JEWISH BOLSHEVISM

Some notice of how the revolutionary events first started heating up in the Russia of 1905 is important. The way that the revolution broke out in 1905 is the most perfect illustration of an event which spontaneously blooms across a whole country without any conspiracy involved. To the extent that there was any kind of conspiratorial work it was done by Sergei Zubatov who sought to promote pro-government trade unions as a way of moving workers away from the Left.

"Workers of the Putilov and other munitions factories struck in January 1905. They prepared to march to the Winter Palace with a petition to the Tsar outlining grievances and asking for a constituent assembly... The procession had been organized by Zubatov, head of the Department of Police, who had got the happy notion of encouraging workers to form 'official' unions so as to divert them from the revolutionary political ones. A priest in the service of the department, Georgy Gapon, was assigned to lead the procession; this he did. But this small and tense man was carried away, in the course of his duties, by the cause of the workers... The march would end in a slaughter known as Bloody Sunday--and the history of the Revolution and the fall of the Romanovs is usually reckoned from that date... The marchers, an impressive procession, complete with crosses, holy images, portraits of the Tsar and his Tsarina, and babes in arms, approached the Winter Palace, and were faced by troops. The usual mix-up in orders took place, the soldiers fired, the Cossack cavalry charged, the snow was speckled with bodies and blood... The remnants of the procession fled, and Gapon ran to Gorky's apartment. Gapon was now a young man shocked into protest way out of line with anything dreamed of by Zubatov."
-- Dan Levin, Stormy Petrol: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky, pp. 114-5, Appleton Century, 1965.

This was how the revolution first broke across Russia, and no one has ever found any evidence to suggest that it was orchestrated by Jews or anyone else. The wave which broke from Bloody Sunday lasted throughout the whole year of 1905.

"The massacre led to a great outburst of indignation in the country and gave another boost to the revolutionary movement...

"The summer of 1905 witnessed new strikes, mass peasant uprisings in many provinces, active opposition and revolutionary movements among national minorities, and even occasional rebellions in the armed forces, notably in the celebrated instance of the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea. On August 19 an imperial manifesto created an elective Duma with consultative powers, but that too failed to satisfy the educated public or the masses. The revolutionary movement culminated in a mammoth general strike which lasted from the twentieth to the thirtieth of October and has been described as the greatest, most thoroughly carried out, and most successful strike in history. Russians seemed to act with a single will... On October 30, the emperor, as advised by Witte, issued the October Manifesto. That brief document ... made the empire of the Romanovs a constitutional monarchy... After a free election, the First Duma convened on May 10, 1906. Contrary to its sanguine expectations, the government had suffered a decisive electoral defeat..."
-- Nicholas Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, Fourth Edition, pp. 407-9, Oxford University Press, 1984.

Although the government suffered a major setback in all of this, the revolutionary movements were also very splintered apart by the elections.

"The cause of the Left in the First Duma had been injured by the fact that both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats had largely boycotted the election to the Duma...

"In contrast to the first election, the government exerted all possible pressure to obtain favorable results in the election to the Second Duma... But the results again disappointed the emperor and his associates. Although ... the Duma opposition, including mainly the Cadets and the Left, might have declined from 69 to 68 per cent of the total number of deputies, it became more extreme... The entire Left membership in the Duma rose from 124 to 216 deputies."
-- Ibid, 410-11.

Because of the rising Left-wing presence in, and opposition dominance over, the Duma, which was won in free elections, Stolypin and Nicholas II engineered a coup d'etat which dissolved the Second Duma and altered the law to favor landed gentry.

"It has been calculated that the electoral change of June 1907 produced the following results: the vote of a landlord counted roughly as much as the votes of four members of the upper bourgeoisie, or of sixty-five average middle-class people, or of 260 peasants, or of 540 workers."
-- Ibid, p. 412.

The obvious signs which anyone could have seen by 1907 was that the broad sentiment of ordinary people was shifting to the Left, but that a lack of organization and consensus on action meant that the political Left would remain paralyzed among itself for a while to come. If the government had simply been willing to accept the reality as it was then the Duma would have been dominated by Leftist groups which would have been occupied with fighting each other a great deal. But eventually a new political order would have evolved. A government which was faced with such parliamentary conflicts would not have been well-suited for offering an alliance to Serbia against Austria. It would have had to remain humble and restrained at peace for the next 30 years or so while it allowed the country time to develop. But as long as such a course was adhered to, there was no reason to think that things needed to blow up.

