As a corollary of the slanders against October, we have the attempt to paint the February Revolution in glowing colours. The ‘democratic’ regime of Kerensky, it is alleged, would have led Russia into a glorious future of prosperity, if only the Bolsheviks had not spoilt it all. Alas! The idealisation of the February Revolution does not stand up to the least scrutiny. The February 1917 Revolution – which had overthrown the old tsarist regime – had not solved one of the tasks of the national-democratic revolution: land reform, a democratic republic, the national question. It was not even capable of bringing about the most elementary demand of the masses – for an end to the imperialist slaughter and the conclusion of a democratic peace. In short, the Kerensky regime in the course of nine months gave ample proof of its total inability to meet the most basic needs of the Russian people. It was this fact, and this alone, which enabled the Bolsheviks to come to power with the support of the decisive majority of society.

Emerging from the ravages of the first world war, tsarist Russia was a semi-colony particularly of France, Germany, and Britain. Russia produced less than 3 per cent of world industrial output. It could not compete on a world scale. For every hundred square kilometres of land, there were only 0.4 kilometres of rail track. Around 80 per cent of the population eked out a bare existence on the land, which was fragmented into millions of smallholdings. The Russian bourgeoisie had entered onto the stage of history too late. It had failed to carry out any of the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that had been solved in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary, the Russian capitalists leaned on imperialism on the one hand and the tsarist autocracy for support on the other. They were linked by a thousand threads to the old landlords and aristocrats. Horrified by the 1905 Revolution, the bourgeoisie had become more conservative and suspicious of the workers. They had no revolutionary role to play. “Whereas in the dawn of its history it was too unripe to accomplish a Reformation,” states Trotsky, “when the time came for leading a revolution it was overripe.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 28.)

The only revolutionary class in Russia was the young, small, but highly concentrated proletariat. Arising from the law of uneven and combined development, a backward country assimilates the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries. It does not slavishly reproduce all the stages of the past, but skips over a whole series of intermediate stages. This gives rise to a contradictory development, where the most advanced features are superimposed upon extremely backward conditions. Foreign investment had meant the creation of highly advanced concentrated factories and industries in Russia. The peasants were uprooted, thrown into industry, and proletarianised overnight. It fell to this youthful proletariat – which had none of the conservative traditions of its counterpart in the West – to take Russian society out of the impasse it faced. The attempt to counter-pose the February regime to October has no foundation whatever. Had the Bolsheviks not taken power, the future that faced Russia was not one of prosperous capitalist democracy, but fascist barbarism under the jackboot of Kornilov or one of the other White generals. Such a development would have signified, not advance, but a terrible regression.

In the October Revolution, the victorious proletariat first had to tackle the basic problems of the national-democratic revolution, then went on, uninterruptedly, to carry out the socialist tasks. This was the very essence of the permanent revolution. Capitalism had broken at its weakest point, as Lenin explained. The October Revolution represented the beginning of the world socialist revolution. The revolution of February had spontaneously thrown up committees of workers and soldiers, as had the revolution of 1905. The committees, or soviets, became transformed from extended strike committees into political instruments of the working class in the struggle for power, and later into administrative organs of the new workers’ state. They were far more democratic and flexible than the territorially elected bodies of bourgeois democracy. To paraphrase Marx, capitalist democracy allows the workers every five years to elect parties to misrepresent their interests. In Russia, with the establishment of peasants’ soviets, they embraced the overwhelming majority of the population.

Throughout the nine months between February and October, the soviets represented a rival power to the capitalist state. It was a period of ‘dual power’. One of the key demands of the Bolsheviks throughout this time was: “All power to the soviets!” Months of patient explanation and the harsh experience of events won over the overwhelming majority of the workers and poor peasants to Bolshevism. The October Revolution brought to power a new revolutionary government, which took its authority from the Congress of Soviets. Contrary to common belief, it was not a one-party regime but originally a coalition government of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries. The urgent task facing the government was to spread the authority of Soviet power – the rule of the working class – throughout all Russia. On 5 January 1918, the government issued a directive which declared that the local soviets were from then on invested with all the powers held by the former administration and added: “The entire country must be covered with a network of new soviets.”

The system of soviets was not, as the reformists claim, an exclusively Russian phenomenon. The November 1918 Revolution in Germany spontaneously threw up similar bodies. They were the embodiment of workers’ self-organisation. In every German port, town and barracks, workers’, soldiers’ and sailors’ councils were established and held effective political power. Soviets were established in Bavaria and during the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. In Britain also, Councils of Action were established in 1920, which were described by Lenin as “soviets in all but name”, as well as during the 1926 General Strike (committees of action and trades councils). Although the Stalinists and reformists tried to prevent the reappearance of soviets, they re-emerged in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, with the creation of the Budapest Workers’ Council.

In its origins, the soviet – the most democratic and flexible form of popular representation yet devised – was simply an extended strike committee. Born in mass struggle, the soviets (or workers’ councils) assumed an extremely broad sweep, and ultimately became transformed into organs of revolutionary direct government. Beside the local soviets, elected in every city, town and village, in every large city there were also ward (raionny) soviets as well as district or provincial (oblastny or gubiernsky) soviets, and finally delegates were elected to the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets in Petrograd. The delegates were elected at every unit of labour to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, and subject to immediate recall. There was no bureaucratic elite. No deputy or official received more than the wage of a skilled worker.

The Soviet government issued a whole series of economic, political, administrative and cultural decrees in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. At a grassroots level, there was a mushrooming of soviet organisation. Everywhere attempts were made to do away with the distinction between legislative and executive functions, to allow individuals to participate directly in the application of decisions they had made. As a consequence, the masses began to take their destiny into their own hands. In November 1917 Lenin wrote an appeal in Pravda: “Comrades, working people! Remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of state. No one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all affairs of state… Get on with the job yourselves; begin right at the bottom, do not wait for anyone.” (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 297.) He was anxious for the masses to involve themselves in the running of industry and the state.

In December 1917 Lenin wrote:

One of the most important tasks of today, if not the most important, is to develop [the] independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs, we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called upper classes, only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society. (LCW, Vol. 26, p. 409.)