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 Contents

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Orlando Figes
Illustrations
Maps
Notes on Dates
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction to the 100th Anniversary Edition
Preface to the 1996 Edition

PART ONE RUSSIA UNDER THE OLD REGIME

1 The Dynasty
i The Tsar and His People
ii The Miniaturist
iii The Heir

2 Unstable Pillars
i Bureaucrats and Dressing-Gowns
ii The Thin Veneer of Civilization
iii Remnants of a Feudal Army
iv Not-So-Holy Russia
v Prison of Peoples

3 Icons and Cockroaches

 i A World Apart
ii The Quest to Banish the Past

4 Red Ink
i Inside the Fortress
ii Marx Comes to Russia

PART TWO THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY (1891–1917)

5 First Blood
i Patriots and Liberators
ii ‘There is no Tsar’
iii A Parting of Ways

6 Last Hopes
i Parliaments and Peasants
ii The Statesman
iii The Wager on the Strong
iv For God, Tsar and Fatherland

7 A War on Three Fronts

i Metal Against Men
ii The Mad Chauffeur
iii From the Trenches to the Barricades

PART THREE RUSSIA IN REVOLUTION (FEBRUARY 1917–MARCH

1918)

8 Glorious February
i The Power of the Streets
ii Reluctant Revolutionaries
iii Nicholas the Last

9 The Freest Country in the World

i A Distant Liberal State
ii Expectations
iii Lenin’s Rage
 iv Gorky’s Despair

10 The Agony of the Provisional Government

i The Illusion of a Nation
ii A Darker Shade of Red
iii The Man on a White Horse
iv Hamlets of Democratic Socialism

11 Lenin’s Revolution
i The Art of Insurrection
ii The Smolny Autocrats
iii Looting the Looters
iv Socialism in One Country

PART FOUR THE CIVIL WAR AND THE MAKING OF THE SOVIET
SYSTEM (1918–24)

12 Last Dreams of the Old World

i St Petersburg on the Steppe
ii The Ghost of the Constituent Assembly

13 The Revolution Goes to War

i Arming the Revolution
ii ‘Kulaks’, Bagmen and Cigarette Lighters
iii The Colour of Blood

14 The New Regime Triumphant

i Three Decisive Battles
ii Comrades and Commissars
iii A Socialist Fatherland

15 Defeat in Victory
i Short-cuts to Communism
ii Engineers of the Human Soul
iii Bolshevism in Retreat

16 Deaths and Departures

 i Orphans of the Revolution
ii The Unconquered Country
iii Lenin’s Last Struggle

Conclusion
Picture Section
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
 About the Book

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A

People’s Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and
comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available
today.

Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered

world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People’s
Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their
world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence
and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys
above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who
lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how
and why it unfolded.

Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new

introduction that reflects on the revolution’s centennial legacy, A
People’s Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the
most important events in modern history.
 About the Author

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University

of London. Born in London in 1959, he was previously a Lecturer in
History and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A People’s Tragedy
received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith
Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los
Angeles Times Book Prize. He is the author of many other books on
Russian history including Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of
Russia, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia, Crimea: the
Last Crusade and Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and
Survival in the Gulag.
 ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution

1917–21

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of

1917

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991: A Pelican Introduction

 Illustrations

Images of Autocracy

1 St Petersburg illuminated for the Romanov tercentenary in

1913
2 The procession of the imperial family during the tercentenary
3 Nicholas II rides in public view during the tercentenary
4 Nevsky Prospekt decorated for the tercentenary
5 Guards officers greet the imperial family during the
tercentenary
6 Townspeople and peasants in Kostroma during the
tercentenary
7 The court ball of 1903
8 The Temple of Christ’s Resurrection
9 Trubetskoi’s equestrian statue of Alexander III
10 Statue of Alexander III outside the Cathedral of Christ the
Saviour
11 The imperial family
12 Rasputin with his admirers
13 The Tsarevich Alexis with Derevenko

Everyday Life Under the Tsars

14 The city mayors of Russia

15 A group of volost elders
16 A newspaper kiosk in St Petersburg
17 A grocery store in St Petersburg
18 Dinner at a ball given by Countess Shuvalov
19 A soup kitchen for the unemployed in St Petersburg
20 Peasants of a northern Russian village
21 Peasant women threshing wheat
 22 Peasant women hauling a barge
23 Twin brothers, former serfs, from Chernigov province
24 A typical Russian peasant household
25 A meeting of village elders
26 A religious procession in Smolensk province
27 The living space of four Moscow factory workers
28 Inside a Moscow engineering works

Dramatis Personae

29 General Brusilov
30 Maxim Gorky
31 Prince G. E. Lvov
32 Sergei Semenov
33 Dmitry Os’kin
34 Alexander Kerensky
35 Lenin
36 Trotsky
37 Alexandra Kollontai

Between Revolutions

38 Soldiers fire at the demonstrating workers on ‘Bloody Sunday’,

1905
39 Demonstrators confront mounted Cossacks during 1905
40 The opening of the State Duma in April 1906
41 The Tauride Palace
42 Petr Stolypin
43 Wartime volunteers pack parcels for the Front
44 A smart dinner party sees in the New Year of 1917
45 Troops pump out a trench on the Northern Front
46 Cossacks patrol the streets of Petrograd in February 1917
47 The arrest of a policeman during the February Days
48 Moscow workers playing with the stone head of Alexander II
49 A crowd burns tsarist emblems during the February Days
 50 The crowd outside the Tauride Palace during the February
Days
51 Soldiers receive news of the Tsar’s abdication

