6) Who led the February Revolution and who took power?

"The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the Czar, the capitalists and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over"

The Soviet ‘Executive Committee’

While the Czar procrastinated and Ivanov tried to gather up his phantom armies, the revolution had been getting on with the job of building new organs of power.

During the 27th, the gaols had been seized, and political prisoners freed. The Bolsheviks, including the Petrograd leaders arrested in the early hours of the 26th, had gone straight to the workers’ districts. They sought to meet up with the workers and soldiers to ensure that the revolution was carried through to the end.

The Mensheviks, like the members of the Military-Industrial committees arrested at the same time, had taken a different line of march. They had set out for the Tauride Palace, home of the Duma, where some of the radical intelligentsia and a few revolutionary officers had been trying to set up a kind of revolutionary headquarters.

Tauride Palace 2012

The Palace was well-placed geographically, being close both to the military districts, containing the barracks, and the Vyborg district, the cauldron of the revolution.

On the evening of the 27th, a stream of workers, soldiers and assorted radicals came to the Palace looking for some kind of leadership. From there detachments of soldiers were sent out to guard key points like the railway stations, and arrested generals, ministers, policemen and so on who were brought to the Palace to be imprisoned.

However, the workers' districts did not need orders from the Tauride Palace and many distrusted these 'leaders' that had suddenly appeared from nowhere. Indeed, the worker-Bolsheviks and the best workers of the other left parties remained at the sharp end, directing the mopping-up operations of the 28th, making arrests and spreading the mutiny to new regiments in the capital and in surrounding areas.

However, while the proletariat and revolutionary soldiers continued the real business of revolution, the petty-bourgeois radicals, true to form, busied themselves with getting hold of positions of leadership.

The freed Mensheviks, together with the Menshevik Duma deputies like Cheidze and Skobelev and other right-wingers like the Trade Union leaders, straight away set about forming a "Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' Deputies" (the “E.C.”). It soon filled out with various well-known socialists, including some Bolsheviks, and summoned the workers to elect deputies at once.

The tradition of soviets, which had taken root in the movement thanks to the experience of 1905, together with the presence of old recognised leaders, meant that this E.C. immediately became the focus of all hopes and also all authority for the mass of workers and soldiers.

However, unlike the Soviet of 1905, its representatives were, on the whole, elements who had played little or no role in the revolution. Their views and experiences did not coincide with those of the activists who had actually led the revolution in the streets. However, those revolutionaries had no organisation or well-known leaders with which to stamp their authority on events.

Even in the cauldron of Petrograd, the consciousness of those fresh to the struggle lagged behind events. They had not had time to free themselves fully from old opinions and prejudices during the rapid changes of the war years, let alone in the five days of revolution.

During the insurrection the broad masses had followed the lead of the most revolutionary elements without being actively involved in the struggle themselves. Now, the middle-class officials, lawyers and other radicals elbowed the workers and soldiers to one side, leaning upon the illusions and inexperience of these fresher masses to build their personal positions.

The first session of the Soviet took place in the Tauride Palace on the evening of the 27th, and, with some additions, ratified the E.C. membership.

In the midst of proud and joyful speeches from soldiers' deputies, it was agreed to build on the fraternisation of the days of revolution by uniting the garrison with the workers in a general Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

This inclusion of the representatives of the overwhelmingly peasant army gave the soviets a much wider base of support than in 1905. From the beginning, the E.C., in the name of the Soviet, acted as the nation's sovereign power. It organised a revolutionary staff and controlled the garrison, food supplies and the State Bank and Printing Office, which it occupied with a revolutionary guard.

However, even in these first days of the victory, those socialists at the head of the Soviet were looking around for those that they felt should really have the power - the bourgeoisie.

As Trotsky had suggested, the leaders of the Soviet E.C. showed their petty-bourgeois inadequacy before the big bourgeoisie. Hiding their cowardice with theoretical arguments about the need to limit the struggle to a "bourgeois" revolution, they looked to the bourgeois leaders in the Duma to take the power from them.

The Duma’s ‘Provisional Committee’

The Duma had in fact been dissolved by the Czar on the 26th - although few beyond the party leaders had ever received the news. So the deputies had gathered on the 27th to be told of the Czar's decision. However, this "revolutionary" class offered neither any resistance to the dissolution nor leadership to the masses.

In fact their leaders were at that very moment trying to fix up a deal with the autocracy to put down the revolution. This involved using Czar Nicholas' brother, Mikhail, as a figurehead for some kind of military dictatorship. The fact that it was refused merely reflected the fact that the bureaucracy knew that the liberal bourgeoisie offered no serious threat to their rule.

Bewildered by exaggerated reports that the masses were marching on the Duma, the deputies in panic hurriedly suggested forming a "Provisional Committee". It was agreed to do so, but without time for a vote, since the majority of these "revolutionaries" had already fled!

It was this Provisional Committee of the Duma that the Soviet E.C. appealed to, demanding that they take power in their hands. However, the Duma leaders tried to stall, fearful of their positions in case the insurrection might turn out, as they still hoped, to be defeated.

In the end, on the 28th, realising that it might be the only way of tearing the revolution away from more threatening leadership, they decided to agree to the Soviet E.C.'s demands. As Trotsky says, their moral was clear: "If the monarchy wins we are with it, if the revolution wins, we will try to plunder it". (43).

The reformist socialist Sukhanov perfectly expressed the joy of the fearful middle-class at the news - "I felt that the ship of revolution, tossed in the squall of those hours by the complete caprice of the elements, had put up a sail, acquired stability ... amid the terrible storm." As Trotsky adds: "What a high-flying formula for a prosaic recognition of the slavish dependence of the petty bourgeois democracy upon capitalistic liberalism! And what a deadly mistake in political perspective. The handing over of power to the liberals not only will not give stability to the ship of state, but, on the contrary, will become from that moment a source of headlessness of the revolution, enormous chaos, embitterment of the masses, collapse of the front, and in the future, extreme bitterness of the civil war" (44).

Moscow only saw an echo of the insurrection in Petrograd. Strikes and demonstrations did not begin until the 27th but soon the revolution spread with regiments mutinying and the prisons being opened. The Polish revolutionary, Dzerzhinsky, addressed the newly-appointed soviet in the Moscow Duma building still wearing the uniform of the hard-labour prison from which he had just been released.

In many other cities the revolution began only on March 1st and only gradually spread to the villages as news filtered in from the towns. In this gentler atmosphere the police chiefs and bureaucrats were often able to simply remove the Czar's portraits from the wall, declare themselves for the revolution, and hold on to their positions.

It was Petrograd that achieved the revolution, the only arena of struggle. The rest of the country followed for there was no force anywhere in the country prepared to fight for the old regime. The capital may only have had 1/75 of the country's population, but played a dominant role. Petrograd, with the largest concentration of the proletariat, expressed most sharply the forces pushing Russia towards a new society.

Who led the revolution?

At first glance, it might appear that the February events contradict the idea that a successful revolution must have a conscious leadership.

Indeed, afterwards the bourgeoisie tried to paint a picture of a spontaneous and bloodless movement in which, almost mystically, the whole people were moved of themselves to remove the old regime. Certainly it was true that acts of revenge by workers and soldiers were surprisingly few and far between but the 1443 killed and wounded in the streets hardly added up to a bloodless transformation.

This conception, of course, allowed the bourgeoisie to pretend that they had got hold of power without the need of an unsavoury insurrection. It also gained popularity amongst some of the Soviet leaders who, having taken no leading role in the revolution, wanted to hope that nobody else had either! However, a five-day struggle against not only the power of the old state but also the opposition of the liberals and social-patriots can hardly be called "spontaneous".

Who took the critical decisions? Who led the struggle? Clearly the bourgeoisie, who were terrified of a revolution which, in any case, they had not seen coming, had not led the uprising. The future "General Administrator" of the revolution's "Provisional Government", the Kadet Nabokov, spent the 27th looking at events from his apartment window "in dull and anxious expectancy" (45)!