Instead of opting for this as the only sensible road, the Czarist government took advantage of the circumstances to simply dismiss the Leftist Duma which had achieved support from the majority of the population. In doing this, they were setting the stage for the next revolution which was bound to come the next time there was a war. This was the great error of Stolypin's coup d'etat of 1907. However, even Stolypin proved to be intolerable for the Right-wing elements within the aristocracy.

Stolypin was assassinated in 1911 by a man who had been employed by the secret police since 1907.

"Stolypin was determined not to confiscate any gentry land, even with recompense... On September 14, 1911, Stolypin was fatally shot by a police agent..."
--Ibid. p. 415.

The police agent in question (Dmitry Bogrov) was subsequently executed, even though Stolypin's wife was opposed to the execution. Having Stolypin be assassinated by someone who had been working for the secret police since 1907 was not something which the police wanted to have investigated. Nicholas II prohibited further investigation into the assassination. More recently, Solzhenitsyn promoted the allegation that Bogrov was some kind of "Jewish revolutionary." A man who worked for the Okhrana since 1907 was not a revolutionary at all.

www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/pyotr-stolypin-assassinated-kiev

"To mark the centenary of the liberation of Russia’s serfs a monument to Tsar Alexander II was unveiled in Kiev. Tsar Nicholas II attended, along with his prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, and the festivities included a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the Kiev opera. A young man named Dmitri Bogrov, who had been an agent of the secret police for several years, told them there was a plan to assassinate Stolypin in the opera house and the police allowed him into the building that evening although they knew he had a revolver... The behaviour of the police created a suspicion that they had been involved in Stolypin’s murder. The investigation into the assassination was stopped on Tsar Nicholas’ orders for reasons that remain unknown. As prime minister since 1906 Stolypin had tried to turn the Russian peasantry into prosperous independent small farmers who would be grateful and loyal to the imperial regime... His methods aroused fierce opposition and only a minority of the Russian peasantry took advantage of the opportunities he offered them."
-- Richard Cavendish, "Pyotr Stolypin assassinated in Kiev," History Today, Volume 61, Number 9, September 2011.

The Black Hundred leader Pavel Bulatzel once charged at a meeting of the Main Council of the Union of the Russian People that "Stolypin and Shcheglovitov are the main culprits and panderers."

scepsis.net/library/id_743.html

Including Shcheglovitov as part of Bulatzel's tirade is an interesting point, since Shcheglovatov was a principal instigator of the libel trial against Menachem Beilis in 1913. What stands out about the Black Hundreds is that most of their attacks were either directed at the most conservative liberals, or even against outright Rightists such as Shchleglovitov. In addition to assassinating Herzenstein and Iollos of the Constitutional Democrats, the Black Hundreds also attacked Milyukov and Witte.

Some observations should be made about the pogroms which erupted in Czarist Russia in 1905 and which the Black Hundreds played a notable role in. The most important thing to underscore about these pogroms is that the elements of popular participation in them were very small in comparison with the sweeping scope of the strikes and protests which had fueled the revolutionary wave in 1905. It's common that when a popular eruption such as the 1905 revolutionary wave has sputtered out from political confusion, one should expect a partial shift towards some conservative attitudes. There have been many times in the past when peasants have supported a broadly Left-wing view while treating Jews with hostility as outsiders. If the Black Hundreds had taken up the demands for land redistribution which the Social Revolutionary Party advocated, then they could have easily spiced such a program with Jew-baiting and made a Right-wing popular movement of some sort. But they did not do this and their movement never attracted popular support which could have made it a serious competitor with the Left under conditions of open politics.

It can be highly misleading to assess the political situation by looking at the number of members who at one time joined the Black Hundreds versus membership in groups on the Left. From the piece by Sergey Stepanov, linked to above:

"The Black Hundred was a conglomerate of loosely connected alliances, societies and fraternities. The largest of the Black Hundred parties was the Union of the Russian People, established in November 1905 in St. Petersburg... They managed to attract more members under their banners than all the political parties in Russia combined. A comprehensive analysis of the sources allows us to establish that at the time of the highest prosperity of the Black Hundred, which occurred in 1907-1908, more than 400,000 members belonged to the ranks of monarchical organizations. The flip side of mass membership was the looseness and amorphousness of the Black Hundred organizations. Most members of monarchical unions were listed in them only nominally."
-- Sergey Stepanov, "The Black Hundred Terror of 1905-1907," published in the book: Individual political terror in Russia, 1996.