Images of 1917

52 The First Provisional Government in the Marinsky Palace

53 The burial of victims of the February Revolution
54 A meeting of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies
55 Waiters and waitresses of Petrograd on strike
56 The All-Russian Congress of Peasant Deputies
57 Fedor Linde leads an anti-war demonstration by the Finland
Regiment during the April Crisis
58 Kerensky makes a speech to soldiers at the Front
59 Patriarch Nikon blesses the Women’s Battalion of Death
60 General Kornilov’s triumphant arrival in Moscow during the
State Conference
61 Members of the Women’s Battalion of Death in the Winter
Palace on 25 October
62 Some of Kerensky’s last defenders in the Winter Palace on 25
October
63 The Smolny Institute
64 The Red Guard of the Vulkan Factory

The Civil War

65 General Alexeev
66 General Denikin
67 Admiral Kolchak
68 Baron Wrangel
69 Members of the Czech Legion in Vladivostok
70 A group of White officers during a military parade in Omsk
71 A strategic meeting of Red partisans
72 An armoured train
73 The Latvian Division passing through a village
74 Two Red Army soldiers take a break
 75 Red Army soldiers reading propaganda leaflets
76 A Red Army mobile library in the village
77 Nestor Makhno
78 The execution of a peasant by the Whites
79 Jewish victims of a pogrom
80 Red Army soldiers torture a Polish officer

Everyday Life Under the Bolsheviks

81 Muscovites dismantle a house for firewood

82 A priest helps transport timber
83 Women of the ‘former classes’ sell their last possessions
84 A soldier buys a pair of shoes from a group of burzhoois
85 Haggling over a fur scarf at the Smolensk market in Moscow
86 Traders at the Smolensk market
87 Two ex-tsarist officers are made to clear the streets
88 Cheka soldiers close down traders’ stalls in Moscow
89 Requisitioning the peasants’ grain
90 ‘Bagmen’ on the railways
91 The 1 May subbotnik on Red Square in Moscow, 1920
92 An open-air cafeteria at the Kiev Station in Moscow
93 Delegates of the Ninth All-Russian Party Congress
94 The Agitation and Propaganda Department of the
Commissariat for Supply and Distribution in the Northern
Region
95 The Smolny Institute on the anniversary of the October coup

The Revolutionary Inheritance

96 Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base

97 Peasant rebels attack a train of requisitioned grain
98 Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga
region
99 Unburied corpses from the famine crisis
100 Cannibals with their victims
101 Street orphans in Saratov hunt for food in a rubbish tip
102 The Secretary of the Tula Komsomol
103 A juvenile unit of the Red Army in Turkestan
104 Red Army soldiers confiscate valuables from the Semenov
Monastery
105 A propaganda meeting in Bukhara
106 Two Bolshevik commissars in the Far East
107 The dying Lenin in 1923

Photographic Credits

Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University: 58; California Museum of

Photography, University of California, Riverside: 20. Hoover
Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford, California: 82–4;
Life on the Russian Country Estate. A Social and Cultural history, by
Priscilla Roosevelt (Yale University Press, 1995): 26; Museum of the
Revolution, Moscow: 7, 15, 36, 52, 61–2, 77–8, 90; Photokhronika
Tass, Moscow: 107; private collections: 10, 32, 97; Russian in
Original Photographs 1860–1920, by Marvin Lyons (Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, 1977): 25, 47; Russie, 1904–1924: La
Révolution est là, (Baschet, Paris, 1978): 80; Russian Century, The,
by Brian Moynahan (Chatto & Windus, London, 1994): 13, 28
(courtesy of Slava Katamidze Collection/Endeavour Group, London),
46 (Courtesy of the Endeavour Group, London); Russian State
Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk: 18–19,
21–3, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 48, 51, 59–60, 65–71, 73–6, 79, 81, 85–93,
98–106; Russian State Military History Archive, Moscow: 29;
Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, St Petersburg: 12; State Archive of Film
and Photographic Documents, St Petersburg: 1–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16–
17, 24, 27, 30–1, 34, 39, 41–4, 49–50, 53–7, 63–4, 72, 94–6; Tula
District Museum: 33.
 Note on Dates

Until February 1918 Russia adhered to the Julian (Old Style)

calendar, which ran thirteen days behind the Gregorian (New Style)
calendar in use in Western Europe. The Soviet government switched
to the New Style calendar at midnight on 31 January 1918: the next
day was declared 14 February. Dates relating to domestic events are
given in the Old Style up until 31 January 1918; and in the New
Style after that. Dates relating to international events (e.g.
diplomatic negotiations and military battles in the First World War)
are given in the New Style throughout the book.

NB The term ‘the Ukraine’ has been used throughout this book,
rather than the currently correct but ahistorical ‘Ukraine’.
For Stephanie
 Introduction to the 100th Anniversary
Edition