Kerensky, a Narodnik intellectual soon to become a revolutionary "Minister of Justice" was reportedly against a revolution in January 1917 in case it took "an extreme leftward channel and this would create vast difficulties in the conduct of the war" (46).

The initiative did not come from here, nor from the Mensheviks, nor from the Social-Revolutionaries to whom "the revolution fell like thunder out of the sky" (47), according to their party president.

As has been shown, even the Bolshevik leaders lagged behind events. Kayurov asserted that on the 26th: "Absolutely no guiding initiative from the party centres was felt. The Petrograd Committee had been arrested and the representative of the Central Committee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any directives for the coming day" (48).

In the end, Shliapnikov produced an appeal to the soldiers on the morning of the 27th - but by the time it was distributed the troops had nearly all mutinied already.

In fact Trotsky notes: "We must lay it down as a general rule for those days that the higher the leaders, the further they lagged behind” (49).

It has to be said, in defence of the Bolsheviks, that the party had not yet recovered from its weakened condition of the early war years and that many of its authoritative leaders were abroad or in exile. Those leaders remaining in Petrograd, both Bolsheviks and of other left parties, often did not consider themselves, and were not considered by others, capable of playing a guiding role in events.

The Bolshevik Party had come closest to providing a revolutionary organisation, but an extremely weak and scattered one without central direction. Instead, the search for the leaders of the revolution must be made amongst the countless nameless leaders of groups of workers and soldiers.

Despite the dilution of the Petrograd proletariat during the war, the years of hard-earned experience of the struggles from 1905-17 had not gone entirely wasted. Conscious revolutionary workers and progressive soldiers existed, educated in the past by the left parties, particularly the Bolsheviks who had often stood alone alongside the workers in the years of reaction.

These minor leaders were able to make an estimation of forces and arrive at a strategic decision for themselves. Their role was no less significant simply because their names were never recorded for posterity. However, without a strong revolutionary socialist party: "This leadership proved sufficient to guarantee the victory of the insurrection, but it was not adequate to transfer immediately into the hands of the proletarian vanguard, the leadership of the revolution" (50).

The paradox of February

The paradox of the February Revolution is to understand how a revolution led by the workers and peasants came to surrender power to the bourgeoisie.

It was certainly not inevitable. The revolution found the proletariat at a far higher political level than in previous revolutions where the bourgeoisie had stood on the sidelines and then quietly gathered up the power. It had formed a new organ of revolutionary power, the Soviet, based upon the armed strength of the masses.

Trotsky explained that the solution to the paradox could be found in the contradictory character of the petty - bourgeois democrats and socialists in this leadership of the Soviet. This middle-class layer "had taught the masses that the bourgeoisie is an enemy, but themselves feared more than anything else to release the masses from the control of that enemy" (51).

One of these petty-bourgeois, Sukhanov, later admitted that "the people did not gravitate toward the State Duma, they were not interested in it, and never thought of making it either politically or technically the centre of the movement", and "that the [Soviet] Executive Committee was in a perfect position either to give power to the bourgeois government or not give it" (52).

And yet, the reactionary bourgeoisie, who had fled in terror from the revolution, were turned by these "socialists" into the key to the revolution's success. As Sukhanov went on: "The power destined to replace czarism must be only a bourgeois power ... we must steer our course by this principle. Otherwise the uprising will not succeed and the revolution will collapse" (53).

Yet, on March 1st, Rodzianko, leader of the Provisional Committee that had "taken over" the power was too scared to go to the telegraph office alone to contact the Czar. The telegraph workers would only take orders from the Soviet - it had the real power not Rodzianko's committee.

Rodzianko wanted to contact the Czar to add a further twist to the paradox. As Trotsky put it:"The liberals agreed to take the power from the socialists only on condition that the monarchy should agree to take it from their hands" (54).

They were still attempting to use Grand Duke Mikhail as a "customary symbol of power" to place over a constitutional monarchy. The bourgeoisie hoped that this would safely guarantee their right to make profits for the time-being, while also using the monarchy as a point of support from which to later claw back the gains of the revolution.

Under pressure from his generals, who were also doing their best to save their own skins, the Czar, surrounded by treachery, finally abdicated on March 2nd in favour of Mikhail. Thus the rotten dynasty fell without any remaining support. The Czar complained to his family "there is no justice among men", but, as Trotsky adds: "Those very words irrefutably testify that historic justice, though it comes late, does exist" (55).

Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, the masses were not prepared to accept their betrayal as easily as they had swallowed that of the Soviet leaders. Guchkov arrived at the station holding the Czar's act of abdication. When he read it out to a crowd of railway workers, ending with the exclamation, "Long Live the Emperor Mikhail!", they even threatened him with execution!

Mikhail himself declined the lofty but risky position offered to him. So the bourgeoisie were forced to give up their plan for a monarchist fig-leaf to cover their treachery. Nevertheless, thanks to the Soviet leaders, the Provisional Committee of the Duma were able to announce on March 2nd the setting-up of the "Provisional Government". It consisted of a handful of the very richest landlords and industrialists.

The Soviet 'socialists' were content - they only wanted to be a left-wing opposition in a bourgeois regime, not the leaders of a people’s uprising. They accepted the new government without a word on the question of war, republic, land, 8-hour day, or any of the other burning issues that the revolution had to deal with. Their only concern was that the left parties should have freedom of agitation! And this when the soldiers listened only to the Soviet and the bourgeoisie still feared to go out alone!

"In giving their confidence to the socialists, the workers and soldiers found themselves, quite unexpectedly, expropriated politically. They were bewildered, alarmed, but did not immediately find a way out. Their own betrayers deafened them from above with arguments to which they had no ready answer, but which conflicted with all their feelings and intentions. The proletariat and the peasantry voted for the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries not as compromisers, but as opponents of the Czar, the capitalists and the landowners. But in voting for them they created a partition-wall between themselves and their own aims. They could not now move forward at all without bumping into this wall erected by themselves, and knocking it over" (56).

Section Two - The Dual Power

References

Numbered quotes are listed against each chapter of Volume One of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. Page numbers refer to the Pluto Press 1979 edition.

Chapter VIII: (138) p.168.

Chapter IX: (1) p.190; (2) p.196; (11) p.182; (20) p.189.

Chapter X: (3) p.219; (4) p.201; (5) p.202; (6) p.215; (7) p.211-2; (8) p.212; (9) p.212; (10) p.216-7; (12) p.213; (13) p.218; (14) p.218; (15) p.220; (17) p.221.

Chapter XI: (18) p.229-30.

Chapter XII: (19) p.240; (21) p.241; (22) p.235; (23) p.251; (24) p.261; (25) p.243; (26) p.262; (27) p.243; (28) p.250; (29) p.262; (30) p.263; (31) p.238; (32) p.254; (33) p.255; (34) p.257; (35) p.256; (36) p.260.

Chapter XIII: (37) p.264; (38) p.267; (39) p.270; (40) p.274; (42) p.280; (47) p281-2.

Chapter XIV: (16) p.291; (41) p.294; (43 & 44) p.285; (45) p.286; (46) p.295; (48) p.298-9.

Chapter XV: (49) p.300; (50) p.302; (52) p.302; (53) p.319; (54) p.305; (55) p.317; (56) p.318; (57) p.305; (58) p.306; (59) p.306; (60) p.307; (63) p.307-8; (64) p.311; (65) p.312; (67) p.320-1; (68) p.325-6; (69) p.327; (70) p.321.

Chapter XVI: (51) p.330; (71) p.335; (72) p.333; (75) p.335; (76) p.332; (77) p.332; (78) p.334; (79) p.333; (85) p.331; (86) p.339; (87) p.336; (88) p.337; (89) p.342; (90) p.339-40; (91) p.343; (92) p.344; (93) p.337-8.