In a country like Czarist Russia in the early 1900s, the fact that the Black Hundreds had a nominal membership which was greater "than all the political parties in Russia combined" does not signify what it might in a more liberal society.

"These proto-storm-troopers had the active moral and financial support of P. N. Durnovo, who become Minister of the Interior in Witte's Council of Ministers, and of Trepov, who, removed from office by Witte, had become the Czar's close and trusted advisor ('Durnovo,' wrote Nicholas to his mother, 'is doing splendid work. Trepov is absolutely indispensable to me.') This precious pair undermined both Witte and the Constitutional reform."
-- Warren Walsh, Russia and the Soviet Union, p. 336, University of Michigan Press, 1958.

It is a giant mistake to confuse the fizzling out of the 1905 revolution as evidence of a serious conservative sentiment among the Russian populace. Revolutions generally succeed when 3 things come together:

1) Significant popular discontent.
2) Coherent political leadership.
3) A link connecting 1 & 2.

In the Czarist Empire from 1905-17, it was obvious that popular discontent was vastly greater than any discontent with the British monarchy that prevailed among American colonists in 1776. But the main revolutionary parties were divided into Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and even smaller factions. The outbreak of the uprising happened spontaneously in January 1905 and caught all of the would-be revolutionary leaders off-guard. It's no surprise that the ball was fumbled on this first run. But in no way should that be misconstrued to mean that the aristocracy had any solid basis of support. That was obviously not the case.

After the 1905 uprising had subsided, it was the February Revolution which turned into the big event. This was a sweeping popular revolt against the Czarist monarchy carried out by a public that was fed up with the First World War. Despite the silly claims made by Tonjoroff in the piece which Wear cites, no one could ever find any evidence to suggest that this February Revolution was made by anyone other than the Russian public at large.

Some arguments have gone back and forth about the degree of spontaneity in the February Revolution. An early popular history by William Henry Chamberlin made the claim that:

"The collapse of the Romanov autocracy in March 1917 was one of the most leaderless, spontaneous, anonymous revolutions of all time. While almost every thoughtful observer in Russia in the winter of 1916-1917 foresaw the likelihood of the crash of the existing regime no one, even among the revolutionary leaders, realized that the strikes and bread riots which broke out in Petrograd on March 8 would culminate in the mutiny of the garrison and the overthrow of the government four days later."
-- Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, Volume 1, p. 73, Universal Library Edition, 1935.

Arguments have been made that various local figures played some role in organizing events so that the uprising was not as purely spontaneous as William Chamberlin thought.

"Socialists had no specific plans in advance to launch revolutionary disturbances on 23 February [old style] and bring them to fruition on 27 February. What they did have, as overwhelming evidence indicates, was an orientation to promote strikes and demonstrations and, if they showed promise, to prolong them and push them towards revolution... The individuals chiefly responsible for the unfolding of the February Revolution were Kerensky, Chkheidze, Skobelev, Zenzinov, Rafes, Peshekhonov, Sokolov, Ermanskii, Shliapnikov, Iurenev, and Aleksandrovich. These individuals met repeatedly before and during the disturbances, some among them promoted the 23 February strikes, others called the Petrograd Soviet, and all formed the kernel of its Executive Committee, which became the real arbiter of Russia's fate."
-- Michael Melancon, Rethinking Russia's February Revolution: Anonymous Spontaneity or Socialist Agency?, pp. 96-7, The Carl Beck Papers, Number 1408, June 2000.

Chamberlin's view emphasized instead the absence from Petrograd of the more traditionally prominent leaders of the various revolutionary parties, whereas Melancon indicates how others came to fulfill a local leadership role. Either way, no one has ever refuted Chamberlin's basic point:

"The atmosphere of Petrograd was so charged with discontent in this third winter of an unsuccessful war that very slight causes were sufficient to bring about a formidable explosion."
-- Chamberlin, ibid, p. 75.

"On March 8 [new style] the soldiers' wives, mothers and sisters unwittingly ignited the February Revolution with the simple spark of an innocuous Petrograd procession to mark International Women's Day. That innocent procession bred a spate of ill-planned strikes by 90,000 workers the next day. Although revolutionary committees and police planning teams had been preparing for this moment for years, with both sides intent on improving their 1905 performances, their blueprints and timetables for carefully calculated movements and actions did not take into account the emotion of the mounted Cossacks ... when ordered to stampede through 2,500 Erikson millworkers on the cold morning of 10 March 1917. First with a wink, then with a smile, the Cossacks signalled the crowd that they would neither attack the workers nor flagrantly disobey their officers."
-- Jamie Bisher, White Terror, p. 30.