It is hard to think of an event, or series of events, that has affected

the history of the past one hundred years more profoundly than the
Russian Revolution of 1917. A generation after the establishment of
the Soviet system, one-third of the human race was living under
regimes modelled, more or less, upon it. The fear of Bolshevism was
a major factor in the rise of fascist movements, leading to the
outbreak of the Second World War. From 1945, the export of the
Leninist model to Eastern Europe, China, South-East Asia, Africa and
Central America engulfed the world in a long Cold War, which came
to an uncertain end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991. ‘The revolution of 1917 has defined the shape of the
contemporary world, and we are only now emerging from its
shadow,’ I wrote in the Preface to the first edition of A People’s
Tragedy in 1996. Today, in 2017, that shadow still hangs darkly over
Russia and the fragile new democracies that emerged from the
Soviet Union. Its presence can be felt in the revolutionary and
terrorist movements of our age. As I warned in the final sentence of
A People’s Tragedy, ‘The ghosts of 1917 have not been laid to rest.’
That was not how it appeared to many in the years immediately
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was a widespread
feeling, in the West at least, that the Russian Revolution was over,
its false gods toppled by democracy. In that moment of democratic
triumph and triumphalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote his influential
book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he
announced the ultimate victory of liberal capitalism in its great
ideological battle against communism. ‘What we are witnessing,’
Fukuyama wrote, ‘is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of
a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government.’
When I was working on A People’s Tragedy, between 1989 and
1996, there was, for sure, a liberating sense for me, as a historian,
that my subject need no longer be defined by Cold War ideological
battles. The Russian Revolution was becoming ‘history’ in a new
way: with the collapse of the Soviet system, it could at last be seen
to have a complete historical trajectory – a beginning and a middle
and, now, an end – which could be studied more permissively,
without the pressures of contemporary politics or the limiting
agendas of Sovietology, the political-science framework in which
most Western studies of the Revolution had been written when the
Soviet Union was alive.
Meanwhile the opening of the Soviet archives enabled new
approaches to the Revolution’s history. Mine was to use the personal
stories of ordinary individuals whose voices had been lost in the Cold
War-era histories (both Soviet and Western), which had focused on
the abstract ‘masses’, social classes, political parties and ideologies.
Having worked in the Soviet archives since 1984, I was sceptical that
startling revelations about Lenin, Trotsky or even Stalin were yet to
be found, which is what the new arrivals in the reading rooms were
mostly looking for. But I was excited by the opportunity to work with
the personal archives of the Revolution’s minor figures – secondary
leaders, workers, soldiers, officers, intellectuals and even peasants –
in much larger quantities than had previously been allowed. The
biographical approach I ended up adopting in A People’s Tragedy
was intended to do more than add ‘human interest’ to my narrative.
By weaving the stories of these individuals through my history, I
wanted to present the Revolution as a dramatic series of events,
uncontrolled by the people taking part in them. The figures I chose
had one feature in common: setting out to influence the course of
history, they all fell victim to the law of unintended consequences.
By focusing on them, my aim was to convey the Revolution’s tragic
chaos, which engulfed so many lives and destroyed so many
dreams.
 My conception of the Revolution as a ‘people’s tragedy’ was also
meant to work as an argument about Russia’s destiny: its failure to
overcome its autocratic past and stabilize itself as a democracy in
1917; its descent into violence and dictatorship. The causes of that
democratic failure, it seemed to me, were rooted in the country’s
history, in the weakness of its middle class and civil institutions and,
above all, in the poverty and isolation of the peasantry, the vast
majority of Russia’s population, whose agrarian revolution I had
studied in detail in my first book, Peasant Russia, Civil War (1989).
When A People’s Tragedy came out, some reviewers thought the
book too bleak in its assessment of the Revolution’s democratic
potential. Part of this reaction had its origins in the Marxist view of
October 1917 as a popular uprising based on a social revolution that
lost its democratic character only after Lenin’s death, in 1924, and
the rise of Stalin to power. But part of it was rooted in the
democratic hopes invested in post-Soviet Russia by a wide variety of
interested parties, ranging from those veteran idealists, the Russian
intelligentsia, who wanted to believe that Russia could yet become a
flourishing democracy once it had been freed from its Stalinist
inheritance, to Western business leaders, more pragmatic but
ignorant of Russia, who needed to believe the same in order to put
their money into it.
Those hopes proved short-lived, as Russia under Vladimir Putin,
elected President in 2000, reverted to a more authoritarian and
familiar form of rule. The causes of this democratic failure were
similar to those in 1917, as I had identified them in A People’s
Tragedy, but with one important difference. Unlike the downfall of
the Tsarist system in February 1917, the collapse of the Soviet
regime in 1991 was not brought about by a popular or social
revolution, leading to the democratic reform of the state. It was
essentially an abdication of power by the Communist élites, who, at
least in Russia, where there were no lustration laws like those in
Eastern Europe and the Baltic states to keep them out of public
office, were soon able to recover dominant positions in politics and
business with new political identities. Spared any public scrutiny of
its activities in the Soviet period, the KGB, in which Putin had made
his career, was allowed to reconstruct itself, eventually becoming the
Federal Security Service (FSB), without substantial changes in its
personnel.
As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin
was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public
institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected to the pressures of the
market, the intelligentsia proved far smaller and less influential than
it thought it was, and lost its credibility as the people’s moral voice, a
role it had assumed since the nineteenth century: it lived in a world
of books at a time when power and authority were increasingly
defined by the state-controlled mass media. In the quarter of a
century since the collapse of the Soviet regime, the development of
public bodies in Russia has been pitifully weak. Where are the
professional societies, the trade unions, the consumer organizations,
the real political parties? The problem for democracy in Russia lies as
much in the weakness of civil society as in the state’s oppressive
strength.
But the biggest problem for the democratic project in 1991, as it
had been in 1917, was the simple historical fact that the Russians
had no real experience of it. Neither the Tsarist nor Soviet
governments had given them a taste or even an understanding of
parliamentary sovereignty, government accountability or legally
protected liberties. The popular conception of ‘democracy’ in 1917
was not as a form of government at all, but rather as a social label,
equivalent to ‘the common people’, whose opposite was not
‘dictatorship’ but instead ‘the bourgeoisie’. On this basis, for the next
six or perhaps seven decades, people could believe that the Soviet
system was ‘the most democratic in the world’ insofar as it provided,
more or less, universal employment, housing, health care and social
equality. In such a view, the economic crisis that accompanied the
collapse of the Soviet system undermined the credibility of the
capitalist versions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that were offered in
its place.
For the majority of ordinary Russians, especially for those of a
certain age who identified themselves as ‘Soviet’, the 1990s were
little short of a catastrophe. They lost everything: a familiar way of
life; an economic system that guaranteed security; an ideology that
gave them moral certainties, perhaps even hope; a huge empire
with superpower status and an identity that covered over ethnic
divisions; and national pride in Soviet achievements in culture,
science and technology. Struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of
the new capitalist way of life, where there was no great idea, no
collective purpose defined by the state, they looked back with
nostalgia to the Soviet period. Many yearned for the mythic past
they remembered or imagined under Stalin, who, they believed, had
presided over times of material plenty, order and security, the ‘best
times in the country’s history’. According to a poll of 2005, 42 per
cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years
of age, wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’.
From the start of his regime, Putin aimed to restore pride in Soviet
history. This was an important part of his agenda to rebuild Russia
as a great power. The rehabilitation of the Soviet past, including
Stalin, sanctioned Putin’s own authoritarian government, legitimizing
it as the continuation of a long Russian tradition of strong state
power, going back before 1917 to the Tsars. The order and security
provided by the state, according to this myth, are more highly
valued by Russians than the Western liberal concepts of human
rights or political democracy, which have no roots in Russian history.
Putin’s historical initiative was popular in Russia, particularly when
it gave encouragement to nationalist feelings, patriotic pride about
the Soviet victory of 1945 and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. When
he declared to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2005 that ‘the
breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of
the twentieth century’, Putin was articulating the opinion of three-
quarters of the population, who, according to a poll in 2000,
regretted the collapse of the USSR and wanted Russia to expand in
size, incorporating ‘Russian’ territories, such as the Crimea and the
Donbass, which had been ‘lost’ to Ukraine. In 2014, volunteers with
neo-Soviet flags would cross the border from Russia to fight for the
return of these two Ukrainian territories.
The positive rewriting of Soviet history also came as a relief to
those Russians who had resented the ‘blackening’ of their country’s
history in the glasnost period, when the media was full of revelations
about ‘Stalin’s crimes’, which undermined the Soviet textbook version
they had learned at school. Many had been made uncomfortable by
the questions they had been forced to ask about their families’
actions in the period of Stalin’s rule. They did not want to listen to
moralising lectures about how ‘bad’ their country’s history was. By
restoring pride in the Soviet past, Putin helped the Russians to feel
good as Russians once again.
His initiative began in schools, where textbooks deemed too
negative about the Soviet period were denied approval by the
Ministry of Education, effectively removing them from the classroom.
In 2007, Putin told a conference of history teachers:

