''He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan. When Lenin reduced all the problems of the revolution to one – ‘patiently explain’ - that meant it was necessary to bring the consciousness of the masses into correspondence with that situation into which the historic process had driven them".
Bolshevism turns to Menshevism
“On the 3rd of April Lenin arrived in Petrograd from abroad. Only from that moment does the Bolshevik Party begin to speak out loud, and, what is more important, with its own voice. For Bolshevism the first months of the revolution had been a period of bewilderment and vacillation” (49).
The leading organisations of the Bolshevik Party had not put forward any clear opposition to the Provisional Government. Indeed at the session of the E.C. on March 1st to discuss the details of the handing over of power to the bourgeoisie, not one voice was raised against the actual giving up of power itself. This when 11 of the 39 E.C. members were Bolshevik supporters, including 3 Central Committee (C.C.) members! Similarly, at the meeting of the full Soviet to ratify the E.C.’s decision on March 2nd, only 19 out of the 400 delegates present voted against the transfer of power to the Provisional Government when there were already 40 in the Bolshevik faction.
The Bolshevik C.C. did adopt a resolution on March 4th talking of the need to move towards the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, but these were really just academic points that were not backed up with any directives for action. In reality, the leadership submitted to the position of the Soviet majority.
As Trotsky had predicted in 1909, now, after an initial revolutionary victory, the anti-revolutionary side of the old Bolshevik formula was being revealed. The first issue of the new Bolshevik newspaper Pravda (‘Truth’) on March 5th declared, ‘The fundamental problem is to establish a democratic republic’. In an instruction to the workers’ deputies, the Moscow Committee announced: ‘The proletariat aims to achieve freedom for the struggle for socialism, its ultimate goal'. Trotsky adds: “This traditional reference to the ‘ultimate goal’ sufficiently emphasises the historic distance from socialism. Farther than this nobody ventured. The fear to go beyond the boundaries of a democratic revolution dictated a policy of waiting, of accommodation, and of actual retreat before the Compromisers” (50).
Trotsky continues: “The Bolshevik staff in Russia continued to stand by the old formula and regarded the February revolution, notwithstanding its obvious establishment of two incompatible regimes, merely as the first stage of a bourgeois revolution. All the leading Bolsheviks - not one exception is known to us - considered that the democratic dictatorship still lay in the future. After this Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie ‘exhausts itself’, then a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants will be established as a forerunner of the bourgeois parliamentary regime. This was a completely erroneous perspective. The regime which issued from the February revolution was not preparing a democratic dictatorship, but was a living and exhaustive proof that such a dictatorship was impossible” (51).
Many of the left-Bolsheviks were opposed to the leadership's position and, like the Vyborg committee, had at first campaigned amongst the workers and soldiers for the seizure of power by the soviets. This theoretically correct idea also matched the mood of many workers in the days after the revolution. However, thanks to the opposition of the leadership, the agitation was halted. A great opportunity was lost and the Bolshevik influence on the masses, magnified during the February days, declined, to be replaced by that of the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries.
“The left-Bolsheviks, especially the workers, tried with all their force to break through this quarantine. But they did not know how to refute the premise about the bourgeois character of the revolution and the danger of an isolation of the proletariat. They submitted, gritting their teeth, to the directions of the leaders” (52).
Once the right-wing Bolshevik Kamenev and the energetic, but theoretically primitive, Stalin returned from exile in mid-March, things grew even worse. They took control over first the party leadership and then the editorial board of 'Pravda’. Stalin, in particular, had no time for any theoretical camouflage and pushed the position of the leadership to its logical practical conclusions, even urging unity with the Mensheviks, saying “we will live down petty disagreements within the party”.
As Trotsky explains, Lenin had already warned in advance about such a casual sweeping aside of the struggle between Marxism and left-reformism. He had written to Petrograd in September 1916 saying: “Conciliationism ... is the worst thing for the workers’ party in Russia, not only idiotism, but ruin to the party. We can rely only on those who have understood the whole deceit involved in the idea of unity and the whole necessity of a split with ... Cheidze & Co. in Russia” (53).
