THE COMBINED character of Russia’s economic development also affected the development of politics and culture in Russia. Again, Trotsky explains:

The works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels became available in Russia because the censor opined that they were "an abstract speculation" and therefore of little relevance for Russia. Their works would help shape Russia’s revolutionary movement, but not quite in the way they had expected. The main current among Russian revolutionaries, the Narodniks (or populists), took Marx’s denunciation of capitalism as showing that Russia would be better off if it could bypass capitalism altogether. The populists argued that the peasant Mir or traditional commune could become the basis of moving straight to a socialist society.

The later generations of populists, perhaps best represented by an organization called Zemlya I Volya (land and freedom), vacillated between two strategies—both of which started with the assumption that the populists would act on behalf of the people. On the one hand they went "to the people" and tried to foment peasant rebellion, and when that failed they took matters into their own hands and launched a campaign of terror against the Tsar and his government.

The development of Marxism in Russia was very much influenced by, and developed against, the ideas of the populist movement. While Lenin accurately described populism as reactionary (in its historic philosophical sense) he also acknowledged the important role it played in the development of a revolutionary movement in Russia.

The break with populism and the turn to the working class came in 1883, when G.V. Plekhanov founded the Emancipation of Labor Group. Plekhanov had enthusiastically endorsed militant populism which tried to rouse the peasantry. But by the 1880s several factors led him towards Marxism. First, despite considerable heroism on the part of idealistic revolutionaries, the great hopes of Zemlya I Volya failed to ignite a social revolution, or even to produce any revolutionary activity among the peasants.

Second, after the failure of Zemlya I Volya, populism took a turn to individual terror, which Plekhanov rejected. Third, Plekhanov began to doubt the economic viability of the peasant commune as the basis of a new society. And, fourth, a newly emerging industrial working class began to make itself felt, leading Plekhanov to see workers as the key force in Russia’s revolution.

Plekhanov developed what became the basic ideas of Russian Social Democracy (synonymous with revolutionary Marxism today). Two propositions of Plekhanov’s deserve mention.

Plekhanov argued that because the productive forces were too low, the immediate political objective of the proletariat had to be the victory of the democratic or bourgeois revolution. But Russia’s bourgeoisie, a diminutive late-comer, was not going to lead such a struggle or even give the struggle consistent support. Echoing Marx, Plekhanov argued "that whenever the ‘red specter’ took at all a threatening form, the ‘liberals’ were ready to seek protection in the embraces of the most unceremonious military dictatorship." This led Plekhanov to the central operational question. "In conclusion," he wrote, "I repeat—and I insist upon this important point: the revolutionary movement in Russia will triumph only as a working class movement or it will never triumph!"¹⁷

For 10 years after its founding in 1883, the Emancipation of Labor Group remained largely an exile organization. But it nevertheless played a tremendous role in spreading the ideas of Marxism within émigré circles and in Russia itself. By the early 1890s, Marxist study circles, composed primarily of students and intellectuals, existed in many Russian cities and towns. Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov—Lenin—the future leader of the Bolshevik Party, joined such a group when he moved to St. Petersburg in 1893.

Lenin was typical in many respects of the second generation of Russian Marxists. Initially attracted to populism, he was profoundly influenced by Plekhanov’s critique and by the growing ferment among Russian workers. In this period, Lenin’s efforts were directed in the main to fusing Marxism with the working class movement. Lenin believed that "by directing socialism towards a fusion with the working-class movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did their greatest service," because the previous "separation of the working-class movement and socialism gave rise to weakness and underdevelopment in each: the theories of the socialist, unfused with the workers’ struggle, remained nothing more than utopias, good wishes that had no effect on real life; the working-class movement remained petty, fragmented, and did not acquire political significance, was not enlightened by the advanced science of its time."¹⁸

Therefore, Lenin concluded, "the task of Social-Democracy is to bring definite socialist ideals to the spontaneous working-class movement, to connect this movement with socialist convictions that should attain the level of contemporary science, to connect it with the regular political struggle for democracy as a means of achieving socialism—in a word, to fuse this spontaneous movement into one indestructible whole with the activity of the revolutionary party."¹⁹

Marxism, for Lenin, was therefore, not simply a set of economic laws or doctrines, nor simply a world view, but a guide to action which had definite practical implications.

Marxism makes clear "the real task of a revolutionary socialist party: not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to preach to the capitalists and their hangers-on about improving the lot of the workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organize the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the organization of a socialist society."²⁰

Lenin’s conclusions were not shared by all Marxists at the time. Indeed, the very success of the Marxist study circles’ turn to agitation in the latter 1890s produced a distinctly "anti-political" current, Economism, which glorified the economic struggles of the proletariat. This current, echoing the "revisionism" of the German Socialist leader Eduard Bernstein, who argued "the movement is everything, the final goal nothing," aimed to limit workers to purely economic struggles, leaving the political struggle to the liberals. In these views, the Economists were the political forerunners of the Mensheviks, who formed the moderate wing of Russian socialism after a split in 1903.

