Click on title to link to International Communist League web site to access other articles on the history of the Russian Revolution from a Trotskyist perspective.
Commentary
This year is the 90th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. I have endlessly pointed out that the October Revolution in Russia was the definitive political event of the 20th century. The resulting change in the balance of world power with the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s is beginning to look like a definitive political event for the 21st century, as well. I have urged those interested in the fight for socialism to read, yes to read, about the Russian Revolution in order to learn some lessons from that experience. Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution is obviously a good place to start for a pro-Bolshevik overview. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the Russian Revolution offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing in 1917 from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World is invaluable. Forward to new October Revolutions.
To get a quick overview I have reprinted here some articles that made up a class on the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1917. They are, however, no substitute for thorough reading on the subject.
Workers Vanguard No. 874 4 August 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the February Revolution to the July Days
Part One
We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow, which was one in a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school.
It was in the course of the year 1917 that Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution, came over to the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky had declared his political solidarity with the Bolsheviks to the party's leaders upon his return to Russia in May 1917. Having facilitated the fusion of the Inter-Borough Group of United Social Democrats (known as the "Mezhrayontsi") with the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks as part of this fusion in July.
Trotsky titled the first chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution "Peculiarities of Russia's Development"; his summary of the 1917 February Revolution is "The Paradox of the February Revolution." These two themes continue throughout the events that occurred in Russia in 1917, which culminated in the October Revolution. The first goes back to Trotsky's brilliant prognosis, Results and Prospects (1906), which forecast not only the possibility, but the necessity for the Russian proletariat to seize power, leading behind it the mass of the peasants. This work, begun in 1904, was completed shortly after the 1905 Revolution, which shook the rotting edifice of the tsarist monarchy to its core. But it did not overthrow the monarchy. That task would have to wait until 12 years later, which is the second of Trotsky's themes. Its completion in the conquest of state power by the Bolsheviks occurred a mere eight months after the February Revolution deposed Tsar Nicholas Romanov and his dynasty.
A key outgrowth of 1905 was the creation of the Soviets (workers councils). These were formed spontaneously by the insurgent workers and had not been called for by any of the left parties, the Bolsheviks included. Their significance as the most democratic and flexible form of mass organization of the working class quickly became apparent. Soviets reappeared in 1917 during the February Revolution with an added important difference—not only the workers but also the soldiers were represented in the Soviets. As Trotsky notes in his History:
"As a matter of fact, thanks to the tradition of 1905, the Soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organisations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions). As for the peasantry, a class by its very nature scattered, thanks to the war and revolution it was exactly at that moment organised as never before. The war had assembled the peasants into an army, and the revolution had given the army a political character! No fewer than eight million peasants were united in companies and squadrons, which had immediately created their revolutionary representation and could through it at any moment be brought to their feet by a telephone call."
The politicization of the peasants—driven at bottom by their desire for a sweeping agrarian revolution—was critical. Without the support, overt or tacit, of the peasants, the proletarian revolution could not hope to succeed and survive in backward Russia, with its overwhelmingly agrarian population.
War and Revolution
The strains of World War I really laid the basis for the downfall of the monarchy. Trotsky's chapter on the tsar and the tsarina is one of my favorites: to put it mildly, Nicholas was a dim bulb on the family tree, totally isolated and deliberately ignorant of what was going on in his country (except for his generous support to Black Hundred pogromists, reports of whose activities he eagerly consumed). But with or without the will of the dynasty, Russia could not have avoided participation in the interimperialist conflict. Trotsky placed Russia's participation in WWI somewhere between that of France (a full-blown imperialist power) and China (with itscomprador bourgeoisie subservient to the big powers). In his History, he adds:
"Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it—that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies—but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself."
Russia did not do well in the war. There were some successes against the Austrians, but as Trotsky notes, this was less due to the skill of the Russians than to: "The disintegrating Hapsburg monarchy had long ago hung out a sign for an undertaker, not demanding any high qualifications of him."
When it came to the Germans, things went rather badly for Russia. In August 1915, that is, one year after the war began, General Ruszky reported to the Council of Ministers: "The contemporary demands of military technique are beyond our powers; in any case we cannot keep up with the Germans" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Two years later, in the aftermath of the revolutionary upheaval and repression of the July Days, and the failure of then-Minister of War Kerensky's June offensive, this same general would rail: "People followed the old banners as sacred things and went to their deaths.... But to what have the red banners brought us? To the surrender of armies in whole corps." The decrepit generals and the bourgeoisie would blame Russia's collapse on the Bolsheviks, whom they slanderously claimed were acting as paid agents of Germany.
By Trotsky's reckoning, some 15 million men, mostly peasants, were mobilized for the war, out of which 5.5 million were counted as killed, wounded or captured; some 2.5 million were killed. Trotsky encapsulated the situation as follows: '"Everything for the war!' said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. 'Yes,' the soldier began to think in the trenches, 'they are all ready to fight to the last drop...of my blood'."
The extraordinary casualty rates were due both to incompetent military command and a pervasive lack of supplies, including weapons and ammunition, and even boots. Meanwhile, the capitalists were making huge profits selling (often inferior) goods to the government, paid for by exactions on the working class and also by more and more loans from the City of London and the French Bourse (stock market). Rodzianko, Lord Chamberlain under Tsar Nicholas II, later President of the State Duma (Russian Parliament), and one of the leaders of the Russian big bourgeoisie, got rich by providing low quality, essentially useless wood to be used for rifle stocks. As an aside, one might note that Halliburton has a long line of predecessors! Trotsky speaks of the "shower of gold" coming from the top that funded the lavish parties of the rich, while the lower classes were desperate to find even bread.
What broke the back of the dynasty was that the army no longer wanted to fight, and units were increasingly either abandoning the front in mass desertions or refusing to carry out orders. A powerful indication was when the Cossack regiments in Petrograd refused to suppress a workers demonstration in the Vyborg district—the proletarian core of Petrograd. As Trotsky relates in the History:
"...the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect, galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. 'Some of them smiled,' Kayurov recalls, 'and one of them gave the workers a good wink.'"
If the Cossacks were winking at the workers, the tsar was in trouble.
The February Revolution
Trotsky's chronology in Volume One of the History of the Russian Revolution gives a vivid idea of the tempo of events: on February 23, a demonstration for International Women's Day demanding bread sparks the revolution. By February 25, there is a general strike in Petrograd. The next day, the tsar dissolves the Duma— but neither this, nor the shooting of demonstrators, are to any avail. On the next day, there is a mutiny in the Guard regiments and the formation of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies. By February 28, the tsar's ministers are arrested. Attempts to arrange an orderly succession failed—none of the grand dukes wanted to feel the rope, so richly deserved by Tsar Nicholas Romanov, around their own necks.
The revolution came as a surprise not only to the abysmally clueless monarch but also to the assorted political parties. Its spontaneity carried dangers. As Trotsky noted:
"A revolutionary uprising that spreads over a number of days can develop victoriously only in case it ascends step by step, and scores one success after another. A pause in its growth is dangerous; a prolonged marking of time, fatal. But even successes by themselves are not enough; the masses must know about them in time, and have time to understand their value. It is possible to let slip a victory at the very moment when it is within arm's reach. This has happened in history."
It was only on February 25 that the Bolsheviks decided to issue a leaflet calling for an ail-Russian general strike — when Petrograd was facing an armed uprising. What was clearly lacking was political leadership: "The leaders were watching the movement from above; they hesitated, they lagged — in other words, they did not lead. They dragged after the movement" (Trotsky's History).
Hence the paradox of the February Revolution: the tsar was overthrown by a massive upsurge of the Petrograd workers, with the support or indulgence of the garrison troops, and the Soviets emerged with the real power. Yet the Provisional Government which was formed was dominated by monarchists — its leader was Prince Lvov — and even the Kadets (a bourgeois and landlord party favoring a constitutional monarchy) were considered to be on the left wing! The workers had toppled the monarchy, but the political power which they rightly possessed was handed off to the bourgeoisie like a hand grenade whose pin was already pulled.
How to explain this? On the face of it, the overthrow of the monarchy had been accomplished without the leadership of a revolutionary party. But as Trotsky points out, this is a misleading view. First, there had been the experience of 1905. Subsequent to that, despite the period of deep reaction, the Bolshevik Party was steeling its cadres in all arenas of work, both legal and underground. By 1912, the working class had recovered some fighting spirit, and a series of strikes occurred. The influence of the Bolsheviks within the proletariat was steadily growing. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the proletariat could have conquered power in the urban centers of Petrograd and Moscow (as was later threatened in the July Days in 1917). The question was how long they could have held it — without a shift in the attitude of the peasantry, one would likely have had a repeat of the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 .
The world war changed that. Despite the initial burst of patriotism in August 1914, in which the Bolsheviks were shunned by the masses and repressed by the government, the seeds planted by the Bolsheviks through their intervention into the workers' upsurges from 1912 to 1914 eventually found fertile ground. After August 1914, the defeats on the military front, and the corresponding economic suffering in the rear that was brought about during two and a half years of imperialist carnage, had weakened support for the monarchy to zero. As Trotsky points out, even though the Bolsheviks as a party were repressed to the point of organizational collapse, the individual cadres were still alive and able to engage fellow workers on the shop floor. That is, if the Bolsheviks as a party were not in the leadership per se of the February Revolution, their ideas and agitators certainly played a critical role.
Dual Power
This brings us to the period of dual power. The downfall of the monarchy was brought about through the forces of the Petrograd proletariat and the active support (or neutrality) of the military garrison. The cringing liberals had no role, and the big bourgeoisie sought to cover their power with some regurgitated monarchical order. The Provisional Government was headed by Prince Lvov, with a sprinkling of Kadets representing the bourgeoisie and with the deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky, assuming the post of Minister of Justice in contravention of a Soviet Executive Committee decision that its members not enter the government. In reality, the power belonged to the Soviet, but its leadership was dominated by the Mensheviks and, especially, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs, a leftist party based on the peasantry); the Bolsheviks were a minority, even among the workers. The Soviets of February reflected the consciousness of February, which accounts for the position of the SRs, who were the predominant party of the peasants and hence the soldiers.
As Trotsky noted, the Soviet leadership was ceding power:
"The bourgeoisie received the power behind the backs of the people. It had no support in the toiling classes. But along with the power it received a simulacrum of support second-hand. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, lifted aloft by the masses, delivered as if from themselves a testimonial of confidence to the bourgeoisie."
When the Compromiser leadership crawled before the bourgeoisie, begging it to take the power, they were politically consistent—the Mensheviks thought that the Russian Revolution never could go beyond the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Even the sharp Miliukov (head of the Kadets) was astonished and proclaimed his praise to the Mensheviks' betrayal: "Yes, I was listening and I was thinking how far forward our workers' movement has progressed since the days of 1905" (quoted in Trotsky's History).
So here you have an official government, representing the bourgeoisie and committed to the imperialist war aims of the Romanovs and the Entente (the alliance of Britain, France and Russia in WWI), and side by side with it the Soviet, created by the insurgent workers and soldiers. Does this mean that there existed two actual governments or a state power of multiple classes? If that were true it would certainly violate the Marxist conception of the state. But it isn't true. If anything, the history of Russia between February and October was continual conflict between the Provisional Government and the Soviet—despite and also because of the backsliding of the latter's Menshevik and SR leaders. Lenin, as usual, got to the core of the issue in his article on the dual power in April 1917:
"The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.
"The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old 'formulas,' for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.
"What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies."
—V.I. Lenin, "The Dual Power"
Referring to the Menshevik/SR leaders of the Soviets and their capitulations, Lenin adds:
"They refuse to recognise the obvious truth that inasmuch as these Soviets exist, inasmuch as they are a power, we have in Russia a state of the type of the Paris Commune.
"I have emphasised the words 'inasmuch as,' for it is only an incipient power. By direct agreement with the bourgeois Provisional Government and by a series of actual concessions, it has itself surrendered and is surrendering its positions to the bourgeoisie."
In several instances, the Soviets intervened and took actions which are normally the prerogative of the (bourgeois) state power. The first Minister of War in the Provisional Government, Guchkov, complained: "The government, alas, has no real power; the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are in the hands of the Soviet. The simple fact is that the Provisional Government exists only so long as the Soviet permits it" (quoted in Trotsky's History). However, this did not alter the fact that the Provisional Government was bourgeois, that it was pursuing the imperialist war aims of the bourgeoisie, and that the economy of Russia was still operating on a capitalist basis. The Provisional Government sought to strangle the Soviet in order to exercise its state power unfettered. Please recall Lenin's description of the Soviets as an incipient power. Dual power was inherently an unstable situation, during which the contending classes marshaled their forces for the confrontation which would decide which class would rule. In other words, it would take another revolution to put state power in the hands of the Soviets. And that is what would happen in October.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 875 1 September 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the February Revolution to the July Days
Part Two (Young Spartacus pages')
We print below, edited for publication, the second and concluding part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The first part appears in WV No. 874, 4 August.
During the February Revolution and the subsequent month, Lenin was still in exile in Switzerland, desperately trying to find a way to get to Russia. During March, the attitude of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia came very close to the position of the Mensheviks. On March 15, Pravda, then edited by Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov, carried an article which declared:
"Our slogan is not the empty cry 'Down with war!' which means the disorganization of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is bring pressure [!] to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy [!], an attempt [!] to induce [!] all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let everyone [!] remain at his post [!]." [Trotsky's emphases]
—Leon Trotsky, Lessons of October (1924)
This article was wholly in the spirit of the "revolutionary" defensism of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs)—i.e., the Russian Revolution had achieved the main task of overthrowing the monarchy, and the "revolution" and its "free people" had to defend themselves against the German Kaiser. What this really meant was that the war aims of the Russian bourgeoisie would continue, now under the cover of "democracy" rather than the Romanov eagle. This defensism stood in stark contrast to the position of revolutionary defeatism advocated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during WWI. In opposition to the Mensheviks and the social-democratic leaders throughout Europe who either outright supported their own imperialist ruling class, or begged the imperialists for a just peace, Lenin maintained that the working class had no side in the interimperialist war and that the only road to peace was for the working class of each of the belligerent nations to turn the imperialist war into a civil war to overthrow the capitalist rulers.
A measure of how far the Bolsheviks had gone toward conciliating the Mensheviks following the February Revolution was that, as Trotsky notes in his History, in some of the provinces the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had entered into united organizations. In fact, party leaders such as Stalin were advocating fusion with the Mensheviks at the beginning of the April party conference. As you should recognize, Lenin had his work cut out for him.
Lenin had made many key positions clear in his "Letters from Afar" of March. He was explicit that any conciliation of defensism vis-a-vis the imperialist war was a split question. In his History, Trotsky cites a March letter from Lenin: "Our party would disgrace itself forever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit.... I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party, rather than surrender to social patriotism...." In any case, the speech Lenin gave upon his arrival in Petrograd on April 3 on the socialist character of the Russian Revolution should have been less of a surprise to the Bolsheviks than it apparently was.
Lenin's Fight to Rearm the Party
On April 4, Lenin presented the brilliant theses now known as the "April Theses." In the space of only a few pages, Lenin reasserted the strategic aims of the Bolsheviks, from which they had been sliding, and promulgated a whole new tactical orientation for the party. This included the abandonment of old slogans, such as the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian power in Russia. In doing so, Lenin repudiated in practice the faulty formula of a two-class dictatorship, arriving atessentially the same conception of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky had outlined as early as 1905 and which became known as the theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky understood that the completion of the democratic revolution in backward Russia was conceivable only as the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry, and that the seizure of power by the working class in Russia would place on the order of the day not only the democratic, but also the socialist tasks. This would give a powerful impetus to international socialist revolution, which was necessary for the development of socialism in Russia. [For further background on the Mensheviks', the Bolsheviks' and Trotsky's conceptions of the Russian Revolution, see: "The Russian Revolution of 1905," WVNo. 872, 9 June.]
Lenin's April Theses also called for the construction of a new, revolutionary Third International. The need for a new international and a break with the social-chauvinists, including the wavering centrist elements that followed German social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky, had been a demand by Lenin since the beginning of the imperialist war.
There was no small opposition to Lenin—he had to wage a fight to win over the party, at times even threatening to go outside the Central Committee and appeal directly to the ranks. In short, that posed a faction fight and a split. It is notable that when the April Theses were published in Pravda on April 7, not a single member of the Central Committee would cosign Lenin's article. In fact, the editors of Pravda wrote: "As for the general scheme of Comrade Lenin, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is ended, and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution" (quoted in Trotsky's History). The seriousness of the situation within the party was well summarized by Trotsky:
"The central organ of the party thus openly announced before the working class and its enemies a split with the generally recognised leader of the party upon the central question of the revolution for which the Bolshevik ranks had been getting ready during a long period of years. That alone is sufficient to show the depth of the April crisis in the party, due to the clash of two irreconcilable lines of thought and action. Until it surmounted this crisis the revolution could not go forward."
Bourgeois-Democratic or Socialist Revolution?
The "Old Bolsheviks," including Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, seemed to believe that the old slogan of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" had been realized in some amalgam of the Provisional Government and the Soviets—later, in October of 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in opposition to the Central Committee vote for armed insurrection, would explicitly proclaim that: "The Constituent Assembly plus the Soviets—that is that combined type of state institution towards which we are going" (quoted in Lessons of October). That would have been the death of the Russian Revolution.