Chapter XVII: (94) p.347; (95) p.348; (96) p.349; (97) p.350; (98) p.350; (99) p.354; (102) p.359; (103) p.368; (105) p.369.

Chapter XVIII: (106) p.372; (107) p.376-7; (108) p.374; (109) p.378; (110) p.378; (111) p.380; (116) p.377; (117) p.381; (118) p.382.

Chapter XIX: (112) p.393; (119) p.386; (120) p.387-8; (121) p.390; (122) p.394; (123) p.396; (124) p.399; (125) p.397; (126) p.397; (127) p.396.

Chapter XX: (80) p.418; (82) p.418-9; (133) p.402; (134) p.415; (135) p.416; (136) p.409; (137) p.413; (139) p.414; (140) p.412; (141) p.417.

Chapter XXI: (128) p.421; (129) p.437; (130) p.437; (131) p.438-9; (132) p.443; (142) p.423; (143) p.427; (144) p.432; (145) p.433; (146) p.435; (161) p.430-1.

Chapter XXII: (147) p.448; (148) p.449; (151) p.453; (152) p.455; (153) p.457; (154) p.459; (155) p.461; (156) p.462; (157) p.463; (158) p.463; (159) p.463; (160) p.466.

Chapter XXIII: (162) p.468.

Appendix II to Volume One: (83) p.479-80; (84) p.481.

Appendix III: (149) p.486; (150) p.487.

Additional quotes are taken directly from other speeches and articles by Lenin and Trotsky.

7) The Provisional Government

"So far as concerned the most threatening problems of the people's existence, the revolution had apparently been achieved only in order to make the announcement: everything remains as before"

The Provisional Government

Trying to outwit the revolution

The bourgeois leaders of the Progressive Bloc had spent the February days of revolution in hiding, fearing the worst. Now, to their astonishment and delight, they found that the Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders had handed power over to them, behind the backs of the revolutionary masses. No wonder the grateful Miliukov praised the Soviet leadership by remarking “how far forward our workers’ movement has progressed since the days of 1905” (1)!

Miliukov was the key figure in bourgeois political circles. Unlike some of his more liberal colleagues, many of whom had had socialistic leanings in their youth, the leader of the Kadet Party was unashamedly a representative of the bourgeois class.

While the petty-bourgeois 'socialists' dreamt of uniting the proletariat and bourgeoisie in some liberal alliance, Miliukov understood, just as Lenin and Trotsky did from the opposing camp, that the interests of the two classes could never be reconciled.

He knew that, despite the Soviet leadership, the revolutionary masses were never going to willingly surrender power to the bourgeoisie. However, without support from the people, Miliukov recognised that his class was in no position to break the revolution. Its only hope was to bide its time, to manoeuvre, to gradually outwit the revolution.

So the bourgeoisie decided to continue with the policy that they had been using from the very start of the negotiations with the Soviet E.C. - to try and avoid any firm decisions and to postpone all reforms to some unknown future date.

Above all, the Kadets wanted to avoid "the fatal question of convoking a Constituent Assembly [some kind of elected Parliament] in war time” (2). So the official Declaration of the Provisional Government of March 6th promised to summon the people’s representatives to a Constituent Assembly at the earliest possible date - but carefully avoided saying when that date would be!

Nothing was said about the form of government. Miliukov still hoped he might be able to resurrect the monarchy as a point of support for the reaction. The only firm promise in the Declaration was to honour the secret treaties with the 'Allies' and to carry on with the war.

"So far as concerned the most threatening problems of the people's existence, the revolution had apparently been achieved only in order to make the announcement: everything remains as before" (3).

Kerensky enters the Government

Although largely responsible for its political direction, Miliukov did not become leader of the Provisional Government. This grey, cowardly and unpopular man too sharply reflected the political essence of the bourgeoisie. Instead, he took the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, leaving the post of Prime Minister to the rich, but politically very ordinary, Prince Lvov.

The rich landlord Rodzianko, President of the Provisional Committee of the Duma, had been pushed to one side, his ability to mediate between the monarchy and the property-owners now unwanted, his ability to mediate between the property-owners and the revolution too transparently lacking.

The rest of the ministry was made up almost entirely by those wealthy landlords, industrialists and bourgeois politicians that the Duma had been recommending to the deposed Czar since 1915. The Octobrist leader Guchkov became War Minister, united with Miliukov in a determination for Russia to continue the war.

The portfolio of Finance went to the extremely wealthy property-owner Tereschenko, that of Agriculture to the mediocre Kadet deputy Shingarev. The landowning Colonel Engelhardt was made commander of Petrograd, while the liberal noble Nabokov became, in effect, minister without portfolio.

"The fact is that, with one single exception, the revolution accomplished by workers and soldiers found no reflection whatever in the staff of the revolutionary government. The exception was Kerensky" (4).

Over the years the capitalists have learnt that there can be at times distinct advantages in involving workers' leaders in the business of government. Abusing the trust that the masses place in them, these traitors can persuade the workers to put up with measures that they might never accept from a bourgeois politician. With this strategy in mind, the Russian liberals tried to ensnare the Menshevik President of the Soviet, Cheidze, with the offer of the Minister of Labour.

The Soviet E.C. had, after all, voted against its members entering the government - but not for reasons of revolutionary principle! They knew that the Petrograd Soviet had no sympathy for the bourgeoisie, so, raising the question of having Soviet ministers in the government was risky. “The Soviet might simply answer: ‘the power ought to belong to the soviet democracy’ " (5).

So the Soviet E.C. decided it would be safest to avoid taking any of the responsibility for the mess that had been created. Instead the bourgeoisie should be left to have sole charge of the revolution that the Menshevik theorists had said was only for the bourgeoisie to lead.

Kerensky, on the other hand, a lawyer and president of the small Trudovik party of Narodnik intellectuals who had become one of the Vice-Presidents of the Soviet E.C., was not weighed down by any such theoretical considerations. He just wanted a place in the government and saw no reason why he should turn down such a golden opportunity to boost his fame!

While Kerensky's Soviet colleagues had no real objection to him taking a portfolio, they couldn't risk giving him an official sanction in full view of the revolutionary masses. But Kerensky wanted to enter the government with the aura of a revolutionary leader.

Without warning the Soviet leaders, he announced to a full session of the Soviet that he was ready to die for the revolution, but more immediately he was more than ready to take the position of Minister of Justice! Convinced by Kerensky's promises of a complete political amnesty and a prosecution of the Czar's officials, the inexperienced assembly gave him a mighty round of applause. Kerensky took this as a vote of confidence and promptly accepted the post in the government.

The Soviet E.C., under the leadership of Sukhanov and the Mensheviks Cheidze and Skobelev, were fairly content with the situation. They had successfully avoided taking the power that they so dreaded and were able to announce support for the Provisional Government "in so far as" it truly served the democratic revolution. In other words, “this support was promised only as a reward for good behaviour - that is, for fulfilling tasks alien to it, and which the democracy itself had declined to fulfil" (6)!

As for Kerensky's portfolio, once the question had passed without too much trouble through the Soviet, they were happy enough. After all, now the intelligentsia had their own man in the government to let them know what the capitalists were up to.

In addition, the E.C. had set up a "Contact Commission" as a 'go-between' to negotiate between the Soviet and the Government. This ludicrous body became, of course, only a talking shop in which two irreconcilable classes would try, and fail, to reach a mutually agreed compromise.

Real power lies with the Soviets

The revolutionary masses viewed the situation with very different emotions. "Among the workers and soldiers the composition of the government created an immediate feeling of hostility, or at the best a dumb bewilderment. The name of Miliukov or Guchkov did not evoke one voice of greeting in either factory or barrack. Officer Mstislavisky reports the sullen alarm of his soldiers at the news that the power had passed from czar to prince: Is that worth shedding blood for? " (7).