Lenin responded to the Economist challenge by arguing against the arbitrary separation of economics and politics. It would be counterproductive for a revolutionary to "adapt himself to the lowest level of understanding" in a manner that would "put the ‘demands and interests of the given moment’ in the foreground and…push back the broad ideas of socialism and the political struggle." Revolutionaries should rather "connect socialism and the political struggle with every local and narrow question."²¹

Lenin’s words have tremendous relevance and meaning for socialists today. Revolutionary socialists, he argued, should not simply talk to workers about factory conditions and workplace struggles, but also about the "Brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc." The reasons for making sure that political agitation of this kind is carried out are not based on some abstract "Marxist" principles, but flow directly from what is needed in the struggle. Working class consciousness "cannot be genuine political consciousness," Lenin further argued, "unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social Democratic point of view and no other."²²

These ideas would become the cornerstone of the revolutionary wing of the Russian socialist movement—the Bolsheviks.

IT WAS widely accepted among Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries that the coming Russian revolution would be a bourgeois revolution. The founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, stated:

Russia was an economically backward country, with a weak bourgeoisie, a weak industrial base and a small working class. The country was overwhelmingly agricultural with only 4-5 million industrial workers out of a total population of 160 million.

The Mensheviks argued that because the revolution was a bourgeois one, its leadership belonged to the bourgeoisie. The working class would have to consciously subordinate its demands and interests to those of the bourgeoisie. The Mensheviks drew direct parallels between the Russian bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of France at the time of the French Revolution of 1789. It was a vital imperative for the Mensheviks that all be done to safeguard the interests of the bourgeoisie and to make sure that they were not frightened by the prospects of a movement from below.

The role of social democracy was to "exert revolutionary pressure on the will of the liberal and radical bourgeoisie," and "to force the upper strata of society to lead the bourgeois revolution to its logical conclusions." ²⁴

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not challenge the idea that the Russian revolution would be bourgeois. "The democratic revolution will not extend beyond the scope of the bourgeois social-economic relationships," wrote Lenin.25 He maintained this position until mid-1917.

But unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin refused to subordinate the demands of the working class to those of the bourgeoisie or to compromise the independence of the labor movement politically and organizationally. Though Russia’s economic level permitted only a bourgeois revolution, the development of a combative working class meant that the bourgeoisie would be incapable of taking the lead:

Because of this, Lenin argued, the working-class would take the lead in the democratic revolution. He went on to argue that since the peasantry had a real interest in ending Tsarism and destroying the remnants of feudalism, the "only force capable of gaining ‘a decisive victory over Tsarism’ is the people, i.e., the proletariat and the peasantry.… The revolution’s ‘decisive victory over Tsarism’ means the establishment of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry…

Leon Trotsky rejected the Mensheviks’ reliance on the Russian bourgeoisie as strongly as the Bolsheviks. But this led him to conclusions quite different from those of Lenin.

Following Marx (and largely in agreement with the Menshevik theoreticians) he argued that the peasantry would not play an independent political role in the revolution.

Because "the town leads in modern society," only an urban class can play the leading role and because the bourgeoisie was not revolutionary, this role fell to the working class:

But if the working class must lead the revolution, then the working class cannot be expected to stop its struggle after the overthrow of the autocracy. Lenin’s "democratic dictatorship" is an impossibility.

But this proposition clearly leads to a difficulty—one that all Russian Marxists understood: Russia was economically and culturally too backward for socialism. How did Trotsky propose to overcome this problem? Given that Russia in isolation did not have the economic prerequisites to build socialism, the Russian revolution would have to be a prelude to revolutions in Europe and elsewhere.

Trotsky called his analysis the theory of "permanent revolution."

THE REVOLUTION of 1905 was the first mass rising against the imperial regime. It was, in Lenin’s words, the "great dress rehearsal" for 1917. All of the elements of 1917 were there in less developed form. Russia was embroiled in a losing war with Japan, and troop discontent mingled with peasants’ desire for land and the mass strikes of workers in the main cities for economic and political rights. Also of critical importance was the emergence of the soviets—or workers’ council—which first made their appearance in St. Petersburg at the height of the revolution.

The revolution began in January 1905 with Bloody Sunday —when the Tsar’s troops massacred more than 800 workers in a mass procession to humbly ask the Tsar for reforms. This led to an explosion of mass strikes, mutinies in the army and scattered peasant revolts. It ended in December of that year with a failed uprising in Moscow under the slogan "the eight hour day and a gun," inspired and led by the Bolsheviks. Though it ended in defeat, 1905 was also significant because it cemented the political differences between the Mensheviks, who concluded that the revolution had "gone too far" and had therefore frightened the bourgeoisie into the arms of reaction, and the Bolsheviks, who were confirmed in their view that only the independent mass struggle of workers could carry the revolution to success.