Before the convocation of the all-Russian conference of the Bolshevik Party on April 24, events in Petrograd strongly underlined that Lenin's reorientation of the party was correct and overdue. Perhaps as a slap in the face to the Soviets, on April 18, Miliukov, leader of the Kadets and at that point the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, made public a letter reaffirming Russia's commitment to the imperialist war. On the Western calendar this occurred on May 1—the international workers holiday. On that day in Petrograd there were peaceful and celebratory demonstrations. Miliukov's letter provoked deep outrage among the masses of Petrograd, and on April 20, as Trotsky describes in his History: "The masses came out with arms in their hands. Among the bayonets of the soldiers glimmered the letters on a streamer: 'Down with Miliukov!'" Trotsky goes on to note: "The slogan carried into the streets by the armed soldiers and sailors: 'Down with the Provisional Government!' inevitably introduced into the demonstration a strain of armed insurrection."
This was a far cry from the almost festive demonstration of only a month before when 800,000 came out for the funeral of the martyrs of the February Revolution. The April 20 demonstration was not to be the last time that the Petrograd masses came out, arms in hand, with the evident intent to seize state power but without the leadership to carry the struggle to victory. That leadership would only be in place in October.
So the Bolshevik conference convened alongside a serious revolutionary manifestation of the Petrograd workers—and this was keenly felt by the Bolshevik workers inside the plants and in the lower-level Soviets. Lenin was above all an astute politician! As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October
"This manner of formulating the question is most highly significant. Lenin, after the experience of the reconnoiter, withdrew the slogan of the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. But he did not withdraw it for any set period of time—for so many weeks or months —but strictly in dependence upon how quickly the revolt of the masses against the conciliationists would grow.... He based himself exclusively on the idea that the masses were not at the moment capable of overthrowing the Provisional Government and that, therefore, everything possible had to be done to enable the working class to overthrow the Provisional Government on the morrow.
"The whole of the April Party Conference was devoted to the following fundamental question: Are we heading toward the conquest of power in the name of the socialist revolution or are we helping (anybody and everybody) to complete the democratic revolution? Unfortunately, the report of the April Conference remains unpublished to this very day, though there is scarcely another congress in the history of our party that had such an exceptional and immediate bearing on the destiny of our revolution as the conference of April 1917.
"Lenin's position was this: an irreconcilable struggle against defensism and its supporters; the capture of the soviet majority; the overthrow of the Provisional Government; the seizure of power through the Soviets; a revolutionary peace policy and a program of socialist revolution at home and of international revolution abroad."
The First Coalition Government and the June Congress of Soviets
Prior to April, and with the exception of Kerensky, who had joined the Provisional Government as Minister of Justice in March, the Compromiser (SR and Menshevik) leadership of the Soviets had tried to give up the power of the Soviets without openly joining the bourgeois government. In early May, the first coalition government was formed. Kerensky (who had joined the SRs after the February Revolution) became the Minister of War. Mensheviks and SRs also took on ministerial posts in the Provisional Government. This was a political betrayal of the mass base of the Soviets, but it flowed harmoniously with the basic politics of the Compromisers. As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October.
"As a matter of fact, the Mensheviks had for many years tapped away like so many woodpeckers at the idea that the coming revolution must be bourgeois; that the government of a bourgeois revolution could only perform bourgeois tasks; that the social democracy could not take upon itself the tasks of bourgeois democracy and must remain an opposition while 'pushing the bourgeoisie to the left.' This theme was developed with a particularly boring profundity by Martynov. With the inception of the bourgeois revolution in 1917, the Mensheviks soon found themselves on the staff of the government. Out of their entire 'principled' position there remained only one political conclusion, namely, that the proletariat dare not seize power."
On May 1, the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet voted to enter the coalition government. As a gesture to the masses, Miliukov was forced to resign as foreign minister the next day. (In his History, Trotsky notes one proposal by an SR leader to defuse the crisis precipitated by Miliukov's note: "Chernov found a brilliant solution, proposing that Miliukov go over to the Ministry of Public Education. Constantinople as a topic in geography would at any rate be less dangerous than as a topic in diplomacy.") Miliukov's resignation was just a sop to the masses, since the government continued to carry out the policies of the bourgeoisie, especially with regard to the war.
On June 3, the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. To give an idea of the masses represented by the Soviets, Trotsky writes in his History that "The right to a vote was accorded to Soviets containing not less than 25,000 men. Soviets containing from 10,000 to 25,000 had a voice." But it was not the factories and barracks who were in control, but rather the Compromisers who entered the first coalition government in May. One of the "achievements" of this Congress was to give formal approval to a new offensive against the German forces. This ill-fated plan, issued by Kerensky, was in fact the Russian bourgeoisie's partial payment to the Entente for the massive loans from Britain and France. It is doubtful that any member of the Russian bourgeoisie thought this military attack could succeed. As Trotsky relates in his History"The American journalist, John Reed, who knew how to see and hear, and who has left an immortal book of chronicler's notes of the days of the October Revolution, testifies without hesitation that a considerable part of the possessing classes of Russia preferred a German victory to the triumph of the revolution, and did not hesitate to say so openly. 'One evening I spent at the house of a Moscow merchant,' says Reed, among other examples. 'During tea we asked eleven people at the table whether they preferred "Wilhelm or the Bolsheviks." The vote was ten to one for Wilhelm'."
This would not be the first time in history that the bourgeoisie became defeatist—just look at the Paris Commune. In the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the workers took power in Paris to defend the city. Thiers and all the great French patriots then began to beg for Bismarck, their enemy of yesterday, to intervene. With the assistance of the Prussians, the bourgeois French army was allowed to first bombard, and then enter, Paris. In the repression that followed, tens of thousands of Communards and workers were either executed on the spot or imprisoned. And note that the crushing of the Commune of 1871 was not so far distant in time in 1917—it's less than the span of time separating us today from the end of World War II.
A Shift in the Balance of Forces
The Bolsheviks issued a call for a demonstration in June while the Congress of Soviets was in session. This was not intended to be a call for an insurrection, although the impetus came from the Bolshevik military organization. No matter, that's how the Mensheviks and SRs took it, because they knew that the Petrograd masses were shifting to the Bolsheviks. They used their position at the head of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet to pass a resolution prohibiting any demonstrations for three days. Delegates were sent from the Congress of Soviets to the working-class districts—as Trotsky put it, "If the mountain was not allowed to come to the prophet, the prophet at least went to the mountain."
Not wishing a direct assault against the Soviet, the Bolsheviks stood down. But as Trotsky notes, the emissaries of the Mensheviks and SRs were met with disdain and hostility. One example from the History: "The workers of the Putilov factory agreed to paste up the declaration of the congress against the demonstration only after they learned from Pravda that it did not contradict the resolution of the Bolsheviks." This reaction was comparatively mild. Elsewhere, the Bolsheviks' decision was not so easily accepted:
"The masses submitted to the decision of the Bolsheviks, but not without protest and indignation. In certain factories they adopted resolutions of censure of the Central Committee. The more fiery members of the party in the sections tore up their membership cards. That was a serious warning."
The Mensheviks and SRs were out for blood—shades of things to come in just a few weeks. On June 10, the Menshevik paper declared: "It is time to brand the Leninists as traitors and betrayers of the revolution" (quoted in Trotsky's History). The next day, the Menshevik leader Tseretelli demanded that the Bolsheviks be disarmed. What he really meant was disarming the workers. As Trotsky summarized: "In other words, that classic moment of the revolution had arrived when the bourgeois democracy, upon the demand of the reaction, undertakes to disarm the workers who had guaranteed the revolutionary victory." Trotsky later notes: "To carry the Compromise policy through to a successful end—that is, to the establishment of a parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie—demanded the disarming of the workers and soldiers."
The Mensheviks decided on a public show of force in a demonstration on June 18. The march was to replicate the peaceful parade in March to honor the martyrs of February. At that time, some 800,000 had turned out. This time, half that number marched, but the vast majority were from the factories and barracks. In his History, Trotsky describes the procession:
"The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly—Tseretelli had so confidently thrown down his challenge the day before. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. 'Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!' 'Down with the Offensive' 'All Power to the Soviets!' The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. Bolshevik banners floated everywhere. The delegates stopped counting the uncomfortable totals. The triumph of theBolsheviks was too obvious.... One of the factories carried a placard: 'The right to Life is Higher than the rights of Private Property.' This slogan had not been suggested by the party."
Trotsky went on to note: "The demonstration of June 18 made an enormous impression on its own participants. The masses saw that the Bolsheviks had become a power, and the vacillating were drawn to them." The contradiction between the growing strength of the Bolsheviks and the decline of the authority of the Menshevik/SR leadership of the Soviet would condition the entire period leading up to the October Revolution.
The July Days
It is interesting to note that in the period from February through June, the Bolsheviks had undergone a virtually uninterrupted growth of influence in the working class and also among the Petrograd garrison. Revolutions rarely occur with such a seamless transition, and Russia in 1917 was no exception. The forces of counterrevolution were far from dead, and the ruling class wanted revenge for the humiliation of the June demonstration.
The June 18 demonstration showed clearly that at the base in the factories and some of the garrisons of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks had become the majority, or close to it. It was far from clear that the same situation applied in the provinces or on the front. The full impact of the offensive ordered by Kerensky on June 16—a fully predictable debacle—had yet to become known. But in Petrograd, the masses had reached the boiling point. Everything was in collapse, including transport, food and fuel. The February Revolution was sparked by a mass desire both to be rid of the Romanov dynasty and to put an end to the war—but several months later the murderous war was still raging.
The July 3-5 events were a semi-insurrection. Rejecting attempts by Bolshevik orators to contain the July 3 demonstration, soldiers marching in their regiments shouted "Down! Down!" As Trotsky relates in the History: "Such cries the Bolshevik balcony had never yet heard from the soldiers; it was an alarming sign. Behind the regiments the factories began to march up: 'All power to the Soviets!' 'Down with the ten minister capitalists!' Those had been the banners of June 18th, but now they were hedged with bayonets." The Bolsheviks had tried to restrain the masses, but were unable to do so. Trotsky noted: "The Central Committee was oftener and oftener compelled to send agitators to the troops and the factories to restrain them from untimely action. With an embarrassed shake of the head, the Vyborg Bolsheviks would complain to their friends: 'We have to play the part of the fire hose'."
The insurrectionary sentiment of the workers and soldiers was captured by Trotsky in his descriptions of their military preparations: "On the morning of July 3, several thousand machine-gunners, after breaking up a meeting of the company and regimental committees of their regiment, elected a chairman of their own and demanded immediate consideration of the question of an armed manifestation." Trotsky continues:
"In the yard of the barracks a no less feverish work was going on. They were giving out rifles to the soldiers who did not possess them, giving bombs to some, installing three machine-guns with operators on each motor truck supplied by the factories. The regiment was to go into the street in full military array....
"The longest struggle took place at the Putilov Factory. At about two in the afternoon a rumour went round that a delegation had come from the machine-gun unit, and was calling a meeting. About ten thousand men assembled. To shouts of encouragement, the machine-gunners told how they had received an order to go to the front on the 4th of July, but they had decided 'to go not to the German front, against the German proletariat, but against their own capitalist ministers'."
Raskolnikov, a naval officer and a Bolshevik, desperately phoned the party headquarters for advice, since the Kronstadt sailors were determined to go out arms in hand. After initially opposing the demonstration, the Bolshevik leadership acquiesced. Rather than leaving the masses leaderless, the Bolsheviks went into battle with the demonstrators to provide leadership for an orderly retreat.
The July Days represent the last gasp of the February Revolution, and a foretaste of October. All the contending classes were put on notice, and the counterrevolution did not shrink from battle. While the demonstrations of July 3 and 4 showed the power of the armed workers and soldiers, they did not attempt a seizure of state power. The Compromiser leadership of the Soviets railed against the masses who had come out for "All Power to the Soviets!" Trotsky writes:
"The Compromisers were waiting for reliable regiments. 'A revolutionary people is in the streets,' cried [the Menshevik] Dan, 'but that people is engaged in a counter-revolutionary work.' Dan was supported by Abramovich, one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund, a conservative pedant whose every instinct had been outraged by the revolution."
Among the "reliable" troops the government and the Soviet leaders counted on were the Cossacks; in August, Kerensky would appeal to the Cossack general Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to Petrograd.
The wave of the semi-insurrection broke, in some cases with clashes with government troops. The revolutionary wave was quickly replaced by a counterrevolutionary campaign to drive the Bolsheviks underground. Trotsky was jailed; Lenin went into hiding. Lenin understood the importance of preserving the Bolshevik central cadre. Since 1914, Lenin had understood that the Social Democrats who supported "their" bourgeoisies in the war were agents of the class enemy rather than comrades gone astray. This prescient understanding was reinforced in the positive in October 1917 in Russia and tragically in the negative with the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg during the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by the German Social Democrats following the Spartacus uprising in Berlin in January 1919.
The July Days illustrate with the clarity of a lightning strike the instability of the dual power which issued from the February Revolution. Either the bourgeoisie with its servile Menshevik and SR agents would liquidate the Soviets in favor of some bourgeois parliament—in fact a rubber stamp for a military dictatorship—or the workers would seize the state power. The latter could occur via the Soviets, or perhaps through the factory committees of the organized workers—Lenin remained flexible about the organizational form, particularly when the Soviets under the leadership of the Mensheviks and SRs were more obstacles than assistants to the proletarian revolution.
The repression of the Bolsheviks following the July Days was short-lived. The party rebounded, as the workers and soldiers returned to its banners and leadership. This would be starkly shown when the bourgeoisie placed all their hopes in the Cossack general Kornilov in August. That gamble they lost. Kornilov's coup failed, and it took a party with the determination to realize its revolutionary program in life to both repulse Kornilov and provide proletarian leadership to the agrarian revolt in the summer. That also involved internal party struggle. The great events of late 1917 are known to us not as the October Evolution but the October Revolution. The difference is qualitative, and indicates the divide between reformism of all stripes and Bolshevism, i.e., revolutionary Marxism.
Workers Vanguard No. 877 29 September 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the Kornilov Coup to the October Revolution
Part One {Young Spartacus pages)
We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a class given by comrade Diana Coleman as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The class covering the period from the February Revolution through the July Days, given by comrade T. Marlow, appeared in WV Nos. 874 (4 August) and 875 (1 September).
The first chapter of Trotsky's Lessons of October (1924) is called "We Must Study the October Revolution," and the opening line is: "We met with success in the October Revolution, but the October Revolution has met with little success in our press." Well, we have an even bigger problem in these years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as our left-wing opponents who cheered capitalist counterrevolution have effectively renounced any claim to the heritage of October, our contacts have never heard of the Russian Revolution, and our own young members have been heard to say, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution—but I don't know much about it myself." We can rectify the last part of that, anyhow. So as comrade Marlow told me, he got the bad part where the Bolsheviks are having all this trouble and I got the good part where they win. The two things I have found most useful to read in addition to Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution are Lenin's Collected Works, Volumes 24, 25, and 26, as well as Alexander Rabinowitch. He is an honest guy who, to his own surprise, came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks actually interacted with the masses and went in for lively debate.
In Lessons of October Trotsky tried to grapple with the underlying political reasons for the failure of the 1923 German Revolution. He compared the German events and the Russian October. Trotsky details the fights that Lenin waged after February of 1917 in order to rearm the party. It was only these fights that made the victory in October possible. In speaking of the differences in the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky says: "The fundamental controversial question around which everything else centered was this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether or not we should assume power."
Trotsky defined the Bolshevik tendency as, in essence, "such a training, tempering and organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand" and the social-democratic (Menshevik) tendency as "the acceptance of reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state." The struggle between these tendencies makes itself most strongly felt on the eve of revolution. Trotsky further made the point that there is an intimate connection between the question of power and the question of war.
So these are the questions I kept in mind for this class: the seizure of power, the interimperialist war, and, of course, the party, the party and again the party. Miliukov, the leading representative of the Russian bourgeoisie such as it was, recognized the role of the Bolsheviks as a party when he said: "They knew where they were going, and they went in the direction which they had chosen once for all, toward a goal which came nearer and nearer with every new, unsuccessful experiment of compromisism" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Yes, but it took struggle, external and internal, because, as Trotsky says, the party is a living organism that develops in contradictions. Actually, I think Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution is very helpful in understanding dialectical materialism and contradictions.
The Bolsheviks and the World War
In terms of the interimperialist war, the Bolshevik position of revolutionary defeatism was absolutely crucial to bringing off the October Revolution. The political battles Lenin waged from 4 August 1914, when German Social Democratic parliamentary deputies voted in favor of war credits, to his struggle against the centrist elements, led by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, that participated in the international antiwar conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal were critical. What Lenin hammered on was the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary tasks it demanded; that is, to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie and for socialism.
Another key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chances of revolution was the centrists with all their phrases about "peace campaigns" and "peace without annexations" and, as Lenin said, their real program: "peace with the social-chauvinists" (see "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution," 10 April 1917). So it was the call for a total break with the Second International and for the formation of a Third International that was the most controversial aspect of Lenin's program.
With Lenin's return to Petrograd in April of 1917, the Bolsheviks reaffirmed their intransigent opposition to the imperialist war now being waged by the new "democratic" capitalist government in Russia. Lenin denounced "revolutionary" defensism as "the worst enemy of the further progress and success of the Russian revolution." Certainly the Bolsheviks attempted to find a "bridge" to the defensist sentiments of the masses. Lenin worked hard to patiently explain the Bolshevik position to the working masses (honest defensists, he called them), who in reality had nothing to gain from the imperialist war, contrasting them with the bourgeoisie, intellectuals and social-patriots, who knew quite well that it is impossible to give up annexations without giving up the rule of capital.
However, there was a bigger question at issue here—dual power. The working masses had overthrown the tsar and created the Soviets: incipient organs of proletarian state power. So the proletariat had in hand a conquest worth defending. In Russia there was dual power and a class war was raging; the Bolsheviks had to have a tactical approach that took into account the very real possibility of the seizure of state power by the working class.