As to some problematic pages in our history, yes, we have had

them. But what state hasn’t? And we’ve had fewer of such
pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible
as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages:
let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget
about them. But other countries have had no less, and even
more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of
kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs
than during the entire World War II, as the Americans did in
Vietnam. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism,
for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every
state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt …

Putin did not deny Stalin’s crimes. But he argued for the need not
to dwell on them, to balance them against his achievements as the
builder of the country’s ‘glorious Soviet past’. In a manual for history
teachers commissioned by the President and heavily promoted in
Russian schools, Stalin was portrayed as an ‘effective manager’ who
‘acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to ensure the
country’s modernization’.
Polls suggested that the Russians shared this troubling attitude to
the Revolution’s violence. According to a survey conducted in 2007
in three cities (St Petersburg, Kazan and Lenin’s birthplace,
Ulyanovsk), 71 per cent of the population thought that Felix
Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka (the forerunner of the KGB) in
1917, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent
believed he was a ‘criminal and executioner’. More disturbing was
the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed
about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging
that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had suffered – two-thirds of
these respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the
country. Many thought that, under Stalin, people had been ‘kinder
and more compassionate’. Even with knowledge of the millions who
were killed, the Russians, it appeared, continued to accept the
Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified to meet the
Revolution’s goals.
In the autumn of 2011, millions of Russians watched the TV show
The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which various figures and
episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with
advocates, witnesses and a jury of the viewers, who reached their
verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgements arrived at in this
trial by state TV do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian
attitudes. Presented with the evidence of Stalin’s war against the
peasants and the catastrophic effects of forcible collectivisation, in
which millions died of starvation and many more were sent to the
Gulag camps or remote penal settlements, 78 per cent of the
viewers nonetheless believed that these policies were justified, a
‘terrible necessity’ for Soviet industrialisation. Only 22 per cent
considered them a ‘crime’.
Politically the Revolution may be dead, but it has an afterlife in
these mentalities, which will continue to dominate the Russian polity
for many years.