The soviet was a kind of workers’ government, made up of elected delegates from Petrograd’s factories and workplaces, concentrating all the forces of the revolution. Wrote Trotsky, its president:

The soviet’s premises, wrote Trotsky,

Trotsky recounts another case where an old Cossack sent the soviet a letter asking for some help with a problem. He addressed the letter "simply to The Workers’ Government, Petersburg, yet it was promptly delivered by the revolutionary postal service."³³

The experience of the revolution’s high point—the Soviets, the workers’ councils—would not be lost. Nor would the violence unleashed by the state. After the suppression of the Soviet by force, many workers drew a critically important lesson: "In the clashing and creaking of twisting metal one heard the gnashing teeth of a proletariat who for the first time fully realized that a more formidable and more ruthless effort was necessary to overthrow and crush the enemy."³⁴

The 1905 revolution did not only exposed clearly the character of the revolution in Russia, but also showed in practice what the arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks meant in practice. It also exposed the different currents in the movement internationally. For example, it sparked a heated debate inside the largest social democratic party—the SPD—in Germany. Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly summed up the revolutionary implications of 1905:

Finally, 1905 had a massive impact around the world as Julius Braunthal, one of the historians of the Internationals, writes:

Years of Reaction

The years after 1905 saw repression on an unprecedented scale. As the repression intensified, it was harder and harder to keep any organization going. One historian writes:

Many of the problems facing the party were made worse by the fact that the intellectuals took fright and fled the movement—and were never to return. One worker-Bolshevik, Martsionovsky, a carpenter, wrote:

In a whole series of cities where I took part in illegal work, almost everywhere the party committee consisted exclusively of workers. The intelligentsia was absent, with the exception of those on tour who came for two or three days. In the most difficult years of the reaction, the workers remained almost without leaders from the intelligentsia. They said that they were tired…We, the underground workers, had to work without the intelligentsia, with the exception of individuals. But on the other hand, after the February Revolution, they showed up, they beat their breasts and shouted "we are revolutionaries," etc., but in fact, none of them had conducted revolutionary work, and we had not seen them in the underground.³⁸

The period between 1911 and the outbreak of World War I saw a revival in militancy and a corresponding growth in the Bolshevik Party. In April 1912, the police fired on a demonstration of striking miners in Lena, Siberia—killing 170 and provoking huge sympathy strikes in Moscow and Petersburg. The revival of the workers’ movement is reflected most clearly in the strike statistics for the years leading up to World War I. One study gives the following figures:

Strikes in Russia 1910-1914 ³⁹

Number of Strikes Working Days Lost (in thousands)

Total Economic Political

1910 222 214 8 256

1911 466 442 24 791

1912 2032 732 1300 2376

1913 2404 1370 1034 3863

1914 3534 969 2565 5755

FOR MANY years, the Second International had proclaimed its opposition to militarism and war. The 1907 Resolution of the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart reads:

These resolutions proved hollow. World War I saw the main parties of the Second International abandon the slogans of peacetime and throw their support behind their ruling classes’ own war effort. In every belligerent country, the socialist movement split between "social patriots" and "internationalists." The anti-war camp was, in turn, sharply divided between advocates of "peace" and those, like Lenin, who called for revolutionaries to turn the world war into a civil war against their own ruling classes.

For Lenin, the betrayal of principles and the about face of the German SPD was quite unexpected. When he first heard of the reports that German socialists in the Reichstag had voted for war credits, he did not at first believe them. And the anti-war forces were small. Rosa Luxemburg sent out an anti-war circular to 20 of the most left-wing members of SPD Reichstag group and received only two responses. In 1915, the anti-war socialists met at Zimmerwald in Switzerland and reaffirmed the principles of international socialism. Trotsky wrote of the meeting:

But this nucleus also formed the basis of a new, revolutionary international—the Third International. The coming revolutionary storm was to swell the ranks of the revolutionaries into the hundreds of thousands across Russia and Europe.

The war exacerbated the crisis of Tsarism in several respects. The scale of the carnage and the human toll it exacted was massive. Trotsky writes in his History of the Russian Revolution: "The Russian army lost in the whole war more men than any army which ever participated in a national war—approximately two and a half million killed, or 40 percent of all the losses of the Entente."⁴²

The war and its cost domestically began to split the ruling order in Russia. Some, with the Tsar at their head, believed the war would cement Russian society through a patriotic outpouring and would stave off social revolution. To make matters worse, the Tsar decided to take personal command of the army and war effort in the late summer of 1915. Even members of the Tsar’s cabinet could no longer ignore the decay and stench. The Acting Minister of Agriculture, A.V. Krivoshein:

As the war dragged on, it became more and more unpopular—both at home and at the front. In the towns, food shortages became frequent. Inflation and fuel shortages became permanent features of the lives of workers in the cities. Dissent began to grow in the factories and in the army. The Bolshevik leader, Shlyapnikov, records in his memoirs:

A sign of the decline and decay of the autocracy was the growing influence of a drunk mystic, Gregori Rasputin. The Tsarina called on Nicholas to act as strongman, but it was too late—even if he’d focused his attention long enough to act decisively. Instead, despondency accompanied decline.

