Is a Revolution in the Offing?

I used to own a poster from the old USSR of the “famous charge” on the Winter Palace during the October Revolution.  The focal point of the poster was an ordinary soldier, with a fixed bayonet on his rifle, waving others forward toward the well-defended palace walls. 

I liked the poster for its art.  As a piece of history, it was, however, like many things that came out of the old Soviet Union: a wonderful depiction of an event that did not quite happen.

As the military historian D. J. Goodspeed recounts, there was no charge against the Winter Palace.  While the communists assembled outside the gates, the members of the provisional government sat down to a bountiful, late dinner, seemingly oblivious to the surrounding threat.  Communist units entered the palace gates and were surrounded by overwhelming forces and surrendered. But as more and more communist units entered, more and more of the defenders, seeing a never-ending stream of revolutionaries, deserted their posts.  Sometime early in the morning of the next day, the remaining defenders saw themselves terribly outnumbered by their captives and they too began to leave their posts. 

The last holdouts were the Second Women Moscow Death Battalion, who after some discussion also withdrew, leaving the Winter Palace in the hands of the communists.  The victorious communists let the members of the government and military depart, and then proceeded to embark on a rigorous campaign against the contents of the palace’s wine cellar from which they only emerged days later.

Our image of revolutions is that of men and women running through the streets with guns blazing.  The assault on the Bastille, however, occurred when there were merely a handful of prisoners in it and France’s feudal regime had already crumbled.  The taking of the Bastille, like the taking of the Winter Palace, was symbolic, but revolutions do not occur in the swift momentous events that become the sources of celebrations and the subjects of inspiring works of art.  Regimes die from a slow agonizing death that takes place over long periods of time; when a regime’s decay becomes patently obvious, it is already too late. 

Most regimes began to fall when they lose legitimacy.  Few understand that even an ineffectual regime like czarist Russia was able to stumble on as long as the ordinary Russian still believed the czar was the little father anointed by God.  It is the intellectuals, as Crane Brinton so brilliantly noted, who put the first nail in a regime’s coffin by calling into question the principles that sustain its necessary legitimacy.  Most regimes fall because they give sustenance to their accusers by being out of touch with the lives of average people.  As Alexis de Tocqueville put it, regimes die from an absence of the heart.