***

So how should we commemorate the Revolution during its

centenary? In 1889, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the
French Revolution, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated at the entrance
to the Paris World Fair of that year. The tower symbolized the values
of the Third Republic derived from 1789. No such landmark could be
built in Russia, where the commemoration of the October Revolution
has divided Russia since the downfall of the Soviet regime. In 1996,
Boris Yeltsin replaced the 7 November Revolution Day with a Day of
Accord and Reconciliation, ‘in order to diminish confrontations and
effect conciliation between different segments of society’. But
Communists continued to commemorate the Revolution’s anniversary
in the traditional Soviet manner with a demonstration in massed
ranks with red banners. Putin tried to resolve the conflict by
establishing a Day of National Unity on 4 November (the date of the
end of the Polish occupation of Russia in 1612). It took the place of
the 7 November holiday in the official calendar from 2005. But the
Day of National Unity did not catch on. According to a 2007 poll,
only 4 per cent of the population could say what it was for. Six out of
ten people were opposed to the dropping of Revolution Day. Despite
Putin’s efforts to reclaim the positive achievements of the country’s
Soviet past, there is no historical narrative of the October Revolution
around which the nation can unite: some see it as a national
catastrophe, others as the start of a great civilization, but the
country as a whole remains unable to come to terms with its violent
and contradictory legacies.
Likewise, no consensus could be achieved on what to do with the
founder of the Soviet state. Yeltsin and the Russian Orthodox Church
supported calls to close the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square in
Moscow, where Lenin’s preserved body has been on display since
1924, and bury him next to his mother at the Volkov Cemetery in St
Petersburg, as he had wanted for himself. But the Communists were
organized and vocal in resisting this, so the issue remained
unresolved. Putin was opposed to removing Lenin from the
Mausoleum, reasoning that it would offend the older generation of
Russians, who had sacrificed so much for the Soviet system, by
implying they had cherished false ideals.
With such division and confusion, the commemoration of the
Revolution will probably be muted in Russia in 2017. That too seems
most likely in the West, where the Russian Revolution has retreated
in our historical consciousness, partly as a result of declining media
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 BUSINESS ORGANISATION.
Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Canadian Government made
a donation to the Mother Country of a large quantity of flour, and in
the beginning of 1915 the Baking Society purchased 10,000 sacks of
this flour. The committee decided that when the bags were emptied
they should be sold as souvenirs, and from their sale the sum of £87
was realised, which was distributed amongst local war charities. In
March of this year, the board had a very satisfactory conference with
the board of Kinning Park Society and the dairy employees of that
society. The subject of the conference was a project of Kinning Park
board that the dairy shops of that society should be fitted up for the
sale of teabread and pastries. Later, the board of the Baking Society
discussed the question of opening shops throughout the city for the
sale of smallbread and pastries, but owing to the difficulties imposed
by war conditions, the subject was dropped for the time being.
Immediately the Armistice was signed, however, the subject was
again taken up by the board, with the result that, at the 200th
quarterly meeting, proposals were submitted in which were
embodied a suggestion that the Society should open a development
account and offer to those societies operating in the Glasgow and
Suburban area, which were willing to co-operate with the Federation,
a proportion of the cost of fitting up shops for the sale of teabread
and pastry. In this offer it was provided that the shop, locality, and
scheme of fitting should be approved by the directors of the
Federation; that only U.C.B.S. goods and confections of Co-operative
manufacture should be sold for a period, the period suggested being
ten years. If these provisions were agreed to the Baking Society
would be responsible for one third of the cost of fitting up the shop,
provided that one third did not exceed £150. The scheme received
the hearty commendation of the delegates at the meeting at which it
was submitted, the only objection taken being to the fact that for the
time being it was confined to the Glasgow area.
 THE PRICE OF BREAD.
Reference is made above to the part which was played by the
Federation in keeping down the price of bread. In November 1914
the price of the 4–lb. loaf was increased by a halfpenny; in January
1915 another halfpenny advance took place; and in March of that
year another halfpenny; while by the month of May the price had
risen to 8d. per 4–lb. loaf. In February 1916 another halfpenny was
imposed, and in May of that year yet another halfpenny; while before
control came into operation the price in Glasgow and Clydebank had
risen to 11½d. and in Belfast to 1/ for the 4–lb. loaf. A rather
remarkable note in one of the board minutes for 1916 is that which
states that a letter had been received from a co-operative society,
protesting against the action of the Federation in refusing to consent
to an increase in the price of bread. The secretary of the Federation
mercifully kept the name of the society out of the minute of the
meeting.
Prior to the beginning of 1915, the catering for the meals of the
employees had been done by a committee of themselves, but in
March of that year they approached the board with the request that
the Society should take over and carry on this work. During these
years the output of the Society was increasing gradually but surely.
For the year which ended in January 1915, the output was 230,780
sacks, an average of 4,440 sacks per week for the year, and an
increase of 440 per week in three years. On the 3rd of April, it was
reported that during the preceding week 5,351 sacks had been baked.
This constituted a record week’s baking for the Society, but for some
time afterwards, until the coming of Government Regulation flour,
record after record was made only to be broken. By the month of
September 1916, the turnover had risen to 5,410 sacks per week, or
almost a thousand sacks of a weekly increase in eighteen months. In
the end of that month, the output was 5,925 sacks, and by the end of
February 1917 the record figures of 6,012 sacks were reached. In
these increases all three bakeries participated, and the rapid increase
for 1916 and the early months of 1917 is all the more remarkable in
view of the fact that the amount of baking which was done for the
military was not nearly so great as it had been in the earlier months
of the war. On the last Saturday in 1916, 21,546 dozens of bread were
baked and seventy bridecakes made. There had evidently been an
epidemic of war marriages at this Hogmanay.
 BISCUIT AND TEABREAD TRADE.
In the biscuit trade as well as in the bread trade, the directors
carried out as far as possible their policy of keeping prices as low as
was consistent with securing the Federation against loss, but the
rapidity with which the various ingredients for these luxuries of the
baking trade increased in price caused the prices to the societies to
be raised shortly after the outbreak of war. In March 1915, it was