Even the Tsar’s police could see that a revolution was imminent. At the end of 1916, the police department compared the situation in the main cities to ten years earlier and concluded that "now the mood of opposition has reached such extraordinary proportions as it did by a long way among the broad masses in that troubled time."⁴⁵ Trotsky’s remark about the 1905 revolution, "Every Paris concierge knew…in advance that there was going to a be revolution in Petersburg on Sunday, January 9,"⁴⁶ applied equally to 1917. Revolution was in the air, not only because those at the bottom of society wanted a change, but so too did those at the top. In Lenin’s words,

THE PRELUDE to the February revolution consisted of a series of strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd commemorating Bloody Sunday. The strike movement spread and deepened after workers at the giant Putilov Works were locked out for demanding a wage increase. Even the most militant section of the Bolshevik Party, the Vyborg district, urged that the strikes end for fear that conditions weren’t yet ripe for mass, militant action. Then on February 23—International Women’s Day—women textile workers poured into the streets of Petrograd demanding bread. As Trotsky explained:

The women textile workers of Petrograd came out on strike and dragged behind them the Bolshevik-led metal workers of the Vyborg district. As one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Vyborg District Committee, Kayurov, put it, "with reluctance, the Bolsheviks agreed to this."49 Indeed, Kayurov later remarked that he had tried to talk the women workers out of taking any action at all.⁵⁰

Trotsky remarks, "Thus the fact is that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat—the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives."⁵¹

By the end of the day, 90,000 workers were on strike—without the shootings the Bolsheviks had feared. The next day, the 24th, about half of Petrograd’s workers were on strike and large numbers of them were demonstrating in the streets. The slogan "Bread!" writes Trotsky, "is crowded out or obscured by louder slogans: ‘Down with the autocracy,’ ‘Down with the war!’" Fearful that the infantry would not obey orders to shoot on unarmed workers, the government brought out its most reliable troops, the Cossack cavalry. The Cossacks did not mutiny, but neither did they act as they were expected to:

The disintegration of the Tsar’s armed forces was evident to the demonstrators. In the streets of the Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd a Bolshevik worker and demonstrator saw the front ranks of the crowd, pressed forward by those behind, come closer and closer to a cordon of soldiers:

Another three days of this and it was all over for the Tsar. On the night of the 26th the reserve battalions of the Volynsky Regiment mutinied. The following morning they killed their commanding officer and joined the workers’ demonstrations. General Khabalov, commander of the Petrograd military garrison, conceded on the evening of the 27th, saying, "…I cannot fulfill the command to re-establish order in the capital. Most of the units one by one have betrayed their duty, refusing to fight the rioters."⁵⁴ The speed of the army’s mutiny was striking. On February 26 there were six hundred mutineers; three days later the whole Petrograd garrison of 170,000 had rebelled.

On February 26, Michael V. Rodzyanko, president of the lame Duma, wired the Tsar:

The Tsar’s reply was to delay the opening of the Duma. Its members were at a loss. "I do not want to revolt," exclaimed Rodzyanko.

In the end, Rodzyanko sent another telegram pleading with the Tsar to intervene. "Situation worsening. Immediate steps are necessary, for tomorrow it will be too late. The last hour has come in which the fate of the country and the dynasty is being decided." Forever vigilant and astute, the Tsar was unmoved. "That fat Rodzyanko has again sent me some nonsense to which I will not even reply," he commented to Count Fredericks, minister of the court.⁵⁷

The Tsar’s imbecility achieved a truly remarkable feat: it forced a majority of the Duma’s members to go against his wishes. Not wanting to offend, they refused to disperse, but met only in an unofficial capacity. Rodzyanko, who contemplated the possibility of the Tsar’s abdication with "unspeakable sadness," had just advised Tsarist authorities to use their firehoses to disperse demonstrators. But the situation needed resolution. At midnight on February 27, the Duma’s leaders proclaimed the formation of a provisional government. Their intent was clear. As the leader of the bourgeois Cadet Party, Miliukov, put it: "to direct into a peaceful channel the transfer of power which it had preferred to receive, not from below, but from above." The Duma had no choice but "to take power into its own hands and try to curb the growing anarchy," wrote Rodzyanko.⁵⁸ As the Duma leaders proclaimed a new government, the last of the Romanovs recorded the proud achievements of his last night in power: "read a great deal about Julius Caesar" and slept "long and deeply."⁵⁹ Three centuries of Romanovs finally came to an ignominious end—the Tsar abdicated on March 2.

The February revolution brought a bourgeois government headed by Prince Lvov to office—but it also created another center of power: the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Indeed, in the first days after the fall of the Tsar, effective power was in the hands of the Soviets. The old state had collapsed and the bourgeoisie was reluctant to take power. But so too was the leadership of the Soviets—then in the hands of the Mensheviks and the peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs). In their view, the aim of the revolution was the achievement of a bourgeois democratic republic. They were ready and eager to support the new government to see that the tasks of the "bourgeois revolution" were carried out. As the Menshevik Potresov expressed it: "at the moment of the bourgeois revolution, the [class] best prepared, socially and psychologically, to solve national problem is [the] bourgeoisie."⁶⁰

The new government was above all concerned with a return to order: restoring the authority of the officers in the army and of management over workers in industrial enterprises over the workers. Before declaring a provisional government they aptly called themselves ‘The Committee for the Re-establishment of Order and Relations with Public Institutions and Personages." Their sole preoccupation was stabilizing Russian society—and of course to carrying on the war. Until that time, the other issues raised by the revolution—land reform, the demands of the non-Russian nationalities, the election of a Constituent Assembly, and so on, could all wait. One historian summarizes the approach of the new Provisional Government to the crisis it inherited:

