From his far-off exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched with growing anxiety the evolution of the line pursued by the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd. Immediately on hearing the news of the Tsar’s overthrow he telegraphed Petrograd on 6 March:

Our tactic: no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is particularly suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd City Council; no rapprochement with other parties.

As soon as Pravda recommenced publication, Lenin started to send his famous Letters from Afar. Reading these articles, and comparing them to the speeches at the March Conference, we seem to be in two different worlds. No wonder they fell like a bombshell on the astonished Central Committee members! Lenin bombarded Pravda with letters and articles demanding that the workers break with the bourgeois liberals and take power into their own hands. In Letters from Afar we see Lenin’s revolutionary genius in its authentic stature. His ability to sum up the essence of a situation at a glance, his imaginative sweep, his way of grasping precisely which concrete slogans apply, and how to get from A to B. The February Revolution, he stressed in the first letter, had put the Guchkovs and Milyukovs in power “for the time being”. But a capitalist government could not solve the problems of the Russian people.

The tsarist monarchy has been smashed, but not finally destroyed.

Side by side with this government… there has arisen the chief, unofficial, as yet underdeveloped, and comparatively weak workers’ government, which expresses the interests of the proletariat and of the entire poor section of the urban and rural population. This is the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in Petrograd which is seeking connections with the soldiers and peasants, and also with the agricultural workers, with the latter particularly and primarily, of course, more than with the peasants.

Upon the solution of this contradiction, this regime of ‘dual power’, hung the fate of the revolution. What attitude should the Bolsheviks have towards the Provisional Government?

He who says that the workers must support the new government in the interests of the struggle against tsarist reaction (and apparently this is being said by the Potresovs, Gvozdyovs, Chkhenkelis, and also, all evasiveness notwithstanding, by Chkheidze) is a traitor to the workers, a traitor to the cause of the proletariat, to the cause of peace and freedom.

And here Lenin comes over to a position that is identical to that first defended by Trotsky over a decade earlier:

Ours is a bourgeois revolution, therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception practiced by the bourgeois politicians, teach them to put no faith in words, to depend entirely on their own strength, their own organisation, their own unity, and their own weapons.

In the second letter, Lenin makes a withering criticism of the Manifesto issued by the leaders of the Soviet, which hides behind pacifist phraseology, declares that all democrats must support the Provisional Government, and authorises Kerensky to enter it. Lenin retorts that:

The task is not to ‘coax’ the liberals, but to explain to the workers why the liberals find themselves in a blind alley, why they are bound hand and foot, why they conceal both the treaties tsarism concluded with England and other countries and the deals between Russian and Anglo-French capital, and so forth. (LCW, Telegram to the Bolsheviks Leaving for Russia, 6 (19) March 1917, vol. 23, p. 292, p. 298, p. 304, p. 305, p. 306 and p. 317, emphasis in original.)

When Lenin’s letters reached the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd, they were aghast. They thought that their leader must be completely insane! Or at least, he must be so far out of touch as to fail to understand the practicalities of the situation in Russia. A bitter conflict now opened up between Lenin and his closest comrades. In Pravda No. 27, Kamenev wrote:

As for Comrade Lenin’s general scheme, it appears to us to be unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution. (LCW, Letters on Tactics, vol. 24, p. 50.)

This accurately conveys the opinions of Kamenev, Stalin, and most of the other ‘Old Bolsheviks’ in the spring of 1917.

Out of all the leaders of the Social Democracy at that time, only one completely coincided with the position defended by Lenin. That man was Leon Trotsky, with whom Lenin had clashed so frequently in the past. When Trotsky first heard of the February Revolution, he was still in exile in the United States. Immediately he wrote a series of articles in the paper Novy Mir (New World), which were published in its issues of 13, 17, 19, and 20 March 1917. What is most striking is the fact that, although there was no communication between Trotsky and Lenin, who was thousands of miles away in Switzerland, the content of these articles is identical to that of Lenin’s Letters From Afar, written at the same time. Let us recall that these letters of Lenin proved to be so shocking to the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd that Kamenev and Stalin had them suppressed or published in a mutilated form. At a time when the ‘Old Bolsheviks’, against Lenin’s explicit advice, were moving closer to the Mensheviks, Lenin’s ideas seemed to them to be pure ‘Trotskyism’, and they were not wrong. The logic of events had pushed Lenin and Trotsky together. Independently, and starting from different directions, they came to the same conclusion: the bourgeoisie cannot solve the problems of Russia. The workers must take power.

In his article ‘Two Faces – Internal Forces of the Russian Revolution’, Trotsky wrote:

Formally, in words, the bourgeoisie has agreed to leave the question of a form of government to the discretion of the Constituent Assembly. Practically, however, the Octobrist-Cadet Provisional Government will turn all the preparatory work for the Constituent Assembly into a campaign in favour of a monarchy against a republic. The character of the Constituent Assembly will largely depend upon the character of those who convoke it. It is evident, therefore, that right now the revolutionary proletariat will have to set up its own organs, the Councils of Workingmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, against the executive organs of the Provisional Government. In this struggle the proletariat ought to unite about itself the rising masses of the people, with one aim in view – to seize governmental power. Only a revolutionary labour government will have the desire and ability to give the country a thorough democratic cleansing during the work preparatory to the Constituent Assembly, to reconstruct the army from top to bottom, to turn it into a revolutionary militia, and to show the poorer peasants in practice that their only salvation is in support of a revolutionary labour regime. A Constituent Assembly convoked after such preparatory work will truly reflect the revolutionary, creative forces of the country and become a powerful factor in the further development of the revolution. (L. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky Speaks, pp. 46-47.)

