By 1905, the leaders of the RSDLP were well aware that the masses rise to revolution only in their own interests; the workers against the factory owner, and the great peasant mass of the Russian people against the landlords. The differences between SDs lay in the answers to the questions: What would be the character of the revolutionary government? What tasks would confront it, and in what order? How far would the revolution go?
For SDs, the answers to these important questions would determine which bourgeois and petty bourgeois block(s) the proletariat allied with in the coming bourgeois revolution – the liberal bourgeoisie, the urban petty bourgeois and intellectuals, or the peasantry. The Menshevik leadership retained the view that the bourgeoisie would remain the hegemonic class and so chose to attempt an alliance with the former groups. While critically supporting the bourgeoisie during the 1905 Revolution, they argued against Social-Democratic participation in the transitional revolutionary government, and by 1917 had become apologists for the bourgeoisie and their policies. In this, they constituted a block to the revolutionary progress of both the proletariat and peasantry, and it was against this that Lenin concentrated most of his fire during and after 1905, beginning with, for example, Should We Organise the Revolution[6] and Two Tactics[7].
Lenin had viewed the peasantry – over 80% of the Russian population – as potential allies of the proletariat in the democratic revolution since 1894, but it was re-assessing them as the major allies that became the basis of the historic disagreement between the two factions. The ‘land programme’ or ‘agrarian question’ or ‘land question’ were names for the process that would release the land to the peasant, and – and this was the more important issue for many peasants – end the feudal duties owed by peasants to their landlord. Lenin saw this programme of bourgeois progress as the key question of the bourgeois-democratic revolution because it affected the lives of so many.
Nevertheless, for the next twelve years, in common with the Mensheviks, Lenin continued to support the classical Marxist analysis, that a bourgeois-democratic revolution, particularly the agrarian revolution, was necessary before the question of the socialist revolution could be posed in Russia. In none of his writings before 1917-18 did Lenin ever, for a moment, pose the question of the peasantry becoming an ally of the proletariat in the socialist revolution. On the contrary, at that time he considered the socialist revolution in Russia impossible before the solution of the agrarian question, precisely because of the overwhelming preponderance of the peasantry in Russian society[8]. This idea underpins all his articles which touch directly or indirectly upon the agrarian question. However, whether the allies of the proletariat were the urban petty-bourgeoisie or the peasantry, both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed that the autocratic rule of the Romanovs could be broken only if a majority of the population supported the revolution and the resulting regime rested on majority rule, as expressed in a Constituent Assembly[9].
However, Lenin, in contrast to Plekhanov, insisted that the destruction of Tsarist feudalism was not possible under the political leadership of the Russian bourgeoisie. The triumph of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was possible only if the working class waged the struggle for democracy independently of and, in fact, in opposition to, the bourgeoisie. The necessary mass base of the democratic revolution could not be provided by the working class alone, but the Russian proletariat, would be able to mobilise and lead the Russian peasantry if it consistently advanced an uncompromisingly radical resolution of the agrarian issues10.
Lenin was not the only leading SD to revise his views on the role of the peasantry in the Russian Revolution. Kautsky, the Second International’s leading Marxist theoretician, in his article The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution[11], was strongly in support of the new Leninist position and was quoted with enthusiasm by Lenin:
“Kautsky … points out that in Russia …. the urban petty bourgeoisie ‘will never be a reliable support of the revolutionary parties’ … Kautsky determines that peculiar relation between Russian liberalism and the revolutionary character of the peasants, … ‘The more the peasants become revolutionary, the more do the big landowners become reactionary, … the more unstable become the liberal parties, and the more the liberal professors and lawyers in the towns shift to the right, so as not to lose all connection with their previous mainstay’”[12].
The Russian urban bourgeoisie would not be one of the driving forces in the Russian Revolution. Their function would be performed by the peasantry and the central problem for the democratic revolution in Russia would be the ‘land question’. Only the proletariat and peasantry were authentic revolutionary forces and their alliance would be a RDDPP. Lenin was firmly of the opinion that the peasantry could only carry out an agrarian revolution if they abolished the old regime, the standing army and the bureaucracy, because all these were supports of landlordism, bound to it by ties of family, friendship, and financial interest[13]. The Russian bourgeois revolution would be a bourgeois revolution made largely without and, most likely, against the urban bourgeoisie.