What is clear is that, just as in 1905 the vast mass of the Russian populace had supported the first attempt at a revolution, so too did the overwhelming majority support the February Revolution. The statements made by Tonjoroff in his foolish article of 1920 where he attempts to attribute the February Revolution (but not the October Revolution) to "Jewish thinking" are made irrelevant by the way that the February Revolution broke across all of Russia.

Wilton's fake story about "Trotsky ... 300 Jews" is recycled by John Wear by quoting Nesta Webster as saying:

"At about the same time, Trotsky arrived from the United States, followed by over 300 Jews from the East End of New York and joined up with the Bolshevik Party."

Recycling fake stories from Wilton by quoting other people who are repeating the story in chain-mail is a trick that Wear uses. The closest thing which one can find in any historical source about 300 people being supposedly linked with Trotsky in New York relates simply to his farewell:

"Trotsky and the family had been in America for less than three months. They boarded the SS Kristianiafford of the Norwegian-American line on 27 March looking forward to the journey ... 300 well-wishers saw them off... A handful of revolutionaries secured berths for the same trip. These included Trotsky's associate Grigori Chudnovski. Another passenger was Andrei Kalpashnikov, who may well have been sent by Allied agencies to keep an eye on Trotsky."
-- Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography, p. 159, Pan Books, 2010.

This reference to "300 well-wishers" is the closest thing in any historical source about 300 people being associated with Trotsky's trip back to Russia.

"On 27 March Trotsky, his family, and a small group of other emigres, having the day before been given a boisterous farewell by a multilingual gathering of Socialists, sailed from New York... British naval police forcibly removed him and his family from the ship... the internment became a political scandal. The Menshevik Executive of the Petrograd Soviet demanded Trotsky's release... Finally, after much bungling and intrigue, Miliukov [Milyukov] was compelled to renew the demand for Trotsky's release."
--Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, pp. 246-7, Oxford University Press, 1989.

It calls for emphasis here that, as Deutscher points out, it was pressure from the Russian government of that time which brought about Trotsky's release:

nationalpost.com/news/canada/where-was-leon-trotsky-when-the-russian-revolution-began-why-nova-scotia-of-course

"British intelligence was already on the trail of the 37-year-old radical, and when the ship pulled in for a stop at Halifax, police stepped aboard to arrest Trotsky and a small group of other Russians as dangerous socialists' set on overthrowing Russia’s fragile provisional government...

"Worse still, the British suspected that Trotsky’s passage had been funded by the German enemy...

"The left-wing Russian press, however, was reportedly whipped into a frenzy by news that a prominent comrade was being held against his will by Canadians.

"Amherst’s most difficult prisoner was fast becoming an international incident, and after only one month in Nova Scotia, the British ordered Trotsky freed after receiving an official request from Pavel Milyukov, the foreign minister of Russia’s democratically minded Provisional Government."
-- Tristin Hopper, "Where was Trotsky when the Russian Revolution began? Why Nova Scotia, of course," National Post, published June 28, 2017.

To understand what was going on one must first absorb the fact that Trotsky did not become a Bolshevik until July 1917. Until then he had been a sort of free-wheeling maverick who argued against Lenin very frequently. Milyukov was a leader of the Constitutional Democrats and had no interest in helping Lenin take power. But the overwhelming sense among the Russian public after the February Revolution was that Russian political exiles should be welcomed back and there was no reason for Milyukov (or Lenin or Trotsky for that matter) to believe that Trotsky was about to become a political ally of Lenin's. Hence there is nothing mysterious about Trotsky's release.

Since the original Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903, Trotsky and Lenin had been bitter political rivals. Lenin's comment from a letter to Alexandra Kollontai of February 17, 1917, was typical:

"... it was just as sad to read about the bloc between Trotsky and the Right for the struggle against N. Iv. What a swine this Trotsky is—Left phrases, and a bloc with the Right against the Zimmerwald Left!! He ought to be exposed (by you) if only in a brief letter to Sotsial-Demokrat!"
-- Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 35, p. 285, Progress Publishers, 1966.

A similar letter 2 days later to Inessa Armand of February 19, 1917:

"Trotsky arrived, and this scoundrel at once ganged up with the Right wing of Novy Mir against the Left Zimmerwaldists!! That’s it!! That’s Trotsky for you!! Always true to himself=twists, swindles, poses as a Left, helps the Right, so long as he can...."
-- Ibid, p. 288.