Right up to its overthrow in October, the Provisional Government would doggedly stick to prosecuting the war—effectively laying the basis for its undoing. "If the revolution did not finish the war," wrote the Menshevik Sukhanov, "then the war would strangle the revolution."⁶²

But the provisional government also had a big problem. It didn’t have the power to rule on its own. As the Minister of War and the Navy, Guchkov, wrote to the Commander in Chief, General Alekseev, on March 9:

Reorienting the Bolshevik Party

BOLSHEVIK PARTY leaders in Russia during the February revolution largely accommodated to the Menshevik-SR political line. They clung to the notion that the Russian revolution had to limit itself to a bourgeois aims. They tried to take a verbally critical stance, but effectively served as the left face of the soviet majority, which itself covered for the Provisional Government. The new editors of Pravda, Kamenev and Stalin, who returned from exile in Siberia, "Pronounced that the Bolsheviks would decisively support the Provisional Government ‘insofar as it struggles against reaction or counter-revolution’ forgetting that the only important agent of counter revolution at the time was this same Provisional Government," writes Tony Cliff caustically.⁶⁴ Although there was considerable opposition within the party to the political line adopted towards the Provisional Government, it would take Lenin’s return from exile, on April 3, 1917, to decisively shift the party—indeed, the whole course of the revolution.

At a meeting in March of the Provisional Government, when ministers were discussing Bolshevik agitation, Kerensky blurted out: "Just wait, Lenin himself is coming. Then the real thing will start."⁶⁵ The "real thing" did indeed start—but in a way noone anticipated.

Lenin arrived at the Finland railway station—which was located in the Bolshevik stronghold of the Vyborg district. Like Plekhanov, who had returned a few days earlier, Lenin was welcomed by a group of dignitaries including Chkheidze, the Menshevik chair of the Petrograd Soviet. The description of the official meeting deserves to be quoted in full, despite its length:

Sukhanov summed up Lenin’s speech to a Bolshevik party meeting that day:

The response to Lenin’s speech was that of stunned silence. He was denounced from all sides. "A man who talks that kind of stupidity is not dangerous," exclaimed Stakevich, a moderate socialist. Bogdanov, a Menshevik: "That is raving, the ravings of a lunatic! It is indecent to applaud this claptrap!" A member of the Bolsheviks, Zalezhki, noted: "On that day (April 4) Comrade Lenin could not find open sympathizers even in our own ranks." Lenin’s speech, she remembers "produced on everyone a stupefying impression. No one expected this. On the contrary, they expected Vladimir Ilych to arrive and call to order the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee and especially Comrade Molotov, who occupied a particularly irreconcilable position with respect to the Provisional Government.⁶⁸

On April 9, Pravda, the Bolshevik party newspaper, ran an editorial attacking Lenin written by Central Committee member, L.B. Kamenev:

But Lenin refused to be cowed. He launched an attack of his own. As he had done in 1905, he attacked those "old Bolsheviks" who continued to apply policies and methods which were appropriate for one period, but now acted as a hindrance to the aims of the revolution. For example, he attacked Kamenev’s "old Bolshevik" formula that "the bourgeois revolution is not completed" as "obsolete." "It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it." He criticized the old Bolsheviks for refusing to abandon the formula of the "revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry"—which was his slogan at the start of the 1905 revolution. Those who wanted to hang on to that idea, said Lenin, "should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik" pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘Old Bolsheviks’).⁷⁰

Lenin answered his critics by hammering home the central point: the workers can only rely on themselves.

In effect, Lenin was adopting Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ position. The first stage of the revolution had created a situation of "dual power," in which the working class and rebellious soldiers were not yet conscious of the need to sweep away the bourgeois Provisional Government. The task now was to win over a majority of the proletariat to the side of Bolshevism.

Lenin’s isolation among the leaders of the Bolsheviks can be gauged by the outcome of a debate and vote on Lenin’s views at a Petrograd Committee meeting on April 8. Those opposing Lenin handily won the vote thirteen to two, with one abstention. Similar results were recorded in Moscow and other local Bolshevik committees.⁷³

But several factors worked in Lenin’s favor. First, many of the rank and file members of the party were already unhappy with the line of accommodation to the Provisional Government being pushed by Kamenev, Stalin and the former Duma deputy M.K. Muranov. Indeed some members in Petrograd had called for their expulsion from the party.

Moreover, even if the Bolsheviks’ Petrograd leadership tailed behind the Mensheviks and SRs, the Bolshevik members did not have the same instincts as those of the Mensheviks. As Trotsky notes, the whole history and training of the Bolsheviks led them in the direction of identifying with the masses rather than the new bourgeois government. Trotsky writes:

Second, the very course of the revolution, and in particular the government’s continued escalation to the war effort, was a confirmation of the validity of Lenin’s views. Third, the numbers of workers, soldiers and peasants drawn into the revolution continued to grow—as did their hostility to the government and their gravitation to the Bolsheviks; fourth, the Bolshevik party itself entered a period of explosive growth. In the two months since February, party membership swelled from 24,000 to 80,000. Finally, Lenin carried enormous political weight among the cadres of the Bolshevik party. Indeed, Trotsky is undoubtedly right in saying that only Lenin could have reoriented the party so quickly and with so little damage. By mid-April, Lenin’s attempts to win over the party reached an important turning point: He succeeded in winning a majority at a conference of Bolsheviks held in Petrograd on April 14. By the end of April, Lenin had decidedly won the party over to his views.