The Aftermath of the July Days
I'll take up where comrade Marlow left off. The period following the July Days was what Trotsky called "the month of the great slander." Lenin and Zinoviev went into hiding; Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Raskolnikov (a Bolshevik sailors' leader and author of Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917) and many others were jailed. In The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), Alexander Rabinowitch quotes a Left Menshevik who described the streets of Petrograd on July 5 as "a counterrevolutionary orgy" and said that it was one of the saddest days of his life (a very Menshevik comment). Nevertheless, it was the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary (SR) soviet leaders who were leading the charge in the anti-Bolshevik repression. The Bolsheviks were also blamed for the collapse of the military offensive, a ridiculous charge.
The ever-present Sukhanov, a Left Menshevik often quoted by Trotsky in his History, couldn't understand why Lenin wouldn't present himself for a government inquiry into who was responsible for the July unrest. There was some sentiment to this effect in the Bolshevik Party too, but a look at the fate of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who were murdered in the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by the Social Democratic government in Berlin in 1919, makes clear exactly what Lenin was worried about. However, the repression following the July Days was shallow and temporary. In The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Rabinowitch has a chapter called "The Ineffectiveness of Repression." He writes: "Kerensky's flaming hard-line rhetoric notwithstanding, almost none of the major repressive measures adopted by the cabinet during this period either was fully implemented or successfully achieved its objectives."
Disarming the workers and the Petrograd garrison units loyal to the Bolsheviks wasn't very successful. Some army personnel were transferred to the front, but contrary to plan, the units were not dissolved. Although many Bolshevik leaders were arrested, many were released during the Kornilov days and none were ever brought to trial because the revolution intervened. In any case, there were still some 32,000 Bolsheviks loose in Petrograd. Raskolnikov says:
"The events of July 3-5 and the campaign of savage repression which followed them thoroughly exposed the counterrevolutionary and anti-democratic position of the bourgeois government of Kerensky. The Mensheviks and SRs, tangled in the nets of the coalition, discredited themselves finally and irreparably. "But our persecuted Party, surrounded by the aureole of martyrdom, emerged from these trials even better steeled than before, with its influence and the number of its supporters increased to an unprecedented degree."
—Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (1925)
In his History, Trotsky comments that in October many local Bolshevik leaders would look at the workers they were leading, remember how they held up in July, and assign tasks accordingly. Lenin's April Theses gave the party a correct, principled orientation, and the July Days and their aftermath steeled the party, but neither of these resolved the disagreements among the party tops, which reached their sharpest expression during the most decisive moment of the revolution—in the days of October.
Kornilov's Attempted Coup
The Kornilov events signaled an abrupt shift in the situation to the benefit of the Bolsheviks and the working class. Kornilov: the man with the heart of a lion and the brains of a sheep. Kornilov had been a monarchist of the "Black Hundred" (pogromist) type. Eisenstein's movie October, which is good despite its anti-Trotsky slander, depicts the previously dismantled statue of the tsar repeatedly leaping back into place during the Kornilov insurrection: a quite apt image. Kornilov was a monarchist, but Miliukov, the epitome of the liberal bourgeoisie, wanted some version of the monarchy, too. One thing that interested me in Trotsky's History was the two successive chapters titled "Kerensky's Plot" and "Kornilov's Insurrection." I guess the first time I read the book I didn't understand how much Kerensky was plotting with Kornilov. It was clear that, had the Bolsheviks not mobilized the workers, Kerensky would have just sat there paralyzed as Petrograd was invaded as part of a coup plot that Kerensky had originally thought was going to make him dictator. The Bolsheviks and the workers would have been slaughtered.
During the Kornilov events, Trotsky relates how sailors from the revolutionary Kronstadt garrison asked, "Isn't it time to arrest the government?" Trotsky's answer was: "No, not yet.... Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky." The fact that the Kronstadt sailors now listened more carefully to the Bolsheviks than in the July Days showed the maturing of the workers' and soldiers' political understanding. Trotsky said the same thing in another way when he said that Kerensky and Kornilov were "two variants of one and the same danger...the one chronic and the other acute" and that you had to "ward off the acute danger first, in order afterwards to settle with the chronic one."
Trotsky makes some thought-provoking remarks when he talks about aspects of bonapartism in the Russian Revolution. He says that Kerensky was not the representative of the Soviets in the government like the SR leader Chernov or the Menshevik Tseretelli, but the living tie between the bourgeoisie and the democracy: the "personal incarnation of the Coalition itself." Kornilov was a different kind of bonapartist.
Meanwhile, Lenin was arguing against the right-wing deviation in the Bolshevik Party, which manifested itself in drawing closer to the Menshevik and SR soviet majority and, in part, to "defense of the fatherland." Lenin said: "Even now we must not support Kerensky's government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren't we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise" ("To the Central Committee of the RSDLP," 30 August 1917).
So here we see military defense of, but not political support to, the Provisional Government. In the same letter, Lenin explained how this was to be used like an effective united front: "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." Lenin continues: "It would be wrong to think that we have moved farther away from the task of the proletariat winning power. No. We have come very close to it, not directly, but from the side." Lenin kept the proletarian seizure of power in mind at all times.
By August 30, the Kornilov insurrection disintegrated: the railroad workers wouldn't move him, his troops were won over by Bolshevik agitators, workers tore up the train tracks, etc. Throughout this whole period all these right-wingers were always saying, "If only I had one good regiment!" Except that they never did. The Bolsheviks gained greatly from these events. In his 1922 memoir, Sukhanov spoke candidly about the role of theBolsheviks in the Soviet "Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution" which included SRs, Mensheviks, as well as Bolsheviks:
"At that time theirs [the Bolsheviks'] was the only organization that was large, welded together by elementary discipline, and united with the democratic rank-and-file of the capital. Without them the Military Revolutionary Committee was impotent; without them it could only have passed the time with makeshift proclamations and flabby speeches by orators who had long since lost all authority. With the Bolsheviks, however, the Military Revolutionary Committee had at its disposal the full power of all organized worker-soldier strength, of whatever kind."
—N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 7977(1955)
That's right: if you want to fight right-wing reaction you need Bolsheviks!
Kornilov's Defeat and the Rise of Bolshevism
Alexander Rabinowitch, sort of puzzled, says of Kerensky:
"One might have expected that at this point, having suffered so badly at the hands of the right and having witnessed the enormous power of the left, the prime minister would have taken pains to retain the support of the latter. Yet, obsessed more than ever by fear of the extreme left and still intent on somehow strengthening the war effort, Kerensky now behaved almost as if the Komilov affair had not happened.... Kerensky began laying plans to form an authoritarian government oriented toward law and order—a right-socialist-liberal coalition cabinet in which the influence of the Kadets would be stronger than ever."
—The Bolsheviks Come to Power
Rabinowitch thinks Kerensky was stupid, but what were Kerensky's choices? Lenin put it clearly when he said, "Kerensky is a Kornilovite; by sheer accident he has had a quarrel with Kornilov himself, but he remains in the most intimate alliance with other Kornilovites" ("Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks," September 1917). In any case, by this time the masses were fed up not only with Kornilov, the Kadets and Kerensky, coalitionism in general was discredited too.
Everything was shifting to the left, and the situation of the country was getting worse by the minute: famine was threatening, capitalists were deliberately sabotaging industry, soldiers were starving, Riga had been fairly deliberately abandoned to German imperialism and Petrograd was threatened. Even the Menshevik and SR compromisers were saying that a coalition with the Kadets was no longer thinkable. Of course, the Kadets hadn't changed any, so why had it been thinkable before?
Lenin had withdrawn the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" in the aftermath of the July Days as Bolsheviks were being hounded and jailed, not least by the Menshevik and SR soviet majority. He now began to think it was necessary to look to the factory committees, instead of the Soviets, as the organs of workers power. But between September 1 and 3 he wrote "On Compromises." Seeing the Soviets revitalized by the struggle against Kornilov and the Menshevik and SR compromisers at least talking about "no coalition," he offered this compromise to them:
"The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of S.R.s and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.
"Now, and only now, perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way....
"The Bolsheviks, without making any claim to participate in the government (which is impossible for the internationalists unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants has been realised), would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer of power to the proletariat and the poor peasants and from employing revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand."
Instead, with new elections to the Soviets and full freedom of propaganda the Bolsheviks would peaceably fight for their ideas. Not surprisingly, the Menshevik and SR compromisers made clear that they were not up for this, which was an important lesson for some Bolsheviks and many workers. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets" was again suspended, but in the next few days the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and, following that, in a number of other Soviets also. The slogan therefore received a new meaning: all power to the Bolshevik Soviets. So now the Soviets really represented the interests of the working class, as the proletariat was becoming not merely a class in itself, but a class for itself. In this situation the slogan had decisively ceased to be a slogan of peaceful development. The party was launched on the road of armed insurrection through the Soviets and in the name of the Soviets.
Lenin's Struggles with the Central Committee
The seizure of power was clearly on the order of the day, or I should say, it should have been on the order of the day. From mid-September onwards, Lenin began pounding away at this: that the Bolsheviks should get on with it and do it! In "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power," written between September 12 and 14, Lenin says: "The point is to make the task clear to the Party. The present task must be an armed uprising in Petrograd and Moscow (with its region), the seizing of power and the overthrow of the government. We must consider how to agitate for this without expressly saying as much in the press."
Let me touch on other things before I get into the political debates over the seizure of power. The April Theses called for a break with the centrists of Zimmerwald and the formation of a Third International. This was not accepted at the April Bolshevik Party conference, where Lenin cast the only vote against participation in a projected Zimmerwald antiwar conference in May. In "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution," he wrote: "It is not as yet known in Russia that the Zimmerwald majority are nothing but Kautskyites." Lenin went on: "The Zimmerwald bog can no longer be tolerated. We must not, for the sake of the Zimmerwald 'Kautskyites,' continue the semi-alliance with the chauvinist International of the Plekhanovs and Scheidemanns."
In May the Bolshevik Central Committee passed a motion that they would walk out of Zimmerwald if the Zimmerwaldists called for any discussion with Second International social-patriots. This battle continued; in August Lenin was denouncing Kamenev for speaking out in public in favor of going to a proposed Stockholm antiwar conference, which was to be a nasty melange of Russian compromisers, Kautskyites and outright social-patriots. This demonstrated that everything Lenin said as to why they should get out of Zimmerwald was true. Trotsky said the road to Stockholm was the road to the Second International. It is important to remember that in the very heat of the struggle, Lenin did not for a single moment forget the task of creating a new Communist International. It wasn't until after the October Revolution that the Third International was founded.
Let me talk a little about the Democratic Conference, which went on from September 14-22, and the Pre-Parliament that followed on October 7. I won't go into all the ins and outs of the Democratic Conference, since it's kind of boring. This was a totally rigged conference in which the Mensheviks and SRs saw to it that conservative and outright bourgeois forces were preponderant. Through the channel of the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament, the political awareness of the masses was to be directed away from the Soviets, as "temporary" and dying institutions, to the Constituent Assembly and a bourgeois republic. Lenin was still in hiding, chafing at the refusal of the Bolshevik Central Committee to get on with the insurrection. In his spare time he was writing The State and Revolution, which he made Kamenev promise to complete and print if he were to be assassinated.
Just as the Democratic Conference closed, Lenin wrote for the Bolshevik newspaper an article referring to it as a "hideous fraud" and a "pigsty" and comparing it to the Duma (Russian parliament under the tsar). The second part of Lenin's article took on the errors of the Bolsheviks and argued that when the nature of the conference became clear, the Bolsheviks should have walked out in protest. In a comradely but direct way, the article specifically takes up Kamenev and Zinoviev, their enthusiasm for the conference and their weak speeches. Lenin stated that 99 percent of the Bolshevik delegation should have left the Democratic Conference and gone to the factories and barracks to discuss with the masses the lessons of this farcical conference and the rottenness of the Menshevik and SR compromisers. It is revealing that although Lenin wanted this article, titled "Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks," to be published in the Bolshevik paper, it was censored by the Editorial Board so that it was only called "Heroes of Fraud," and all direct criticisms of the Bolsheviks were edited out. We can assume Lenin was furious and worried.
Within a few days, Lenin had concluded that the Bolsheviks never should have gone to the Democratic Conference and was arguing furiously for a boycott of the upcoming Pre-Parliament, as was Trotsky. They were not immediately successful. The majority of the large fraction who had gone to the Democratic Conference was in favor of going to the Pre-Parliament—you have to keep your eye on those parliamentary fractions, something that comrades used to remind me of when I ran for office. Lenin demanded to know: Who was the parliamentary fraction to decide these questions in any case? He was on the warpath, despite the comparatively narrow scope of the question, because it was another attempt by the rightist leaders in the party to turn the party onto the road of "completing the democratic revolution." In reality the quarrel revived the April disagreements and initiated the disagreements of October. Actually, as comrade George Foster has pointed out, the differences with Kamenev and Stalin went back to 1912.
Toward the Proletarian Conquest of Power
The question was whether the party should accommodate its tasks to the development of a bourgeois republic, or set itself the goal of the conquest of power by the proletariat. The deeper one went into the rank and file of the party, the more members were for the boycott of the Pre-Parliament. The Kiev citywide conference, calling for the boycott, stated: "There is no use wasting time in chattering and spreading illusions" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Thus, the party promptly corrected its leaders. In the end, the Bolsheviks only went to the Pre-Parliament to denounce the whole thing in a ten-minute-long speech by Trotsky and then walked out.
The Bolshevization of the masses was proceeding apace all over the country, as were the peasant seizures of land—a real peasant war in the countryside. This was a necessary component of the revolution. The Menshevik and SR compromisers were appalled, but consoled themselves with the thought that this was just the ignorant "dark masses." "Their Bolshevism," wrote Sukhanov scornfully, "was nothing but hatred for the coalition and longing for land and peace" (quoted in Trotsky's History). As though this were so little! Hatred for the coalition meant a desire to take power from the bourgeoisie. Land and peace was the colossal program which the peasant and soldier masses intended to carry out under the leadership of the workers.
The agitation for the Second Congress of Soviets was wildly popular with the masses because everyone knew it would have a Bolshevik majority. Consequently, it was unpopular with the Menshevik and SR compromisers, who kept trying to put off the congress. Like any form of representative government, the Soviets were not perfect; especially in times of rapid shifts in consciousness they lagged behind the masses. By September you see Lenin writing very specific articles like "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It" in which he lays out the socialist tasks that the proletariat must take on, even with the understanding that Russia was a backward country: nationalization of the banks and workers control of industry. He wrote: "It is impossible.. .to go forward without advancing towards socialism, without taking steps towards it (steps conditioned and determined by the level of technology and culture: large-scale machine production cannot be 'introduced' in peasant agriculture nor abolished in the sugar industry)."
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 879 27 October 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the Kornilov Coup to the October Revolution
Part Two (Young Spartacus pages)
We print below, edited for publication, the second and concluding part of a class given by comrade Diana Coleman as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The first part appears in WV No. 877, 29 September.
Let me speak about the war again. In his History, Trotsky said sharply of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, which was rejecting revolutionary defeatism in March: "'Defeatism' was not invented by a hostile press under the protection of a censorship, it was proclaimed by Lenin in the formula: 'The defeat of Russia is the lesser evil.' The appearance of the first revolutionary regiment, and even the overthrow of the monarchy, did not alter the imperialist character of the war." From February to October, the Bolsheviks began to wield the peace demand more directly because the proletarian seizure of power, the necessary precondition for realizing that demand, was now on the agenda. Lenin never repudiated his scathing pre-1917 polemics against the social pacifists, like Kautsky, or those who conciliated them, like Trotsky at that time. These polemics were crucial to winning Trotsky to Bolshevism and genuine revolutionary internationalism. For Lenin, any demands for peace were now inseparable from the impending socialist revolution and the seizure of power.
Lenin gave an instructive talk on 14 May of 1917 appropriately titled "War and Revolution." He starts out talking about the need to understand the "class character of the war," i.e., what the war is waged for and what classes staged and directed it. He said:
"We Marxists do not belong to that category of people who are unqualified opponents of all war. We say: our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society.... But in the war to win that socialist system of society we are bound to encounter conditions under which the class struggle within each given nation may come up against a war between the different nations, a war conditioned by this very class struggle. Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility of revolutionary wars."
Lenin ridicules the declarations of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary (SR) compromisers for "peace without annexations" when they have ministers in the Provisional Government that is telling the army to take the offensive. He goes on to say:
"The Russian revolution has not altered the war, but it has created organizations which exist in no other country.... We have all over Russia a network of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies. Here is a revolution which has not said its last word yet. Here is a revolution which Western Europe, under similar conditions, has not known. Here are organizations of those classes which really have no need for annexations...."
Lenin is talking about dual power here. In ending this article he says:
"Nothing but a workers' revolution in several countries can defeat this war. The war is not a game, it is an appalling thing taking toll of millions of lives, and it is not to be ended easily.
"The soldiers at the front cannot tear the front away from the rest of the state and settle things their own way. The soldiers at the front are a part of the country. So long as the country is at war the front will suffer along with the rest.... Whether you will get a speedy peace or not depends on how the revolution will develop."
In this article and in many others you see Lenin's internationalism: "When power passes to the Soviets the capitalists will come out against us. Japan, France, Britain—the governments of all countries will be against us. The capitalists will be against, but the workers will be for us. That will be the end of the war which thecapitalists started." You also see him taking the situation of dual power into account and actually planning for what will happen after the Soviets seize power. There are a lot of articles where he ridicules the idea that peace conferences and peace resolutions can end interimperialist war and states that only the proletarian seizure of power can do that. Although the Bolsheviks certainly supported mass fraternization at the front, which Lenin called an "instinctive" response, the soldiers had to understand that this would not end the war.
