09-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘March 1917, Book 4' Review: Solzhenitsyn on Russia's Moment of Crisis
The great British historian Herbert Butterfield cautioned against the temptation to tell a neat story about historical events or discover 'an unfolding logic' in them. History, he argued, is constructed 'not by a line but by a labyrinthine piece of network' comprised of 'strange conjunctures' with 'purposes marred perhaps more than purposes achieved.' That is precisely the picture Alexander Solzhenitsyn presents in the four volumes of 'March 1917,' his series of historical novels, written between 1969 and 1991, that describe the chaotic events surrounding the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the nominal transfer of power to the Duma and its Provisional Government. An attempt to understand how Russia descended into the horrors described in Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' (1973), it demonstrates how the Bolshevik takeover could have and should have been avoided.
Instead of presenting a conventional narrative, Solzhenitsyn crafts 655 brief chapters in which diverse actors, unaware of what others are doing, blindly shape events. 'Revolution follows no well-worn track. A hundred lines diverge,' he comments. Ably translated by Marian Schwartz, the present volume is devoted to the short period between March 23 to March 31, 1917, after the czar had been deposed but a month before Lenin arrived at Finland Station and seven months before the Bolsheviks took charge.
The book invites readers to follow the thinking of Duma members, the collapse of the Russian army facing German invaders, and the machinations of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, which, by controlling the Petrograd mobs, held the only real power. The novel's fictional characters, who would be familiar to readers from earlier volumes, try to make sense of what is going on. Solzhenitsyn also reproduces genuine selections from Russian and foreign newspapers along with German authorities' decisions aimed at returning the exiled Lenin to Russia to sow more chaos and provoke the Russian army's disintegration. As this volume closes, Lenin is about to embark on that return journey.
Lenin was able to take over because none of the other actors understood power remotely as well as he did. Olda Andozerskaya, the history professor who is Solzhenitsyn's fictional heroine, observes that despite the czar's 'shining soul,' 'it was as if he intentionally conducted the state to grow only weaker and weaker. The monarchy did not fall because there was a revolution; there was a revolution because the monarchy had immeasurably weakened.' The Provisional Government proved just as hapless.
