5.1 Introduction
In the period February to October 1917, Lenin’s strategic goal for the Russian Revolution passed from the stagist position of the RDDPP, as adopted in the 1905 Revolution, to a position that was in all essentials identical with the ToPR. Between receiving news of the February Revolution, and his delivery of the April Theses at the Tauride Palace on 4 April (developed into a programme for action at the Petrograd City RDSLP(B) Conference on 22-24 April and the Seventh All-Russian Conference of the RDSLP(B) of 24-29 April), Lenin moved to a position of publicly calling for the Bolsheviks to lead the Russian socialist revolution.
Just as events in Russia caused Lenin to change his political goal and to consciously work towards establishing, in October 1917, the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than a democratic dictatorship, so those same events caused Trotsky to completely revise and change his position on the party. Throughout the rest of his life, Trotsky readily admitted how wrong he had been on this question, and how on all issues relating to the party, Lenin had been correct.
During the initial period of the so-called dual power, the Bolshevik fraction was in a small minority in the Soviets; barely 13% at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and insignificant at the First All-Russian Congress of Peasant Delegates held on 17 May 1917. From his return in April to the events of 4 July, Lenin and the Bolsheviks campaigned for a peaceful transfer of power to the Soviets, mounting a campaign under the slogans “All Power to the Soviets” and “Down with the Capitalist Ministers”. During this period Bolshevik policy was to win a majority in the Soviets by demonstrating that the Mensheviks and SRs were tied to the government presided over by Prince Lvov, and would not carry out policies that were in the interests of either the proletariat or peasantry.
After the July Days, and the repression unleashed by Kerensky’s coalition government, Lenin called for all state power to be in the hands of the proletariat, and for the Bolshevik Party to take that power in an armed uprising. After July, he openly argued that only by the dictatorship of the proletariat, could peace be achieved and the agrarian problem solved.
Lenin, being human, could not see, in advance, how the Russian Revolution would actually unfold. He wrote in April 1917, “The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. … Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power”[1]. An inability to foresee such an eventuality did not mean that the class struggle confounded his expectations and left him floundering. Lenin’s methodological emphasis on reality and concrete events meant that his strategies would be altered or fine-tuned as events unfolded. It was one of his great strengths that he could throw away an old schema if events proved it outmoded, and develop new strategies that would take the movement forward. As we have seen, Lenin, based on his experiences of the revolutionary upheavals of 1903-1906 had changed the orientation of the Bolsheviks towards the peasantry. He would do so again in 1917.
But it is not helpful to talk of Lenin’s strategy as though it were a single indivisible unit. Like all real life, Lenin’s strategy contained within it contradictory elements, it developed dialectically. Where he erected schema that were based not on actual events but on prognostications, such as the idea of the provisional RDDPP, he had, subsequently, to measure these against reality. In 1905-1906, Lenin projected onto the future revolution, his ideas of how the bourgeois-democratic tasks could be achieved to the best advantage of the working class, but events unfolded differently, in a way he did not foresee. Lenin’s methodology enabled him to develop a strategy necessary for the success of the Russian Revolution, even though this meant changing party policy during the revolution itself. As a consequence, in 1917, he independently adopted the essence of the ToPR. Such an analysis explains his political development, including the changes made to the party programme in 1917, adopted through the support of the newer, rank and file members, and against the opposition of the Old Bolsheviks.
One obvious, and important, reflection of the change to his political line was his dropping of the use of the term “RDDPP” to describe the goal for the second Russian Revolution. Lenin later described the post-October regime in Russia in terms to suit the particular audience he was addressing, referring to it as the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a step towards socialism, and even as a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. He did so because it was simultaneously each and every one of these, but he never referred to the post-October 1917 regime in Russia as the RDDPP. The reason for this was because the post-October regime in Russia, brought to power by the Bolsheviks, was not a democratic (i.e. bourgeois) dictatorship, but a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government resting on the power of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Different authors propose different reasons for Lenin’s transition from a belief that the Russian Revolution would be in two separate and distinct stages, to the demand that the Bolsheviks take the power in a socialist revolution. Leibman argued that this was due to Lenin’s better appreciation of the international context of the Russian Revolution: “Furthermore, and most important of all, it was during the First World War that Leninism and its founder acquired an international dimension”[2]. This is a somewhat harsh view of a man who from at least 1905 had proposed that the ultimate success of a thorough-going revolution in Russia depended upon revolution in Western Europe. However, it is undeniable that Lenin’s Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism[3] gave him a new insight on the integration of the Russian banks, bourgeoisie and landowners with, particularly, French imperialism[4], and the consequent negligible possibilities for the independent capitalist development of Russia. Harding concurs, and places the cause of the transition as due to Lenin having reached a new stage in his economic analysis, a stage which demonstrated that capitalism had entered its world-encompassing imperialist phase, with no space for new imperialisms, and which required a world-wide socialist response[5]. Both stress the inner consistency of Lenin’s socio-political analysis, and date Lenin’s move to adopt a socialist goal for the Russian Revolution as beginning with the development of his theory of imperialism. However, Harding believes Lenin was an opponent of the ToPR but this opinion appears to be based on his erroneous belief that the ToPR meant an attempt to immediately introduce socialism into Russia[6]. Alternatively, Carr argued that the problems of the severe food shortages in the cities of Russia and the dangers of social collapse were the spur that caused Lenin’s re-orientation[7].
Of course, any number of reasons may be proposed, but whatever the reasons for the change, Lenin had adopted a new perspective on the goals of the Russian Revolution by the time of his arrival in Russia in April 1917.
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Lenin, V.I., The Dual Power, April 1917, CW 24:38. A review of the reasons why the Bolsheviks could have the support of the majority of the core proletariat but be a small minority in the soviets can be found in Longley, D.A., Iakovlev’s Question, in Revolution in Russia, ed. Frankel E.R., CUP, 1992, pp365-387
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Leibman, M., Leninism Under Lenin, Merlin Press, London, 1975. p114
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Lenin, V.I., Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Jan-June 1916, CW 22:85-304
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 22:231-231
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Harding, N., Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol 1 Theory and Practice of the Democratic Revolution, Macmillan Press, London, 1977, p6
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Harding, N., ibid p75
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Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Pelican, 1983. Vol 2 p34