I recommend the book Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 by the Bolshevik sailors' leader F.F. Raskolnikov. It is a very lively and readable account of revolutionary Kronstadt and Bolshevik work in the army and navy. Trotsky talks about how sailors from Kronstadt toured the country with special mandates from the Kronstadt Soviet granting them free transport and the right to vote in, speak at and even convene local committee meetings. Raskolnikov describes one of the tours he went on to different ships in the active navy "which at that time had still not emerged from under the influence of 'compromiser' sentiments." In one place he unmasked a former editor of a "Black Hundreds" [pogromist] publication who had become the deputy chairman of a soviet as an SR. In another he spoke, somewhat nervously, to a ship's crew that had only a few months back passed a resolution calling for "war to the end," but was welcomed enthusiastically as he denounced the war, the government and the coalition with the bourgeoisie. On another ship a rightist officer threw his comrade off the deck. Elsewhere he spoke to a group of Bolshevik-minded Estonians through an interpreter. It is fun reading.
The Fall of Riga and "Defensism"
In Volume One of The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky says of the liberal bourgeoisie: "In external appearance the war policy of liberalism remained aggressive-patriotic, annexationist, irreconcilable. In reality it was self-contradictory, treacherous, and rapidly becoming defeatist." Since the liberal bourgeoisie didn't think it could use the February Revolution to advance the war, they planned "to use the war against the revolution." Trotsky noted, "The concern of the moment was not to secure advantageous international conditions for bourgeois Russia, but to save the bourgeois regime itself, even at the price of Russia's further enfeeblement."
On August 20, German forces occupied the key Russian seaport of Riga. Baltic sailors had been fighting to protect the approaches to Petrograd, in their words, "not in the name of the treaties of our rulers with the allies... but in the name of the defense of the approaches to the hearth-fire of the revolution, Petrograd." Trotsky calls this "the deep contradiction in their position as vanguards of a revolution and involuntary participants in an imperialist war." These events tested the Bolsheviks' internationalism. They did not for a minute intend to share with the ruling groups the responsibility, before the Russian people and the workers of the world, for the war.
Fearing that defensive moods would turn into a defensist policy, Lenin wrote: "We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat.... Neither the capture of Riga nor the capture of Petrograd will make us defencists." Writing from prison, Trotsky said: "The fall of Riga is a cruel blow. The fall of Petersburg would be a misfortune. But the fall of the international policy of the Russian proletariat would be ruinous." In the first week of October, fears about a German attack on Petrograd again mounted sharply.
The Provisional Government began actively to plan to abandon Petrograd and set up the government in Moscow. Rabinowitch [The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976)] says cautiously that "there is no direct evidence that the Provisional Government ever seriously entertained the idea of surrendering Petrograd to the Germans without a fight," but he is at least honest enough to say why everybody thought exactly that. Rodzianko, the former head of the State Duma, said: "Petrograd appears threatened.... I say, to hell with Petrograd.... People fear our central institutions in Petrograd will be destroyed. To this, let me say that I should be glad if these institutions are destroyed because they have brought Russia nothing but grief." The workers and peasants, especially after Rodzianko's blunt confession, had no doubt that the government was getting ready to send them to school under German general Ludendorff. This echoes the "patriotism" of the French bourgeoisie in 1871, who begged Bismarck to come in and crush the Paris Commune.
Lenin was calling for insurrection now, not least because revolutionary Petrograd with its majority Bolshevik Soviet was being directly threatened with a bloodbath by German imperialism; a conspiracy was entered into by the Kerensky government and the Anglo-French imperialists to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, and in this way to suppress the revolution. Lenin called for the overthrow of the Kerensky government and the substitution of a workers' and peasants' government "to open the road to peace, to save Petrograd and the revolution, and to give the land to the peasants and power to the Soviets." The shift in Bolshevik propagandistic emphasis led Lenin to remark in 1918 that "we were defeatists at the time of the tsar, but at the time of Tsereteli and Chernov we were not defeatists." The Bolsheviks never abandoned a defeatist posture toward the Russian bourgeois government—they simply varied the tactical application because of the class war then raging in Russia.
The Revolutionary Crisis Matures
The Bolsheviks as an organization had to decide to proceed with the revolution. All but one of the copies of the letter that I referred to before, titled "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power," were burned by the majority of the Central Committee, who had been trying to keep Lenin's appeals from getting into the hands of the worker-Bolsheviks. Lenin, still in hiding, was raging and writing to everybody: Smilga who was a party leftist and president of the Regional Committee of the Soviets, Krupskaya in Petrograd who read his letters out to the Vyborg District Committee. By the time Lenin wrote "The Crisis Has Matured" on September 29, he was tendering his resignation from the Central Committee to free his hands to go to the party membership. One worker from the Vyborg District Committee said: "We got a letter from Ilych for delivery to the Central Committee.... We read the letter and gasped. It seems that Lenin had long ago put before the Central Committee the question of insurrection. We raised a row. We began to bring pressure on them."
Early in October—and now over the head of the Bolshevik Central Committee—Lenin wrote directly to the Petrograd and Moscow Committees: "Delay is criminal. To wait for the Congress of Soviets would be...a disgraceful game of formalities, and a betrayal of the revolution." He noted that the masses could just as easily become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks as they had with other parties, if the Bolsheviks failed to act. As laid out in Trotsky's Lessons of October, the basic position of the rightists in the party, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, was that the party would be risking everything in an armed insurrection, the outcome of which was extremely dubious, when they could be winning "a third and even more of the seats in the Constituent Assembly." This purely parliamentary, social-democratic course was thinly camouflaged by their assertion that, of course, the Soviets were important and that dual power would continue for an unlimited length of time. No, that was not possible; there would have been another Kornilov or perhaps he would have returned.
Of course, if Kamenev and Zinoviev's policy had won, we would be hearing today about the massive forces arrayed against the revolution and how it was impossible anyhow. Like so many defeats, from Germany and China in the 1920s to Spain in the 1930s, which occurred because of the lack of a vanguard party with a hardened revolutionary leadership, had the Bolsheviks failed to lead the October Revolution the defeat would all be blamed on the objective situation and the backwardness of the masses. This is what I call the Stalinist theory of the crisis of followers, where they say, "We tried to lead you, but you wouldn't follow."
The first showdown in the Bolshevik leadership over the insurrection was the famous meeting on October 10 where the insurrection was voted up ten votes to two—Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against. The resolution, as is typical of Lenin, starts with the international situation, that is, the ripening of world revolution; the insurrection in Russia is regarded only as a link in the general chain. The idea of having socialism in one country was not in anyone's mind then, even Stalin's.
Rabinowitch tells a funny story about the October 10 meeting:
"This was to be Lenin's first direct confrontation with the Central Committee since his return from Finland; it had been carefully organized by Sverdlov at Lenin's behest. By an ironic twist of fate the gathering was to be held in the apartment of the left Menshevik Sukhanov, that unsurpassed chronicler of the revolution who had somehow managed to turn up at almost every important political meeting in Petrograd since the February revolution. But on this occasion Sukhanov was not in attendance. His wife, Galina Flakserman, a Bolshevik activist since 1905... once had offered Sverdlov the use of the Sukhanov flat, should the need arise.... For her part, Flakserman insured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on this historic night. "The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try to make it all the way back home tonight,' she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning."
Talk about a strained personal relationship!
The resolution of October 10 was immensely important. It promptly put the genuine advocates of insurrection on the firm ground of the party majority. The workers were arming, drilling, setting up the Red Guards. Workers at the weapons factories were funneling weapons directly to the workers. But the October 10 meeting certainly did not eliminate the differences in the leadership. There was another meeting on October 16, where Lenin again argued for insurrection and Kamenev and Zinoviev again voted against it. The next day, Kamenev and Zinoviev submitted a public statement to Maxim Gorky's newspaper opposing the insurrection, which was published on October 18. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion from the party. This didn't happen because the insurrection intervened. Stalin tried to paper over the differences in the Bolshevik newspaper, alibiing Kamenev and Zinoviev, keeping his options open in case the insurrection failed.
The Party, the Soviets and the Conquest of Power
Kamenev and Zinoviev's differences with Lenin were principled questions: seize state power or not. You can't get more fundamental than that. Trotsky had tactical differences with Lenin: should the insurrection be run through the soviet or directly through the party? Trotsky speaks about the importance of soviet legality to the masses, and the usefulness of appearing to be defending the Soviets. But Trotsky had no naive hopes that the Congress of Soviets itself could settle the question of power. You can see in Trotsky's chapter "The Art of Insurrection" that by 1917 he had finally understood Lenin on the party question. He wrote: "In order to conquer the power, the proletariat needs more than a spontaneous insurrection. It needs a suitable organization, it needs a plan; it needs a conspiracy. Such is the Leninist view of this question." He goes on:
"The organization by means of which the proletariat can both overthrow the old power and replace it, is the Soviets....
"However, the Soviets by themselves do not settle the question. They may serve different goals according to the program and leadership. The Soviets receive their program from the party.... The problem of conquering the power can be solved only by a definite combination of party with Soviets—or with other mass organizations more or less equivalent to Soviets."
The government was planning to send the Petrograd garrison to the front. There was total uproar and refusal from the Petrograd regiments. It was at this point in early October that the Menshevik and SR compromisers put up a resolution in the Petrograd Soviet, which had a Bolshevik majority. Rabinowitch describes this:
"The Menshevik Mark Broido put before the deputies a joint Menshevik-SR resolution which, while calling on garrison soldiers to begin preparations for movement to the front, at the same time sought to calm them by providing for the creation of a special committee to evaluate defense needs and to prepare military defense plans that would inspire popular confidence. At bottom, the intent of the resolution was to facilitate cooperation between the Petrograd Soviet and the government in the interest of the war effort."
Boy, were they surprised when the Bolsheviks eagerly seized on this proposal, resulting in the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee that organized the insurrection! In an interesting passage in the History, Trotsky writes:
"The formulae were all-inclusive and at the same time ambiguous: they almost all balanced on a fine line between defense of the capital and armed insurrection. However, these two tasks, heretofore mutually exclusive, were now in actual fact growing into one. Having seized the power, the Soviet would be compelled to undertake the military defense of Petrograd. The element of defense-camouflage was not therefore violently dragged in, but flowed to some extent from the conditions preceding the insurrection."
The Military Revolutionary Committee had a Left SR as its formal head, but proceeded in a Bolshevik fashion with Trotsky as its principal political leader. Basically, in what one might call a "cold insurrection," the Bolshevik-led Soviet took control of the armed bodies of men out of the hands of the Provisional Government. By October 13, the Soldiers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet voted to transfer military authority from Headquarters to the Military Revolutionary Committee. In other words, the Soviet now had the state power in all but name. By October 21 or 22 the Military Revolutionary Committee told the military high command bluntlythat they were not in charge any more. Rabinowitch says that's insurrection right there. The troops were ready, the Red Guards were ready.
On October 24, Kerensky fairly stupidly provided the spark by trying to shut down the Bolshevik newspaper. The Military Revolutionary Committee sent in a detachment to reopen the newspaper and began seizing government institutions and communication centers. Lenin was still worried. He wrote:
"I am writing these lines on the evening of the 24th....
"With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people....
"Who must take power?
"That is not important at present. Let the Revolutionary Military Committee do it, or 'some other institution'...."
Lenin became so agitated that he went in disguise to the Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, where the Petrograd Soviet was located, to see what was happening. Even a day later, they still hadn't taken the Winter Palace (where the Provisional Government was based) due to a very over-elaborate plan. One Bolshevik remembered that Lenin "paced around a small room at Smolny like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost: it remained the last gate on the road to workers' power. V. I. scolded...he screamed.. .he was ready to shoot us." Kerensky escaped in the safety of a diplomatic vehicle flying the American flag. You will be interested to know that Kerensky eventually wound up here in the U.S., home to gusanos of all varieties, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. There he wrote and lectured about how to fight communism—something which he hadn't done too well at in life.
The Birth of the Soviet Workers State
When the Second Congress of the Soviets opened, the cruiser Aurora was still firing on the Winter Palace. In response to the uprising and seizure of power, now openly proclaimed by the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the congress, some proclaiming that they were going with the majority of the City Duma deputies to the Winter Palace to die with the Provisional Government. They left deluged by shouts of "lackeys of the bourgeoisie" and "good riddance." Only the Left SRs and a few remnants of left menshevism stayed. The compromisers wanted nothing to do with the workers state. Always up for a coalition with the bourgeoisie, they wanted no coalition with the Bolsheviks.
Lenin got up and opened his speech with the famous sentence: "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order." The three-point agenda was end the war, give land to the peasants and establish a socialist dictatorship. The peace decree promised an end to secret diplomacy and proposed to the governments and peoples of the warring countries immediate negotiations to secure a democratic peace without annexations and without indemnities. The land decree, borrowed in its essentials from the agrarian program of the Left SRs, abolished private property in land and provided for the transfer of all private and church estates to land committees and Soviets of peasants' deputies for distribution to the peasantry according to need. A new revolutionary government of People's Commissars, at first made up exclusively of Bolsheviks, was appointed, which over the next period proceeded with nationalizing the banks, restarting industry and laying the foundations of the new soviet state.
Very importantly, they worked on convening the Third (Communist) International as the necessary instrumentality to achieve world socialist revolution. They fought with all possible means and determination to spread the revolution to the advanced industrial countries of Europe. Read Victor G.'s revealing letter to WV (see "On Lenin's Address to the Petrograd Soviet," ffFNo. 861, 6 January) about how the account of Lenin's speech to the Petrograd Soviet that appears in the Collected Works is at variance with other newspaper accounts of the time that highlighted Lenin's points on the international extension of the revolution.
The Spectre of "Democratic" Counterrevolution
Let me touch briefly on two final debates: the question of a broad socialist coalition and the Constituent Assembly. On the first question, historian Rabinowitch echoes people like Sukhanov, who at the time thought it was terrible that the Bolsheviks didn't invite into the government the compromiser parties: the Mensheviks and the Right SRs. Not surprisingly, arguments in favor of forming a government in coalition with the Menshevik and SR compromisers were advanced within the Bolshevik Party by Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had opposed the insurrection in the first place, as well as by some others. Sukhanov bemoans the fact that by walking out of the congress the Mensheviks and the Menshevik-Internationalists "gave the Bolsheviks with our own hands a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the revolution."
In principle the Bolsheviks were not opposed to a coalition. They agreed to a coalition with any party if it would accept soviet constitutionalism, which meant accepting the reality of the October insurrection and the fact that the Soviets had a Bolshevik majority and they would therefore form the majority of the government. But that was a big "if." At least Rabinowitch is honest enough to tell you what the problem with this was: not only had the Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the soviet but:
"Initially fierce resistance to the Bolshevik regime coalesced around the so-called All-Russian Committee for the Salvation of the Country and the Revolution organized on October 26, primarily by the Mensheviks and SRs in the Petrograd City Duma....
"Leaders of the Committee for Salvation also drew up plans to coordinate an uprising in Petrograd with the entry into the capital of Krasnov's cossacks, expected momentarily."
They were unsuccessful, of course, but they certainly didn't waste a minute before organizing counterrevolution, not one minute. Let me state as a general rule, it is a bad idea to seek a coalition with those who are actively trying to overthrow the workers state and kill you all.
Trotsky states that what was in question here was "the liquidation of October—no more, no less" by diverting the revolution back into the channel of a bourgeois regime. Since the Bolshevik opposition had gone public with this, Lenin finally denounced them publicly as waverers and doubters: "Shame on all the faint¬hearted...on all those who allowed themselves to be intimidated by the bourgeoisie or who have succumbed to the outcries of their direct and indirect supporters!" These conciliators backed down, especially as it became clear that there was no one to form a coalition with. The most acute party crisis had been overcome. A couple of Left SRs finally did join the government—at least until the Soviet government signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
Finally, I want to address the Constituent Assembly. I was reassured to find out that a new youth comrade in the Bay Area who wanted to talk about the Constituent Assembly wasn't worried about why the Bolsheviks dispersed it. He wanted to know why they ever called for it! A better impulse, I think. We wrote a good article on constituent assemblies titled "Why a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly?" (WV No. 221, 15 December 1978). It makes the point that in backward countries under autocratic or military bonapartist rule, the struggle for a sovereign constituent assembly based on universal suffrage can in certain circumstances be key in uniting the toiling masses behind the proletarian vanguard. It was based on such an understanding that the Bolsheviks fought throughout the spring and summer of 1917 for elections to a constituent assembly at a time when the government refused to hold them out of fear that this would lead to a peasant uprising. This stage had passed with the workers seizing state power, but the Bolsheviks didn't simply call off the elections to the Constituent Assembly because a pro-soviet majority might well have emerged in the wake of the peasant land seizures. That would have been useful in reinforcing the authority of the Soviets among the peasants in the upcoming civil war.
However, this was not to be. Between the old election lists and the way parliamentary elections gave the petty-bourgeoisie the overwhelming weight of the vote, the SRs, Kadets and Mensheviks won the majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly. It was a retrograde force and could become a focus for bourgeois restorationist forces. So the Bolsheviks wisely demanded that the Constituent Assembly recognize the victorious soviet power as its first act. Only when they refused to do so did the Soviet Executive Committee decree the dissolution of the assembly. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly closes this chapter of the history of the Russian Revolution and the history of the Bolshevik Party. The differences revolved around the fundamental questions: should we struggle for power, can we assume power? Through struggle, internal and external, they resolved both these questions in the affirmative.
In conclusion, the October Revolution remains our compass. It demonstrates how a revolutionary party can win the working masses away from the reformist class traitors and lead them to power. To quote Trotsky: "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer."
Commentary
This year is the 90th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. I have endlessly pointed out that the October Revolution in Russia was the definitive political event of the 20th century. The resulting change in the balance of world power with the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s is beginning to look like a definitive political event for the 21st century, as well. I have urged those interested in the fight for socialism to read, yes to read, about the Russian Revolution in order to learn some lessons from that experience. Trotsky’s three volume History of the Russian Revolution is obviously a good place to start for a pro-Bolshevik overview. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s History of the Russian Revolution offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing in 1917 from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s Notes on the Russian Revolution. For a more journalistic account John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World is invaluable. Forward to new October Revolutions.
