In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 Celebrating “The Greatest Event in the History of the World” Against the backdrop of the Red Terror in Petrograd, Bolsheviks in the former capital were preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of the October revolution.The history of the organization and staging of this premier Soviet holiday sheds light on broader political and social issues confronting the Petrograd Bolsheviks and Soviet power a year after “October.” These issues include the redefinition of Petrograd’s identity from the perspective of Petrograd Bolsheviks, the relationship between Petrograd and Moscow, the institutional locus and structure of power and authority, and the extent of popular support for Soviet power in the Petrograd region. Considering the previous months of continuing crises, in the fall of 1918 Petrograd workers could still legitimately ask, as many had on the eve of May Day, “What do we have to celebrate?” Nonetheless, many Petrograd Bolsheviks saw ample reasons to rejoice as the anniversary approached. In west central Russia, the advance of the Czechs and Whites had been reversed . Kazan had been recaptured on 10 September. Most important, German forces in Western Europe were in full retreat. In October and early November , the German war effort collapsed completely, the Habsburg Empire disintegrated, and democratic revolutions toppled the old order in Central Europe. Although Lenin was deeply troubled by the possibility that the Entente powers would unite with defeated Germany and attempt to stamp out the threat to capitalism posed by Bolshevism in Russia, his reading of the significantly enhanced threat to the survival of Soviet power caused by Germany ’s impending defeat was taken with a grain of salt by leading Petrograd Bolsheviks. “What we are seeing now exceeds our loftiest expectations,” gushed the popular Bolshevik Petersburg Committee member Moisei Kharitonov at a plenary meeting of the First City District Soviet in mid September. “Just re- Celebrating “The Greatest Event in the History of the World” / 357 call that last October the fondest dream of almost all of us was to somehow survive until the Constituent Assembly. . . . At that time, very few of us agreed with Lenin’s confidence in the permanence of Soviet power. Now it is an accomplished fact.” At a meeting of the same district soviet a month later, Ivan Pashkevich, a highly educated former member of the German Social Democratic Party,1 speaking on behalf of the soviet’s leadership, dismissed both foreign and domestic threats out of hand. “Recently, events have been developing with the speed of a moving picture,” he observed. “Each new day brings more news than one could previously expect in a year, and that which recently seemed out of reach is now achieved easily and quickly. We are gradually growing accustomed to considering our situation stable.” To hear Pashkevich tell it, the Czechs were retreating in panic. Once German forces left the Don region and Ukraine, those areas would quickly come under Soviet control. Whatever meager [new] interventionist forces the Allies might muster would quickly become as demoralized as were the Allied units then in North Russia. Dismissing Lenin’s concerns, Pashkevich insisted that “fear of [further] foreign intervention is unjustified.”2 In the fall of 1918, euphoria over revolutionary triumphs on the Volga and in Central Europe was reflected in the Petrograd press, in reports and resolutions at Petrograd Soviet meetings,3 as well as in speeches by Petrograd Bolshevik leaders at weekly Sunday rallies4 and in the proceedings of the Seventh City Conference of Petrograd Bolsheviks and the First Petrograd Province Bolshevik Conference (7–11 October).5 To be sure, in these forums Petrograd Bolshevik leaders echoed Lenin’s call for continued sacrifice and the building of a three-million-man army. But, in contrast to Lenin, they considered a huge military buildup, universal military training, and the like, necessary not so much to defend Soviet Russia from White forces and an inevitable attack by a coalition of imperialist powers as to prepare for the Red Army’s role in bringing about the triumph of socialist revolutions in Central Europe.They drew strength from the fact that Soviet power in Russia had survived for a full year (significantly longer than the legendary Paris Commune), and from the firm belief that they were the vanguard at the dawn of the global socialist millennium. This, in broadest outline, was the mood among Petrograd Bolsheviks as they prepared for a grand festival to mark what the future prominent Soviet historian Vadim Bystranskii referred to at the time as “the greatest event...

Share