The only name greeted with any enthusiasm was that of Kerensky. He was now being made out by the bourgeoisie to be the central hero of the revolution! The masses saw in Kerensky the first step toward the liquidation of the bourgeois government. They only wondered why he was there alone. What they did not yet recognise was that Kerensky was not " a counterpoise to the bourgeois government ... but a finishing touch, a screen, a decoration" (8).

The masses not only did not trust or support the bourgeoisie; they did not even distinguish them from the nobility and the bureaucracy. They put their weapons only at the disposal of the soviets. These had sprung up out of the blue, thanks to the tradition of 1905, giving them tremendous power.

"The masses went over in droves to the socialists, whom they identified with the Soviet. Not only the workers and soldiers ... but all the many-coloured small people of the town - feeling alien to the Provisional Government and its bureaux, were seeking a closer and more accessible authority. The masses poured into the Soviet as though into the triumphal gates of the revolution. All that remained outside the boundaries of the Soviet seemed to fall away from the revolution, seemed somehow to belong to a different world. And so it was in reality. Beyond the boundaries of the Soviet remained the world of the property-owner, in which all colours mingled now in one grayish-pink defensive tint. Not all the toiling masses chose the Soviet ... but all the active elements of the masses poured into the Soviet, and activity prevails in times of revolution. Moreover, since mass activity was growing from day to day, the basis of the Soviet was continually broadening. It was the sole genuine basis of the revolution" (9).

In bourgeois circles and in the Allied embassies the new government had been greeted with satisfaction and relief. Nevertheless, the capitalists did not feel that they were really in charge. Under the Czar, despite the intrigues of the Rasputin clique, the bourgeoisie felt that they had real influence. If nothing else, the factories, land, banks, houses, newspapers and so on had been guaranteed to the property owners.

Now the revolution threatened to call all this into question. The bourgeoisie had the external attributes of power, but knew full well that, in Guchkov's words, ''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'' (10).

A comment from Shidlovsky, a leading deputy in Guchkov's Octobrist party, adds further detail to this accurate observation - ''The Soviet seized all the Post and Telegraph bureaux, the wireless, all the printing establishments, so that without its permission it was impossible to send a telegram, to leave Petrograd, or to print an appeal". Trotsky adds however, "it is necessary to introduce one slight correction: the 'seizure' by the Soviet ... meant merely that the workers and clerks in those enterprises refused to submit to anybody but the Soviet" (11).

The reality was, indeed, that real power was in the hands of the soviets. All of the upper layers of society, officers, directors, landlords, factory managers, felt that they were under the constant suspicious scrutiny of the masses. The Soviet had become an organised expression of the masses' distrust.

“Typesetters would jealously follow the text of the articles which they had set up ... soldiers would glance around suspiciously every time their officer made a move, workers would dismiss from the factory an overseer belonging to the [ultra-reactionary monarchist] Black Hundreds and take in under observation a liberal manager. The Duma from the first hours of the revolution, and the Provisional Government from its first days, became reservoirs into which flowed a continuous stream of complaints and objections from the upper layers of society, their protests against 'excesses', their woeful comments and dark forebodings'' (12).

The reaction begins to organise

The reaction began to organise around the banner of the Kadet Party, now the only openly organised non-socialist party, and all its tendencies hastened to group themselves around the Provisional Government.

On March 2nd the Council of Trade and Industry, representing the capitalists, declared its support for the new government and was soon followed by the town dumas and the provincial councils or "zemstvos". On March 10th even the Council of the United Nobility, previously the mainstay of the Czar declared its support for the Provisional Government.

The possessing classes began, first cautiously and then more and more boldly, to campaign for a 'single sovereignty', blaming all disorders and difficulties upon the existence of the Soviet.

Nevertheless, the reaction and, in particular, the Provisional Government, did not know how much of their real intentions they could risk revealing before the masses. The Soviet leaders in the 'Contact Commission' were not much help either because they too found it hard to judge the exact level of dissatisfaction.

However, there was no serious force behind these veiled threats from the propertied classes. Property "represents an enormous power so long as it is universally recognised and supported by that system of compulsion called Law and the State. But the very essence of the present situation was that the old state had suddenly collapsed, and the entire old system of rights had been called in question by the masses" (13).

The new ministers took over the old czarist apparatus but found that its rule was no longer obeyed. The provincial commissars, often just the old feudal landlords that used to be presidents of the zemstvos given new titles, faced the same problem. They took possession of the clerks, typewriters and chiefs of police only to find that real power lay with the soviets.

This was even more true in the provinces where the rather simpler Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders had not appreciated the requirement to renounce the power as quickly as their colleagues in Petrograd!

In the factories the workers were regarding themselves more and more as the proprietors. In the country the peasants began to look with an ever more determined eye at the landlords' land. "The property-holders, deprived of the possibility of using their property, or protecting it, ceased to be real property-holders and became badly frightened Philistines who could not give any support to the government for the simple reason that they needed support themselves. They soon began to curse the government for its weakness, but they were only cursing their own fate" (14). In truth, the Provisional Government's only real support came from the official democracy and without it the government could not survive.

The Government drags its feet

While still holding onto the power that the Soviet leadership had presented to them, the Provisional Government continued to try and carry out its adopted policy - to make as few reforms as possible.

As early as March 1st, Karaulov, the Minister of the Interior, had issued an order for the arrest of all police officials, but this was, if anything, merely a means of ensuring that these hated men were given refuge from the masses in the jails. Similarly, the Decree of Amnesty on March 8th was a belated gesture since, by then, prisons had been opened by the people all over Russia.

Kerensky, in a moment of revolutionary zeal, actually carried out a resolution of the Soviet E.C., introducing representatives of the workers and soldiers as members of the courts of justice. However, the 'socialist' lawyer Demianov decided that the measure would not be carried out, since "the policies of a revolutionary government ought never to offend anybody unnecessarily” !

As Trotsky notes: “That was, at bottom, the guiding principle of the whole Provisional Government, which feared most of all to offend anybody from the circles of the possessing classes, or even the czarist bureaucracy. To be sure the masses might be offended. But that was the Soviet's business; the masses did not enter into the field of vision of the government" (15).

About the only worthwhile measure to be produced in those days was the famous "Order No. 1", a charter for the freedom of the revolutionary army. It had been passed by the Soviet in the heady days of revolution at the dictation of the mutinous soldiers.

It declared, amongst other things, "that elective committees shall be formed in all military regiments; soldiers' deputies shall be elected to the Soviet; in all political acts the soldiers shall submit to the Soviet and its committees; weapons shall be in the control of the regimental and battalion committees, and shall 'in no case be given up to the officer'; on duty, the severest military discipline - off duty, complete citizens rights" (16).

The Soviet E.C. had not dared oppose the soldiers' demands at the meeting but tried afterwards to send out the order together with an appeal that effectively demanded the soldiers' subordination to the old commanding staff. The typesetters simply refused to set up the document! The E.C. then tried to limit the order to the Petrograd military district only - but in vain, the revolutionary soldiers would not let their new-found rights be taken away.

Apart from this Order No. 1, everything continued pretty much as before, despite the masses' protests. The 'Holy Synod' continued to sit; Greek Orthodoxy remained the state religion. The Czar's old State Council continued to draw their salaries; the arrested ministers were even voted a pension!

Against all the teachings of Marxism on the State, the Mensheviks were allowing the old bureaucracy, the old judges, the old army commanders to remain in place so as not to offend anybody! The only initiative was shown in the haste to remove the old czarist limitations on share-holding!

The workers demanded an eight-hour day - the Provisional Government said nothing, leaving the Soviet leaders to try and pacify its ranks. The peasants demanded land - the government said that any reforms would be best left for the Constituent Assembly to decide on. But they knew full well that they had no intention of ever calling such an assembly if they could avoid it.