decided to reduce the discount allowed on teabread by two and a half
per cent., in order to compensate in some measure for the increases
in the cost of materials. Toward the end of 1915 the Society found
that their stocks of biscuits were falling very low, owing to the
shortage of labour, as about 30,000 tins of biscuits were being sent
out every week. Systematic overtime was worked in the biscuit
factory with the object of overcoming the shortage. The Society were
also faced with a serious shortage of biscuit tins, due to the fact that
societies were not returning the empty tins promptly, while the
manufacturers were not able to supply the demand for new tins. To
meet this difficulty the directors authorised the purchase of a
machine for the manufacture of the tins. By the beginning of 1916 the
shortage of materials necessary for the manufacture of pastries, and
especially of sugar, was becoming very marked, and in March of that
year it was decided to stop the manufacture of a number of the
varieties of which sugar was a considerable ingredient. In May, it was
found necessary to advance the price of biscuits by, on the average,
nine shillings per cwt., yet, notwithstanding the high price, the
Society were having difficulty in fulfilling their orders. Earlier in the
year it had been decided to look out for suitable ground for an
extension of the biscuit factory, and at the quarterly meeting held in
September power was granted the directors to spend up to £9,500 in
purchasing land for this purpose. By October, the price of biscuits
was advanced other eight shillings per cwt., but as this was four
shillings per cwt. below the price which other merchants were
charging the societies were getting a very good bargain. In
November, it was decided to cease the manufacture of all French,
iced, and sugar-coated pastries, owing to the increasing shortage of
sugar.
 THE SOCIETY AND ITS WORKERS.
At the outbreak of war many employees joined the Army or Navy,
and to these the Society decided to pay half-wages. As the months
passed, more and more of the younger men joined up, first under the
Derby Scheme and later under the Conscription Act, so that the
carrying out of the policy of paying half-wages meant the disbursing
of a considerable sum every half-year, and by the end of 1916 the sum
of £10,628 had been so expended; £7,892 being paid to dependants
and £2,736 retained in the hands of the Society at the credit of
employees serving with the Colours. At this time, 304 of the Society’s
employees had joined the Services, and eighteen had made the great
sacrifice.
This drain on the male workers of the Society brought troubles of
its own in its train. We have already seen that considerable difficulty
was being experienced in meeting the demand of customer societies
for biscuits, while the difficulty in meeting the demand for bread was
equally great. Toward the end of 1915, the Operative Bakers’ Union
consented to allow their members to begin work one hour earlier on
Saturday mornings, while a number of men who had been formerly
employed as “jobbers” were given full-time employment. In the
beginning of the following year an attempt was made to induce the
Bakers’ Union to permit the employment of women in the bakery,
but this permission they refused, although they admitted that
“dilution” was in operation in similar establishments. In July of 1916
an agreement with regard to dilution was reached, whereby it was
decided that, after all reasonable efforts had been made to obtain
male labour, females should be appointed in the same proportion as
apprentices; that two girls could be appointed for every man who
left, and that the arrangement was to continue for the duration of the
war or of conditions created by the war.
In that year some difficulty was experienced in getting the bakers
to come to terms with the employers in the Glasgow district on the
question of wages, but the dispute was finally adjusted after notices
to cease work had been handed in. The terms finally agreed on were
substantially those which had been offered by the Federation, and
gave the bakers an increase in wages of four shillings per week. The
bakers did not take kindly to the proposal to introduce female labour
into the bakehouse, and when the directors proposed to take that
step protested strongly, notwithstanding the agreement which had
been arrived at on the subject, and although they were working very
many hours of overtime each week. The directors therefore decided
that the question of the employment of female labour should be
referred to the War Emergency Committee, and that committee gave
their award in favour of the introduction of female labour into the
pastry and smallbread flats, but would not allow them to take part in
the baking of loaf bread.
 DELIVERY DIFFICULTIES.
We have already seen that the needs of the war transcended all
other considerations in the opinion of the War Office officials, who
commandeered many horses and vans from the Society at the
outbreak of war and later. The difficulties of delivery thus created the
directors endeavoured to overcome by the use of motors for delivery.
But even machinery will not go on for ever without requiring repairs,
and as breakdowns became more frequent increasing difficulty was
being found in having the necessary repairs done, because of
shortage of labour of the necessary skill, and because also of the
shortage of the necessary material. Another delivery difficulty had a
different cause. The shortage of labour was general, and the retail
stores were as greatly handicapped as were other businesses. In 1916,
with the view of overcoming this handicap to some extent and at the
same time ensuring as far as possible that the shops should not be
open in the absence of skilled supervision, the societies adopted the
policy of closing their shops during the lunch hour. To some extent
this policy attained the object which the societies had in view, but as
soon as it was put into operation the Baking Society found their
delivery difficulties increased, for their vans had to stand idle while
the shops were closed. Representations on the subject were made to
the various societies, which gave very favourable consideration in
most cases, and the practice grew up of leaving one employee in each
shop to take delivery of goods which arrived during the lunch hour.
Early in 1916 the societies gave tangible form to their recognition
of the strenuous work which was being imposed on the directors by
circumstances brought about by the war; this tangible recognition
taking the form of an all-round increase in salaries and allowances
for committee work.
Yet strenuous as had been their work during those first two years
of the war, and great as had been their difficulties, the two years on
which they were about to enter were to provide even more strenuous
work and to produce difficulties which were so great as to prove
almost insurmountable. They were to provide conditions of bread
baking which were to change loaf bread from being one of the most
palatable forms of food into for the time being one of the most
detestable and detested.
 While the Congress was meeting at Leicester in 1915, the news
arrived that Mr Duncan M‘Culloch, who had done so much to build
up the Baking Society, had passed away, and fitting reference was
made to his decease at the quarterly meeting in June, and also at the
annual meeting with the representatives of the Irish societies in July.
His death removed a man to whom the shareholders of the Baking
Society, and particularly the shareholders in Ireland, owed much,
and many were the expressions of regret when the news became
generally known.
 CHAPTER XIX.
BREAD BAKING UNDER CONTROL.