To get a quick overview I have reprinted here some articles that made up a class on the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1917. They are, however, no substitute for thorough reading on the subject.
Workers Vanguard No. 874 4 August 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the February Revolution to the July Days
Part One
We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow, which was one in a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school.
It was in the course of the year 1917 that Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution, came over to the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky had declared his political solidarity with the Bolsheviks to the party's leaders upon his return to Russia in May 1917. Having facilitated the fusion of the Inter-Borough Group of United Social Democrats (known as the "Mezhrayontsi") with the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks as part of this fusion in July.
Trotsky titled the first chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution "Peculiarities of Russia's Development"; his summary of the 1917 February Revolution is "The Paradox of the February Revolution." These two themes continue throughout the events that occurred in Russia in 1917, which culminated in the October Revolution. The first goes back to Trotsky's brilliant prognosis, Results and Prospects (1906), which forecast not only the possibility, but the necessity for the Russian proletariat to seize power, leading behind it the mass of the peasants. This work, begun in 1904, was completed shortly after the 1905 Revolution, which shook the rotting edifice of the tsarist monarchy to its core. But it did not overthrow the monarchy. That task would have to wait until 12 years later, which is the second of Trotsky's themes. Its completion in the conquest of state power by the Bolsheviks occurred a mere eight months after the February Revolution deposed Tsar Nicholas Romanov and his dynasty.
A key outgrowth of 1905 was the creation of the Soviets (workers councils). These were formed spontaneously by the insurgent workers and had not been called for by any of the left parties, the Bolsheviks included. Their significance as the most democratic and flexible form of mass organization of the working class quickly became apparent. Soviets reappeared in 1917 during the February Revolution with an added important difference—not only the workers but also the soldiers were represented in the Soviets. As Trotsky notes in his History:
"As a matter of fact, thanks to the tradition of 1905, the Soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organisations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions). As for the peasantry, a class by its very nature scattered, thanks to the war and revolution it was exactly at that moment organised as never before. The war had assembled the peasants into an army, and the revolution had given the army a political character! No fewer than eight million peasants were united in companies and squadrons, which had immediately created their revolutionary representation and could through it at any moment be brought to their feet by a telephone call."
The politicization of the peasants—driven at bottom by their desire for a sweeping agrarian revolution—was critical. Without the support, overt or tacit, of the peasants, the proletarian revolution could not hope to succeed and survive in backward Russia, with its overwhelmingly agrarian population.
War and Revolution
The strains of World War I really laid the basis for the downfall of the monarchy. Trotsky's chapter on the tsar and the tsarina is one of my favorites: to put it mildly, Nicholas was a dim bulb on the family tree, totally isolated and deliberately ignorant of what was going on in his country (except for his generous support to Black Hundred pogromists, reports of whose activities he eagerly consumed). But with or without the will of the dynasty, Russia could not have avoided participation in the interimperialist conflict. Trotsky placed Russia's participation in WWI somewhere between that of France (a full-blown imperialist power) and China (with itscomprador bourgeoisie subservient to the big powers). In his History, he adds:
"Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it—that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies—but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself."
Russia did not do well in the war. There were some successes against the Austrians, but as Trotsky notes, this was less due to the skill of the Russians than to: "The disintegrating Hapsburg monarchy had long ago hung out a sign for an undertaker, not demanding any high qualifications of him."
When it came to the Germans, things went rather badly for Russia. In August 1915, that is, one year after the war began, General Ruszky reported to the Council of Ministers: "The contemporary demands of military technique are beyond our powers; in any case we cannot keep up with the Germans" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Two years later, in the aftermath of the revolutionary upheaval and repression of the July Days, and the failure of then-Minister of War Kerensky's June offensive, this same general would rail: "People followed the old banners as sacred things and went to their deaths.... But to what have the red banners brought us? To the surrender of armies in whole corps." The decrepit generals and the bourgeoisie would blame Russia's collapse on the Bolsheviks, whom they slanderously claimed were acting as paid agents of Germany.
By Trotsky's reckoning, some 15 million men, mostly peasants, were mobilized for the war, out of which 5.5 million were counted as killed, wounded or captured; some 2.5 million were killed. Trotsky encapsulated the situation as follows: '"Everything for the war!' said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. 'Yes,' the soldier began to think in the trenches, 'they are all ready to fight to the last drop...of my blood'."
The extraordinary casualty rates were due both to incompetent military command and a pervasive lack of supplies, including weapons and ammunition, and even boots. Meanwhile, the capitalists were making huge profits selling (often inferior) goods to the government, paid for by exactions on the working class and also by more and more loans from the City of London and the French Bourse (stock market). Rodzianko, Lord Chamberlain under Tsar Nicholas II, later President of the State Duma (Russian Parliament), and one of the leaders of the Russian big bourgeoisie, got rich by providing low quality, essentially useless wood to be used for rifle stocks. As an aside, one might note that Halliburton has a long line of predecessors! Trotsky speaks of the "shower of gold" coming from the top that funded the lavish parties of the rich, while the lower classes were desperate to find even bread.
What broke the back of the dynasty was that the army no longer wanted to fight, and units were increasingly either abandoning the front in mass desertions or refusing to carry out orders. A powerful indication was when the Cossack regiments in Petrograd refused to suppress a workers demonstration in the Vyborg district—the proletarian core of Petrograd. As Trotsky relates in the History:
"...the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect, galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. 'Some of them smiled,' Kayurov recalls, 'and one of them gave the workers a good wink.'"
If the Cossacks were winking at the workers, the tsar was in trouble.
The February Revolution
Trotsky's chronology in Volume One of the History of the Russian Revolution gives a vivid idea of the tempo of events: on February 23, a demonstration for International Women's Day demanding bread sparks the revolution. By February 25, there is a general strike in Petrograd. The next day, the tsar dissolves the Duma— but neither this, nor the shooting of demonstrators, are to any avail. On the next day, there is a mutiny in the Guard regiments and the formation of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies. By February 28, the tsar's ministers are arrested. Attempts to arrange an orderly succession failed—none of the grand dukes wanted to feel the rope, so richly deserved by Tsar Nicholas Romanov, around their own necks.
The revolution came as a surprise not only to the abysmally clueless monarch but also to the assorted political parties. Its spontaneity carried dangers. As Trotsky noted:
"A revolutionary uprising that spreads over a number of days can develop victoriously only in case it ascends step by step, and scores one success after another. A pause in its growth is dangerous; a prolonged marking of time, fatal. But even successes by themselves are not enough; the masses must know about them in time, and have time to understand their value. It is possible to let slip a victory at the very moment when it is within arm's reach. This has happened in history."
It was only on February 25 that the Bolsheviks decided to issue a leaflet calling for an ail-Russian general strike — when Petrograd was facing an armed uprising. What was clearly lacking was political leadership: "The leaders were watching the movement from above; they hesitated, they lagged — in other words, they did not lead. They dragged after the movement" (Trotsky's History).
Hence the paradox of the February Revolution: the tsar was overthrown by a massive upsurge of the Petrograd workers, with the support or indulgence of the garrison troops, and the Soviets emerged with the real power. Yet the Provisional Government which was formed was dominated by monarchists — its leader was Prince Lvov — and even the Kadets (a bourgeois and landlord party favoring a constitutional monarchy) were considered to be on the left wing! The workers had toppled the monarchy, but the political power which they rightly possessed was handed off to the bourgeoisie like a hand grenade whose pin was already pulled.
How to explain this? On the face of it, the overthrow of the monarchy had been accomplished without the leadership of a revolutionary party. But as Trotsky points out, this is a misleading view. First, there had been the experience of 1905. Subsequent to that, despite the period of deep reaction, the Bolshevik Party was steeling its cadres in all arenas of work, both legal and underground. By 1912, the working class had recovered some fighting spirit, and a series of strikes occurred. The influence of the Bolsheviks within the proletariat was steadily growing. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the proletariat could have conquered power in the urban centers of Petrograd and Moscow (as was later threatened in the July Days in 1917). The question was how long they could have held it — without a shift in the attitude of the peasantry, one would likely have had a repeat of the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 .
The world war changed that. Despite the initial burst of patriotism in August 1914, in which the Bolsheviks were shunned by the masses and repressed by the government, the seeds planted by the Bolsheviks through their intervention into the workers' upsurges from 1912 to 1914 eventually found fertile ground. After August 1914, the defeats on the military front, and the corresponding economic suffering in the rear that was brought about during two and a half years of imperialist carnage, had weakened support for the monarchy to zero. As Trotsky points out, even though the Bolsheviks as a party were repressed to the point of organizational collapse, the individual cadres were still alive and able to engage fellow workers on the shop floor. That is, if the Bolsheviks as a party were not in the leadership per se of the February Revolution, their ideas and agitators certainly played a critical role.
Dual Power
This brings us to the period of dual power. The downfall of the monarchy was brought about through the forces of the Petrograd proletariat and the active support (or neutrality) of the military garrison. The cringing liberals had no role, and the big bourgeoisie sought to cover their power with some regurgitated monarchical order. The Provisional Government was headed by Prince Lvov, with a sprinkling of Kadets representing the bourgeoisie and with the deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky, assuming the post of Minister of Justice in contravention of a Soviet Executive Committee decision that its members not enter the government. In reality, the power belonged to the Soviet, but its leadership was dominated by the Mensheviks and, especially, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs, a leftist party based on the peasantry); the Bolsheviks were a minority, even among the workers. The Soviets of February reflected the consciousness of February, which accounts for the position of the SRs, who were the predominant party of the peasants and hence the soldiers.
As Trotsky noted, the Soviet leadership was ceding power:
"The bourgeoisie received the power behind the backs of the people. It had no support in the toiling classes. But along with the power it received a simulacrum of support second-hand. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, lifted aloft by the masses, delivered as if from themselves a testimonial of confidence to the bourgeoisie."
When the Compromiser leadership crawled before the bourgeoisie, begging it to take the power, they were politically consistent—the Mensheviks thought that the Russian Revolution never could go beyond the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Even the sharp Miliukov (head of the Kadets) was astonished and proclaimed his praise to the Mensheviks' betrayal: "Yes, I was listening and I was thinking how far forward our workers' movement has progressed since the days of 1905" (quoted in Trotsky's History).
So here you have an official government, representing the bourgeoisie and committed to the imperialist war aims of the Romanovs and the Entente (the alliance of Britain, France and Russia in WWI), and side by side with it the Soviet, created by the insurgent workers and soldiers. Does this mean that there existed two actual governments or a state power of multiple classes? If that were true it would certainly violate the Marxist conception of the state. But it isn't true. If anything, the history of Russia between February and October was continual conflict between the Provisional Government and the Soviet—despite and also because of the backsliding of the latter's Menshevik and SR leaders. Lenin, as usual, got to the core of the issue in his article on the dual power in April 1917:
"The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.
"The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old 'formulas,' for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.
"What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies."
—V.I. Lenin, "The Dual Power"
Referring to the Menshevik/SR leaders of the Soviets and their capitulations, Lenin adds:
"They refuse to recognise the obvious truth that inasmuch as these Soviets exist, inasmuch as they are a power, we have in Russia a state of the type of the Paris Commune.
"I have emphasised the words 'inasmuch as,' for it is only an incipient power. By direct agreement with the bourgeois Provisional Government and by a series of actual concessions, it has itself surrendered and is surrendering its positions to the bourgeoisie."
In several instances, the Soviets intervened and took actions which are normally the prerogative of the (bourgeois) state power. The first Minister of War in the Provisional Government, Guchkov, complained: "The government, alas, has no real power; the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are in the hands of the Soviet. The simple fact is that the Provisional Government exists only so long as the Soviet permits it" (quoted in Trotsky's History). However, this did not alter the fact that the Provisional Government was bourgeois, that it was pursuing the imperialist war aims of the bourgeoisie, and that the economy of Russia was still operating on a capitalist basis. The Provisional Government sought to strangle the Soviet in order to exercise its state power unfettered. Please recall Lenin's description of the Soviets as an incipient power. Dual power was inherently an unstable situation, during which the contending classes marshaled their forces for the confrontation which would decide which class would rule. In other words, it would take another revolution to put state power in the hands of the Soviets. And that is what would happen in October.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 875 1 September 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the February Revolution to the July Days
Part Two (Young Spartacus pages')
We print below, edited for publication, the second and concluding part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The first part appears in WV No. 874, 4 August.
During the February Revolution and the subsequent month, Lenin was still in exile in Switzerland, desperately trying to find a way to get to Russia. During March, the attitude of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia came very close to the position of the Mensheviks. On March 15, Pravda, then edited by Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov, carried an article which declared:
"Our slogan is not the empty cry 'Down with war!' which means the disorganization of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is bring pressure [!] to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy [!], an attempt [!] to induce [!] all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let everyone [!] remain at his post [!]." [Trotsky's emphases]
—Leon Trotsky, Lessons of October (1924)
This article was wholly in the spirit of the "revolutionary" defensism of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs)—i.e., the Russian Revolution had achieved the main task of overthrowing the monarchy, and the "revolution" and its "free people" had to defend themselves against the German Kaiser. What this really meant was that the war aims of the Russian bourgeoisie would continue, now under the cover of "democracy" rather than the Romanov eagle. This defensism stood in stark contrast to the position of revolutionary defeatism advocated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during WWI. In opposition to the Mensheviks and the social-democratic leaders throughout Europe who either outright supported their own imperialist ruling class, or begged the imperialists for a just peace, Lenin maintained that the working class had no side in the interimperialist war and that the only road to peace was for the working class of each of the belligerent nations to turn the imperialist war into a civil war to overthrow the capitalist rulers.
A measure of how far the Bolsheviks had gone toward conciliating the Mensheviks following the February Revolution was that, as Trotsky notes in his History, in some of the provinces the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had entered into united organizations. In fact, party leaders such as Stalin were advocating fusion with the Mensheviks at the beginning of the April party conference. As you should recognize, Lenin had his work cut out for him.
Lenin had made many key positions clear in his "Letters from Afar" of March. He was explicit that any conciliation of defensism vis-a-vis the imperialist war was a split question. In his History, Trotsky cites a March letter from Lenin: "Our party would disgrace itself forever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit.... I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party, rather than surrender to social patriotism...." In any case, the speech Lenin gave upon his arrival in Petrograd on April 3 on the socialist character of the Russian Revolution should have been less of a surprise to the Bolsheviks than it apparently was.
Lenin's Fight to Rearm the Party
On April 4, Lenin presented the brilliant theses now known as the "April Theses." In the space of only a few pages, Lenin reasserted the strategic aims of the Bolsheviks, from which they had been sliding, and promulgated a whole new tactical orientation for the party. This included the abandonment of old slogans, such as the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry," in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian power in Russia. In doing so, Lenin repudiated in practice the faulty formula of a two-class dictatorship, arriving atessentially the same conception of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky had outlined as early as 1905 and which became known as the theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky understood that the completion of the democratic revolution in backward Russia was conceivable only as the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry, and that the seizure of power by the working class in Russia would place on the order of the day not only the democratic, but also the socialist tasks. This would give a powerful impetus to international socialist revolution, which was necessary for the development of socialism in Russia. [For further background on the Mensheviks', the Bolsheviks' and Trotsky's conceptions of the Russian Revolution, see: "The Russian Revolution of 1905," WVNo. 872, 9 June.]
Lenin's April Theses also called for the construction of a new, revolutionary Third International. The need for a new international and a break with the social-chauvinists, including the wavering centrist elements that followed German social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky, had been a demand by Lenin since the beginning of the imperialist war.
There was no small opposition to Lenin—he had to wage a fight to win over the party, at times even threatening to go outside the Central Committee and appeal directly to the ranks. In short, that posed a faction fight and a split. It is notable that when the April Theses were published in Pravda on April 7, not a single member of the Central Committee would cosign Lenin's article. In fact, the editors of Pravda wrote: "As for the general scheme of Comrade Lenin, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is ended, and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution" (quoted in Trotsky's History). The seriousness of the situation within the party was well summarized by Trotsky:
"The central organ of the party thus openly announced before the working class and its enemies a split with the generally recognised leader of the party upon the central question of the revolution for which the Bolshevik ranks had been getting ready during a long period of years. That alone is sufficient to show the depth of the April crisis in the party, due to the clash of two irreconcilable lines of thought and action. Until it surmounted this crisis the revolution could not go forward."
Bourgeois-Democratic or Socialist Revolution?
The "Old Bolsheviks," including Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, seemed to believe that the old slogan of the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" had been realized in some amalgam of the Provisional Government and the Soviets—later, in October of 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in opposition to the Central Committee vote for armed insurrection, would explicitly proclaim that: "The Constituent Assembly plus the Soviets—that is that combined type of state institution towards which we are going" (quoted in Lessons of October). That would have been the death of the Russian Revolution.
Before the convocation of the all-Russian conference of the Bolshevik Party on April 24, events in Petrograd strongly underlined that Lenin's reorientation of the party was correct and overdue. Perhaps as a slap in the face to the Soviets, on April 18, Miliukov, leader of the Kadets and at that point the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, made public a letter reaffirming Russia's commitment to the imperialist war. On the Western calendar this occurred on May 1—the international workers holiday. On that day in Petrograd there were peaceful and celebratory demonstrations. Miliukov's letter provoked deep outrage among the masses of Petrograd, and on April 20, as Trotsky describes in his History: "The masses came out with arms in their hands. Among the bayonets of the soldiers glimmered the letters on a streamer: 'Down with Miliukov!'" Trotsky goes on to note: "The slogan carried into the streets by the armed soldiers and sailors: 'Down with the Provisional Government!' inevitably introduced into the demonstration a strain of armed insurrection."