Only on March 25th did the government finally agree to call a Special Conference for the working out of an election law for the assembly. Needless to say the conference never opened. However, Shingarev "ordered the formation of local land committees - prudently refraining, however, from defining their tasks and functions. The peasants had an idea that these committees ought to give them the land. The landlords thought the committees ought to protect their property. From the very start the muzhik's [nickname for peasant's] noose, more ruthless than all others, was tightening round the neck of the February regime" (17).

8) The Soviet Power

"These complacent rulers of destiny thought that in entrusting the leadership to them the soviets had essentially completed their task … The masses are long-suffering but they are not clay out of which you can fashion anything you want to. Moreover, in a revolutionary epoch they learn fast. In that lies the power of a revolution"

The Nature of the ‘Dual Power’

The confusing political situation that the February revolution had created was certainly not unique in history. The simultaneous existence of two conflicting governmental organisations, known to Marxism as "dual power" is a fundamental element of a revolutionary period. Indeed, a dual power can only exist at such a time, when two irreconcilable classes are fighting each other for control of society.

In normal times, society needs a single government in order to advance, but that only happens when a strong ruling class is able to stamp its economic and political regime on the whole of society. In a time of revolution, when the old ideas are being challenged, the new revolutionary class strives to lay claim to state power.

It will either create its own alternative state organisation, or take over and adapt existing institutions. However, such a transformation cannot happen overnight. A period of instability continues where the two conflicting half-ruling classes struggle to take full control. The actual amount of power falling to either side at any particular time depends on the balance of forces in the struggle. This double sovereignty may be endured for some time, but will inevitably lead to open conflict, even to civil war.

Trotsky explains how the English Revolution of the seventeenth century became exactly such a civil war. A new bourgeois class had gradually obtained more and more economic power until it came to a point where it had to do battle with the old privileged classes of the monarchy, aristocrats and bishops in order to make any further advance. The dual power turned into open civil war between the royal power based in Oxford, and the new power based around Parliament and the City of London.

However, the victorious Parliamentarians were soon confronted with a new challenger - the 'Independents', based on the parliamentary army, representing the petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. A new dual power followed, with the new class again relying on a new state organisation, in this case the council of soldiers' and officers' deputies of the Independents' ‘New Model Army'.

This double sovereignty was ended by the victory of this army, leading to the dictatorship of Cromwell. A third dual power was threatened by the struggle of the lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers but this extreme left-wing of the revolution was soon defeated.

Just like their English counterparts, the Russian bourgeoisie entered the revolution having already concentrated a good share of the state power in its hands. Thanks to its position in the Military-industrial Committees and local government bodies, the bourgeoisie had gained more and more economic and political control, setting up an initial dual power that quickly led to the defeat of czarism in February. However, and far more rapidly than in the English Civil War, a new political force arose to challenge the capitalists’ power.

Another dual power was set up between conflicting state organisations, the Provisional Government acting for the bourgeoisie, and the Soviet, acting in the interests of the workers and peasants. As Lenin pointed out, this was an entirely new type of power because it was “based on a revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralised state power".

However, in previous revolutions the dual power had arisen as a natural stage in the struggle with each side trying to replace the double sovereignty with its own rule. The peculiarity of the February Revolution was that "we see the official democracy consciously and intentionally creating a two-power system, dodging with all its might the transfer of power into its own hands. The double sovereignty is created, or so it seems at a glance, not as a result of a struggle of classes for power, but as the result of a voluntary yielding of power by one class to another. If you look deeper, the twofold rule of the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee had the character of a mere reflection ... (it) only reflected the still concealed double sovereignty of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the Bolsheviks displace the Compromisers at the head of the Soviet ... then that concealed double sovereignty will come to the surface, and this will be the eve of the October Revolution" (18).

The support for the ‘Compromisers’

In order to understand how it could be possible for the 'Compromisers' in the Soviet leadership to conceal the real nature of the struggle for so long, the characteristics of the two parties that at first dominated the soviets must be remembered.

The Mensheviks, based on the left-wing of the radical intelligentsia and the more moderate upper layer of the working-class, used Marxist phraseology but as an argument for the inevitability of bourgeois development in Russia.

The Social Revolutionaries (S-R's) on the other hand, had their roots in the peasantry. The S-R leaders spoke out against Marxism, adopting confused Narodnik ideas that reflected the contradictory pressures facing the Russian peasant at that time. After February the S-R's gained enormous support in the country, thanks partly to its slogan “Land and Freedom”.

Its support among the peasantry meant that the majority of the soldiers also voted for the S-R’s. This also gave the S-R’s a dominant influence in the city soviets, thanks to the support of the soldiers’ delegates.

In reality, the initial dominance of this party simply reflected the confused and immature nature of the revolution at this point. “Everybody who had not inherited from the pre-revolutionary past sufficient reasons to vote for the Kadets or the Bolsheviks voted for the Social-Revolutionaries. But the Kadets stood inside a closed circle of property owners; and the Bolsheviks were still few, misunderstood and even terrifying. To vote for the Social Revolutionaries meant to vote for the revolution in general, and involved no further obligation” (19).

The masses took the line of least resistance, in this case the S-R’s. They seemed to offer the easiest promise of change, without demanding too much further struggle. Their support in the army also raised their status among layers of workers and townspeople who, seeking to maintain the hard-fought ties with the soldiers, also gave them their vote.

In fact, the central nucleus of the S-R’s was far more closely linked with the liberal bourgeoisie than with the revolutionary masses. After the revolution, this radical upper layer present in the S-R’s had been swollen by a flood of careerists, often young officers and petty military officials.

These liberals had gained their influence over the peasantry by adding a socialist tinge to their bourgeois beliefs. Indeed, how else could the rotten Russian bourgeoisie gain any support? However, now the Social Revolutionaries, along with the Mensheviks who were playing the same role amongst the working-class, were beginning to worry that the effect of these socialist phrases was going further than they intended!

“… the democracy did not trust its own support … and worst of all dreaded what they called ‘anarchy’, that is, that having seized the power, they might along with the power prove a mere plaything of the so-called unbridled elements” (20).

“In its entirety this democratic fright was a reflection of the very real danger to the possessing classes caused by a movement of the oppressed, a danger which united them in a single camp, the bourgeois-landlord reaction. The bloc of the S-R’s with the government of the landlord Lvov signalised their break with the agrarian revolution, just as the bloc of the Mensheviks with the industrialists and bankers of the type of Guchkov, Tereschenko and Konovalov, meant their break with the proletarian movement. In these circumstances the union of the Mensheviks and S-R’s meant not a co-operation of proletariat and peasantry, but a coalition of those parties which had broken with the proletariat and the peasants respectively, for the sake of a bloc with the possessing classes” (21).

The make-up of the soviets

The other thing that must be understood to explain the peculiar nature of the dual power is the composition of both the Soviet Executive Committee and the elected delegations to the Soviet itself.

The 1905 Soviet had been formed out of a General Strike so that both its membership and leadership had been selected in the heat of battle. Trotsky himself became its leading figure. The Soviet of 1917 had been formed only after the February victory and was led by a self-appointed E.C. set up independently of the active masses.

These leaders, misusing the masses’ old memories of 1905, nevertheless gained the authority in the eyes of the workers that the proletariat readily gives to the leadership of its traditional organisations.

In addition, the actual soviet delegates rarely reflected the aspirations of the revolutionary activists that had actually led the February struggles on the streets of Petrograd. Now that the initial battle was over, the broader, previously inactive masses dominated in the elections for soviet delegates. Less revolutionary in mood, without the same experience of struggle, these less active layers voted for the parties that most reflected their aspirations.