No sooner had Lenin won the party over did the opposite danger come to the fore. The same militants who supported Lenin’s "no support for the Provisional Government" slogan tended to be involved in head-on clashes with the government. The slogan of "no support" was soon transformed into one of "Down with the Provisional Government." Lenin now swung from the party’s left to its right, calling such slogans "premature" and "adventurist." Petrograd’s workers were well ahead of the rest of the country, and the danger existed of a premature confrontation with the government which would leave the most militant sections of the movement isolated. The Bolshevik strategy was to rely on peaceful agitation and propaganda to win over a majority in the Soviets. This was the strategy that the Bolsheviks intended to follow, but the actual course of the struggle forced them to adopt a different course.

On May 1, Guchkov, Minister of War and the Navy, resigned his post from the Provisional Government. He announced that he was no longer able to fulfill his duties because of the continued disintegration and open rebellion in the army: "conditions which I am powerless to alter and which threaten the defense and, freedom and even the existence of Russia with fatal consequences."⁷⁵ One graphic symptom of the collapse of the Russian army was the ever rising number of deserters. The total number of registered deserters (as opposed to a much larger but unknown total number of deserters) from the outbreak of war to February 1917, was 195,130, or 3,423 per fortnight. From the beginning of the revolution to May 15, the number rose to 85,921 or 17,185 per fortnight.⁷⁶

The collapse of the army was one reflection of the growing rebellion among peasants throughout the country. Writes Lionel Kochan: "The storm in the countryside burst in April. Statistics, necessary incomplete, show an unmistakable and sudden upsurge. In March the number of districts affected by peasant disorders had been 34; in April it was 174; in May 236; in June 280; and in July 325."⁷⁷

The government’s response to this crisis was to try to expand its base of support—especially among the Mensheviks and the SRs who still held a majority in the Soviets. In late April, these parties entered the Provisional Government. The right-wing SR Alexander Kerensky became minister of war. From May onwards, the revolution’s advance required fighting not only the bourgeoisie, but the leaders of the Mensheviks and SRs. From May to the October seizure of power, there is a visible and steady decline in the levels of support to both Mensheviks and SRs and a sharp swing to the left.

The swing left is best illustrated by the events of the "July Days." Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership had attempted to temper the most militant sections of the party. But this proved no easy task. Already in April, there had been clashes between pro- and anti-government forces, as demonstrations of some 30,000 workers and sailors were organized by the Bolsheviks. On June 9, the Bolsheviks found themselves having to call off a peaceful demonstration in Petrograd where their supporters were going to demand the government resign. The majority in the Soviets, citing the fear of anarchy, had banned the demonstration. The party protested, but submitted. This only infuriated thousands of workers—mainly against the Provisional Government, but many also questioned the party’s decision to avoid confrontation. An alternative, official Soviet demonstration held some days later paraded overwhelmingly pro-Bolshevik slogans.

The unavoidable confrontation came in July. Nearly a million demonstrators took to the streets of Petrograd on July 4, demanding an end to the war and the overthrow of the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks, having failed to restrain the demonstrators, decided to join them. In the confrontations that followed, there were hundreds of casualties. There is little doubt that had the Bolshevik Party called for the overthrow of the government, it could have achieved that aim. But Lenin and others were clear that the rest of Russia wasn’t yet ready to overthrow the Provisional Government. Aware of the Bolsheviks’ growing strength—and now terrified—the Provisional Government banned the Bolshevik Party. Warrants were issued for the arrest of key leaders of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky. The Bolshevik press was banned and the printing presses smashed to bits. Sukhanov writes in his memoirs that the Bolshevik Party was finished.

But instead, it was the Provisional Government whose days were numbered. With every passing day, it grew more unpopular, its position more tenuous. Bolshevik Party membership increased dramatically—transforming the party completely. In a report to the Sixth Party Congress, held in August, Sverdlov reported that party membership stood at 240,000. The report showed that in Petrograd there were now 41,000 members, as against 15,000 in April. In Moscow 50,900 as against 13,000. By October, the party numbered 350,000.⁷⁸

The growth of the party is all the more remarkable given that the party was virtually driven underground after July. Alongside the repression and intimidation came a well orchestrated propaganda campaign to discredit and smear the Bolsheviks. Lenin, in particular, was "exposed" as an agent of the Kaiser and anything else they could invent—a slander campaign which is still alive in many history books today! The repression was not strong enough to crush the Bolsheviks. They continued to win members and wider layers of support. The government campaign against the left had one unintended effect—to virtually finish any base the Mensheviks had among workers. As an historian of the Mensheviks writes:

The government’s hard line also helped push large sections of the SRs towards the Bolsheviks. But if the Mensheviks and the SRs no longer had a mass base, they were of no use to the reactionaries that made up the officer caste in the army, to the bourgeoisie or to the middle classes. The call for a military coup from the right began to be raised openly. In mid-August, the Provisional Government tried to muster public support by organizing a State Conference. To protest the conference, the Bolsheviks called a general strike in Moscow that shut much of the city down—yet another sign of the Bolshevik’s resurgence from the July repression. During the proceedings General Kornilov, Commander in Chief, talked about the need to restore order in the army and at "the rear."

