The most burning issue facing the revolution was the war and the ever deepening mood of discontent of the soldiers. After the collapse of the old regime, the soldiers spontaneously moved to purge the officers who had opposed the revolution. The men in grey coats demanded their right to be treated like human beings, not animals. Out of this was born the celebrated Order Number One, which Trotsky describes as “the single worthy document of the February Revolution”. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 291.) The initiative for this remarkable document came from the ranks themselves. In it one can hear the real voice of the front, the anguished but hopeful voice of men who, staring death in the face, had not lost the spark of human dignity and the desire to be treated like human beings. Here, in turn, was the real face of the February Revolution: not the studied and artificial speeches of the politicians, but the masses newly awakened to political life seeking democratic rights and freedom in place of the old ranks and servility. Order Number One expresses better than anything else the democratic and revolutionary aspirations of the masses.
The demands put forward represented a real soldiers’ charter:
Elected committees at all levels of the army and the navy.
Election of representatives to the Soviet where these have not been held.
The soldiers will obey only the Soviet and its committees.
The orders of the Provisional Government will be obeyed only where they are not in contradiction to those of the Soviet.
All weapons to be under the control of elected soldiers’ committees, and in no case to be given to officers.
While on duty, strict maintenance of discipline: when off duty and out of barracks, full freedom and civil rights.
Elimination of officers’ titles, no ‘bull’; officers are forbidden to behave rudely to soldiers, and especially to use the familiar form (‘ty’) when addressing them.
The demands were called ‘Order Number One’. It fell like a bombshell among the reactionary officers and their political friends in the Provisional Government. Here was a challenge to the autocratic ‘divine right’ of the officer caste to rule the roost, and, by extension, a challenge to the pillars of the existing bourgeois order. The ‘Provisional Committee of the Duma’ immediately clashed with the soldiers’ deputies who drew up the ‘Order Number One’ for the Petrograd garrison. The reactionary officers, now sporting republican insignia in their buttonholes, tried to prevent it being carried out at the front, alleging it to be a “purely Petrograd affair”. In this they had the backing of the SRs and Mensheviks, who were as anxious as they to put an end to the revolutionary ‘madness’ and restore (bourgeois) order. In vain. The demand for democratic rights contained in the ‘soldiers charter’ spread through the army like wildfire. The clash over Order Number One showed the shape of things to come.
What the army wanted was the immediate conclusion of a peace without annexations or indemnities. The Soviet leaders made speeches about a ‘just peace’, but as long as the power remained in the hands of bankers and industrialists, tied hand and foot to the interests of Anglo-French capital, this was just a dream. Throughout the spring, the discontent of the soldiers grew, as the government dragged its feet over the question of peace. The bourgeoisie, through its chief representative in the government, Milyukov, made no secret of its intention to pursue the war to a “victorious conclusion”. This enraged the soldiers and created an explosive situation in Petrograd.
The processes that unfolded after February can be observed in every revolution. The fall of the old regime is greeted with enthusiasm by the masses. There is universal rejoicing, as men and women enjoy the new-found freedoms. This is the stage of democratic illusions, a carnival in which people become drunk with the sensation of liberation and hopes that know no bounds. Alas, this beautiful love feast is not destined to last. The enormity of the illusion rapidly finds its counterpart in the depth of disappointment as expectation cracks its head against reality. “We have scotched the serpent, not killed him,” exclaims Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Gradually, the idea begins to dawn upon the masses that, beneath the tinsel and the speeches, nothing has really changed. The old order has merely swapped its garb and its mode of address, but the same old masters still remain, and the same old problems too.
This rapid spread of disillusionment does not affect all layers at once. It finds its first expression in the ranks of the most advanced section of the masses. Vaguely realising that the power won with so much effort and sacrifice is slipping out of their hands, the advanced guard instinctively lashes out. This is a moment of utmost danger for the revolution. The advanced guard understands more than the mass, and impatiently pushes ahead with demands for precipitate action. But it is necessary to win over the rest of society, which lags behind and has not yet drawn the necessary conclusions. If the advanced guard breaks away from the mass, it can become isolated and cut down by the reaction. Under such conditions it is the duty of the party to attempt to restrain the advanced elements, to avoid battle until such time as the reserve battalions are in place.