The masses voted for socialist delegates, ones that seemed to be against both the bourgeoisie and the monarchy, but did not at this stage recognise the differences between the different socialist parties. They did not realise that the majority of the activists that they had cheered on from a distance during the revolution were probably Bolshevik supporters. Instead, as has been explained, they turned to the easier options of the S-R's and Mensheviks whose more well-known leaders warned against the dangers of Bolshevism.

Apart from the political immaturity of the masses, the Bolsheviks were also hampered by the weakness of their organisation, which had been so fiercely attacked by the czarist state during the war years. The fresh Petrograd proletariat were far more likely to come across Menshevik and Social Revolutionary agitators since these parties had more staff, stronger organisations and a greater influence in the intelligentsia and among the junior officers.

All of the parties now coming out of the underground, plus the newly forming trade unions and local soviets, seized vacant buildings left by czarist officials so that their organisational structures soon had a firm basis in each locality.

Another reason for the domination of the Compromisers was that the rules of electoral representation meant that the soldier masses, the freshest and least politically experienced layers, had an overwhelming majority in many soviets.

In Petrograd, despite the fact that the workers outnumbered the soldiers by at least four to one, there were five soldier-delegates to every two from the workers. The workers elected one delegate for every thousand, the soldiers often sent two delegates from every tiny unit. However, the workers accepted and even welcomed this imbalance, again in an effort to ensure that the troops retained their links with the revolution.

On top of this a number of civilians gained entrance to the Petrograd Soviet without election but by individual invitation. These were usually various middle-class radicals, lawyers, students, journalists, who “for a long time crowded out with their authoritative elbows the silent workers and irresolute soldiers” (22). What is more, the soldiers often selected more educated intellectuals and junior officers as their delegates, which, together with special representation often given to the commanding staff, meant that the military delegations in the soviet were far less revolutionary in mood than the rank-and-file soldiers in the barracks.

In the provinces, where victory had been won without any struggle, the soviets were naturally even less revolutionary in character. In early March most towns and industrial centres had built soviets, but the process did not spread to all the villages until April, or even May. So, to start with, the soldiers’ soviets were practically the only voice of the peasantry.

These local soviets looked to the E.C. of the Petrograd Soviet for a lead and it was given an official position of state leadership at the first All-Russian Conference of Soviets on March 29th.

This unrepresentative conference, dominated by the provincial soviets, mainly soldiers’ soviets, declared the existence of the dual power a fiction, with the government and soviets having complete unity of aims. It filled out the Petrograd E.C. with sixteen conservative provincials, giving the leadership a more national, but even more moderate character.

With all these factors taken into account, it is not at all surprising that the Mensheviks and S-R’s dominated the workplace delegations. Even the Vyborg Soviet was initially controlled by the worker-Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks represented an insignificant minority who, in any case, as we shall see later, had no clear idea of what their program should be.

Nevertheless, this did not mean that the masses were totally taken in by the lies and promises of the Soviet E.C. The workers, in particular, regarded the Provisional Government with great distrust, and, as early as March 3rd, meetings of soldiers and workers began to demand that the Soviet take power in its own hands. Again, the Vyborg district took the lead in this agitation.

However, without any clear leadership or political program for taking power these demands foundered against the opposition of the Compromisers. The mood from below instead broke out in a more disguised manner. For example, many regiments resolved to submit only to the directions of the Soviet, not the Government.

Indeed, to the masses it was obvious that the Soviet was the power that they should turn to for a solution to their problems. So much so that, in the words of Sukhanov, making the artificial nature of the dual power crystal clear, “the Soviet apparatus began involuntarily, automatically, against the will of the Soviet, to crowd out the official government machine. It became necessary to reconcile oneself and take up the separate functions of administration, at the same time preserving the fiction that the Mariinsky Palace [HQ of the Provisional Government] was performing them” (23).

What is more, the E.C. then requested a small subsidy for the expenses of carrying out these governmental functions. The Provisional Government refused! The Soviet budget remained, as before, totally dependent on collections from the workers.

As Trotsky points out, even the soviet form of representation was shown to have imperfections, producing a leadership that did not correspond with the aspirations of the masses: “The soviet form does not contain any mystic power. It is by no means free from the faults of every representative system - unavoidable so long as that system is unavoidable. But its strength lies in that it reduces all these faults to a minimum. We may confidently assert - and the events will soon prove it - that any other representative system, atomising the masses, would have expressed their actual will in the revolution incomparably less effectively and with far greater delay. Of all the forms of revolutionary representation, the soviet is the most flexible, immediate and transparent. But still it is only a form. It cannot give more than the masses are capable of putting into it at a given moment. Beyond that, it can only assist the masses in understanding the mistakes they have made and correcting them. In this function of the soviets lay one of the most important guarantees of the development of the revolution” (24).

The exiles shift the E.C. to the right

“In the Menshevik-Social Revolutionary bloc the dominant place belonged to the Mensheviks, in spite of the weight of numbers on the side of the Social Revolutionaries. In this distribution was expressed in a way … the predominance of the city over the rural petty bourgeoisie, and the intellectual superiority of a ‘Marxist’ intelligentsia … which prided itself on the meagreness of the old Russian history” (25).

The president of the Menshevik faction of the Duma, Cheidze, had become almost automatically the President of the Soviet E.C. However, after an initial mood of watchful waiting by the temporary leaders in Petrograd, the return of the exiled leaders to the capital gave the E.C. a more solid, if more right-wing, foundation.

When the Menshevik Tseretelli returned on March 19th, he immediately took over the leadership of both his party and the whole Soviet E.C. “Under the leadership of Tseretelli, the vacillations of the E.C., if they were not put an end to, were at least organised into a system. Tseretelli openly announced that without a firm bourgeois power the revolution will inevitably fail. The democracy must limit itself to bringing pressure on the liberal bourgeoisie, beware of pushing it over by some incautious step into the camp of reaction, and conversely, support it in so far as it backs up the conquests of the revolution” (26).

Supported by other leading Mensheviks like Dan and Skobelev, the Soviet leadership was turned sharply to the right by Tseretelli. All these Mensheviks, previously anti-war 'Zimmerwaldist' socialists [i.e. supporting the conference of anti-war socialists held in Zimmerwald in 1915], now proclaimed that the war should be supported as a struggle in defence of the revolution!

The left-Menshevik, Martov, arriving from abroad only on May 9th, remained in opposition to Tseretelli and Dan but his faction never played any significant part in events. The old Plekhanov had by now become hopelessly right-wing and led a group standing outside the Mensheviks. It had supported the war even before the revolution.

The Narodnik leaders were of little significance, Kerensky being by far the most talented. He decided to formally join the Social-Revolutionary party but continued to act totally independently of it. The various non-party men who had taken an important role in the initial days of the Soviet, like Sukhanov, began to lose influence as the official party leaders began to return from exile.

The Bolsheviks also swung to the right under the influence of the newly arrived Kamenev and Stalin in mid-March, “so that the distance between the Soviet majority and its left opposition had become by the beginning of April even less than it was at the beginning of March. The real differentiation began a little later. It is possible to set the exact date: April 4th, the day after the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd" (27).

Interestingly, a large number of the leading Soviet figures were non-Russians, like the Georgian’s Tseretelli and Cheidze, showing how the oppressed nationalities played a significant part in the revolutionary movement. 

Trotsky concludes, “such was the E.C., the highest organ of the democracy. Two parties which had lost their illusions but preserved their prejudices, with a staff of leaders who were incapable of passing from word to deed, arrived at the head of a revolution called to break the fetters of a century and lay the foundations of a new society. The whole activity of the Compromisers became one long chain of gainful contradictions, exhausting the masses and leading to the convulsions of civil war” (28).

By the middle of April even the Executive Committee had become too broad a body for the leading Compromisers and a right-wing ''bureau'' was set up which, in consultation with the Provisional Government's ruling nucleus, took most important decisions.