Stalin became the Bolshevik representative on the Soviet E.C., where, without any independent theoretical position, he became more and more under the influence of the alien ideas of the petty-bourgeois Compromisers. In turn, Stalin, together with Kamenev, influenced the Bolsheviks’ thinking, convincing them to support many Menshevik resolutions. In the provinces the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks entered into united organisations, with resolutions in many soviets being adopted unanimously.
At the All-Russian Soviet Conference on March 29th the official resolution prepared by Dan denying the existence of the dual power was supported by the Bolshevik faction, notwithstanding the fact that many conference delegates had made speeches denouncing Bolshevik excesses!
Under its new editorship of Stalin, Kamenev and another new arrival, Muranov, Pravda declared in an announcement of its new political line that the Bolsheviks would support the Provisional Government “in so far as it struggles against reaction or counter-revolution'' (54).
Stalin made the same political errors in a speech to the Bolshevik party conference at the end of March: “The power has been divided between two organs of which neither one possesses full power. The roles have been divided ... the Soviet is the revolutionary leader of the insurrectionary people; an organ controlling the Provisional Government. And the Provisional Government has in fact taken the role of fortifier of the conquests of the revolutionary people. It is not to our advantage at present to force events, hastening the process of repelling the bourgeois layers, who will in the future inevitably withdraw from us” (55).
These words are filled with the spirit of Menshevism, of building alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie, of a unity of aims of Soviet and Provisional Government. In fact Stalin was forced to withdraw his formula of conditional support to the bourgeois Government after the official spokesperson of the Soviet, Steklov, unintentionally revealed to the Bolshevik Conference the true desires of the Provisional Government in “fortifying” the revolution - leaning towards the monarchy, protecting counter-revolutionaries, hoping for annexations after the war and opposing social reforms! Of course “Although he eliminated the open mention of support, Stalin did not eliminate support” (56) .
In a complete abandonment of Lenin’s revolutionary ‘defeatist’ position on the war, and to the delight of the bourgeoisie and Compromisers alike, the new Pravda editors announced: ''While the German army obeys its emperor, the Russian soldier must ‘stand firmly at his post answering 'bullet with bullet and shell with shell’ … ‘Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with war’. Our slogan is pressure upon the Provisional Government with the aim of compelling it … to make an attempt to induce all the warring countries to open immediate negotiations … and until then every man remains at his fighting post’ !” (57).
This was just the same excuse that the ‘defencists’ in the Soviet and the ‘socialist’ leaders throughout Europe were using to justify their support for the imperialist war. Shliapnikov later recalled that: “When that number of Pravda was received in the factories it produced a complete bewilderment among the members of the party and its sympathisers, and a sarcastic satisfaction among its enemies. The indignation in the party locals was enormous, and when the proletarians found out that Pravda had been seized by three former editors arriving from Siberia they demanded their expulsion from the party” (58).
Trotsky adds that:“Pravda was soon compelled to print a sharp protest from the Vyborg district: ‘If the paper does not want to lose the confidence of the workers, it must and will bring the light of revolutionary consciousness, no matter how painful it may be, to the bourgeois owls’. These protests from below compelled the editors to become more cautious in their expressions, but did not change their policy. Even the first article of Lenin [the 'Letters from Afar’] which got there from abroad passed by the minds of the editors” (59).
The whole mass of workers and soldiers were being miseducated by the Bolshevik leadership, putting quite unnecessary obstacles in the way of the revolution.
Lenin's 'Letters from Afar’
Throughout the war, Lenin had been looking on in frustration at the growing revolutionary movement in Russia from his enforced exile in Zurich. The British government had refused to give Lenin, Zinoviev and the other Bolshevik exiles the visa they required to travel to Russia.
Once news of the February revolution reached Lenin in Switzerland, he tried desperately to think of a workable scheme to enable him to travel secretly to Petrograd. Meanwhile Lenin scoured the bourgeois press for news of the revolution and attempted to make contacts with the Russian Bolsheviks from Zurich.
On March 6th Lenin sent a telegram to Petrograd which clearly set out the main elements of a revolutionary policy which the party so desperately needed at that time: “Our tactic; absolute lack of confidence; no support to the new government; suspect Kerensky especially; arming of proletariat the sole guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd Duma; no rapprochement with other parties” (60). The only misjudgement was his call for elections to the Duma instead of the Soviet, an understandable error considering Lenin's fragmentary knowledge of the exact political situation.
