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
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
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
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 Russia 's participation in WWI somewhere between that of France (a full-blown imperialist power) and China
"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."
When it came to the
Germans, things went rather badly for Russia 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
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 assortedcomprador 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."
When it came to the
Germans, things went rather badly for Russia 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
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
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 Russia
"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. Lenm,
"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
"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
[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 Russia
"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 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 Russia
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 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 Moscow
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 Paris
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Stockholm
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
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
[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
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 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
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
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
On August 20, German
forces occupied the key Russian seaport of Riga 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 Petersburg Petrograd
again mounted sharply.
The Provisional Government began actively
to plan to abandon Petrograd and set up the government in Moscow 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 Bismarck
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
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
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 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 Winter Palace 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.
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 Winter Palace
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
"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 fainthearted...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."
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