“The Anti-Bourgeois Democratic Revolution”

A Reading of the Russian Revolution

Resumen

I propose a new category to describe the Russian revolution of 1917: the “anti-bourgeois democratic revolution.” “Soviet power” was actually proclaimed in during the February revolution in 1917. The basic force behind this new power or sovereign authority—the workers, soldiers and peasant who made up the constituency of the soviets—was hostile to the burzhui both in its narrow meaning of industrial owners and in its wider meaning of the tsenzoviki (an abusive term for the educated elite that derived from property requirements or “census” for voters). The central aim of this revolution was to carry out the vast program of reforms earlier denoted by the term “democratic revolution”—first and foremost, land to the peasants and liquidation of the pomeshchiki (gentry landowners) as a class. Commitment in a positive way to socialist institutions was much less powerful than a negative attitude toward the bourgeois as individuals as well as toward bourgeois values.