This was a far cry from the almost festive demonstration of only a month before when 800,000 came out for the funeral of the martyrs of the February Revolution. The April 20 demonstration was not to be the last time that the Petrograd masses came out, arms in hand, with the evident intent to seize state power but without the leadership to carry the struggle to victory. That leadership would only be in place in October.
So the Bolshevik conference convened alongside a serious revolutionary manifestation of the Petrograd workers—and this was keenly felt by the Bolshevik workers inside the plants and in the lower-level Soviets. Lenin was above all an astute politician! As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October
"This manner of formulating the question is most highly significant. Lenin, after the experience of the reconnoiter, withdrew the slogan of the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. But he did not withdraw it for any set period of time—for so many weeks or months —but strictly in dependence upon how quickly the revolt of the masses against the conciliationists would grow.... He based himself exclusively on the idea that the masses were not at the moment capable of overthrowing the Provisional Government and that, therefore, everything possible had to be done to enable the working class to overthrow the Provisional Government on the morrow.
"The whole of the April Party Conference was devoted to the following fundamental question: Are we heading toward the conquest of power in the name of the socialist revolution or are we helping (anybody and everybody) to complete the democratic revolution? Unfortunately, the report of the April Conference remains unpublished to this very day, though there is scarcely another congress in the history of our party that had such an exceptional and immediate bearing on the destiny of our revolution as the conference of April 1917.
"Lenin's position was this: an irreconcilable struggle against defensism and its supporters; the capture of the soviet majority; the overthrow of the Provisional Government; the seizure of power through the Soviets; a revolutionary peace policy and a program of socialist revolution at home and of international revolution abroad."
The First Coalition Government and the June Congress of Soviets
Prior to April, and with the exception of Kerensky, who had joined the Provisional Government as Minister of Justice in March, the Compromiser (SR and Menshevik) leadership of the Soviets had tried to give up the power of the Soviets without openly joining the bourgeois government. In early May, the first coalition government was formed. Kerensky (who had joined the SRs after the February Revolution) became the Minister of War. Mensheviks and SRs also took on ministerial posts in the Provisional Government. This was a political betrayal of the mass base of the Soviets, but it flowed harmoniously with the basic politics of the Compromisers. As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October.
"As a matter of fact, the Mensheviks had for many years tapped away like so many woodpeckers at the idea that the coming revolution must be bourgeois; that the government of a bourgeois revolution could only perform bourgeois tasks; that the social democracy could not take upon itself the tasks of bourgeois democracy and must remain an opposition while 'pushing the bourgeoisie to the left.' This theme was developed with a particularly boring profundity by Martynov. With the inception of the bourgeois revolution in 1917, the Mensheviks soon found themselves on the staff of the government. Out of their entire 'principled' position there remained only one political conclusion, namely, that the proletariat dare not seize power."
On May 1, the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet voted to enter the coalition government. As a gesture to the masses, Miliukov was forced to resign as foreign minister the next day. (In his History, Trotsky notes one proposal by an SR leader to defuse the crisis precipitated by Miliukov's note: "Chernov found a brilliant solution, proposing that Miliukov go over to the Ministry of Public Education. Constantinople as a topic in geography would at any rate be less dangerous than as a topic in diplomacy.") Miliukov's resignation was just a sop to the masses, since the government continued to carry out the policies of the bourgeoisie, especially with regard to the war.
On June 3, the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. To give an idea of the masses represented by the Soviets, Trotsky writes in his History that "The right to a vote was accorded to Soviets containing not less than 25,000 men. Soviets containing from 10,000 to 25,000 had a voice." But it was not the factories and barracks who were in control, but rather the Compromisers who entered the first coalition government in May. One of the "achievements" of this Congress was to give formal approval to a new offensive against the German forces. This ill-fated plan, issued by Kerensky, was in fact the Russian bourgeoisie's partial payment to the Entente for the massive loans from Britain and France. It is doubtful that any member of the Russian bourgeoisie thought this military attack could succeed. As Trotsky relates in his History"The American journalist, John Reed, who knew how to see and hear, and who has left an immortal book of chronicler's notes of the days of the October Revolution, testifies without hesitation that a considerable part of the possessing classes of Russia preferred a German victory to the triumph of the revolution, and did not hesitate to say so openly. 'One evening I spent at the house of a Moscow merchant,' says Reed, among other examples. 'During tea we asked eleven people at the table whether they preferred "Wilhelm or the Bolsheviks." The vote was ten to one for Wilhelm'."
This would not be the first time in history that the bourgeoisie became defeatist—just look at the Paris Commune. In the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the workers took power in Paris to defend the city. Thiers and all the great French patriots then began to beg for Bismarck, their enemy of yesterday, to intervene. With the assistance of the Prussians, the bourgeois French army was allowed to first bombard, and then enter, Paris. In the repression that followed, tens of thousands of Communards and workers were either executed on the spot or imprisoned. And note that the crushing of the Commune of 1871 was not so far distant in time in 1917—it's less than the span of time separating us today from the end of World War II.
A Shift in the Balance of Forces
The Bolsheviks issued a call for a demonstration in June while the Congress of Soviets was in session. This was not intended to be a call for an insurrection, although the impetus came from the Bolshevik military organization. No matter, that's how the Mensheviks and SRs took it, because they knew that the Petrograd masses were shifting to the Bolsheviks. They used their position at the head of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet to pass a resolution prohibiting any demonstrations for three days. Delegates were sent from the Congress of Soviets to the working-class districts—as Trotsky put it, "If the mountain was not allowed to come to the prophet, the prophet at least went to the mountain."
Not wishing a direct assault against the Soviet, the Bolsheviks stood down. But as Trotsky notes, the emissaries of the Mensheviks and SRs were met with disdain and hostility. One example from the History: "The workers of the Putilov factory agreed to paste up the declaration of the congress against the demonstration only after they learned from Pravda that it did not contradict the resolution of the Bolsheviks." This reaction was comparatively mild. Elsewhere, the Bolsheviks' decision was not so easily accepted:
"The masses submitted to the decision of the Bolsheviks, but not without protest and indignation. In certain factories they adopted resolutions of censure of the Central Committee. The more fiery members of the party in the sections tore up their membership cards. That was a serious warning."
The Mensheviks and SRs were out for blood—shades of things to come in just a few weeks. On June 10, the Menshevik paper declared: "It is time to brand the Leninists as traitors and betrayers of the revolution" (quoted in Trotsky's History). The next day, the Menshevik leader Tseretelli demanded that the Bolsheviks be disarmed. What he really meant was disarming the workers. As Trotsky summarized: "In other words, that classic moment of the revolution had arrived when the bourgeois democracy, upon the demand of the reaction, undertakes to disarm the workers who had guaranteed the revolutionary victory." Trotsky later notes: "To carry the Compromise policy through to a successful end—that is, to the establishment of a parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie—demanded the disarming of the workers and soldiers."
The Mensheviks decided on a public show of force in a demonstration on June 18. The march was to replicate the peaceful parade in March to honor the martyrs of February. At that time, some 800,000 had turned out. This time, half that number marched, but the vast majority were from the factories and barracks. In his History, Trotsky describes the procession:
"The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly—Tseretelli had so confidently thrown down his challenge the day before. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. 'Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!' 'Down with the Offensive' 'All Power to the Soviets!' The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. Bolshevik banners floated everywhere. The delegates stopped counting the uncomfortable totals. The triumph of theBolsheviks was too obvious.... One of the factories carried a placard: 'The right to Life is Higher than the rights of Private Property.' This slogan had not been suggested by the party."
Trotsky went on to note: "The demonstration of June 18 made an enormous impression on its own participants. The masses saw that the Bolsheviks had become a power, and the vacillating were drawn to them." The contradiction between the growing strength of the Bolsheviks and the decline of the authority of the Menshevik/SR leadership of the Soviet would condition the entire period leading up to the October Revolution.
The July Days
It is interesting to note that in the period from February through June, the Bolsheviks had undergone a virtually uninterrupted growth of influence in the working class and also among the Petrograd garrison. Revolutions rarely occur with such a seamless transition, and Russia in 1917 was no exception. The forces of counterrevolution were far from dead, and the ruling class wanted revenge for the humiliation of the June demonstration.
The June 18 demonstration showed clearly that at the base in the factories and some of the garrisons of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks had become the majority, or close to it. It was far from clear that the same situation applied in the provinces or on the front. The full impact of the offensive ordered by Kerensky on June 16—a fully predictable debacle—had yet to become known. But in Petrograd, the masses had reached the boiling point. Everything was in collapse, including transport, food and fuel. The February Revolution was sparked by a mass desire both to be rid of the Romanov dynasty and to put an end to the war—but several months later the murderous war was still raging.
The July 3-5 events were a semi-insurrection. Rejecting attempts by Bolshevik orators to contain the July 3 demonstration, soldiers marching in their regiments shouted "Down! Down!" As Trotsky relates in the History: "Such cries the Bolshevik balcony had never yet heard from the soldiers; it was an alarming sign. Behind the regiments the factories began to march up: 'All power to the Soviets!' 'Down with the ten minister capitalists!' Those had been the banners of June 18th, but now they were hedged with bayonets." The Bolsheviks had tried to restrain the masses, but were unable to do so. Trotsky noted: "The Central Committee was oftener and oftener compelled to send agitators to the troops and the factories to restrain them from untimely action. With an embarrassed shake of the head, the Vyborg Bolsheviks would complain to their friends: 'We have to play the part of the fire hose'."
The insurrectionary sentiment of the workers and soldiers was captured by Trotsky in his descriptions of their military preparations: "On the morning of July 3, several thousand machine-gunners, after breaking up a meeting of the company and regimental committees of their regiment, elected a chairman of their own and demanded immediate consideration of the question of an armed manifestation." Trotsky continues:
"In the yard of the barracks a no less feverish work was going on. They were giving out rifles to the soldiers who did not possess them, giving bombs to some, installing three machine-guns with operators on each motor truck supplied by the factories. The regiment was to go into the street in full military array....
"The longest struggle took place at the Putilov Factory. At about two in the afternoon a rumour went round that a delegation had come from the machine-gun unit, and was calling a meeting. About ten thousand men assembled. To shouts of encouragement, the machine-gunners told how they had received an order to go to the front on the 4th of July, but they had decided 'to go not to the German front, against the German proletariat, but against their own capitalist ministers'."
Raskolnikov, a naval officer and a Bolshevik, desperately phoned the party headquarters for advice, since the Kronstadt sailors were determined to go out arms in hand. After initially opposing the demonstration, the Bolshevik leadership acquiesced. Rather than leaving the masses leaderless, the Bolsheviks went into battle with the demonstrators to provide leadership for an orderly retreat.
The July Days represent the last gasp of the February Revolution, and a foretaste of October. All the contending classes were put on notice, and the counterrevolution did not shrink from battle. While the demonstrations of July 3 and 4 showed the power of the armed workers and soldiers, they did not attempt a seizure of state power. The Compromiser leadership of the Soviets railed against the masses who had come out for "All Power to the Soviets!" Trotsky writes:
"The Compromisers were waiting for reliable regiments. 'A revolutionary people is in the streets,' cried [the Menshevik] Dan, 'but that people is engaged in a counter-revolutionary work.' Dan was supported by Abramovich, one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund, a conservative pedant whose every instinct had been outraged by the revolution."
Among the "reliable" troops the government and the Soviet leaders counted on were the Cossacks; in August, Kerensky would appeal to the Cossack general Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to Petrograd.
The wave of the semi-insurrection broke, in some cases with clashes with government troops. The revolutionary wave was quickly replaced by a counterrevolutionary campaign to drive the Bolsheviks underground. Trotsky was jailed; Lenin went into hiding. Lenin understood the importance of preserving the Bolshevik central cadre. Since 1914, Lenin had understood that the Social Democrats who supported "their" bourgeoisies in the war were agents of the class enemy rather than comrades gone astray. This prescient understanding was reinforced in the positive in October 1917 in Russia and tragically in the negative with the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg during the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by the German Social Democrats following the Spartacus uprising in Berlin in January 1919.
The July Days illustrate with the clarity of a lightning strike the instability of the dual power which issued from the February Revolution. Either the bourgeoisie with its servile Menshevik and SR agents would liquidate the Soviets in favor of some bourgeois parliament—in fact a rubber stamp for a military dictatorship—or the workers would seize the state power. The latter could occur via the Soviets, or perhaps through the factory committees of the organized workers—Lenin remained flexible about the organizational form, particularly when the Soviets under the leadership of the Mensheviks and SRs were more obstacles than assistants to the proletarian revolution.
The repression of the Bolsheviks following the July Days was short-lived. The party rebounded, as the workers and soldiers returned to its banners and leadership. This would be starkly shown when the bourgeoisie placed all their hopes in the Cossack general Kornilov in August. That gamble they lost. Kornilov's coup failed, and it took a party with the determination to realize its revolutionary program in life to both repulse Kornilov and provide proletarian leadership to the agrarian revolt in the summer. That also involved internal party struggle. The great events of late 1917 are known to us not as the October Evolution but the October Revolution. The difference is qualitative, and indicates the divide between reformism of all stripes and Bolshevism, i.e., revolutionary Marxism.
Workers Vanguard No. 877 29 September 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the Kornilov Coup to the October Revolution
Part One {Young Spartacus pages)
We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a class given by comrade Diana Coleman as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The class covering the period from the February Revolution through the July Days, given by comrade T. Marlow, appeared in WV Nos. 874 (4 August) and 875 (1 September).
The first chapter of Trotsky's Lessons of October (1924) is called "We Must Study the October Revolution," and the opening line is: "We met with success in the October Revolution, but the October Revolution has met with little success in our press." Well, we have an even bigger problem in these years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as our left-wing opponents who cheered capitalist counterrevolution have effectively renounced any claim to the heritage of October, our contacts have never heard of the Russian Revolution, and our own young members have been heard to say, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution—but I don't know much about it myself." We can rectify the last part of that, anyhow. So as comrade Marlow told me, he got the bad part where the Bolsheviks are having all this trouble and I got the good part where they win. The two things I have found most useful to read in addition to Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution are Lenin's Collected Works, Volumes 24, 25, and 26, as well as Alexander Rabinowitch. He is an honest guy who, to his own surprise, came to the conclusion that the Bolsheviks actually interacted with the masses and went in for lively debate.
In Lessons of October Trotsky tried to grapple with the underlying political reasons for the failure of the 1923 German Revolution. He compared the German events and the Russian October. Trotsky details the fights that Lenin waged after February of 1917 in order to rearm the party. It was only these fights that made the victory in October possible. In speaking of the differences in the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky says: "The fundamental controversial question around which everything else centered was this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether or not we should assume power."
Trotsky defined the Bolshevik tendency as, in essence, "such a training, tempering and organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand" and the social-democratic (Menshevik) tendency as "the acceptance of reformist oppositional activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e., the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state." The struggle between these tendencies makes itself most strongly felt on the eve of revolution. Trotsky further made the point that there is an intimate connection between the question of power and the question of war.
So these are the questions I kept in mind for this class: the seizure of power, the interimperialist war, and, of course, the party, the party and again the party. Miliukov, the leading representative of the Russian bourgeoisie such as it was, recognized the role of the Bolsheviks as a party when he said: "They knew where they were going, and they went in the direction which they had chosen once for all, toward a goal which came nearer and nearer with every new, unsuccessful experiment of compromisism" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Yes, but it took struggle, external and internal, because, as Trotsky says, the party is a living organism that develops in contradictions. Actually, I think Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution is very helpful in understanding dialectical materialism and contradictions.
The Bolsheviks and the World War
In terms of the interimperialist war, the Bolshevik position of revolutionary defeatism was absolutely crucial to bringing off the October Revolution. The political battles Lenin waged from 4 August 1914, when German Social Democratic parliamentary deputies voted in favor of war credits, to his struggle against the centrist elements, led by German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, that participated in the international antiwar conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal were critical. What Lenin hammered on was the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary tasks it demanded; that is, to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie and for socialism.
Another key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chances of revolution was the centrists with all their phrases about "peace campaigns" and "peace without annexations" and, as Lenin said, their real program: "peace with the social-chauvinists" (see "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution," 10 April 1917). So it was the call for a total break with the Second International and for the formation of a Third International that was the most controversial aspect of Lenin's program.
With Lenin's return to Petrograd in April of 1917, the Bolsheviks reaffirmed their intransigent opposition to the imperialist war now being waged by the new "democratic" capitalist government in Russia. Lenin denounced "revolutionary" defensism as "the worst enemy of the further progress and success of the Russian revolution." Certainly the Bolsheviks attempted to find a "bridge" to the defensist sentiments of the masses. Lenin worked hard to patiently explain the Bolshevik position to the working masses (honest defensists, he called them), who in reality had nothing to gain from the imperialist war, contrasting them with the bourgeoisie, intellectuals and social-patriots, who knew quite well that it is impossible to give up annexations without giving up the rule of capital.
However, there was a bigger question at issue here—dual power. The working masses had overthrown the tsar and created the Soviets: incipient organs of proletarian state power. So the proletariat had in hand a conquest worth defending. In Russia there was dual power and a class war was raging; the Bolsheviks had to have a tactical approach that took into account the very real possibility of the seizure of state power by the working class.
The Aftermath of the July Days
I'll take up where comrade Marlow left off. The period following the July Days was what Trotsky called "the month of the great slander." Lenin and Zinoviev went into hiding; Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev, Raskolnikov (a Bolshevik sailors' leader and author of Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917) and many others were jailed. In The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), Alexander Rabinowitch quotes a Left Menshevik who described the streets of Petrograd on July 5 as "a counterrevolutionary orgy" and said that it was one of the saddest days of his life (a very Menshevik comment). Nevertheless, it was the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionary (SR) soviet leaders who were leading the charge in the anti-Bolshevik repression. The Bolsheviks were also blamed for the collapse of the military offensive, a ridiculous charge.
