False Economy - Alan Beattie [33]
The real genius that led to the Bolsheviks' eventual triumph was their increasing control over Petrograd's soviet, or workers' organization, through the months that followed. They watched their rivals punch themselves out and exhaust local popular support by trying to run a provisional government for Russia after the February Revolution. With mounting discontent with the world war, which was still continuing, the Bolsheviks' October Revolution (or October Uprising, as it was more accurately called at first) was a special-forces assassination of a tottering government, not a pitched battle against the commanding heights of a functioning state. The climactic "storming" of the Winter Palace, the central seat of government, met almost no resistance. More people were accidentally killed in the making of Sergei Eisenstein's subsequent film about the episode than died in combat during the event itself.
Had the political allegiances of the country as a whole led the October Revolution in 1917 and decided the political shape of the nation, post-tsarist Russia would have been dominated by the Socialist Revolutionaries—a rural party whose central priority was to win for peasants the title to their land. In practice, with the city and the country desperate for stability and the Socialist Revolutionaries' supporters spread across Russia's vast interior, the Bolsheviks found it amazingly easy to simply dismiss the Constituent Assembly, which was supposed to take power and in which the Socialist Revolutionaries had a clear majority, and take control themselves.
Unstable governments have learned the appropriate lesson about paying particular attention to the mood of the capital, and the result is frequently a city bloated beyond all economic logic. Some examples are striking. We saw in the first chapter how Argentina's misguided policies and attitudes warped its development—a landholding class that did not live on the land, an indulged hothouse of industrial companies that could not survive being planted out in the fields of international competition, and, like early Stuart England, an economy distorted by cronyism and a corrupt government that hedged it around with regulations, monopolies, and licenses. It is not entirely surprising that more than 35 percent of Argentines—not 35 percent of the county's urban population, the average for unstable democracies, but 35 percent of the entire nation—live in Buenos Aires.
The pattern is common across Latin America. Mexico City, a small capital of less than 3 million in 1950, whose dysfunctional expansion created one of the modern world's first vast slums, now has a population pushing 22 million. A well-practiced routine in the city's postwar growth involved a group of rural migrants turning up, squatting on vacant land on the outskirts, and choosing a leader who agitated against the ruling PRI party. The government would promptly give them title to the land and provide them with some basic infrastructure, whereupon they would fall into line behind the PRI. Another small chapter in the bloating of the congested, polluted capital would be complete. Given the influence of the central government, even the governors of Mexico's regions find it politically prudent to spend a lot of their time in Mexico City.
Some of Asia does better, especially where the authorities are able and willing to plan, and where rural