His ‘Letters from Afar’, largely ignored by Pravda's editors, set out a more detailed analysis. The first letter, written on March 7th, argued: “That the revolution succeeded so quickly ... is only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situation absolutely contrary political and social strivings have merged. Namely, the conspiracy of the Anglo-French imperialists, who impelled Miliukov, Guchkov & Co. to seize power for the purpose of continuing the imperialist war. On the other hand, there was a profound proletarian and mass movement of a revolutionary character ... for bread, for peace, for real freedom” (61).
Lenin continues: “He who says that the workers must support the government in the interests of the struggle against czarist reaction ... is a traitor to the workers, a traitor to the cause of the proletariat, to the cause of peace and freedom. For the only guarantee of freedom and of the complete destruction of czarism lies in arming the proletariat, in strengthening, extending and developing the role, significance and power of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. The government ... of the Guchkovs and Miliukovs ... cannot give the people either peace, bread or freedom. It cannot give peace because it is a war government ... bound hand and foot by Anglo-French imperialist capital. It cannot give bread because it is a bourgeois government. But the people ... will learn ... that there is bread and that it can be obtained, but only by methods that do not respect the sanctity of capital and landownership. It cannot give freedom because it is a landlord and capitalist government which fears the people and has already begun to strike a bargain with the Romanov dynasty” (62).
At this stage, Lenin probably did not suspect that these accusations of treachery could be directed at his own party's leadership. However, by March 17th, he had begun to fear that the ease with which the workers were being deceived into supporting the war might be in part due to Bolshevik errors. He wrote in alarm: “Our party would disgrace itself for ever, 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” (63).
Lenin's arrival and the ‘April theses’
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| Statue outside Finland station 2012 |
He knew full well of the huge political difficulties such a deal would cause, leaving Lenin open to the accusation that he was a German ‘agent’. But he had no choice but to travel through Germany in a ‘sealed train’ to Petrograd, arriving there on April 3rd.
Lenin's first impressions of the welcoming ceremony arranged for him must have confirmed his worst suspicions. He was handed a large bouquet of flowers, given a ‘speech of greeting’ by Cheidze spelling out the official Soviet ‘line’ on the revolution, and then even had to listen to a naval officer making a speech suggesting Lenin might want to become a member of the Provisional Government!
Lenin lost no opportunity to get straight to the point. He turned away from Cheidze to face the assembled crowd and spoke: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers, I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army. The Russian revolution achieved by you has opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!” (64).
The several thousand workers and soldiers who had come to welcome Lenin may not have appreciated fully the political turnaround that Lenin was determined to begin from that moment. They were simply happy to parade Lenin through the streets of Petrograd to the Bolshevik headquarters.
On arriving at his party's centre, Lenin expanded his brief reply at the station into a two-hour speech addressed directly to the leading Bolshevik cadres in Petrograd. His exact words went unrecorded but many witnesses recall the astonishment with which Lenin's ideas were met. As Trotsky says: “The fundamental impression made by Lenin's speech even among the nearest to him was one of fright. All the accepted formulas ... were exploded one after another before the eyes of that audience” (65).
The political content of most of that speech can be read in the so-called ‘April Theses’ which Lenin presented on April 4th, developing them in a speech to the Bolshevik party conference which was still going on in Petrograd. The main points were as follows:
1) That the war cannot be supported as one ‘in defence of the revolution’ while the capitalists remain in power. ''In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism ... it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain ... that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace” (66a).
2) “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution – which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry” (66b).
3) “No support for the Provisional government” (66c). In particular, Lenin wanted an end to the hypocritical appeals to this capitalist government to stop behaving like greedy capitalists!
4) To explain that only the Soviets can provide a revolutionary government and that while the Bolsheviks remain in a minority they must expose the Compromisers and patiently explain to the masses the errors of their tactics.
5) Looking to a new kind of state, Lenin called for the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people; for all officials to be elected, subject to immediate recall and to receive only the average wage of a worker; and “not a parliamentary republic - to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies would be a retrograde step - but a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies throughout the country from top to bottom” (66d).
6) For the nationalisation of the land to be placed under control of the Soviets.
7) For the setting-up of a single national bank under Soviet control.
8) That socialism could not be built immediately but that social production and distribution could immediately be put under Soviet control.