These lines, which are typical of the position taken by Trotsky at the time, exactly reproduce that of Lenin. But Lenin was not aware of this. He was misled by the false reports of Trotsky’s position sent from America by Alexandra Kollontai, who, having only recently broken with Menshevism, was anxious to present herself to Lenin as an ultra-radical, and falsely presented Trotsky as a ‘centrist’. Lenin accepted this nonsense as good coin and wrote some very harsh things about Trotsky in his replies to Kollontai, which were later used unscrupulously by the Stalinists. Only later, when Trotsky had returned to Russia and immediately began to play an outstanding role in the revolutionary wing, did Lenin change his opinion of Trotsky, saying of him that there was “no better Bolshevik”. As for Kollontai, she carried her ultra-leftism to its logical conclusion, entering into conflict with both Lenin and Trotsky, before she finally became a submissive servant of the totalitarian regime of Stalin.

The complete convergence of views between Lenin and Trotsky in the moment of truth was no accident. As long ago as 1909, Leon Trotsky – the only one to predict that the revolution would triumph as a workers’ revolution or not at all – had warned that the counter-revolutionary nature of the slogan of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ would only become clear in the moment when the question of power was posed. Now he was proved to have been correct. The weak side of Lenin’s theory, and its effect in practice, was the cause of very serious mistakes made by the Bolshevik leaders at the time of the February Revolution, which were only corrected by Lenin after his return on the basis of a sharp internal struggle. Even Zinoviev admits this in his tendentious History of the Bolshevik Party, published in 1923 as part of the campaign against ‘Trotskyism’, although in a typically roundabout and dishonest way:

This evolution in our views over the years from 1905 to 1917 cannot be denied, any more than the fact that it proceeded with definite inconsistencies which were to produce among us very dangerous differences on the eve of October 1917. Some of us (including myself) for too long upheld the idea that in our peasant country we could not pass straight on to the socialist revolution, but merely hope that if our revolution coincided with the start of the international proletarian one it could become its overture. (G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, pp. 177-78.)

These lines, despite their evasive character, hold the clue to all that happened in the Bolshevik Party in the first few months after February 1917. What happened to his letters sheds a lot of light on Lenin’s relations with the ‘Old Bolsheviks’. It was a carbon copy of what had happened in 1912-13. Even the actors were the same. Stalin and Kamenev were once again the editors. Once again they opted for the line of least resistance called conciliationism. And once again they reacted to Lenin’s criticism and protests by blatant censorship. The Bolshevik leaders were so embarrassed by Lenin’s letters that, when Kollontai brought the first two letters to Petrograd late in March, they hesitated for several days before publishing. Even then, they printed only one of the two, which was censored to cut out all those passages where Lenin opposed any agreement with the Mensheviks. The same fate awaited the remainder of Lenin’s articles. They were just not published or issued in a mutilated form. Krupskaya comments:

Only the first letter was published on the day Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg, three others were lying in the editors’ office and the fifth had not even been sent to Pravda, as Lenin had started writing it just before leaving for Russia. (N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 338.)

In his autobiography, Trotsky recalls:

In New York, at the beginning of March, 1917, I wrote a series of articles dealing with the class forces and perspectives of the Russian Revolution. At that very time, Lenin, in Geneva, was sending to Petrograd his Letters From Afar. And both of us, though we were writing in different parts of the world and were separated by an ocean, gave the same analysis and the same forecast. On every one of the principal questions, such as the attitude toward the peasantry, toward the bourgeoisie, the Provisional Government, the war, and the world revolution, our views were completely identical. Here a test of the relations between ‘Trotskyism’ and Leninism was made on the very touchstone of history. And it was carried out under the conditions of a chemically pure experiment. At that time I knew nothing of Lenin’s stand; I argued on the basis of my own premises and my own revolutionary experience, and I drew the same perspective and suggested the same line of strategy as Lenin.

But perhaps the question was quite clear to everyone at that time, and the solution universally accepted? On the contrary; Lenin’s stand at that period, that is, before 4 April, 1917, when he first appeared on the Petrograd stage, was his own personal one, shared by no one else. Not one of those leaders of the party who were in Russia had any intention of making the dictatorship of the proletariat – the social revolution – the immediate object of his policy. A party conference which met on the eve of Lenin’s arrival and counted among its numbers about 30 Bolsheviks showed that none of them even imagined anything beyond democracy. No wonder the minutes of that conference are still kept a secret! Stalin was in favour of supporting the Provisional Government of Guchkov and Milyukov, and of merging the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. (L. Trotsky, My Life, pp. 329-30.)