As with the ruling parties and conspirators of our own time, the seizure and application of political power in October 1917 was driven largely by the effective use of secrecy, propaganda, and the coercive power of a small minority.
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