Political parties of Russia in 1917

Already on March 5, 1917, the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet prohibits the publication of Black Hundred newspapers, including Russkoe Znamya and Novoye Vremya.

Also on March 5, the Provisional Government establishes an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, before which, in addition to the highest tsarist officials and generals, also the leaders of the right–wing parties appeared.

The estate noble organization "United Nobility", which back in January 1917 declared about the "inviolability of the foundations of autocracy and readiness to serve it with faith and truth", after the February Revolution, sharply changed its rhetoric.

The Permanent Council of the organization sends telegrams to the localities calling for "quiet work and the maintenance of order", on March 9, 1917, adopts a resolution: "The nobility must direct all forces to promote the now unified legitimate government".

May God bless our great Motherland with happiness and glory on its new path.Beloved children of the holy Orthodox Church!The Provisional Government came into control of the country at a difficult historical moment.

[5] Rasputin, starting in 1912, actively intervened in the activities of the Holy Synod and in the process of appointing bishops, in particular, removing his former supporter, Bishop Hermogenes of Saratov and Tsaritsyno (according to some sources, the conflict even reached a fight)[6] and, conversely, bringing Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, Metropolitan of Petrograd and Ladoga Pitirim, Archbishop of Tobolsk and Siberia Varnava closer.

Researcher Mikhail Babkin cites, as a characteristic, a letter to the Holy Synod of a group of persons who signed themselves as "Orthodox Christians" and asked to explain to them "what to do with the old oath and with the one that will be forced to take?

Right–wing Socialist Revolutionaries (Alexander Kerensky, Boris Savinkov, Nikolay Avksentyev, Ekaterina Breshko–Breshkovskaya), close in views to the "Trudoviks", became a moderate trend.

At the 3rd Congress of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in late May – early June 1917, the left wing forms its own faction and accuses the Central Committee of "shifting the center of the party's support to strata of the population that, due to their class character or level of consciousness, cannot be a real support for the policy of true revolutionary socialism", demands the transfer of land to the peasants, the transfer of power to the Soviets, the refusal to prepare the June 1917 offensive.

The disadvantages of the Mensheviks in the political competition were indecision and an amorphous organizational structure; the Bolsheviks opposed it with a rigid, centralized organization headed by a charismatic leader.

The main reason for the internal Menshevik splits was the question of peace, which divided the party into "defencists" who defended the idea of the so–called "revolutionary defencism" ("war to a victorious end"), and "internationalists" who leaned towards the position of the Bolsheviks.

In general, all the Menshevik factions, both "left" and "right", refused to support the October armed uprising in Petrograd, to characterize it as the establishment of a "Bolshevik dictatorship" by means of a "military conspiracy".

As researchers Richard Pipes and Mikhail Voslensky point out, Lenin back in January 1917, in exile, speaking to young Swiss socialists, declared: "We, the elderly, may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.

During the February Revolution, not a single member of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) was in Petrograd – all of them were in exile or emigration.

The provocateur Roman Malinovsky even managed to become a member of the Central Committee and in 1913 the Chairman of the Bolshevik faction in the Duma, but in 1914 he fled Russia under the threat of exposure.

The Narodniks' attempt to rely on the majority of the population – the peasantry – has failed, therefore the Leninists are guided by the minority, but organized and disciplined – by the working class in order to seize power by its hands".

Killed during the "Great Purge": 18 (58%) Berzin, Bubnov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Milyutin, Rykov, Smilga, Krestinsky, Sokolnikov, Trotsky (liquidated by an agent of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs in Mexico in 1940), Kiselev, Lomov (Oppokov), Obolensky (Osinsky), Preobrazhensky, Skripnik (committed suicide during the campaign of persecution), Teodorovich, Yakovleva (sentenced to 20 years in 1937, died in 1944).

The Central Committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party, elected in May 1917, consisted of 66 people, including 5 princes, one baron, one countess, several large bankers and industrialists, about 20 professors, etc.

The researcher Vadim Kozhinov, having analyzed the ethnic composition of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in the period 1917–1922, includes 27 Russians, 10 Jews and 11 persons of other nationalities (Latvians, Poles, Georgians, Armenians, etc.).

By the will of the tyrants, peoples tormented each other,You got up, labor Petersburg,And the first one started the war of all the oppressed;Against all oppressors;To kill the very seed of war.No victims – heroes lie under this grave;Not grief, but envy, is your fate in hearts;All grateful descendants on terrible red days;Gloriously you lived and died beautifully.

One of the founders of Russian Marxism, the Menshevik Pavel Axelrod, expressed himself even more rudely, calling the Leninist organization "a simplified copy ... of the bureaucratic–autocratic system ... of the Minister of Internal Affairs".

As far as Lenin himself was able to find out first–hand, "Narodnaya Volya", in contrast to "Earth and Freedom", had a hierarchical command structure of a paramilitary type headed by the executive committee.

This circumstance is the reason why the Leninist faction is always better organized than others, stronger in its unanimity, more inventive in terms of putting its ideas into the working environment and applying it to the political situation.

Richard Pipes in his research claims that Lenin's power became absolute only by the end of 1918, after he recovered from the assassination attempt on August 30, 1918; a rapid recovery after a seemingly fatal wound was superimposed on the traditional for Russia notions of the sacredness of the tsar.

Vladimir Bonch–Bruevich, in the first edition of his memoirs, claimed that the sight of the wounded Lenin reminded him of "the removal from the cross of Christ, crucified by priests, bishops and the rich".

As the historian Yuri Felshtinsky points out, the policy of splitting the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions was supported by the Police Department, which recklessly believed that this would weaken the revolutionary movement.

The Bolsheviks in the Struggle for Power (1917–1918)" draws attention to the fact that Lenin actively used in 1917–1918 the method he first tested during the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903.

Of course, the intellectuals–party members promise the worker that with their coming to power they themselves will vegetate for a pittance and work day and night in the name of his interests, for him rivers of milk will flow in the banks of the jelly.

The main ideologues of Russian anarchism were Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin, who developed the doctrine of "anarcho–communism" as a free union of separate communities ("communes") without any central state power at all.

The surviving groups are mainly concerned with issuing proclamations; however, in 1911 the Moscow anarchists succeeded in carrying out a number of successful raids ("expropriations") on state–owned wine warehouses and postal and telegraph offices.