9) For the Party Programme to be changed, particularly as regards the war, the state and the party’s name.
10) For the setting-up of a new ‘Communist’ International, to break with the so-called ‘socialist’ traitors.
Lenin's approach shifted the whole debate from one of finding ‘objective’ excuses for supporting the bourgeoisie to subjective reasons as to why the proletariat did not seize power. As Lenin said in his speech: “The reason is that the proletariat was not sufficiently organised. The material force was in the hands of the proletariat, but the bourgeoisie was conscious and ready. That is the monstrous fact … A dictatorship of the proletariat exists, but nobody knows what to do with it” (67).
Lenin’s speech bewildered his friends and delighted his enemies. As the Social Revolutionary Zenzinov recalls: ''His programme at that time was met not so much with indignation, as with ridicule. It seemed to everybody so absurd and fantastic. Even his party comrades turned away in embarrassment from him” (68).
The old Bolsheviks thought Lenin was out of touch, and his theses found not one single open supporter beyond their author at first. Kamenev, writing in Pravda on April 8th stated: “As for the 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” (69).
Yet Lenin was not afraid to be in a minority. As he said in his speech on April 4th: “Even our Bolsheviks show confidence in the government. Only the fumes of the revolution can explain that. That is the death of socialism. If that's your position, our ways part. I prefer to remain in the minority” (70).
Lenin understood that only his policy could succeed; a policy to make the masses, and firstly his own Party, conscious of the needs of the new and unexpected post-revolutionary situation.
Lenin’s old formula outlives itself
Paradoxically, the main cause of Lenin’s isolation was the ‘old’ Bolsheviks’ belief in Lenin’s own slogan of the “Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry”. The Party had always argued that only the unity of these two classes could guarantee that the bourgeois revolution would sweep away the old feudal refuse of monarchy and landlords. In the words of one of the older leaders, Olminsky: “The coming revolution must be only a bourgeois revolution. That was an obligatory premise for every member of the party ... right up to the February revolution of 1917, and even some time after'' (71).
In this way Lenin’s opponents argued that since the bourgeois tasks such as the confiscation of the landed estates had not yet been carried out, there was no place for talk of socialism, or a Paris Commune-style proletarian state power. As the old worker-Bolshevik Tomsky argued: “The democratic dictatorship is our foundation stone. We ought to organise the power of the proletariat and the peasants, and we ought to distinguish this from the Commune, since that means the power of the proletariat alone” (72).
Lenin countered these arguments in his ‘Letters on Tactics’. Quoting Marx and Engels he pointed out: “Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action”, meaning that any formula cannot simply be repeated as if by rote but can only be used as a general outline to be modified in the light of events. A complex and unforeseen situation had arisen where ''reality shows us both the passing of power into the hands of the bourgeoisie ... and, side by side with the real government, the existence of a parallel government which represents the 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ ” (73).
In a direct response to Kamenev's criticism in Pravda, Lenin asks: “Is this reality covered by Comrade Kamenev's old-Bolshevik formula ...? It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all”. He explains: “A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements ... and the petty-bourgeois elements. The person who now speaks only of a 'revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty-bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle” (74).
In other words, whereas Lenin’s old formula in the past correctly explained the need for the workers and peasants to rely on their own forces, clinging to it now meant supporting the very bourgeois power that was incapable of carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.
Lenin knew full well that the bourgeois tasks of the revolution had not yet been carried out but understood that Soviet activity could carry out these tasks far more effectively than any parliamentary republic. Furthermore, the Soviets were exactly the essence of the Paris Commune type state, relying on the masses’ own participation in decision-making and with no army standing apart from the people. So, although not calling for ‘immediate’ socialism as Kamenev was alleging in Pravda, Lenin saw that the soviets could, once freed from the influence of the Compromisers, begin to take steps towards a socialist society.
Finally, in answer to those Bolshevik leaders like Rykov who argued that the socialist revolution must begin in the industrialised West before backward Russia could begin to move towards socialism, Lenin replied: “You cannot say who will start and who will finish” (75).
As Lenin had said in his ‘Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers’, confident in particular in spurring on the German workers: “ ‘Here [in Russia] socialism cannot immediately conquer but ... our revolution [can be] a prologue to the worldwide socialist revolution'. In this sense Lenin first wrote that the Russian proletariat will begin the socialist revolution” (76).