These sentiments date back much further than early 1917, as seen in this letter from Lenin to Zinoviev of August 24, 1909:

"I object to Trotsky’s signature; signatures must be omitted. (I have not yet read the articles.) ... As regards Pravda, have you read Trotsky’s letter to Inok? If you have, I hope it has convinced you that Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist of the Ryazanov-and-Co. type? Either equality on the editorial board, subordination to the C.C. and no one’s transfer to Paris except Trotsky’s (the scoundrel, he wants to “fix up” the whole rascally crew of Pravda at our expense!)— or a break with this swindler and an exposure of him in the C.O. He pays lip-service to the Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists."
-- Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 34, pp. 399-400, Progress Publishers, 1974.

These polemics by Lenin against Trotsky were a follow-up response to an earlier polemic which Trotsky had made against Lenin back in 1904:

"But in so far as we have to deal with a more complex task – transforming these 'instincts' into conscious aspirations of a working class which is determining itself politically – we tend to resort to the short-cuts and over-simplifications of 'thinking-for-others' and 'substitutionism.' In the internal politics of the Party these methods lead, as we shall see below, to the Party organisation 'substituting' itself for the Party, the Central Committee substituting itself for the Party organisation, and finally the dictator substituting himself for the Central Committee..."
-- Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, p. 77, New York Publications, 1980.

It was only after Trotsky had returned to Russia and seen the July Uprising that he became convinced that a revolution was now possible and that only Lenin (not any of the other Bolsheviks, not Zinoviev or Kamenev or Stalin, but only Lenin) understood the situation (besides himself, of course) that he decided to suddenly join Lenin's Bolshevik faction and permanently committed himself to this. But no one who knew Trotsky in January-March 1917 would have regarded him as a Bolshevik.

So not only are Wilton/Webster/Wear repeating a fake story about Trotsky traveling with 300 New York Jews, but they are creating the false impression that Trotsky going back to Russia would have had something to do with a conspiracy to bring Lenin to power. In reality, no one in early 1917 would have regarded Lenin and Trotsky as allies.

"the team was led by Yakov Yurovsky, a Jew"

That was never disputed, that Yurovsky was Jewish and led the team. Wilton tried to claim that there was one Russian Pavel Medvedev and that the others were Latvians. Not true. There was one Latvian Y.M. Tselms involved, and the other 7 members of the team were Russians, including Pavel Medvedev.

"The Soviets maintained it was a local initiative. Their fellow-travelers obliged. Wilton thus provided a much more accurate account of the killing of the Romanovs than his opponents by any standards."

So, your alternative to a liar like Wilton is Soviet official statements? Trotsky's Diary in Exile: 1935, published through Harvard University Press as far back as 1958 (reissued in 1976) contains a more honest account of things. See pages 80-1 of the 1976 edition. Or look for the same pages here:

bishopkingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SIbMZeGL08TCx6Ap4gIS.pdf

Even the book published in 1957 by Frederick Schuman contains a simple concise account:

"A brutal incident of these days of incipient civil war is noteworthy. Nicholas II, with his wife and children, had been shipped from Tsarkoe Selo near Petrograd to Tobolsk and then to Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), north of Chelyabinsk. When Czech and Russian anti-Soviet troops moved on the town, the Ural Territorial Soviet concluded that the royal refugees could not be permitted to fall into hostile hands. During the night of July 16-17, 1918, Red Guards took the Romanovs, with their doctor and servants, to the basement of the house where they resided and there shot them all to death, burning the bodies in a near-by mine and scattering the ashes in a swamp."
-- Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, pp. 106-7, publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

There is no special and accurate reliable information added on to the above by Wilton's propaganda.

"The killing of the Romanovs did not reflect"

While the specific act of execution at that moment was based upon a political calculation by Lenin, that if he could not put the royal family on trial then it was better to execute them swiftly, there should be no doubt about the fact that broad sentiment favored a general revolution. Not necessarily the Bolshevik brand of revolution. The Social Revolutionaries were the most popular party among peasants and the Mensheviks very often won the support of urban workers away from the Bolsheviks. But there certainly was a very real revolutionary sentiment among the mass of Russians.