FAMINE POSSIBILITIES—CHANGES IN QUALITY OF FLOUR—

FOOD CONTROL DEPARTMENT ESTABLISHED—BAKERS’
DIFFICULTIES—THE POSITION OF THE U.C.B.S.—A BIG
LAND PURCHASE—ILLNESS OF THE PRESIDENT—A
NATURAL WORKING DAY BY ORDER—ITS DIFFICULTIES
—ENTERTAINMENTS TO SOLDIERS—BRANCH BAKERIES
—IRELAND—LEADHILLS—ROTHESAY—BUTE CO-
OPERATIVE SOCIETY FORMED—SUBSIDISED BREAD—AN
INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL—DELIVERY DIFFICULTIES—
EMPLOYEES ON MILITARY SERVICE—THE END OF THE
TASK.

The first two years of the war had brought difficulties in their train
which the bakers of the country found considerable difficulty in
overcoming; but the conditions under which they were called on to
produce bread in the following two years were such as had not been
experienced for at least a hundred years, and there came a time when
the country was faced with the possibility of having to do without
bread altogether for a period. Fortunately this possibility did not
become reality, but it was the cause of material changes in the quality
of the flour used for breadmaking and of the conditions under which
the bread was made and sold which would have seemed impossible
before the war began. By the early winter of 1916 the possibility of a
condition of things obtaining which would prevent the importation
of foodstuffs, and particularly of wheat, in sufficient quantities to
provide full supplies for the population of the British Isles began to
force itself on the Government, so they appointed a gentleman to the
position of Food Controller and conferred on him almost despotic
powers. One result of this control of food was a drastic interference
with the milling of flour. In Scotland the millers produced flour in
ordinary times which contained a little more than 70 per cent. of the
wheat; the first fruits of the new order of things was a regulation that
the extraction from the wheat should be increased, by about 8 per
cent.
There can be no doubt that under the circumstances this
regulation was necessary. There was a time in the history of these
islands when practically all the food consumed by the people was
grown in the country; but during the lifetime of the last generation
this position had gradually altered until Britain was dependent on
wheat imported from abroad for four-fifths of the bread supply of her
people. There had always been pessimists who foresaw, as a result of
a war with a maritime power, a danger of interruption to the steady
supply of seaborne food which was necessary if the people were to be
saved from starvation, and who uttered warnings which passed more
or less unheeded; but the time had arrived when these warnings
seemed likely to become justified. Towards the end of 1916 it was
becoming apparent that there was likely to be a world shortage of
foodstuffs, and particularly of wheat, and doubts were being
expressed in well-informed circles as to whether there would be
supplies sufficient to enable the people to carry on until the 1917 crop
was ready. While this world shortage was due in a measure to the
war, because of the number of men who usually devoted themselves
to agricultural pursuits who were then engaged in war work of one
form or another or serving with the Forces, it was also due in large
measure to a world shortage for which Nature, through the medium
of a bad summer and a wet autumn, was responsible.
The result was that in this country the regulations affecting flour
extraction became more and more rigorous, until not only were
millers extracting a proportion approaching 25 per cent. additional
from the wheat, rejecting practically nothing but the outer husk, but
many other varieties of cereal, even including a considerable
proportion of maize, were pressed into service and mixed with the
flour from which bread had to be baked. In some cases potato flour
was also used for this purpose. Fortunately, the famine which had
threatened in the summer of 1917 was staved off, but the inveterate
submarine campaign waged by the Germans during the whole of that
year was responsible for the destruction of many food-carrying ships
and of many thousands of tons of wheat and flour which were being
conveyed to this country from America as well as of many other
varieties of food.
 BAKERS’ DIFFICULTIES.
All this was the cause of much worry to bakers. They had been
accustomed to the manufacture of bread from flour the quality of
which was well known and regulated with almost scientific accuracy,
but under the new order of things they found the knowledge which
they had acquired laboriously over a long period of years almost
useless to them. So long as they were dealing with wheat flour, even
if that flour did contain a large proportion of offal which had
formerly been used to feed cattle, the position was not quite so bad,
for most of them had been in the habit of baking a greater or lesser
proportion of what was termed “wheaten” and “wholemeal” bread.
But when flour produced from rye, barley, and even maize had to be
added their troubles began, for only by chemical analysis was it
possible for them to determine the proportions in which the various
cereals were used, and these proportions were varied arbitrarily week
by week at the whim of the Wheat Commission authorities; while the
millers were absolutely prohibited from giving any information on
the subject. Thus, when after a series of experiments they had
ascertained the method by which they could produce the best loaf
from a given flour, they suddenly discovered that the mixture had
been altered, and that their experiments had to begin all over again;
and this continued to be the position for some time even after the
end of the war.
 THE POSITION OF THE U.C.B.S.
While the position of the average private baker was that which has
been described above, the baking departments of Co-operative
societies found themselves in a very much worse position in direct
ratio as they had been loyal hitherto in the use of Co-operatively
milled flour. The flour mills of Scotland did not produce more than
one half of the flour which was used in the country, with the result
that the remainder had to be imported; but the Scottish Co-operative
Wholesale Society imported wheat and themselves milled practically
all the flour sold by them. The consequence was that as the quality of
“Government Regulation” flour deteriorated, the flour which was
supplied by the Wholesale Society’s mills, in common with that
supplied by the other millers, was of such a nature that bread baked
with it was inferior in quality and unpalatable. As, however, bakers
were compelled to take flour from the source from which they
procured it at the time when the Food Control regulations came into
force, those who had formerly used a considerable proportion of
imported flour were allowed to mix a good percentage of the flour
which was still being imported with the “Regulation” flour, and were
thus enabled to produce a comparatively white and palatable loaf;
while the Wholesale Society, which had not been in the habit of
importing much flour, were now allowed by those responsible for the
bread regulations to import only a very small proportion, and their
customers suffered accordingly. It was only after repeated
representations had been made to the Government and the Wheat
Commission that, ultimately, the proportion of imported flour which
Co-operative bakers generally were allowed to use was raised
considerably.
From this cause the Baking Society was as great a sufferer as were
the others. The bread became more and more unpalatable as the
admixture of foreign cereals in the flour used increased, and
complaints about the quality of the bread began to come in with
irritating frequency. The receipt of these complaints, justifiable as
they were, must have been all the more irritating to the committee
from the fact that they found themselves the victims of
circumstances over which they had not the slightest control. They
knew that the bread which they were producing was unpalatable, and
the fact that the Germans had to eat bread which was very much
inferior was but poor consolation in view of the fact that many of
their trade rivals were able to produce better bread because of the
larger proportion of white flour which they were allowed to use.
There ensued, as a consequence, a very considerable decline in the