The ever-present Sukhanov, a Left Menshevik often quoted by Trotsky in his History, couldn't understand why Lenin wouldn't present himself for a government inquiry into who was responsible for the July unrest. There was some sentiment to this effect in the Bolshevik Party too, but a look at the fate of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who were murdered in the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by the Social Democratic government in Berlin in 1919, makes clear exactly what Lenin was worried about. However, the repression following the July Days was shallow and temporary. In The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Rabinowitch has a chapter called "The Ineffectiveness of Repression." He writes: "Kerensky's flaming hard-line rhetoric notwithstanding, almost none of the major repressive measures adopted by the cabinet during this period either was fully implemented or successfully achieved its objectives."
Disarming the workers and the Petrograd garrison units loyal to the Bolsheviks wasn't very successful. Some army personnel were transferred to the front, but contrary to plan, the units were not dissolved. Although many Bolshevik leaders were arrested, many were released during the Kornilov days and none were ever brought to trial because the revolution intervened. In any case, there were still some 32,000 Bolsheviks loose in Petrograd. Raskolnikov says:
"The events of July 3-5 and the campaign of savage repression which followed them thoroughly exposed the counterrevolutionary and anti-democratic position of the bourgeois government of Kerensky. The Mensheviks and SRs, tangled in the nets of the coalition, discredited themselves finally and irreparably. "But our persecuted Party, surrounded by the aureole of martyrdom, emerged from these trials even better steeled than before, with its influence and the number of its supporters increased to an unprecedented degree."
—Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 (1925)
In his History, Trotsky comments that in October many local Bolshevik leaders would look at the workers they were leading, remember how they held up in July, and assign tasks accordingly. Lenin's April Theses gave the party a correct, principled orientation, and the July Days and their aftermath steeled the party, but neither of these resolved the disagreements among the party tops, which reached their sharpest expression during the most decisive moment of the revolution—in the days of October.
Kornilov's Attempted Coup
The Kornilov events signaled an abrupt shift in the situation to the benefit of the Bolsheviks and the working class. Kornilov: the man with the heart of a lion and the brains of a sheep. Kornilov had been a monarchist of the "Black Hundred" (pogromist) type. Eisenstein's movie October, which is good despite its anti-Trotsky slander, depicts the previously dismantled statue of the tsar repeatedly leaping back into place during the Kornilov insurrection: a quite apt image. Kornilov was a monarchist, but Miliukov, the epitome of the liberal bourgeoisie, wanted some version of the monarchy, too. One thing that interested me in Trotsky's History was the two successive chapters titled "Kerensky's Plot" and "Kornilov's Insurrection." I guess the first time I read the book I didn't understand how much Kerensky was plotting with Kornilov. It was clear that, had the Bolsheviks not mobilized the workers, Kerensky would have just sat there paralyzed as Petrograd was invaded as part of a coup plot that Kerensky had originally thought was going to make him dictator. The Bolsheviks and the workers would have been slaughtered.
During the Kornilov events, Trotsky relates how sailors from the revolutionary Kronstadt garrison asked, "Isn't it time to arrest the government?" Trotsky's answer was: "No, not yet.... Use Kerensky as a gun-rest to shoot Kornilov. Afterward we will settle with Kerensky." The fact that the Kronstadt sailors now listened more carefully to the Bolsheviks than in the July Days showed the maturing of the workers' and soldiers' political understanding. Trotsky said the same thing in another way when he said that Kerensky and Kornilov were "two variants of one and the same danger...the one chronic and the other acute" and that you had to "ward off the acute danger first, in order afterwards to settle with the chronic one."
Trotsky makes some thought-provoking remarks when he talks about aspects of bonapartism in the Russian Revolution. He says that Kerensky was not the representative of the Soviets in the government like the SR leader Chernov or the Menshevik Tseretelli, but the living tie between the bourgeoisie and the democracy: the "personal incarnation of the Coalition itself." Kornilov was a different kind of bonapartist.
Meanwhile, Lenin was arguing against the right-wing deviation in the Bolshevik Party, which manifested itself in drawing closer to the Menshevik and SR soviet majority and, in part, to "defense of the fatherland." Lenin said: "Even now we must not support Kerensky's government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren't we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise" ("To the Central Committee of the RSDLP," 30 August 1917).
So here we see military defense of, but not political support to, the Provisional Government. In the same letter, Lenin explained how this was to be used like an effective united front: "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." Lenin continues: "It would be wrong to think that we have moved farther away from the task of the proletariat winning power. No. We have come very close to it, not directly, but from the side." Lenin kept the proletarian seizure of power in mind at all times.
By August 30, the Kornilov insurrection disintegrated: the railroad workers wouldn't move him, his troops were won over by Bolshevik agitators, workers tore up the train tracks, etc. Throughout this whole period all these right-wingers were always saying, "If only I had one good regiment!" Except that they never did. The Bolsheviks gained greatly from these events. In his 1922 memoir, Sukhanov spoke candidly about the role of theBolsheviks in the Soviet "Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution" which included SRs, Mensheviks, as well as Bolsheviks:
"At that time theirs [the Bolsheviks'] was the only organization that was large, welded together by elementary discipline, and united with the democratic rank-and-file of the capital. Without them the Military Revolutionary Committee was impotent; without them it could only have passed the time with makeshift proclamations and flabby speeches by orators who had long since lost all authority. With the Bolsheviks, however, the Military Revolutionary Committee had at its disposal the full power of all organized worker-soldier strength, of whatever kind."
—N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 7977(1955)
That's right: if you want to fight right-wing reaction you need Bolsheviks!
Kornilov's Defeat and the Rise of Bolshevism
Alexander Rabinowitch, sort of puzzled, says of Kerensky:
"One might have expected that at this point, having suffered so badly at the hands of the right and having witnessed the enormous power of the left, the prime minister would have taken pains to retain the support of the latter. Yet, obsessed more than ever by fear of the extreme left and still intent on somehow strengthening the war effort, Kerensky now behaved almost as if the Komilov affair had not happened.... Kerensky began laying plans to form an authoritarian government oriented toward law and order—a right-socialist-liberal coalition cabinet in which the influence of the Kadets would be stronger than ever."
—The Bolsheviks Come to Power
Rabinowitch thinks Kerensky was stupid, but what were Kerensky's choices? Lenin put it clearly when he said, "Kerensky is a Kornilovite; by sheer accident he has had a quarrel with Kornilov himself, but he remains in the most intimate alliance with other Kornilovites" ("Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks," September 1917). In any case, by this time the masses were fed up not only with Kornilov, the Kadets and Kerensky, coalitionism in general was discredited too.
Everything was shifting to the left, and the situation of the country was getting worse by the minute: famine was threatening, capitalists were deliberately sabotaging industry, soldiers were starving, Riga had been fairly deliberately abandoned to German imperialism and Petrograd was threatened. Even the Menshevik and SR compromisers were saying that a coalition with the Kadets was no longer thinkable. Of course, the Kadets hadn't changed any, so why had it been thinkable before?
Lenin had withdrawn the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" in the aftermath of the July Days as Bolsheviks were being hounded and jailed, not least by the Menshevik and SR soviet majority. He now began to think it was necessary to look to the factory committees, instead of the Soviets, as the organs of workers power. But between September 1 and 3 he wrote "On Compromises." Seeing the Soviets revitalized by the struggle against Kornilov and the Menshevik and SR compromisers at least talking about "no coalition," he offered this compromise to them:
"The compromise on our part is our return to the pre-July demand of all power to the Soviets and a government of S.R.s and Mensheviks responsible to the Soviets.
"Now, and only now, perhaps during only a few days or a week or two, such a government could be set up and consolidated in a perfectly peaceful way....
"The Bolsheviks, without making any claim to participate in the government (which is impossible for the internationalists unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants has been realised), would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer of power to the proletariat and the poor peasants and from employing revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand."
Instead, with new elections to the Soviets and full freedom of propaganda the Bolsheviks would peaceably fight for their ideas. Not surprisingly, the Menshevik and SR compromisers made clear that they were not up for this, which was an important lesson for some Bolsheviks and many workers. The slogan "All Power to the Soviets" was again suspended, but in the next few days the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and, following that, in a number of other Soviets also. The slogan therefore received a new meaning: all power to the Bolshevik Soviets. So now the Soviets really represented the interests of the working class, as the proletariat was becoming not merely a class in itself, but a class for itself. In this situation the slogan had decisively ceased to be a slogan of peaceful development. The party was launched on the road of armed insurrection through the Soviets and in the name of the Soviets.
Lenin's Struggles with the Central Committee
The seizure of power was clearly on the order of the day, or I should say, it should have been on the order of the day. From mid-September onwards, Lenin began pounding away at this: that the Bolsheviks should get on with it and do it! In "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power," written between September 12 and 14, Lenin says: "The point is to make the task clear to the Party. The present task must be an armed uprising in Petrograd and Moscow (with its region), the seizing of power and the overthrow of the government. We must consider how to agitate for this without expressly saying as much in the press."
Let me touch on other things before I get into the political debates over the seizure of power. The April Theses called for a break with the centrists of Zimmerwald and the formation of a Third International. This was not accepted at the April Bolshevik Party conference, where Lenin cast the only vote against participation in a projected Zimmerwald antiwar conference in May. In "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution," he wrote: "It is not as yet known in Russia that the Zimmerwald majority are nothing but Kautskyites." Lenin went on: "The Zimmerwald bog can no longer be tolerated. We must not, for the sake of the Zimmerwald 'Kautskyites,' continue the semi-alliance with the chauvinist International of the Plekhanovs and Scheidemanns."
In May the Bolshevik Central Committee passed a motion that they would walk out of Zimmerwald if the Zimmerwaldists called for any discussion with Second International social-patriots. This battle continued; in August Lenin was denouncing Kamenev for speaking out in public in favor of going to a proposed Stockholm antiwar conference, which was to be a nasty melange of Russian compromisers, Kautskyites and outright social-patriots. This demonstrated that everything Lenin said as to why they should get out of Zimmerwald was true. Trotsky said the road to Stockholm was the road to the Second International. It is important to remember that in the very heat of the struggle, Lenin did not for a single moment forget the task of creating a new Communist International. It wasn't until after the October Revolution that the Third International was founded.
Let me talk a little about the Democratic Conference, which went on from September 14-22, and the Pre-Parliament that followed on October 7. I won't go into all the ins and outs of the Democratic Conference, since it's kind of boring. This was a totally rigged conference in which the Mensheviks and SRs saw to it that conservative and outright bourgeois forces were preponderant. Through the channel of the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament, the political awareness of the masses was to be directed away from the Soviets, as "temporary" and dying institutions, to the Constituent Assembly and a bourgeois republic. Lenin was still in hiding, chafing at the refusal of the Bolshevik Central Committee to get on with the insurrection. In his spare time he was writing The State and Revolution, which he made Kamenev promise to complete and print if he were to be assassinated.
Just as the Democratic Conference closed, Lenin wrote for the Bolshevik newspaper an article referring to it as a "hideous fraud" and a "pigsty" and comparing it to the Duma (Russian parliament under the tsar). The second part of Lenin's article took on the errors of the Bolsheviks and argued that when the nature of the conference became clear, the Bolsheviks should have walked out in protest. In a comradely but direct way, the article specifically takes up Kamenev and Zinoviev, their enthusiasm for the conference and their weak speeches. Lenin stated that 99 percent of the Bolshevik delegation should have left the Democratic Conference and gone to the factories and barracks to discuss with the masses the lessons of this farcical conference and the rottenness of the Menshevik and SR compromisers. It is revealing that although Lenin wanted this article, titled "Heroes of Fraud and the Mistakes of the Bolsheviks," to be published in the Bolshevik paper, it was censored by the Editorial Board so that it was only called "Heroes of Fraud," and all direct criticisms of the Bolsheviks were edited out. We can assume Lenin was furious and worried.
Within a few days, Lenin had concluded that the Bolsheviks never should have gone to the Democratic Conference and was arguing furiously for a boycott of the upcoming Pre-Parliament, as was Trotsky. They were not immediately successful. The majority of the large fraction who had gone to the Democratic Conference was in favor of going to the Pre-Parliament—you have to keep your eye on those parliamentary fractions, something that comrades used to remind me of when I ran for office. Lenin demanded to know: Who was the parliamentary fraction to decide these questions in any case? He was on the warpath, despite the comparatively narrow scope of the question, because it was another attempt by the rightist leaders in the party to turn the party onto the road of "completing the democratic revolution." In reality the quarrel revived the April disagreements and initiated the disagreements of October. Actually, as comrade George Foster has pointed out, the differences with Kamenev and Stalin went back to 1912.
Toward the Proletarian Conquest of Power
The question was whether the party should accommodate its tasks to the development of a bourgeois republic, or set itself the goal of the conquest of power by the proletariat. The deeper one went into the rank and file of the party, the more members were for the boycott of the Pre-Parliament. The Kiev citywide conference, calling for the boycott, stated: "There is no use wasting time in chattering and spreading illusions" (quoted in Trotsky's History). Thus, the party promptly corrected its leaders. In the end, the Bolsheviks only went to the Pre-Parliament to denounce the whole thing in a ten-minute-long speech by Trotsky and then walked out.
The Bolshevization of the masses was proceeding apace all over the country, as were the peasant seizures of land—a real peasant war in the countryside. This was a necessary component of the revolution. The Menshevik and SR compromisers were appalled, but consoled themselves with the thought that this was just the ignorant "dark masses." "Their Bolshevism," wrote Sukhanov scornfully, "was nothing but hatred for the coalition and longing for land and peace" (quoted in Trotsky's History). As though this were so little! Hatred for the coalition meant a desire to take power from the bourgeoisie. Land and peace was the colossal program which the peasant and soldier masses intended to carry out under the leadership of the workers.
The agitation for the Second Congress of Soviets was wildly popular with the masses because everyone knew it would have a Bolshevik majority. Consequently, it was unpopular with the Menshevik and SR compromisers, who kept trying to put off the congress. Like any form of representative government, the Soviets were not perfect; especially in times of rapid shifts in consciousness they lagged behind the masses. By September you see Lenin writing very specific articles like "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Combat It" in which he lays out the socialist tasks that the proletariat must take on, even with the understanding that Russia was a backward country: nationalization of the banks and workers control of industry. He wrote: "It is impossible.. .to go forward without advancing towards socialism, without taking steps towards it (steps conditioned and determined by the level of technology and culture: large-scale machine production cannot be 'introduced' in peasant agriculture nor abolished in the sugar industry)."
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 879 27 October 2006
The Russian Revolution of 1917
From the Kornilov Coup to the October Revolution
Part Two (Young Spartacus pages)
We print below, edited for publication, the second and concluding part of a class given by comrade Diana Coleman as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The first part appears in WV No. 877, 29 September.
Let me speak about the war again. In his History, Trotsky said sharply of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, which was rejecting revolutionary defeatism in March: "'Defeatism' was not invented by a hostile press under the protection of a censorship, it was proclaimed by Lenin in the formula: 'The defeat of Russia is the lesser evil.' The appearance of the first revolutionary regiment, and even the overthrow of the monarchy, did not alter the imperialist character of the war." From February to October, the Bolsheviks began to wield the peace demand more directly because the proletarian seizure of power, the necessary precondition for realizing that demand, was now on the agenda. Lenin never repudiated his scathing pre-1917 polemics against the social pacifists, like Kautsky, or those who conciliated them, like Trotsky at that time. These polemics were crucial to winning Trotsky to Bolshevism and genuine revolutionary internationalism. For Lenin, any demands for peace were now inseparable from the impending socialist revolution and the seizure of power.
Lenin gave an instructive talk on 14 May of 1917 appropriately titled "War and Revolution." He starts out talking about the need to understand the "class character of the war," i.e., what the war is waged for and what classes staged and directed it. He said:
"We Marxists do not belong to that category of people who are unqualified opponents of all war. We say: our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society.... But in the war to win that socialist system of society we are bound to encounter conditions under which the class struggle within each given nation may come up against a war between the different nations, a war conditioned by this very class struggle. Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility of revolutionary wars."
Lenin ridicules the declarations of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary (SR) compromisers for "peace without annexations" when they have ministers in the Provisional Government that is telling the army to take the offensive. He goes on to say:
"The Russian revolution has not altered the war, but it has created organizations which exist in no other country.... We have all over Russia a network of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies. Here is a revolution which has not said its last word yet. Here is a revolution which Western Europe, under similar conditions, has not known. Here are organizations of those classes which really have no need for annexations...."
Lenin is talking about dual power here. In ending this article he says:
"Nothing but a workers' revolution in several countries can defeat this war. The war is not a game, it is an appalling thing taking toll of millions of lives, and it is not to be ended easily.
"The soldiers at the front cannot tear the front away from the rest of the state and settle things their own way. The soldiers at the front are a part of the country. So long as the country is at war the front will suffer along with the rest.... Whether you will get a speedy peace or not depends on how the revolution will develop."
In this article and in many others you see Lenin's internationalism: "When power passes to the Soviets the capitalists will come out against us. Japan, France, Britain—the governments of all countries will be against us. The capitalists will be against, but the workers will be for us. That will be the end of the war which thecapitalists started." You also see him taking the situation of dual power into account and actually planning for what will happen after the Soviets seize power. There are a lot of articles where he ridicules the idea that peace conferences and peace resolutions can end interimperialist war and states that only the proletarian seizure of power can do that. Although the Bolsheviks certainly supported mass fraternization at the front, which Lenin called an "instinctive" response, the soldiers had to understand that this would not end the war.