The process of successive approximation by which the masses search out the political party that best expresses their aspirations commenced as soon as the revolution began. There were a whole succession of what we can liken to sorties in a battle, in which the masses tested out the defences of the enemy and their own strength. These sorties took the form of mass demonstrations, beginning in April, when thousands of workers, soldiers, and sailors poured onto the streets of Petrograd, carrying banners displaying the slogans: ‘Down with Milyukov!’ ‘Down with Annexation Politics!’ and even the odd ultra-left ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ These were undoubtedly Bolshevik slogans, but the demonstrations themselves had not been called by the party. As Alexander Rabinowitch explains:
Rank-and-file party members from garrison regiments and factories undoubtedly helped provoke the street demonstrations in the first place, although the Central Committee did not become involved until after the movement was well underway; subsequently, the top party leadership endorsed the demonstrations. Impulsive elements in the Petrograd party organisation and in the Bolshevik Military Organisation, responsive to their militant constituents and fearful of losing ground to the anarchists, took a significantly more radical tack; some officials of the Petersburg Committee prepared and widely circulated a leaflet appealing, in the party’s name, for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government and the arrest of cabinet ministers. (A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, p. xxxii.)
The immediate aim of the demonstration was to protest against plans to continue the war. But this question raised the question of power. The April mobilisations were the first in a whole series of mass demonstrations whereby the masses attempted to force the government and the Soviet leaders to do their bidding. In essence, they played a similar role to reconnaissance missions in war, probing the weaknesses of the enemy and allowing the workers and soldiers to test their strength on the streets. Significantly, the demonstrators only agreed to disperse when asked to do so by the Petrograd Soviet, having openly defied the government’s orders to disperse. This detail says it all. The real power was in the hands, not of the Provisional Government, which the masses hated and distrusted, but in the hands of the reformist leaders, the ‘moderate socialists’ in the Soviet Executive, who feared it as the Devil fears holy water. The masses were compelled to take the reformists by the scruff of the neck and push them into the government. That was the real meaning of the April demonstrations. The sudden eruption of the masses onto the street had an immediate result. The government entered into crisis, in which the bourgeoisie was forced to pass the hot potato to the reformist leaders.
The April demonstration was the first serious test of strength between the workers and the Provisional Government and its right-wing socialist backers. And it was successful. Two of the bourgeois ministers most hated for their pro-war policies, Guchkov and Milyukov, were forced to resign, and several leaders of the Soviet entered the government. The Georgian Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli became Minister of Post and Telegraphs. The veteran SR Victor Chernov became Minister of Agriculture. Alexei Peshekonov, head of the Popular Socialist Party, became Minister of Food supply. Pavel Pereverzev occupied the post of Minister of Justice, and Kerensky became the Minister of War and the Navy. In this way the Soviet leaders accepted direct responsibility for the Provisional Government, instead of supporting it from the outside. The first coalition had been formed.
The masses mostly welcomed this as a sign that ‘their’ ministers would somehow bring about a change of course in the government. But Lenin immediately denounced the participation of the Mensheviks and SRs in the government, pointing out that, by joining the bourgeois Provisional Government, the SRs and Mensheviks “saved it from collapse and allowed themselves to be made its servants and defenders”. (LCW, vol. 25, p. 237.) The Soviet leaders were, in effect, hostages of the bourgeois ministers who called all the shots. They accepted ministerial portfolios, while the real power was left in the hands of the landlords and capitalists, except that here there was another, alternative power which was waiting with anxious expectation for its most pressing problems to be resolved. Vain hope! Terrified of offending the bourgeoisie, who, according to the dogma of the ‘two stages’ ought to rule, the reformist leaders merely acted as a left cover for the Provisional Government, which, in turn, was merely a façade behind which the forces of reaction were regrouping and preparing for a counter-attack, once the masses had been sufficiently demoralised and disappointed by the school of coalition politics.
