After all that has been said above, is it still worthwhile to recall the Fascist writer Malaparte, who ascribes to me tactics which are independent of strategy and amount to a series of technical recipes for insurrection, applicable in all latitudes and longitudes? It is a good thing that the name of the luckless theoretician of the coup d’état makes it easy to distinguish him from the victorious practitioner of the coup d’état; no one therefore runs the risk of confusing Malaparte with Bonaparte [9].
Without the armed insurrection of 7th November, 1917, the Soviet State would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from heaven. A series of historical prerequisites were necessary for the October Revolution.
- The rotting away of the old ruling classes-the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
- The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
- The revolutionary character of the agrarian question.
- The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nationalities.
- The significant social burdens weighing on the proletariat.
To these organic preconditions must be added certain highly important connected conditions.
- The Revolution of 1905 was the great school or in Lenin’s phrase, “the dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets as the irreplaceable organisational form of the proletarian united front in the Revolution were created for the first time in the year 1905.
- The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility, and thus prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.