The Revolutionary Chaos of March 1917
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Lee Congdon has a fine review of March 1917, Book 3 in the latest issue of National Review.
“But perhaps resistance would have been futile. Not so, according to Solzhenitsyn. The revolutionaries were largely untrained and poorly armed. Because of the relative calm then existing at the front, up to a million soldiers would have been available to retake Petrograd. Thirty thousand would have been more than enough, but the Supreme Command thought only of surrender. “It was a panopticum of weak and incapable men.” Those words reflect Solzhenitsyn’s view that history is radically contingent; nothing is inevitable. The revolution resulted from the action (or inaction) of men and women who could have chosen different paths.
Solzhenitsyn’s highly critical account of the March Revolution is of a piece with his hostile attitude toward all revolutions. He was not opposed to change; quite the contrary. He believed strongly and wrote often that czarist Russia had been in need of a reform program of the kind advanced by Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. Had that great leader not been assassinated in 1911, and had the czar not decided for war, Russia would almost certainly have been spared the revolution to come. In the fall of 1993, Solzhenitsyn gave an address in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne commemorating the bicentennial of the counterrevolutionary Vendée Uprising. He told those gathered that he would not wish a “great revolution” upon any nation. France, he said, had a Thermidorian reaction that overthrew Robespierre, but the revolution in Russia “was not restrained by any Thermidor as it drove our people on the straight path to a bitter end, to an abyss, to the depths of ruin.” Those words, and Solzhenitsyn’s riveting account of the March Revolution, should give Americans pause.”