bread sales of the Society. The customer societies would have taken
the bread, but their members could not and would not eat it. From
much the same causes the trade in biscuits and in teabread declined
also. The use of sugar in biscuits or in teabread was prohibited, as
was the manufacture of pastries. The result was that while the output
for the quarter which ended in October 1916 was 68,533 sacks, that
for the quarter which ended in October 1917 was 67,132 sacks, and
that for the corresponding quarter of 1918 was 62,867. And if the
details for loaf bread in M‘Neil Street alone are taken, the contrast is
still more striking. The output for 1918 had fallen below that of 1915
by over 400 sacks, and below that of the quarter which ended in
April 1917 by over 12,000 sacks.
 A BIG LAND PURCHASE.
By the end of 1916 M‘Neil Street bakery, and particularly the
biscuit factory, was again becoming congested, and power was
obtained from the quarterly meeting to spend up to £9,750 on the
purchase of more ground. At the time this power was obtained, the
committee had under consideration the fact that the ground on the
east side of M‘Neil Street, extending from the Clydeside to Govan
Street, was in the market, and ultimately the purchase of this ground
was completed at a cost of £9,750. The ground contained an area of
6,590 yards. Much of it was occupied by buildings of a temporary
character; the only buildings of a permanent nature on the site being
two tenements at the southern end. This site has not yet been utilised
by the Society, but it forms an admirable property which is available
for any extensions which may require to be undertaken in the future.
Meantime it is let at a rental which gives a net return of 3⅓ per cent.
on the capital cost of the site.
 ILLNESS OF PRESIDENT.
In November of 1916 Mr Gerrard was laid aside for a number of
weeks by a severe illness, from which, fortunately, he recovered after
a time. With the exception of one short interval, he was able to carry
out his duties until the beginning of November 1918, when he was
again laid aside with an illness so severe in its nature that ultimately
he was informed by his medical adviser that he would have to give up
all thought of public work for the future. The last regular meeting of
the committee at which he was able to be in attendance was that held
on 10th October 1918.
 A NATURAL WORKING DAY—BY ORDER.
Several years before the outbreak of war the directors of the
Baking Society made a determined effort to institute a natural
working day for bakers, but were unsuccessful, as a natural working
day meant the use of bread which was cold before it reached the
shops, and this the members of the stores refused to accept. In
March of 1917, however, the Government, impelled by the exigencies
of war, were able to do, practically with the stroke of a pen, what the
unaided efforts of the Baking Society had failed to do. This Order of
the Food Controller decreed that bread must be at least twelve hours
old before it was sold in the shops. It is quite likely that those who
devised the Order did not know and did not desire to know how their
proposals were going to affect those engaged in the trade. The bakers
were faced with the necessity of rearranging their methods at a
moment’s notice. They had to rearrange the working day, and also to
find storage accommodation overnight for their total day’s output,
and on Friday nights for almost double that quantity. One good
result of the Order was, as has already been mentioned, that the
working bakers at last obtained a natural working day, for their
hours of work were fixed to begin at 8 a.m. and to end at 4.30 p.m.
The storage difficulty was one which was more difficult to
overcome. At M‘Neil Street storage accommodation had to be found
for 84,000 2–lb. loaves on ordinary weekdays and for 156,000 on
Fridays. This meant the fitting up of every available space with racks
and trays in which to place the bread, and a very serious addition to
the amount of labour necessary. On the other hand it meant that
there would be a considerable saving on delivery charges, as societies
were able to take in larger quantities in the mornings, and so
minimise the duplication of deliveries. The difficulties were all
overcome, and, in a very short time, the delivery side of the business
was working as smoothly as the attenuated state of the delivery staff
could be expected to permit.
 ENTERTAINING SOLDIERS.
During the years of war a feature of the philanthropic work of the
Society was the entertaining of large parties of convalescent soldiers
from the Glasgow military hospitals. The Society began this good
work in August 1916, when a party of convalescent soldiers from
Stobhill Hospital, numbering 200, were conveyed to Calderwood
Castle in brakes, and entertained there. The party were accompanied
by the Society’s Silver Band, and an enjoyable afternoon was passed.
Then, early in 1917, another party of wounded were taken to a
matinee at a theatre in the afternoon, and were afterwards conveyed
in brakes to the Society’s premises, where they had tea, and a
splendid concert was provided. Several of these theatre
entertainments were given, and were much appreciated by the
recipients of the Society’s kindness.
In another way the Society also showed kindness to men who had
been fighting their country’s battles. An “Overseas Club” for
members of the Colonial Forces had been established in Glasgow,
and during 1918 and 1919 a party of visitors from this club were
taken over the bakery every Thursday, being afterwards entertained
to tea, when the work which was being done by the Federation and
the principles on which it was managed were explained to the
visitors. Early in 1919, a letter was received from the Scottish
Sectional Board of the Co-operative Union, commending the
propaganda work which was being done in this way by the U.C.B.S.
directors, and offering a number of copies of “Working Men Co-
operators” for distribution. The Baking Society directors were much
gratified by this commendation and gladly accepted the gift of books,
which were afterwards distributed to the Colonial visitors.
 BRANCH BAKERIES.
Various difficulties attach to a gigantic bread bakery which are not
apparent in the working of any other commercial concern of similar
size, and chief amongst these is that of rapid and cheap delivery. The
perishable nature of bread and the ease with which it is injured by
crushing make carriage by railway impracticable, while combined
with these difficulties is the fact that the majority of bread customers
desire to have it as soon after it is baked as possible. All these
disadvantages combine to limit the distance within which a bakery
can operate successfully to a radius of about twelve miles, and even
on the outer edges of that radius it is doubtful if the cost of delivery
does not counterbalance the saving caused by larger production. Yet
the advantages of having bread baked by a large Co-operative
organisation, instead of by many small ones, are obvious. In the first
place, the large buyer has the advantage of buying all the raw
materials used at rock-bottom prices: he has the advantage also of a
wider knowledge of the fluctuations of a market notorious for
rapidity of rise and fall, and this expert knowledge enables him in
normal times so to average the cost of flour used that it is always at
the lowest average possible.
It can be easily understood, therefore, that Co-operators,
struggling with adversity and yet desirous of providing Co-
operatively-baked bread for their members, should turn to the
U.C.B.S. for help.
In this way there had come to the directors within recent years
numerous calls for help. Unfortunately, the majority of these arrived
at a time when it was impossible to give the help desired. The first of
these calls came from Ireland. In and around Dublin there were
several small societies, having a combined membership of
somewhere over two thousand. The Dublin Industrial Society, after
unsuccessfully endeavouring a few years earlier to get the Baking
Society to help in the financing of a bakery in Dublin, had gone
ahead with the erection of a bakery for themselves, but it had never
been very successful. The Society itself was not too successful for a