This perspective of the international socialist revolution being sparked off by the movement of the Russian workers and peasants was, as Trotsky says: “The connecting link between the old position of Bolshevism, which limited the revolution to democratic aims, and the new'' (77).
Lenin now saw that the only way forward was, in Trotsky's words: ''The preparation of a union of the workers and peasants under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party - that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat'' (78).
Lenin was, in effect, taking up the idea that Trotsky had put forward in theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’, “the idea that the Russian proletariat might win the power in advance of the Western proletariat, and that in that case it could not confine itself within the limits of the democratic dictatorship, but would be compelled to undertake the initial socialist measures. It is not surprising, then, that the April Theses of Lenin were condemned as Trotskyist ” (79).
Lenin had always been concerned that Trotsky was underestimating the ability of the peasantry to act as an independent force, not as a socialist ally of the workers, but as an obstacle to the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the one hand, he warned the old Bolsheviks that: “It is not permissible for a proletarian party to rest its hopes at this time on a community of interest with the peasantry. We are struggling to bring the peasantry over to our side, but they now stand - to a certain degree consciously - on the side of the capitalists. To try and attract the peasant now means to throw ourselves on the mercy of Miliukov” (80). On the other hand, Lenin was at pains to point out that his policy was not to ignore the peasant movement, not to argue for some kind of proletarian ‘coup’ but to patiently win over the soviet majority, in which indeed the peasantry dominated.
At the same time Lenin advised careful attention to the agrarian question, urging the Bolsheviks to propose that the peasants should rely on their own initiative to seize the land, putting it under the control of the Peasants’ Soviets, instead of waiting for the Constituent Assembly as the Compromisers directed. This should be an ordered takeover that would actually then help increase food production for the workers and soldiers, not hinder it.
However, the idea running throughout Lenin’s thinking was that the workers must not rely on the whole peasantry, as this could lead to the revolution being held back in fear of alienating the wealthier elements. Instead, the aim had to be to split the semi-proletarian labourers and poor peasants away from the more capitalist layer.
As Lenin wrote in April: “We cannot confine ourselves to the general Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies alone, for the wealthy peasants are also capitalists and are always liable to wrong or cheat the agricultural labourers, day-labourers and poor peasants. Therefore separate organisations for these groups of the rural population must be set up immediately both within the Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies and as separate Soviets of Deputies from the agricultural labourers” (81).
In fact, as we shall see, the agrarian revolution did indeed develop but with the antagonisms within the peasantry themselves being far less significant than the antagonism between the peasantry as a whole and the landowners. Therefore: “The soviets of farm-hand deputies attained significance only in a few localities. The land committees ... became the instruments of the whole peasantry, who with their heavy-handed pressure converted them from chambers of conciliation into weapons of agrarian revolution” (82).
Trotsky in agreement with Lenin
From now on, Lenin and Trotsky put forward essentially the same perspective for the revolution, if one which really confirmed Trotsky's original idea of Permanent Revolution. Indeed, the differences between the two leaders had never been as great as the Stalinists later tried to make out.
Trotsky himself was unable to take part in the debate within the Bolsheviks in April since he did not reach Petrograd until May 4th, after the British Naval Police had prevented him from travelling earlier on a ship from Canada. Nevertheless, the similarity of his analysis with Lenin’s is clear in the articles Trotsky was writing at the time for ‘Novy Mir’, a Russian daily paper in New York.
As early as March 6th Trotsky had written: “An open conflict between the forces of revolution at whose head stands the city proletariat, and the anti-revolutionary liberal bourgeoisie temporarily in power, is absolutely inevitable ... the revolutionary proletariat ought to oppose its revolutionary institutions, the soviets of workers’, soldiers' and peasants’ deputies, to the executive institutions of the Provisional Government. In this struggle the proletariat, uniting around itself the rising popular masses, ought to make its direct goal the conquest of power. Only a revolutionary workers’ government will have the will and ability, even during the preparation for a Constituent Assembly, to carry out a radical democratic clean-up throughout the country, reconstruct the army from top to bottom, convert it into a revolutionary militia and demonstrate in action to the lower ranks of the peasants that their salvation lies only in supporting a revolutionary workers’ regime” (83).