This coalition of the labour leaders with the bourgeoisie was shot through with insoluble contradictions which paralysed it from the start. It was essentially similar to all such coalitions, from Millerandism in France, passing through the Lib-Lab politics of the British labour leaders to the so-called People’s Front governments in France and Spain in the 1930s. All were justified in the name of the ‘unity of progressive forces’ and ‘national unity’ – the emptiest of all slogans, signifying the ‘unity’ of the horse and its rider. In reality, through such coalitions, the bourgeoisie use and discredit the labour leaders in order to demoralise the masses, while behind the scenes they prepare reaction. The Provisional Government after April was entirely typical of this kind of coalition. The Soviet leaders were placed in those ministries that would bring them in conflict with the aspirations of the workers and peasants: labour, agriculture, and so on. Kerensky, who enjoyed a measure of popularity to begin with, was entrusted with whipping the soldiers into line and getting them to accept the need for a new offensive in the name of “peace, progress, and democracy”, of course.
The entry of the ‘socialist’ ministers into the Provisional Government was a turning point. From now on the workers and peasants could compare words and deeds. The ground was being prepared for the reformist labour leaders to be exposed in practice. That was one side of the question. But the most decisive element was the fact that, under Lenin’s guidance, the Bolsheviks had stayed out of the coalition and maintained an implacable opposition towards it. What had seemed to some a utopian and sectarian stance was now revealed as the only realistic position for a revolutionary party. This was the key to the success of the Bolsheviks and the reason why they grew so rapidly at the expense of the Mensheviks and SRs in the following months. As Rabinowitch observes:
Once they had joined the first coalition, the moderate socialists became identified in the popular mind with the shortcomings of the Provisional Government. Only the Bolsheviks, among the major Russian political groups, remained untainted by association with the government and were therefore completely free to organise opposition to it, a situation of which the party took full advantage. (A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, p. xxviii.)
But the revolutionary wing faced an uphill struggle that must have seemed all but impossible at first. Their slogans seemed too far advanced for the masses. The Menshevik and SR leaders, on the other hand, offered them what seemed to be the easy option. The revolution had triumphed. Russia was now the freest country in the world. With a little patience, all would be resolved. What was needed was for everyone to unite and sink their differences and everything would be fine. The intense pressure for unity was one of the reasons why Kamenev and Stalin had capitulated to the Mensheviks before Lenin’s return. Their mistake had been to see only the situation before them, and not to see the underlying process that would soon stand all this on its head. The philosophical basis of all kinds of reformism is vulgar empiricism that masquerades as ‘realism’, or, as Trotsky once expressed it, the slavish worship of the established fact. But what is a ‘fact’ at one moment can become a fiction the next. In order that the masses should draw the necessary conclusions, two things are necessary: firstly, that the working people, through their own experience, come to understand their true situation, and secondly, that there exists a revolutionary party with a far-sighted leadership capable of going through the experience together with them and explaining its significance at each stage.
But the masses do not all draw the same conclusions simultaneously. By June-July, a layer of the advanced workers and sailors in Petrograd had drawn a balance sheet of the Provisional Government and the Soviet leaders and found them wanting. Likewise, a section of the Bolshevik Party, under the influence of impatience, wanted to move too far ahead too soon; echoing the ultra-lefts and anarchists, they raised the revolutionary slogan ‘Down with the Provisional Government’. This was the slogan of insurrection. What attitude did Lenin take? He completely rejected it. Why? Because such a slogan did not at all correspond to the real stage the movement was at. Lenin, who was a revolutionary to the fingertips, nevertheless implacably opposed this slogan, and instead oriented the Party towards the conquest of the masses, insisting on the need to ‘patiently explain’. The problem was that the mass of the working class in the more backward provinces had not yet had time to understand the role of the reformist leaders in the Soviets, and the peasants still less so. The Bolsheviks had succeeded in winning the most advanced sections of the class. But it would have been a fatal error to bring these into collision with the less conscious majority who still had illusions in the Mensheviks and SRs. Basing themselves on the advanced workers, the Bolsheviks now had to find the way to winning over the majority.