I recommend the book Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917 by the Bolshevik sailors' leader F.F. Raskolnikov. It is a very lively and readable account of revolutionary Kronstadt and Bolshevik work in the army and navy. Trotsky talks about how sailors from Kronstadt toured the country with special mandates from the Kronstadt Soviet granting them free transport and the right to vote in, speak at and even convene local committee meetings. Raskolnikov describes one of the tours he went on to different ships in the active navy "which at that time had still not emerged from under the influence of 'compromiser' sentiments." In one place he unmasked a former editor of a "Black Hundreds" [pogromist] publication who had become the deputy chairman of a soviet as an SR. In another he spoke, somewhat nervously, to a ship's crew that had only a few months back passed a resolution calling for "war to the end," but was welcomed enthusiastically as he denounced the war, the government and the coalition with the bourgeoisie. On another ship a rightist officer threw his comrade off the deck. Elsewhere he spoke to a group of Bolshevik-minded Estonians through an interpreter. It is fun reading.
The Fall of Riga and "Defensism"
In Volume One of The History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky says of the liberal bourgeoisie: "In external appearance the war policy of liberalism remained aggressive-patriotic, annexationist, irreconcilable. In reality it was self-contradictory, treacherous, and rapidly becoming defeatist." Since the liberal bourgeoisie didn't think it could use the February Revolution to advance the war, they planned "to use the war against the revolution." Trotsky noted, "The concern of the moment was not to secure advantageous international conditions for bourgeois Russia, but to save the bourgeois regime itself, even at the price of Russia's further enfeeblement."
On August 20, German forces occupied the key Russian seaport of Riga. Baltic sailors had been fighting to protect the approaches to Petrograd, in their words, "not in the name of the treaties of our rulers with the allies... but in the name of the defense of the approaches to the hearth-fire of the revolution, Petrograd." Trotsky calls this "the deep contradiction in their position as vanguards of a revolution and involuntary participants in an imperialist war." These events tested the Bolsheviks' internationalism. They did not for a minute intend to share with the ruling groups the responsibility, before the Russian people and the workers of the world, for the war.
Fearing that defensive moods would turn into a defensist policy, Lenin wrote: "We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat.... Neither the capture of Riga nor the capture of Petrograd will make us defencists." Writing from prison, Trotsky said: "The fall of Riga is a cruel blow. The fall of Petersburg would be a misfortune. But the fall of the international policy of the Russian proletariat would be ruinous." In the first week of October, fears about a German attack on Petrograd again mounted sharply.
The Provisional Government began actively to plan to abandon Petrograd and set up the government in Moscow. Rabinowitch [The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976)] says cautiously that "there is no direct evidence that the Provisional Government ever seriously entertained the idea of surrendering Petrograd to the Germans without a fight," but he is at least honest enough to say why everybody thought exactly that. Rodzianko, the former head of the State Duma, said: "Petrograd appears threatened.... I say, to hell with Petrograd.... People fear our central institutions in Petrograd will be destroyed. To this, let me say that I should be glad if these institutions are destroyed because they have brought Russia nothing but grief." The workers and peasants, especially after Rodzianko's blunt confession, had no doubt that the government was getting ready to send them to school under German general Ludendorff. This echoes the "patriotism" of the French bourgeoisie in 1871, who begged Bismarck to come in and crush the Paris Commune.
Lenin was calling for insurrection now, not least because revolutionary Petrograd with its majority Bolshevik Soviet was being directly threatened with a bloodbath by German imperialism; a conspiracy was entered into by the Kerensky government and the Anglo-French imperialists to surrender Petrograd to the Germans, and in this way to suppress the revolution. Lenin called for the overthrow of the Kerensky government and the substitution of a workers' and peasants' government "to open the road to peace, to save Petrograd and the revolution, and to give the land to the peasants and power to the Soviets." The shift in Bolshevik propagandistic emphasis led Lenin to remark in 1918 that "we were defeatists at the time of the tsar, but at the time of Tsereteli and Chernov we were not defeatists." The Bolsheviks never abandoned a defeatist posture toward the Russian bourgeois government—they simply varied the tactical application because of the class war then raging in Russia.
The Revolutionary Crisis Matures
The Bolsheviks as an organization had to decide to proceed with the revolution. All but one of the copies of the letter that I referred to before, titled "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power," were burned by the majority of the Central Committee, who had been trying to keep Lenin's appeals from getting into the hands of the worker-Bolsheviks. Lenin, still in hiding, was raging and writing to everybody: Smilga who was a party leftist and president of the Regional Committee of the Soviets, Krupskaya in Petrograd who read his letters out to the Vyborg District Committee. By the time Lenin wrote "The Crisis Has Matured" on September 29, he was tendering his resignation from the Central Committee to free his hands to go to the party membership. One worker from the Vyborg District Committee said: "We got a letter from Ilych for delivery to the Central Committee.... We read the letter and gasped. It seems that Lenin had long ago put before the Central Committee the question of insurrection. We raised a row. We began to bring pressure on them."
Early in October—and now over the head of the Bolshevik Central Committee—Lenin wrote directly to the Petrograd and Moscow Committees: "Delay is criminal. To wait for the Congress of Soviets would be...a disgraceful game of formalities, and a betrayal of the revolution." He noted that the masses could just as easily become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks as they had with other parties, if the Bolsheviks failed to act. As laid out in Trotsky's Lessons of October, the basic position of the rightists in the party, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, was that the party would be risking everything in an armed insurrection, the outcome of which was extremely dubious, when they could be winning "a third and even more of the seats in the Constituent Assembly." This purely parliamentary, social-democratic course was thinly camouflaged by their assertion that, of course, the Soviets were important and that dual power would continue for an unlimited length of time. No, that was not possible; there would have been another Kornilov or perhaps he would have returned.
Of course, if Kamenev and Zinoviev's policy had won, we would be hearing today about the massive forces arrayed against the revolution and how it was impossible anyhow. Like so many defeats, from Germany and China in the 1920s to Spain in the 1930s, which occurred because of the lack of a vanguard party with a hardened revolutionary leadership, had the Bolsheviks failed to lead the October Revolution the defeat would all be blamed on the objective situation and the backwardness of the masses. This is what I call the Stalinist theory of the crisis of followers, where they say, "We tried to lead you, but you wouldn't follow."
The first showdown in the Bolshevik leadership over the insurrection was the famous meeting on October 10 where the insurrection was voted up ten votes to two—Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against. The resolution, as is typical of Lenin, starts with the international situation, that is, the ripening of world revolution; the insurrection in Russia is regarded only as a link in the general chain. The idea of having socialism in one country was not in anyone's mind then, even Stalin's.
Rabinowitch tells a funny story about the October 10 meeting:
"This was to be Lenin's first direct confrontation with the Central Committee since his return from Finland; it had been carefully organized by Sverdlov at Lenin's behest. By an ironic twist of fate the gathering was to be held in the apartment of the left Menshevik Sukhanov, that unsurpassed chronicler of the revolution who had somehow managed to turn up at almost every important political meeting in Petrograd since the February revolution. But on this occasion Sukhanov was not in attendance. His wife, Galina Flakserman, a Bolshevik activist since 1905... once had offered Sverdlov the use of the Sukhanov flat, should the need arise.... For her part, Flakserman insured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on this historic night. "The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try to make it all the way back home tonight,' she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning."
Talk about a strained personal relationship!
The resolution of October 10 was immensely important. It promptly put the genuine advocates of insurrection on the firm ground of the party majority. The workers were arming, drilling, setting up the Red Guards. Workers at the weapons factories were funneling weapons directly to the workers. But the October 10 meeting certainly did not eliminate the differences in the leadership. There was another meeting on October 16, where Lenin again argued for insurrection and Kamenev and Zinoviev again voted against it. The next day, Kamenev and Zinoviev submitted a public statement to Maxim Gorky's newspaper opposing the insurrection, which was published on October 18. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion from the party. This didn't happen because the insurrection intervened. Stalin tried to paper over the differences in the Bolshevik newspaper, alibiing Kamenev and Zinoviev, keeping his options open in case the insurrection failed.
The Party, the Soviets and the Conquest of Power
Kamenev and Zinoviev's differences with Lenin were principled questions: seize state power or not. You can't get more fundamental than that. Trotsky had tactical differences with Lenin: should the insurrection be run through the soviet or directly through the party? Trotsky speaks about the importance of soviet legality to the masses, and the usefulness of appearing to be defending the Soviets. But Trotsky had no naive hopes that the Congress of Soviets itself could settle the question of power. You can see in Trotsky's chapter "The Art of Insurrection" that by 1917 he had finally understood Lenin on the party question. He wrote: "In order to conquer the power, the proletariat needs more than a spontaneous insurrection. It needs a suitable organization, it needs a plan; it needs a conspiracy. Such is the Leninist view of this question." He goes on:
"The organization by means of which the proletariat can both overthrow the old power and replace it, is the Soviets....
"However, the Soviets by themselves do not settle the question. They may serve different goals according to the program and leadership. The Soviets receive their program from the party.... The problem of conquering the power can be solved only by a definite combination of party with Soviets—or with other mass organizations more or less equivalent to Soviets."
The government was planning to send the Petrograd garrison to the front. There was total uproar and refusal from the Petrograd regiments. It was at this point in early October that the Menshevik and SR compromisers put up a resolution in the Petrograd Soviet, which had a Bolshevik majority. Rabinowitch describes this:
"The Menshevik Mark Broido put before the deputies a joint Menshevik-SR resolution which, while calling on garrison soldiers to begin preparations for movement to the front, at the same time sought to calm them by providing for the creation of a special committee to evaluate defense needs and to prepare military defense plans that would inspire popular confidence. At bottom, the intent of the resolution was to facilitate cooperation between the Petrograd Soviet and the government in the interest of the war effort."
Boy, were they surprised when the Bolsheviks eagerly seized on this proposal, resulting in the formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee that organized the insurrection! In an interesting passage in the History, Trotsky writes:
"The formulae were all-inclusive and at the same time ambiguous: they almost all balanced on a fine line between defense of the capital and armed insurrection. However, these two tasks, heretofore mutually exclusive, were now in actual fact growing into one. Having seized the power, the Soviet would be compelled to undertake the military defense of Petrograd. The element of defense-camouflage was not therefore violently dragged in, but flowed to some extent from the conditions preceding the insurrection."
The Military Revolutionary Committee had a Left SR as its formal head, but proceeded in a Bolshevik fashion with Trotsky as its principal political leader. Basically, in what one might call a "cold insurrection," the Bolshevik-led Soviet took control of the armed bodies of men out of the hands of the Provisional Government. By October 13, the Soldiers' Section of the Petrograd Soviet voted to transfer military authority from Headquarters to the Military Revolutionary Committee. In other words, the Soviet now had the state power in all but name. By October 21 or 22 the Military Revolutionary Committee told the military high command bluntlythat they were not in charge any more. Rabinowitch says that's insurrection right there. The troops were ready, the Red Guards were ready.
On October 24, Kerensky fairly stupidly provided the spark by trying to shut down the Bolshevik newspaper. The Military Revolutionary Committee sent in a detachment to reopen the newspaper and began seizing government institutions and communication centers. Lenin was still worried. He wrote:
"I am writing these lines on the evening of the 24th....
"With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people....
"Who must take power?
"That is not important at present. Let the Revolutionary Military Committee do it, or 'some other institution'...."
Lenin became so agitated that he went in disguise to the Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny, where the Petrograd Soviet was located, to see what was happening. Even a day later, they still hadn't taken the Winter Palace (where the Provisional Government was based) due to a very over-elaborate plan. One Bolshevik remembered that Lenin "paced around a small room at Smolny like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost: it remained the last gate on the road to workers' power. V. I. scolded...he screamed.. .he was ready to shoot us." Kerensky escaped in the safety of a diplomatic vehicle flying the American flag. You will be interested to know that Kerensky eventually wound up here in the U.S., home to gusanos of all varieties, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. There he wrote and lectured about how to fight communism—something which he hadn't done too well at in life.
The Birth of the Soviet Workers State
When the Second Congress of the Soviets opened, the cruiser Aurora was still firing on the Winter Palace. In response to the uprising and seizure of power, now openly proclaimed by the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the congress, some proclaiming that they were going with the majority of the City Duma deputies to the Winter Palace to die with the Provisional Government. They left deluged by shouts of "lackeys of the bourgeoisie" and "good riddance." Only the Left SRs and a few remnants of left menshevism stayed. The compromisers wanted nothing to do with the workers state. Always up for a coalition with the bourgeoisie, they wanted no coalition with the Bolsheviks.
Lenin got up and opened his speech with the famous sentence: "We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order." The three-point agenda was end the war, give land to the peasants and establish a socialist dictatorship. The peace decree promised an end to secret diplomacy and proposed to the governments and peoples of the warring countries immediate negotiations to secure a democratic peace without annexations and without indemnities. The land decree, borrowed in its essentials from the agrarian program of the Left SRs, abolished private property in land and provided for the transfer of all private and church estates to land committees and Soviets of peasants' deputies for distribution to the peasantry according to need. A new revolutionary government of People's Commissars, at first made up exclusively of Bolsheviks, was appointed, which over the next period proceeded with nationalizing the banks, restarting industry and laying the foundations of the new soviet state.
Very importantly, they worked on convening the Third (Communist) International as the necessary instrumentality to achieve world socialist revolution. They fought with all possible means and determination to spread the revolution to the advanced industrial countries of Europe. Read Victor G.'s revealing letter to WV (see "On Lenin's Address to the Petrograd Soviet," ffFNo. 861, 6 January) about how the account of Lenin's speech to the Petrograd Soviet that appears in the Collected Works is at variance with other newspaper accounts of the time that highlighted Lenin's points on the international extension of the revolution.
The Spectre of "Democratic" Counterrevolution
Let me touch briefly on two final debates: the question of a broad socialist coalition and the Constituent Assembly. On the first question, historian Rabinowitch echoes people like Sukhanov, who at the time thought it was terrible that the Bolsheviks didn't invite into the government the compromiser parties: the Mensheviks and the Right SRs. Not surprisingly, arguments in favor of forming a government in coalition with the Menshevik and SR compromisers were advanced within the Bolshevik Party by Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had opposed the insurrection in the first place, as well as by some others. Sukhanov bemoans the fact that by walking out of the congress the Mensheviks and the Menshevik-Internationalists "gave the Bolsheviks with our own hands a monopoly of the Soviet, of the masses, and of the revolution."
In principle the Bolsheviks were not opposed to a coalition. They agreed to a coalition with any party if it would accept soviet constitutionalism, which meant accepting the reality of the October insurrection and the fact that the Soviets had a Bolshevik majority and they would therefore form the majority of the government. But that was a big "if." At least Rabinowitch is honest enough to tell you what the problem with this was: not only had the Mensheviks and SRs walked out of the soviet but:
"Initially fierce resistance to the Bolshevik regime coalesced around the so-called All-Russian Committee for the Salvation of the Country and the Revolution organized on October 26, primarily by the Mensheviks and SRs in the Petrograd City Duma....
"Leaders of the Committee for Salvation also drew up plans to coordinate an uprising in Petrograd with the entry into the capital of Krasnov's cossacks, expected momentarily."
They were unsuccessful, of course, but they certainly didn't waste a minute before organizing counterrevolution, not one minute. Let me state as a general rule, it is a bad idea to seek a coalition with those who are actively trying to overthrow the workers state and kill you all.
Trotsky states that what was in question here was "the liquidation of October—no more, no less" by diverting the revolution back into the channel of a bourgeois regime. Since the Bolshevik opposition had gone public with this, Lenin finally denounced them publicly as waverers and doubters: "Shame on all the faint¬hearted...on all those who allowed themselves to be intimidated by the bourgeoisie or who have succumbed to the outcries of their direct and indirect supporters!" These conciliators backed down, especially as it became clear that there was no one to form a coalition with. The most acute party crisis had been overcome. A couple of Left SRs finally did join the government—at least until the Soviet government signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
Finally, I want to address the Constituent Assembly. I was reassured to find out that a new youth comrade in the Bay Area who wanted to talk about the Constituent Assembly wasn't worried about why the Bolsheviks dispersed it. He wanted to know why they ever called for it! A better impulse, I think. We wrote a good article on constituent assemblies titled "Why a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly?" (WV No. 221, 15 December 1978). It makes the point that in backward countries under autocratic or military bonapartist rule, the struggle for a sovereign constituent assembly based on universal suffrage can in certain circumstances be key in uniting the toiling masses behind the proletarian vanguard. It was based on such an understanding that the Bolsheviks fought throughout the spring and summer of 1917 for elections to a constituent assembly at a time when the government refused to hold them out of fear that this would lead to a peasant uprising. This stage had passed with the workers seizing state power, but the Bolsheviks didn't simply call off the elections to the Constituent Assembly because a pro-soviet majority might well have emerged in the wake of the peasant land seizures. That would have been useful in reinforcing the authority of the Soviets among the peasants in the upcoming civil war.
However, this was not to be. Between the old election lists and the way parliamentary elections gave the petty-bourgeoisie the overwhelming weight of the vote, the SRs, Kadets and Mensheviks won the majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly. It was a retrograde force and could become a focus for bourgeois restorationist forces. So the Bolsheviks wisely demanded that the Constituent Assembly recognize the victorious soviet power as its first act. Only when they refused to do so did the Soviet Executive Committee decree the dissolution of the assembly. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly closes this chapter of the history of the Russian Revolution and the history of the Bolshevik Party. The differences revolved around the fundamental questions: should we struggle for power, can we assume power? Through struggle, internal and external, they resolved both these questions in the affirmative.
In conclusion, the October Revolution remains our compass. It demonstrates how a revolutionary party can win the working masses away from the reformist class traitors and lead them to power. To quote Trotsky: "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer."