Trotsky continued on March 8: “The agrarian question will drive a deep wedge into the present aristocratic bourgeois social-patriotic bloc. What personal choice Kerensky makes will make no difference. It is another matter with the peasant mass, the rural lower ranks. To bring them over to the side of the proletariat is the most urgent unpostponable task. It would be a crime to try to accomplish this task by adapting our policy to the national-patriotic limitedness of the village: the Russian worker would commit suicide if he paid for his union with the peasant at the price of a breaking of his ties with the European proletariat. But there is no political need for this …” (84).
Demonstrating his confidence in the leading role of the working-class, Trotsky sums up the post-revolutionary situation as follows: “The peasantry always has two faces, one turned towards the proletariat, the other toward the bourgeoisie. But the intermediary, compromising position of ‘peasant’ parties like the S-R's, can be maintained only in conditions of comparative political stagnation; in a revolutionary epoch the moment inevitably comes when the petty bourgeoisie is compelled to choose. The S-R's and Mensheviks made their choice from the first moment. They destroyed the ‘democratic dictatorship’ in embryo, in order to prevent it from becoming a bridge to the dictatorship of the proletariat. But they thus opened a road to the latter - only a different road, not through them, but against them.
Through their representatives the masses were drawn, partly against their will ... into the mechanics of the two- power regime. They now had to pass through this in order to learn by experience that it could not give them either peace or land. But it is quite evident that a political turning of the workers and soldiers toward the Bolsheviks, having knocked over the whole two-power construction, could now no longer mean anything but the establishment of a dictatorship resting upon a union of the workers and peasants. In case the popular mass had been defeated, only a military dictatorship of capital could have risen on the ruins of the Bolshevik party” (85).
Lenin’s theses conquer the party
Remarkably, given Lenin’s isolation on April 4th, by the time Trotsky arrived in May the vast majority of the Bolsheviks had already been won to Lenin’s position. To explain this rapid turnaround it is important to remember the preceding history of the Bolshevik party.
The theoretical and practical struggle against both Czarism and Menshevism had built the party on a solid foundation of revolutionary workers who had a strong tradition of opposition to class collaborationism; a tradition in total contradiction to the position of Stalin. In particular, the party had gained strength in the upward years of 1912-14, recruiting a proletarian layer that Lenin had then looked to with confidence as being the ''class-conscious workers, from among whom in spite of all difficulties a new staff of leaders will arise” (86).
Lenin was now relying on this revolutionary backbone of Bolshevism to defeat the dogmatic position of the party leadership. Indeed, these worker-Bolsheviks, who had played such a decisive role during the February revolution, had, in effect, already been following Lenin's line.
Unlike the Mensheviks, the Bolshevik ranks had acted uncompromisingly both during and after the revolution. They ensured that momentum was kept up with their agitation for the eight-hour day and their efforts to make sure the czarist officials were arrested and a workers’ militia set up.
As Olminsky recalled: “We (or at least many of us) were unconsciously steering a course toward proletarian revolution, although thinking we were steering a course toward a bourgeois-democratic revolution. In other words we were preparing for the October revolution while thinking we were preparing the February” (87).
Lenin’s formula had led to an element of contradiction in the theoretical education of the Bolshevik cadres, although the revolutionary side had won out in February. As one woman Bolshevik remarked: “The prognosis made by the Bolsheviks proved wrong, but their tactics were right” (88). The worker-Bolsheviks thought it obvious that the class which had won the victory should seize the power but had to draw back in the face of the theoretical obstacles thrown up by Stalin, Kamenev and co.
The leaders returning from exile gained their commanding positions due to their prestige. However, they were out of touch with the mood of the workers having spent months or even years alone or in small groups outside active work. Their views corresponded to the difficult days at the start of the war, made worse by their subsequent isolation.
The party ranks were far more conscious of the enormous shifts of opinion produced by the war and the revolution. The workers fought instinctively against the leaders, illustrated by the Vyborg district's angry protest against Pravda’s line, but lacked the theoretical resources to defend their position.
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| Plaque on site of Petrograd City Conference near Vladimirskaya |
Lenin’s confidence in the proletarian core of the party was proved to be well-founded. District after district declared for Lenin’s position so that by April 24th, the date set for the decisive all-Russian Bolshevik Conference, the whole of the Petrograd organisation was in favour of his ‘Theses’.