The meetings of the full Soviet were regarded as having no practical importance. “The main difficulty for the leaders was not so much to find a general plan, as a current programme of action. The Compromisers had promised the masses to get from the bourgeoisie by way of ‘pressure’, a democratic policy, foreign and domestic. But ‘pressure’ means, in the last analysis, a threat to crowd the ruling class out of the power and occupy its place. At moments of conflict the democracy did not threaten to seize the power, but on the contrary the bourgeoisie frightened them with the idea of giving it back. Thus, the chief lever of pressure was in the hands of the bourgeoisie. This explains how, in spite of its complete impotence, the government succeeded in resisting every somewhat serious undertaking of the Soviet leaders” (29).

However, just as the ‘bureau’ was being formed and the right-wing seemed to have full control of the situation, then, according to one of Kerensky's allies, “exactly at this moment they let slip from their hands the leadership of the masses - the masses moved away from them” (30). 

As Trotsky relates: “These complacent rulers of destiny thought that in entrusting the leadership to them the soviets had essentially completed their task … The masses are long-suffering but they are not clay out of which you can fashion anything you want to. Moreover, in a revolutionary epoch they learn fast. In that lies the power of a revolution ” (31).

9) Peace, Bread and the Eight-Hour Day

"The workers won a political and moral victory [which] ... had an immense significance for the whole future development of the revolution. The workers had gained a few free hours a week for reading, for meetings and also for practice with the rifle"

Food queues in Petrograd

Once again, the demand for bread

''The bread-lines had given the last stimulus to the revolution. They also proved the first threat to the new regime'' (32).

In answer to the workers’ demands, the very first session of the Soviet had set up a food commission to investigate the problem of feeding the capital. The commission, consisting largely of Menshevik economists, found themselves compelled by the needs of the situation to recommend extremely radical measures to control speculation and organise the market.

The Soviet therefore voted for resolutions fixing the price of bread, declaring all grain stores public property, for a regulated exchange of goods with the peasants and state control of industry. The E.C. leadership had no alternative proposals so had to support the resolutions and then convey them to the government through the 'Contact Commission’.

The government, of course, ignored the Soviet's wishes. They had no desire to restrict the profiteering of their bourgeois friends nor were they overly concerned with the conditions facing the hungry workers. “All the economic measures of the Soviet went to pieces against the passive resistance of the state apparatus - except in so far as they were carried out independently by local soviets. The sole practical measure carried through by the Petrograd Soviet in the matter of food supply was the limitation of the consumer to a strict ration” (33).

In fact, the rationing was not yet too strict but the measure added to the growing insecurity in the face of continued economic crisis. However, having given up the power, the Soviet had no means of tackling these problems.

The struggle for the 8-hour day

Among the working-class, meanwhile, impatience was growing as to when the new regime would meet the long-standing demand of the Russian labour movement for an eight-hour working day.

Despite their leaders’ demands for a return to work, the proletariat had continued its general strike of the February days. They rightly felt that if they did not succeed in winning this reform now, when the opposition was in crisis, then perhaps they would never succeed.

The Soviet E.C., carrying out their role as the strike-breakers of the revolution, designated March 5th as the date for the return to work. The Menshevik leaders tried to persuade the workers that the political victory of the revolution had been enough. '' ‘For the working class’, they taught, ‘social questions are not now of first importance. Its present task is to achieve political freedom’. But just what this speculative freedom consisted of, the workers could not understand. They wanted in the first place a little freedom for their muscles and nerves'' (34).

The arrogant Soviet leadership “believed that millions of workers and soldiers lifted to the heights of insurrection by the unconquerable pressure of discontent and hope, would after the victory tamely submit to the old conditions of life” (35). However, a movement of this magnitude would only be beaten back by a series of defeats and deceptions.

The workers were not prepared to return to the factories empty-handed and many defied the resolution of the E.C. The Mensheviks, anticipating the 'two-stage' theory of the Stalinists after their counter-revolution, answered that, while in theory the workers would have to fight the capitalists in the future, right now they should settle with a struggle against czarism. Luckily, the proletariat were not to be comforted by such lame excuses.

The workers’ struggle continued. In Petrograd and Moscow there was some return to the factories but the workforce in many plants downed tools after eight hours of work and walked out each day. Bolshevik shop-floor activists were very active in the movement.

By March 10th the Manufacturers Association in Petrograd gave in, announcing it was willing to introduce the eight-hour day and permit the organisation of shop-floor committees. Unlike the Soviet leaders, the employers realised it was necessary to grant a temporary concession in the hope of taking it back again in the future. Of course they resisted the demand for an actual eight-hour law that the disgraced Soviet leaders were forced to call for.

In Moscow, the city Soviet itself was finally forced to introduce the eight-hour day on March 21st. In the provinces the struggle continued into April but eventually most areas won the eight- hour day either in agreement with the employers or by an independent decree of the local soviet.

The government had deliberately stood aside from the negotiations on the working day, leaving it to the Soviet to attempt to pacify the workers. Instead they used the struggle to try and split the unity of the proletariat and soldiers by suggesting through frenzied agitation that the eight-hour day would weaken the war effort.

The campaign had some effect, particularly in Petrograd itself, but the workers answered it successfully by skilfully explaining the reality of the war profits and the terrible conditions in the factories. The soldiers were invited to visit the workplaces to see the industrial battlefront for themselves. By April the campaign was called off by the bourgeoisie.

“Thus after their economic victory, the workers won a political and moral victory [which] ... had an immense significance for the whole future development of the revolution. The workers had gained a few free hours a week for reading, for meetings and also for practice with the rifle, which became a regular routine from the moment of the creation of the workers’ militia. Moreover, after this clear lesson, the workers began to watch the Soviet leadership more closely. The authority of the Mensheviks suffered a serious drop. The Bolsheviks grew stronger in the factories, and partly too in the barracks. The treacherous design of the demagogues turned against its own inspirers. Instead of alienation and hostility, they got a closer welding together of workers and soldiers” (36).

The soldiers make their demands

On March 23rd, the unity of the army and proletariat was visible in the massive funeral procession for the victims of the February revolution. 800,000 people filed past the graves in complete order: workers, soldiers, townspeople, students, ministers, journalists, the solid bourgeoisie, party leaders. The Vyborg section carried 51 red coffins and many of its workers were holding Bolshevik banners.

This peaceful and triumphant procession, where all the various elements of the struggle paraded together, was in many ways a final note of the harmony that the Compromisers thought that they had managed to build.

Indeed, on the very day of the funeral a new development had occurred in the world events that were lying in wait to sabotage the Compromisers’ plans. The USA entered the war, encouraging Miliukov and all the others who hoped to use the slaughter to further their own ends. However, the news alarmed the despairing peasant soldiers who were longing for peace.

It had been no accident that the slogan ‘Down with the War!’ had become one of the chief slogans of the February revolution. The demoralised troops, sick of war and death, longed for this demand above any other - even the demand for land for the peasants. After all, a piece of land was of little use to a dead soldier. Moreover, the days of revolution had awakened the hopes and personality of the peasant army and shown the troops that they did have a way of imposing their own wishes on events. Now, like the workers in the cities, the soldiers were expecting and waiting for the revolution to answer their demands - and bring peace.

The immediate effect of the revolution in the army had in fact been to slow the pre-revolutionary flood of desertions. The soldiers were prepared to wait at their posts - not by any means to go on the offensive but to defend the revolution against attack and to give the new government a stronger position from which to negotiate peace. They were not, however, prepared to see the hated czarist regime in the army continue unaltered.

“ In the minds of the soldiers the insurrection against the monarchy was primarily an insurrection against the commanding staff ” (37). It was this hatred of their commanders that had produced the indestructible ‘Order No.1,’ which resisted all attempts by the Soviet E.C. to reintroduce the troops’ subordination to their former superiors.