"Weber tells readers the lists appear to be inaccurate and contradict later available official lists"

Bring that up with John Wear. He was the one who wrote what claimed to be a piece of "Inconvenient History" where he simply recycled stories which were derived from Wilton's original fake lists. If you accept Weber's statement that the lists are inaccurate then the stuff taken from Ernest Elmhurst, The World Hoax, is fake too.

"One of the stories from the early 90s. The reader of Wilton would have been well ahead of the curve."

The Yeltsin and Putin governments have done quite a bit to promote a cult around Nicholas II. But it is very misleading to cite stories like that. Let's look at some other surveys, including more recent ones. To be sure, one can find occasional polls which show a sympathetic view towards Nicholas II. Like this one from 2018:

tass.ru/obschestvo/5324508

"54% of respondents voted for Nicholas II, 51% – for Stalin, 49% – for Lenin."

On the other hand, Nicholas II seems to have been left behind in this poll from 2021:

www.levada.ru/2021/06/21/samye-vydayushhiesya-lichnosti-v-istorii/

"In May 2021, among the most outstanding personalities in the opinion of Russians were: I. Stalin (39%), V. Lenin (30%), A. Pushkin (23%), Peter I (19%) and V. Putin (15%)."

Some more general polling results from other years are worth mentioning:

www.levada.ru/2021/01/14/chelovek-sovetskij-kak-menyalis-vospriyatie-rossiyanami-samih-sebya-i-ih-otnoshenie-k-sssr/

"2019, Russians have a more positive assessment of the Soviet government of the late 1970s and early 1980s than modern managers. Russians often note that the Soviet government was close to the people, and the current one is far away. 54% positively determine the Soviet government, and the modern one – 42%.

"In 2020, a survey by the Levada Center showed that 75% of Russians are confident that the Soviet era is the best time in the history of the country. Only 18% of respondents disagree with this position."

Another poll from 2021 is interesting:

www.levada.ru/2021/05/19/moskvichi-o-pamyatnike-dzerzhinskomu/

"This year, the Moscow authorities again raised the issue of the possible return of the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky to Lubyanka Square. According to an April poll, half of Muscovites would support such a decision. A quarter are opposed and another quarter find it difficult to determine their opinion on this issue."

The obvious lesson from all of this is that many Russians have reached out to symbolism of the past in ways which might seem very confusing if we tried to attach a political meaning to it. But one should be wary of attaching such a political significance to any of this. Actually, given the very explicit overt attempts made by the Russian government since 1991 to promote a positive view of the Czarist era specifically, it is all the more remarkable how often polls show a favorable view of the Soviet era. Whatever misconceptions may be reflected in such polls, the promotion of lies from the White propaganda of the Russian Civil War does not help public understanding.

With the return of Lenin and Trotsky to Russia in 1917, three issues shaped all of the political conflicts which raged through the year:

1) The Russian public was fed up with the First World War.
2) Russian peasants surged forward with new demands of land redistribution.
3) Calls for electing a new Constituent Assembly or Duma were overwhelmingly popular.

None of these issues has any noteworthy inherent association with Bolshevism as such and it was only titanic bungling by the whole Russian aristocracy, especially its most conservative elements, which allowed Lenin's party to make gains off of these issues.

The fact that all Russian conservatives supported the continuance of the World War against Germany until Allied victory is no secret. This also determined the options available to Kerensky as he took nominal command of the Provisional Government. Had Kerensky attempted to sign a peace with Kaiser Wilhelm II in the spring of 1917, he almost certainly would have been overthrown in a military coup d'etat. Lenin was later able to insist upon signing the Brest-Litovsk Peace because he held stronger authority within the Bolshevik government. Even then, Lenin understood that conservative army officers were likely to organize an uprising against the Bolshevik government as soon as a peace was signed. But he could calculate that this too would work to the ultimate benefit of the Bolsheviks as the Whites associated themselves with continuation of an unpopular war.

Kerensky was too politically weak for this. Neither the Social Revolutionaries or the Mensheviks had ever made any organizational plans for a time when they would seize and hold power by force. Having been suddenly swept into office by a popular rebellion, they were not prepared to enforce demands upon the military caste in Russia. Trotsky later on adopted a very wise policy of holding the family members of any uncooperative officers hostage, in order to curb dissent. The SRs and Mensheviks were not organizationally prepared to do this.