General Kornilov launched a coup attempt in late August. On August 26, he sent a representative to demand the surrender of the Provisional Government. He had the backing of all the top generals, big business and the British and French governments. But Kornilov’s coup failed largely because of the organized resistance led by the Bolsheviks.

Lenin’s response to the Kornilov revolt was clear and immediate: "The Kornilov revolt is a most unexpected and downright unbelievably sharp turn in events. Like every sharp turn, it calls for a revision and change of tactics."⁸¹ The Bolshevik Party must lead the resistance to Kornilov, Lenin argued, because a successful coup from the right would be a tremendous setback to the revolution. Thus, Bolsheviks and their supporters were organized to fight Kornilov. This did not mean, however, extending support to the government. "Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled.… We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness.82

"We are changing the form of our struggle against Kerensky. Without in the least relaxing our hostility towards him, without taking back a single word said against him, without renouncing the task of overthrowing him."⁸³

After four days, the coup collapsed. "The insurrection," Trotsky noted, "had rolled back, crumbled to pieces, been sucked up by the earth."⁸⁴ The forces of reaction were completely demoralized, and the Kornilov’s defeat only accelerated the decomposition of the Provisional Government.

THE GREATEST historian of the revolution, and one of its most important participants, Leon Trotsky, described the significance of revolution:

Passivity gave way to self activity. As historian Marc Ferro put it, "the citizens of the new Russia, having overthrown Tsardom, were in a state of permanent mobilization." "All Russia," wrote Sukhanov, "was constantly demonstrating in those days."⁸⁶

The revolution awakened a sense of power in ordinary people.

No longer were discussions of the main issues facing ordinary workers limited to the privileged and powerful. All questions of politics and economics, of war and peace, of how to organize society, were now the property of the masses. Krupskaya, Lenin’s partner, describes the mood:

John Reed described how the thirst for knowledge and culture was insatiable:

ON SEPTEMBER 1, the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet. On September 5, the Moscow Soviet followed suit. On September 9, Trotsky was elected president of the Petrograd Soviet. A clear majority of the working class was behind the Bolsheviks. Lenin launched an offensive within the party to prepare for an armed uprising and seizure of power. He met stiff resistance from the Bolshevik Central Committee. For almost a month, Lenin insistently argued for the party to prepare for an insurrection. Bukharin describes the response of the Central Committee to one of Lenin’s letters.

Finally, on October 10, after bitter debate, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party voted in favor of a rising.

Like every other ruling class, the Russian bourgeoisie and aristocracy thought that nothing and no one could do without it. The conservative daily Novoe Vromia, wrote on the morning after the insurrection (October 26, 1917):

The principal responsibility for organizing the insurrection fell to Trotsky, who, as president of the Soviet and head of the Military-Revolutionary Committee (formed originally during the Kornilov revolt), organized the insurrection. The actual seizure of power involved relatively small numbers of people and had the trappings of a military operation. As Sukhanov wrote, the broad masses

The months of advance and retreat, of revolutionary struggle, ended on October 25. Trotsky describes the situation the morning after the insurrection:

Trotsky then describes a conversation he has with Lenin:

The promise of human emancipation was paramount in the minds of those who led the revolution. In one of his most moving passages, Lenin wrote:

In a similar vein, Trotsky writes in his autobiography, My Life:

Rosa Luxemburg, who leveled some strong criticisms of the Bolsheviks, summed up the Russian Revolution’s historical significance:

Today, we still need to fight for the "great awakening of the personality," as Trotsky put it. The day will come, not easily, not automatically, but it will come, when we can talk once more of "a great awakening of the personality" in the U.S. and internationally.

NOTES:

1 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 28 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), pp. 292-293.

2 Quoted in John Rees, "In Defense of October," in International Socialism 52, Autumn 1991, London, p. 9.

3 Ibid.

4 Philip Foner, editor, The Bolshevik Revolution: Its Impact on American Radicals, Liberals and Labor (International Publishers, New York, 1967), p. 20.

5 For those interested in pursuing any particular aspect of the Russian Revolution see the suggested reading list for a good start.

6 Isaac Deutscher writes in The Prophet Outcast: "For two hours, speaking in German, he addressed an audience of about 2,000 people. His theme was the Russian Revolution. As the authorities had allowed the lecture on the condition that he would avoid controversy, he spoke in a somewhat professorial manner, giving the audience the quintessence of the three volumes of his just concluded History. His restraint did not conceal the depth and force of this conviction; the address was a vindication of the October Revolution, all the more effective because free of apologetics and frankly acknowledging partial failures and mistakes. Nearly twenty-five years later members of the audience still recalled the lecture with vivid appreciation as an oratorical feat." Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929-1940 (Oxford University Press, London, 1970), pp.184-185.

7 Marcel Liebman, The Russian Revolution (Jonathan Cape, London, 1970), p. 17 (see foot 50).

8 Ibid., p. 24.

9 Ibid., p. 19.

10 Dominic Lieven, "Russia, Europe and World War I," in Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, William Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1997), p. 37.