The frightened generals had tried to hide this revolutionary order from the front and indeed: “ In many trenches, perhaps even the majority, the news of the revolution came from the Germans before it got there from Petrograd. Could there have been any doubt among the soldiers that the whole command was in a conspiracy to conceal the truth? “ (38).

Yet once the truth was out, many of the officers tried to save their skins by pinning on red ribbons. Many even registered as Social Revolutionaries. Of course, they were prepared to switch their allegiances but not to change their beliefs. In the words of General Denikin: “I accept the revolution wholly and irrevocably. But to revolutionise the army... I consider ruinous to the country” (39).

The generals were happy for the revolution to do what it liked, as long as it kept its hands off them! Since the commanders belonged to the privileged classes they had a lot to lose - not only their officer privileges but also their landed property.

Through experience the soldiers began to realise that it was only their own actions that were going to make any changes to the army regime. “ ‘But when the soldiers saw’, to quote a delegate from the front, ‘that everything remained as before - the same oppression, slavery, ignorance, the same insults - an agitation began’ '' (40).

The tension between the officers and the soldiers grew greater. In some places, particularly in the navy, bloody retributions had already taken place and the most hated officers were being pushed out, arrested or even assaulted. Gradually the army began to break apart.

As in every army, the divisions in the Russian forces were simply a concentrated picture of the splits in society. At bottom, the antagonism between soldier and officer was the hostility between peasant and landlord. In between a layer of petty-bourgeois officers and clerks attempted to square the circle by urging some general reform but still standing for war to total victory. 

Their counterparts in the Soviet E.C. also tried to make the impossible request of the enemy to voluntarily stop attacking Russia! Under the pressures of the realities of imperialism, the Compromisers had, of course, to make a firm choice between peace and war. Naturally, after a brief hesitation, the petty-bourgeois leaders ran to the side of the bourgeoisie and declared support for the war - in the guise of ‘defence of the revolution’.

The E.C.’s manifesto of March 14th was unanimously supported by the Soviet with even the Bolsheviks, much to Lenin's consternation, offering no resistance to this false document in favour of imperialist slaughter. The bourgeois Miliukov rightly declared that: “The manifesto, although it began with so typical a note of pacifism, developed an ideology essentially common to us and all our allies” (41).

The Soviet leadership, if in words talking about a desire for a democratic peace without annexations or indemnities, were simply again playing the treacherous role of convincing the revolutionary masses to support the policy of the bourgeoisie.

Using the war to halt the revolution

On the surface, the bourgeoisie were apparently taking an aggressively patriotic stance in favour of the war. In reality, perhaps only some of the newly converted warmongers amongst the Compromisers genuinely believed the war could be won.

One letter from the commanders to the Kadet Nabokov was typical of the reports reaching the government and its advisers: “You must clearly understand that the war is finished, that we can't and won't fight any longer. Intelligent people ought to be thinking up a way to liquidate the war painlessly, otherwise there will be a catastrophe” (42).

As Trotsky relates: “The mutiny of the battalions of the Guard foretold to the possessing classes not victory abroad but defeat at home. The unexpected revolutionary optimism of Miliukov - declaring the revolution a step towards victory - was in reality the last resort of desperation ... [The bourgeoisie] felt that they would not be able to use the revolution for the purposes of war, and so much the more imperative became their other task: to use the war against the revolution” (43).

The bourgeoisie, although still worried about the effect of an ‘Allied’ victory on lowly Russia’s international economic position, now gave up thinking about negotiating a separate peace with Germany. “The concern of the moment was not to secure advantageous international conditions for Russia, but to save the bourgeois regime itself, even at the price of Russia’s further enfeeblement'' (44).

“To keep up the war hypnosis and the mood of chauvinism was the only possible way the bourgeoisie could maintain their hold upon the masses - especially upon the army. The problem was to sell to the people an old war which had been inherited from czarism, with all its former aims and allies, as a new war in defence of the conquests and hopes of the revolution. A prolongation of the war would justify them in preserving the old military bureaucratic apparatus, postponing the Constituent Assembly, subordinating the revolutionary country to the front. All domestic questions, especially the agrarian, and all social questions, were to be postponed until the end of the war. A war to exhaust the enemy was thus converted into a war to exhaust the revolution. This was not perhaps a completed plan ... but ... it flowed inevitably from the whole ... situation” (45).

Just to confirm that Miliukov was only being loyal to his class interests, and not to the Allies, he quickly offered his services to the Germans immediately after the October revolution.

In the meantime, with the help of the Soviet etc., Miliukov's scheming seemed to be having some success. Indeed, when on April 1st, General Alexeiev was officially placed at the head of the armed forces, “the inspirer of the czarist foreign policy, Miliukov, was Minister of Foreign Affairs; the leader of the army under the czar, Alexeiev, had become commander-in-chief of the revolution. The succession was fully re-established'' (46).

The army looks to the soviets

Despite the flood of pro-war propaganda, the ordinary soldier still longed for peace. Miliukov was hoping for a strong German attack to convince the workers and soldiers of the need to fight ‘to defend the revolution’. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, the front was generally quiet throughout the spring.

The soldiers left waiting and discussing in the mud grew tired of the lack of progress towards peace. Desertions began to increase again as hope turned to disappointment. Late in March one of the generals reported that: “The fighting spirit has declined. Not only is there no desire among the soldiers to take the offensive, but even a simple stubbornness on the defensive has decreased to a degree threatening the success of the war. Politics, which has spread through all the layers of the army, has made the whole military mass desire only one thing - to end the war and go home” (47).

In fact, this ‘politics’ was simply the revolution awakening the consciousness of the soldier mass since there was no organised party opposing the war at the front. The weak voice of the Bolsheviks in the army had become even quieter after the layer of revolutionary workers that had been sent to the front as punishment was allowed to return home. Nevertheless, the army gradually came over to support the Soviet leadership rather than the supposed commanders.

The Soviet E.C. began to have more and more organisational control over the army through its influence on the soldier delegates in the Soviet and on the elected regimental committees set up by ‘Order No. 1’.

The soldiers were only too happy to use these committees to remove a good number of their former commanding staff from their posts. In addition, the Soviet sent commissars into the regiments to watch over the military chiefs, helping them win their battle with the bourgeoisie for control. However, it was in many ways a pyrrhic victory since the more the soldiers listened to the E.C., the more they became convinced of the bankruptcy of the Soviet leadership.

A congress of trench delegates in early April helped to reveal the real state of affairs: ''Fraternisation was going on along the whole front ... the commanding staff could not even think of repressive measures. Faced by this passionate audience [the liberals] gave up the idea of opposing their own resolutions to those of the Soviet. The battle was won by the democrats without a struggle. The Soviet resolution on the war was adopted by 610 votes against 8, with 46 abstaining. The last hope of the liberals, that of opposing the front to the rear, the army to the Soviet, went up in smoke. But the democratic leaders returned from the congress more frightened than inspired by their victory. They had seen the ghosts raised by the revolution and they felt unable to cope with them” (48).

10) The Bolsheviks and Lenin

''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’

Statue outside Finland station 2012

Lenin was now convinced of the urgent need of his returning to Russia but also now realised this might only be possible through negotiation with Germany.

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.

Plaque on site of Petrograd City
Conference near Vladimirskaya

Armed with the April Theses, the party ranks immediately saw a way forward and came over to Lenin’s position. As one delegate said to the Petrograd city conference on April 14th: “All the comrades before the arrival of Lenin were wandering in the dark, we knew only the formulas of 1905. Our comrades could only limit themselves to getting ready for the Constituent Assembly by parliamentary means, and took no account of the possibility of going farther. In accepting the slogans of Lenin we are now doing what life itself suggests to us. We need not fear the Commune, and say that we already have a workers’ government; the Commune of Paris was not only a workers’, but also a petty bourgeois government” (89).

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.