Instead, the Leftist leaders of the Provisional Government began leaning on Western influence right away. The hope by Kerensky and other moderate socialists and liberals in the Provisional Government was that the entry of the US into WWI guaranteed an eventual German defeat. If Russia stayed in the war until that time, then it could hope for economic bailouts similar to the Marshall Plan of the 1940s, with significant amounts of US aid helping the Russian economy to recover. At the same time, it was hoped that military alliance with the Western powers would encourage Russian officers to be more tolerant towards liberal ideas of republican government.

Most Russian officers had been very hostile towards Western notions of liberal government. They were even more hostile towards outright Leftist parties which had a significant share of Jews in their leadership, as did particularly the Mensheviks and to a somewhat lesser degree the Social Revolutionaries. Although the label of "Jewish Bolshevism" eventually became a meme of the Right, at the time of the revolution in 1917 no rational person would have seen any reason for associating the Bolsheviks as a specific faction with Jews in any particular way. One could pick out some visible cases of Jewish Bolsheviks, but it was obviously much easier to do this with the Mensheviks and even with the SRs. Clearly any government which was able to hold power in Russia from 1917 and onward was going to be Leftist in some shade and would have a share of Jews in its administration that was at least as visible as anything which ever prevailed under the Bolsheviks.

Staying in the war was for Kerensky a means of simultaneously appeasing and weakening the conservative army officers. As long as Russia remained in the war, the officers were under pressure to maintain the government that was in power if they supported the war. Hence a simple military coup d'etat was not so easy. But this also simultaneously invited rising discontent with the war by the mass of people. If the February Revolution had broken out in the fall of 1918 when Germany was just a few months away from defeat, then Kerensky's tactic might have worked. If Nicholas II had been toppled in August 1918, followed by the fall of Wilhelm II in November, then Kerensky could have finished the war as the leader of one of the victorious Allies. The influence of Allied diplomats might then have persuaded the more reactionary Russian officers to accept a new liberal government in which Kerensky would call elections that would have led to the victory of SRs and Mensheviks over all other parties, while a comprehensive land reform was enacted that appeased the demands of Russian peasants.

But this was not possible in the spring of 1917. Suing for peace meant accepting some type of temporary German triumph. With the US declaration of war, any German victory in Russia was likely to be short-lived. But it would likely have been at least close to 2 years before a German defeat. A peace signed by Kerensky with Wilhelm II in spring 1917 would have been a softer peace than the stern Brest-Litovsk Treaty that was later signed by Trotsky at Lenin's order. But it would still have been a national humiliation in the eyes of Russian officers, and it would have allowed German forces to swiftly transfer to the West for an offensive there.

In such a case, US mobilization would likely have speeded up and US forces would have played a much more visible role in an eventual German defeat, closer to 1945 than 1918 in this respect. That would probably have altered the nature of the Versailles Treaty, which was largely shaped by French insistence that France had done much of the decisive fighting against Germany and therefore French officers had the right to insist on reparations. An Allied victory in which the US role was much more visibly decisive might have led to a better peace after 1919.

The leadership in Russia did not have the range of vision needed to plan for such an outcome. Kerensky was therefore locked into continuing a war which was unsustainable. This was the first immediate factor which guaranteed something like the November Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky. But a further issue lay in the demands of peasants for land reform.

"The basic reason for the Red triumph was that the White forces were essentially conservative and the peasants were all essentially radical. Both Kolchak and Denikin favored the restoration of the landlords, for example. The governments of the Whites demonstrated an astounding lack of understanding and consideration of the people… Kolchak’s last Minister of Justice once told me their cabinet meetings were given over to theoretical discussions and to petty jealousies and squabbles. He added that neither he nor any of his colleagues ever made any serious effort to discover what the people wanted or to satisfy those desires. But this was wisdom long after the event."
-- Warren B. Walsh, Russia and the Soviet Union, p. 407.

It was obvious that Kerensky's party of Social Revolutionaries was normally the more logical party to take the lead on issues like this. The SRs had built their platform around peasant demands for land redistribution. Among Marxists it was more common to note how developed capitalist countries had seen a decline in small farming as many former peasants moved to the cities to seek factory-jobs and the remaining farming estates tended to consolidate into large agrarian enterprises. It therefore seemed counter to the trends in history for such land redistribution to be emphasized by the revolution. Lenin was forced to argue within his own Bolshevik faction in favor of supporting peasant demands. But even so, it was clear that Lenin viewed this as a purely transitory demand on the road towards a greater revolution. It was therefore more logical for peasant demands to rally around the SRs as the party which had been the traditional wellspring of peasant advocacy.

