The history of the Russian Revolution has generally been written from the perspective of those who ultimately consolidated power. From that perspective, the revolutionary years appear to lead almost inevitably toward the centralized Soviet state that emerged from the Civil War. Those who resisted, questioned, or operated outside that developing structure are frequently described as undisciplined, politically immature, anarchistic, or simply obstacles to the necessities of revolution and war. Pavel Efimovitch Dybenko presents a problem for that interpretation.
He was not merely a Bolshevik sailor who happened to acquire military prominence during the Revolution. The story of Dybenko cannot be understood simply as the story of a Bolshevik commander carrying out the orders of Lenin. Dybenko's authority did not originate with the Bolshevik Party. By April 1917, he had become the most important representative of the revolutionary Baltic Fleet.
Before October 1917, before the Bolsheviks possessed a government, and before Dybenko held any official position within the Soviet state, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet had already begun constructing a political world of their own.
Their revolution was born from years of confrontation with the old order. It emerged from the ships, the barracks, the ports, and the repeated struggles between the sailors and the officers who represented the imperial state. When the February Revolution destroyed the authority of the Tsar, the sailors did not merely wait for someone in Petrograd to tell them what the new Russia should become. They organized.
The creation of Tsentrobalt became the institutional expression of that transformation. Its authority rested upon elected representatives of the fleet. From its headquarters in Helsingfors, Tsentrobalt involved itself not merely in the internal administration of ships but in questions of command, discipline, political authority, and the direction of the Revolution itself. Its members did not necessarily reject professional naval expertise: rather, they insisted that the fleet could no longer be governed without the participation and consent of those who served in it.
This distinction would become fundamental.
Long before the Bolsheviks possessed a state apparatus, the Russian naval authorities had recognized that the sailors represented a political danger to the existing order. The revolutionary sailors of 1905 had demonstrated that military personnel could acquire political consciousness and collective power. Making possible the fleet would cease to be merely an instrument of the state and become an independent revolutionary force.
The Provisional Government inherited this problem in 1917, and the Bolsheviks inherited it after October.
During the summer of 1917, the Provisional Government increasingly regarded the Baltic Fleet as a danger to its authority. The sailors, meanwhile, regarded themselves as defenders of the Revolution. Tsentrobalt was dissolved, Dybenko was imprisoned, and the elected organization was subjected to governmental pressure. Yet the institution returned, and Dybenko returned with it.
The experience changed the political character of the fleet.
By the autumn, the Baltic sailors had become convinced that the future of the Revolution depended upon the transfer of political authority to the Soviets. When Germany attacked in the Gulf of Riga, they demonstrated that their political radicalism did not necessarily mean military cowardice. At Moon Sound, the sailors fought under conditions of overwhelming German superiority. Naval commanders acknowledged their courage. Even their political opponents were compelled to recognize their fighting qualities.
Then came October. The Baltic Fleet did not simply receive the Revolution from Petrograd. Tsentrobalt made its own decision to support the transfer of power to the Soviets. Dybenko controlled communications, directed the movement of naval forces, and helped send sailors toward Petrograd. When Lenin required naval assistance, he could not simply assume the fleet would obey an order from Smolny. Dybenko and political representatives of the sailors had to be consulted.
This fact is easily obscured when his career is viewed retrospectively through the later Soviet state.
The Bolsheviks and the Baltic sailors were allies, but they were not identical political forces.
The sailors believed in Soviet power, but their understanding of Soviet power had been formed through their own institutions. They had experienced elected committees, collective decision-making, political debate, and a degree of autonomy that predated the Bolshevik seizure of governmental authority. Dybenko embodied this world.
At Gatchina, this distinction became even more striking.
Dybenko did not merely command sailors against Krasnov's Cossacks. He entered into negotiations with them. He spoke to them about Soviet power and attempted to persuade them that the workers, soldiers, sailors, and Cossacks belonged to the same social world. The opposing military force began to fracture politically. The settlement that emerged from Gatchina demonstrated just how independently Dybenko could act--and how much authority he believed he possessed on behalf of the revolutionary sailors.
Who had the right to exercise revolutionary authority?
Was that authority to arise from elected soviets and committees representing workers and sailors? From the revolutionary masses themselves? From the Bolshevik Party? From the central government? From professional military command? Or from some combination of these competing institutions?
Meanwhile,
For a brief moment, the revolutionary world seemed limitless.
Dybenko's relationship with Alexandra Kollontai adds another dimension. Kollontai was not simply Dybenko's companion. She was an important revolutionary intellectual and political figure in her own right, with a long history of independent thought within the socialist movement. Her political ideas concerning women's emancipation, personal freedom, workers' participation, and dangers of bureaucratization intersected with the political culture represented by Dybenko and the Baltic Sailors.
Their relationship deserves to be examined not merely as a romantic episode, nor reduced to the scandals surrounding Kollontai's views on marriage and sexuality. The relationship occurred at the intersection of two forms of revolutionary independence: the independence of an influential political thinker and the independence of an armed revolutionary constituency.
Dybenko and Alexandra Kollontai became symbols of that moment: young, unconventional, passionate, and convinced that the destruction of the old order had opened an unprecedented future. The sailors believed they had earned not merely the right to participate in government, but the right to help determine what the new society would become.
Yet the Revolution was entering another stage.
Overthrowing the Provisional Government had been one problem.
Governing Russia was another.
The Bolshevik leadership increasingly faced the necessity of creating a centralized state, a disciplined military, and a chain of command that could answer ultimately to the new government. The institutions created spontaneously by workers, soldiers, and sailors during the Revolution now presented a difficult question.
Would the new state preserve the revolutionary democracy that had created those institutions--or absorb them into a centralized system of authority?
That question became particularly acute in the Navy.
Lenin could praise the sailors for demonstrating the "creative capacity" of the working masses while simultaneously demanding greater discipline, commissars, and an end to the elective system of command. The contradiction was becoming unavoidable. The Navy that had helped make the Revolution was now expected to submit to the state that the Revolution had created.
And at the center of that contradiction stood Pavel Dybenko.
We will continue our conversation.....