The party conference, held from April 24th to the 29th, gave overwhelming support to Lenin’s position. The initial vote for the conference praesidium gave an indication of the way things would go with neither Kamenev nor Stalin being elected. After that, the opposition gained at most seven votes from the 149 delegates.
The conference showed that the party had grown greatly, both politically and qualitatively, with the reported membership standing at 79,000, of whom 15,000 lived in Petrograd. (This from 8,000 nationally after the February revolution.) The loss of a few old Bolsheviks from the party during the debate had clearly been no great loss.
Some of the leadership tried to defend their position, although Stalin, noticeably, remained silent and waited for people to forget his errors. Some old Bolsheviks emphasised the length of their membership and how they were defending the real traditions of the party. In reality they were only defending that part of Bolshevism's traditions that had not passed the test of history.
The only exception to the leftward jump came when a proposal was made to take part in the planned recall conference of the Zimmerwald pacifists. Lenin objected that the Bolsheviks had to make a clean break with exactly these kind of reformist trends but he was the only one to vote against. This was the last gasp of the tendency within the Bolsheviks to fear the party's ''isolation'' from the movement - in reality only being from its reformist leaders. In effect Lenin’s policy was realised because the divided Zimmerwaldists never held their meeting.
The role of Lenin as an individual
Trotsky’s “History” describes Lenin’s careful method of debate, a method which can be seen in all his speeches and articles of April 1917. Lenin always made his point boldly but avoided attacking party comrades by name except where absolutely necessary. In this way he made it easier for people to change their position in a debate and tried to reduce the chance of personal antagonisms which could damage the internal life of the party.
Lenin won through because his position reflected not only the mood of the worker-Bolsheviks, but was also based on the objective needs of the situation. Stalin and Kamenev's opportunism was an attempt to adapt the party's policy to the temporary illusions of the masses - Lenin saw beyond those moods.
''The chief strength of Lenin lay in his understanding the inner logic of the movement, and guiding his policy by it. He did not impose his plan on the masses; he helped the masses to recognise and realise their own plan. When Lenin reduced all the problems of the revolution to one – ‘patiently explain’ - that meant it was necessary to bring the consciousness of the masses into correspondence with that situation into which the historic process had driven them. The worker or soldier, disappointed with the policy of the Compromisers, had to be brought over to the position of Lenin and not left lingering in the intermediate stage of Kamenev and Stalin” (90).
Lenin was not the cause of the party struggle; his arrival simply hastened both the start and the rapid end to the crisis. “Without Lenin the crisis, which the opportunist leadership was inevitably bound to produce, would have assumed an extraordinarily sharp and protracted character. The conditions of war and revolution, however, would not allow the party a long period for fulfilling its mission. Thus it is by no means excluded that a disoriented and split party might have let slip the revolutionary opportunity for many years. The role of personality arises before us here on a truly gigantic scale. It is necessary only to understand that role correctly, taking personality as a link in the historic chain” (91).
Marxists are sometimes accused of denying the role of the individual in history. On the contrary, Marxism understands exactly that living people make history, otherwise why struggle for cadres and parties? However, Marxism explains that an individual gains their ideas and personality, not by chance, but through experience of life.
“Lenin was not an accidental element in the historic development, but a product of the whole past of Russian history. Along with the vanguard of the workers, he had lived through their struggle in the course of the preceding quarter century. Lenin did not oppose the party from outside, but was himself its most complete expression. In educating it he had educated himself in it. His divergence from the ruling circles of the Bolsheviks meant the struggle of the future of the party against its past. If Lenin had not been artificially separated from the party by the conditions of emigration and war, the external mechanics of the crisis would not have been so dramatic. From the extraordinary significance which Lenin’s arrival received, it should only be inferred that leaders are not accidentally created, they are gradually chosen out and trained up in the course of decades, that they cannot be capriciously replaced...'' (92).
“Lenin became the unqualified leader of the most revolutionary party in the world's history, because his thought and will were really equal to the demands of the gigantic revolutionary possibilities of the country and the epoch” (93). He was not some genius who transformed Bolshevism through force of personality alone. However, Lenin was an essential part in the chain of objective forces that led to October. Without him it is unlikely that the October Revolution of 1917 would have ever succeeded.
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