11 Leon Trotsky, Stalin (Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1941), p. 422.

12 Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Pluto Press, London, 1997), p. 31. Hereafter referred to as HRR.

13 S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917-1918 (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1983), pp. 9-10.

14 One dessiatine equals 2.7 acres.

15 Leon Trotsky Speaks, pp. 252-255.

16 HRR, p. 19.

17 Neil Harding, ed., Marxism in Russia: Key Documents 1879-1906 (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 16.

18 Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Humanities Press International Inc.: Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1990), pp. 17-18.

19 Ibid., p. 18.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., pp. 45-46.

22 Ibid., pp. 66-67.

23 Neil Harding, op. cit., p. 224.

24 Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg (Pluto Press, London, 1970), p. 89.

25 V.I. Lenin, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution," in Collected Works, Volume 9 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), p. 57.

26 Quoted in Cliff, Lenin, Volume 1, p. 143.

27 V.I. Lenin, Volume 9, op. cit., pp. 56-57.

28 Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism (Pluto Press, London, 1978), p. 15.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Leon Trotsky Speaks, Ed. by Sarah Novell (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972) p. 256.

32 Leon Trotsky, 1905 (Pelican Books, Middlesex, England, 1973), p. 122.

33 Ibid., pp. 238-239.

34 Leon Trotsky, My Life (Penguin Books, Ltd., Middlesex, England, 1974), p. 180.

35 Ernest Mandel, "Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy," in Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century (Humanities Press International Inc.: Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1994), pp. 37-38.

36 Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 1864-1914 (Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1967), p. 298.

37 Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought (Humanities Press International Inc.: Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1983), p. 249.

38 David Mandel, "Intelligentsia and the Working Class in 1917," Critique 14, 1981, London, pp. 69-70.

39 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-1917 (The Macmillan Press, Ltd., London, 1983), p. 18.

40 Quoted in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World War: The Origin of the Third International (Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 1976), p. 59.

41 Leon Trotsky, My Life, p. 257.

42 Trotsky, HRR, p. 42.

43 Tony Cliff, Lenin: All Power to the Soviets, Volume 2 (Pluto Press, London, 1976), p.64.

44 Alexander Shlyapnikov, On the Eve of 1917: Reminiscences from the Revolutionary Underground (Allison & Busby, London, 1982), p. 224.

45 Paul Dukes, October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution (Macmillan Press, London, 1979), p. 85.

46 Leon Trotsky, 1905, op. cit., p. 91.

47 Quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin, Volume 2, op. cit., p. 62.

48 HRR, p. 121.

49 Ibid.

50 Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (Jonathan Cape, Ltd., London, 1975), pp. 117-118. The Bolshevik Party did not issue its first leaflet until February 27. Sukhanov notes that the Bolshevik Party leaders present at the start of the February Revolution were unsure of themselves. He describes a meeting on February 25th at which their "flatfootedness or, more properly, their incapacity to think their way into the political problem and formulate it, had a depressing effect on us." Quoted in Liebman, op. cit.,p. 117.

51 HRR, p. 102.

52 Ibid., p. 123.

53 Lionel Kochan, Russia in Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1966) p. 186.

54 Ibid., p. 187.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., p. 188.

59 Ibid., p. 189.

60 Liebman, Leninism, op. cit., p. 121.

61 Kochan, op. cit., p. 212.

62 Ibid.

63 Cliff, Lenin, Volume 2, p. 94.

64 Lenin, op. cit., 1p. 104.

65 Kochan, op. cit., p. 207.

66 Quoted in Cliff, Volume 2, pp. 119-120.

67 Quoted in Cliff, Volume 2, p. 121.

68 Liebman, Leninism, op. cit., p. 129.

69 Ibid., p. 131.

70 Ibid., p. 130.

71 Quoted in LeBlanc, op. cit., p. 252

72 Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 24 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977), pp. 22-23.

73 Liebman, Leninism, op. cit., p. 132.

74 HRR, p. 337.

75 Kochan, op. cit., p. 223.

76 Ibid., pp. 229-230. The total number of deserters reached more than 2 million by October 1917.

77 Ibid., p. 235.

78 Liebman, Leninism, op. cit., p. 158.

79 Duncan Hallas, "All Power to the Soviets," in International Socialism 90, July/August, 1976, London, p. 19.

80 Quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin, Volume 2, pp. 290-291.

81 Ibid., p. 298.

82 Ibid., p. 299.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., p. 304.

85 HRR, p. 17.

86 Liebman, op. cit., p. 201.

87 Marc Ferro, October 1917 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980), p. 2.

88 N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (International Publishers, New York 1979), pp. 351-352.

89 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, p. 14-15.

90 Cliff, Lenin, Volume 2, p. 339.

91 Tony Cliff, Lenin: Revolution Besieged, Volume 3 (Pluto Press, London, 1978), pp.1-2.

92 Quoted in LeBlanc, op. cit., p. 282.

93 Trotsky, My Life, op.cit., pp. 338-339.

94 Ibid., pp. 351-352.

95 Liebman, op. cit., p. 197.

96 Trotsky, My Life, op. cit., pp. 348-349.