But continuing the World War meant that Kerensky could not carry out any such land reform as would fit the original SR program. If an announcement of land redistribution had been made by Kerensky in spring 1917, then most peasants recruited to the army would have quit right away and gone home to participate in the political events of their local village. To maintain the war with Germany, Kerensky had to postpone any such land reform. Moreover, it was obvious that any such land reform when enacted would have meant a confrontation with the Right-wing elements among the army officers. As stated already, Kerensky was not equipped for such and instead hoped that good relations with the Western Allies would ameliorate tensions with the conservative officers. This simply escalated the explosion, since now Kerensky was not only continuing with a futile war but was also postponing the major plank of his own party.

The final thing which should have crowned the steps of a signed peace with Germany and a radical land reform for peasants should have been elections to a new Duma or Constituent Assembly. Elections to this were specifically postponed until after the war was done. Again, this might have been workable if the February Revolution had occurred in August 1918, 3 months shy of German defeat. But it was delusional in spring 1917. The decision to put off elections to a new Duma merely meant that Kerensky was giving ammunition to his critics at a time when it was obvious that the SRs would be the big winners in any elections that were held.

The latter point was shown when elections actually were eventually held to the Constituent Assembly on November 25 (new style) and resulted in the SRs winning the largest share of the vote. The main SR party in Russia won about 40.4% of the vote, while the Ukrainian faction of the SRs picked up an additional 7.7%. There was also the temperamental faction of Left SRs who carried another 1%. The Bolsheviks got only 24%. They clearly won among the urban working class centers, which figured very importantly in their conception of Marxism. But in Russia at large, they were obviously outvoted in favor of the SRs.

While the SRs and the Bolsheviks showed the strongest results, the rest of the election's results are worth a review. The Mensheviks performed dismally, with the main party getting 2.6% and the Georgian faction of the Mensheviks drawing in another 1.5%. If elections to a Duma had been held in the spring, most of the 24% which the Bolsheviks won would have gone to the Mensheviks. It was the war which did the most to alienate urban workers who cast votes for the Bolsheviks. The Constitutional Democrats carried 4.7% of the vote and other liberal parties an additional 2.8%. Other smaller socialist parties won 0.9%. In addition, there were a variety of national minority parties which won their own local vote in the relevant regions such as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. These parties were usually considered to be "liberal" in the way that many national minority parties in various countries often side with the major liberal party.

Altogether, the elections which were held to the Constituent Assembly, when they eventually happened in late November, showed that the populace of the Russian Empire leaned vastly towards the Left in a general sense, but with no indication that Lenin's party was particularly favored. These elections are worth comparing to the July 1933 vote that was held in Germany, as well as to some of the other German elections of that time. The July 1933 vote is noteworthy because this was the height of the open free vote for the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler. The NSDAP managed to win 2.6, 18.3, 37.4 and 33.1% of the votes in the Reichstag elections of May 20, 1928, September 4, 1930, July 31, 1932 and November 6, 1932.

One can immediately see that the vote for the NSDAP in the last 2 of these elections was higher than the 24% won by the Bolsheviks in the November 25, 1917, election. But that's not a good primary standard of comparison. One should also look at the types of other parties on the ballot. In the Russian election, the Left in general swamped the vote all the way through. The German elections were different in this respect. The vote for the Social Democrats in these same German elections was 29.8, 24.5, 21.6 and 20.4%. For the Communists it was 10.6, 13.1, 14.6 and 16.9%. If the votes for these latter 2 parties are lumped together one gets 40.4, 37.6, 36.2 and 37.3%. It's clear that the July 1933 election was the only one where the NSDAP managed to outdraw the combined votes for the SPD and KPD.

In this respect there are both important similarities and differences between the Russian November 1917 election and the elections in Germany of 1928-32. In both cases one can say that Lenin and Hitler failed to win anything like a majority poll among the mass of voters. Despite achieving a significant sweep in selected areas, neither won a general national victory. At the same time, political splits among other parties played to their advantage. In Germany 1932, the bitter hostility between the KPD and SPD meant that what could have been a labor-bloc outvoting Hitler was neutralized, allowing the NSDAP to claim the largest share of the vote more often than they otherwise could have. In Russia 1917, it was the refusal of the army officers to accept the SRs and similar parties as alternatives to the Bolsheviks while carrying out a Leftist program that meant that the Bolsheviks were able to capitalize off of a wider Leftist popular sentiment which didn't specifically lean towards their party.

These 3 factors were what enabled the October Revolution to occur.