The explosive growth of Bolshevism in the nine months from February to October is a phenomenon for which it would be difficult to find a parallel in the history of political parties. The year 1917 perfectly sums up the whole essence and meaning of the history of Bolshevism. All programmes, policies, tactics, and strategies are finally subjected to the acid test of practice. Nowhere is this assertion truer than in the course of a revolution. Looking back on the experience of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky commented:
We must remember, however, that at the beginning of 1917 the Bolshevik Party led only an insignificant number of the toilers. Not only in the soldiers’ soviets but also in the workers’ soviets, the Bolshevik fraction generally constituted 1 to 2 per cent, at best 5 per cent. The leading parties of petty-bourgeois democracy (Mensheviks and the so-called Social Revolutionaries) had the following of at least 95 per cent of the workers, soldiers, and peasants participating in the struggle. The leaders of these parties called the Bolsheviks first sectarians and then… agents of the German Kaiser. But no, the Bolsheviks were not sectarians! All their attention was directed to the masses, and moreover not to their top layer, but to the deepest, most oppressed millions and tens of millions, whom the parliamentarian babblers usually forgot. Precisely in order to lead the proletarians and the semi-proletarians of city and countryside, the Bolsheviks considered it necessary to distinguish themselves sharply from all factions and groupings of the bourgeoisie, beginning with those false ‘Socialists’ who are in reality agents of the bourgeoisie. (L. Trotsky, Writings 1935-36, pp. 166-67.)
As we have seen, the Bolshevik Party before the war had succeeded in winning over the decisive majority of the organised workers. In a sense it was the traditional party of the working class in Russia. But during the war, the class balance of forces was drastically modified. The youth – the natural ‘constituency’ of Bolshevism – was in the army. A large part of the experienced worker-cadres, too, were at the front, where they were submerged in a sea of backward and politically illiterate peasants. The workers’ organisations were decimated by arrests. The workers had their heads down. The influx of a large number of inexperienced elements into the factories – peasants, women, raw youths – made things worse at first. Under such circumstances, no serious advance was possible. It was sufficient to keep what was left of the cadres together and prepare for a break in the situation.
It is difficult to calculate with any precision the membership of the Bolshevik Party in 1917, and different authors give different estimates. The ‘official’ estimate given by the Bol’shoya Sovietskaya Encyclopedia was 23,600 for January 1917, before the start of the revolution, but this piece of guesswork is certainly an exaggeration. The figure of 8,000 members in the whole of Russia is probably not far from the true figure. Rabinowitch claims that there were 2,000 members in Petrograd in February and that the national membership of the party doubled to 16,000 by April:
In February there had been about 2,000 Bolsheviks in Petrograd. At the opening of the April Conference party membership had risen to 16,000. By late June it had reached 32,000, while 2,000 garrison soldiers had joined the Bolshevik Military Organisation and 4,000 soldiers had become associated with the ‘Club Pravda’…
The overwhelming majority of the new recruits were very raw, as the same author points out:
The party’s rapid growth since February had flooded the ranks with militants who knew next to nothing about Marxism and who were united by little more than an overwhelming impatience for immediate revolutionary action. (A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, pp. xxix-xxx and p. xxxi.)
The rapid influx of new, fresh recruits, many of them youngsters (the Mensheviks contemptuously referred to the Bolsheviks as ‘a party of kids’), was part of the reason why Lenin could succeed in overcoming the resistance of the conservative ‘Old Bolsheviks’. This transformed the party. Marcel Liebman points out that:
[B]eginning in April 1917, the Bolshevik Party was reinforced by a steady and large-scale influx of new members. This influx had the effect of crushing the nucleus of ‘old Bolsheviks’ who claimed to be the guardians of Leninist orthodoxy, submerging them under the weight of new members who had been radicalised by the revolutionary events and were not paralysed by the principles of that orthodoxy. (M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, p. 134.)
The most significant feature of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 was its youthfulness. With one exception, all the members of the Moscow party Bureau were under 30 years old. There was a conflict between the Bureau and the Moscow Party Committee, which was made up of older, more conservative Party members. In his biography of Bukharin, Stephen F. Cohen describes the situation of the Bolsheviks in Moscow:
While a majority of the Moscow Committee eventually supported insurrection, its response to the radical course set by Lenin and the Left was sluggish and half-hearted throughout. Most of its senior members believed, as one insisted, that “There do not exist the forces, the objective conditions for this”. Bureau leaders, constantly prodding their elders, remained worried as late as October that the “peace-loving” mood and “significant wavering” in the Moscow Committee would prove fatal “at the decisive moment”. Consequently, despite the radical support of some older Moscow Bolsheviks, the young Muscovites tended to regard the final victory in Moscow as their personal achievement, a tour de force of their generation. As Osinsky later put it, they had led the struggle for power “against significant resistance by a large part of the older generation of Moscow officials”. (S.F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 50.)