At the Third (Bolshevik) Congress of the RSDLP in 1905, Lenin formalised significant changes to his 1903 strategy, and proposed a new scenario for the Russian Revolution that differed substantially from that of Plekhanov and the Mensheviks. The Congress agreed that, notwithstanding the bourgeois character of the coming revolution, the Russian liberal bourgeoisie was hostile to the expropriation of landlords’ estates; instead they wanted a compromise with the monarchy on the basis of a constitutional regime. Lenin now argued that an alliance of workers and the entire peasantry would play the leading role in carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Not that Lenin had any illusions about the extent to which the peasantry as an estate would support the working class struggle, nor the limits on the reciprocal support the proletariat would show for the peasants’ struggle to obtain possession of the land and abolish serfdom. In September 1905, Lenin might have seen the semi-proletarian, landless elements in the Russian village as allies in the struggle for socialism, but never the peasantry as a whole:
“We support the peasant movement to the extent that it is revolutionary democratic. We are making ready (doing so now, at once) to fight it when, and to the extent that, it becomes reactionary and anti-proletarian. The essence of Marxism lies in that double task, which only those who do not understand Marxism can vulgarise or compress into a single and simple task”[14].
Lenin over the period 1905-1909, charted the two possible and alternative capitalist developments for Russian agriculture which he called the Prussian path and the American path[15]. In the former, the semi-feudal system slowly evolved into a bourgeois landed gentry style economy under a constitutional monarchy, this was the favoured option of the liberal bourgeoisie. Here, the process was evolutionary, from feudal bondage to capitalist exploitation on the land of the descendants of the feudal landlords, which condemned the peasants to decades of deprivation and subjugation. In the second case, revolutionary bourgeois democracy eliminated feudal relations on the land by confiscation without compensation, the feudal estates to be seized and divided between the peasants by the peasants themselves. Initially small-holdings would predominate, but eventually the most capitalistic peasants would evolve into bourgeois farmers. Lenin believed that the seizure of the land, and its distribution to the peasants by the peasants, would turn the peasantry into a conservative force protecting its new interests. For Lenin’s most complete description of the processes involved see The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution in particular in Section 5, Two Types of Bourgeois Agrarian Evolution[16]. Of course, there was no suggestion in Lenin’s works that by the use of the term ‘American path’ he was implying that Russia could become a capitalist world power, as had the USA. He was making the point that for the peasants and workers of Russia, the most beneficial development of capitalism would be a revolutionary resolution of the land question.
In the postscript to the 1917 edition of The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, Lenin would say something very different, in clear confirmation that in 1907 the demand for nationalisation of the land was not seen as a step towards socialism:
“At the present time [September 1917] the revolution poses the agrarian question in Russia in an immeasurably broader, deeper, and sharper form than it did in 1905-07. … neither the proletariat nor the revolutionary petty-bourgeois democrats can keep within the limits of capitalism.
Life has already overstepped those limits and … the question of the nationalisation of the land must inevitably be presented in a new way in the agrarian programme, namely: nationalisation of the land is not only ‘the last word’ of the bourgeois revolution, but also a step towards socialism.”[17]
If Lenin had expected the Russian Revolution to proceed from its bourgeois phase to its proletarian phase with no significant period of time between, he would have been unlikely to have spent so much time discussing and describing which was the most beneficial form of capitalist agricultural property relations for the struggle for the socialist revolution[18]. Lenin’s preferred option, the transition of peasant farmers into capitalist farmers is hardly the task of a few months or years and Lenin predicted the process might take “several revolutionary decades”[19]. In describing the development of these bourgeois farmers, Lenin compared them to the growth of capitalist farms after the fall of serfdom in 1861, a process which was nowhere near completion in 1905, even after a period of over forty years. The crucial issue is that Lenin considered the expropriation of the land necessary for the American path, could be carried through by an alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, with the support of the revolutionary democratic petty bourgeoisie, later to be legitimised by the bourgeois Constituent Assembly. During the period, 1905-1915, there was never any suggestion in his writings that it would be necessary for the proletariat to hold state power, for a proletarian, socialist revolution to take place before the land question could be resolved.
Lenin was quite clear, the peasants wanted the land for themselves: small-scale capitalist cultivation was fighting large-scale feudal land-owners. He stressed that the proletarian leadership of the bourgeois liberation movement, had to rally the peasantry as a whole behind it and lead a bourgeois revolution in its most consistent and decisive form. “In the Russian revolution the struggle for the land is nothing else than a struggle for the renovated path of capitalist development”[20].
If there was to be a significant period of time between the bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions then, in the sense that the bourgeois-democratic revolution had at its core the solution of the ‘agrarian problem’, and could only succeed to the extent it solved that problem, it could be said that Lenin was proposing a dominance of peasant interests. Indeed, on certain occasions, Lenin appeared to say just that. For example, at the Stockholm Unity Congress[21] Lenin, in refuting Plekhanov who came out against the ‘utopia’ of seizing power, said that to be victorious, the ‘peasant agrarian revolution’ must become the central authority throughout the state[22].
This point was not, of course, in contradiction to his more common and frequent declarations that “Our party holds firmly to the view that the role of the proletariat is the role of leader in the bourgeois-democratic revolution …”, rather it was confirmation that the proletarian party would not be making demands of the democratic dictatorship which were against or went beyond the interests of the peasantry. That is, the demands of the RSDLP within the revolutionary dictatorship would be limited, essentially, to the SD minimum programme[23]. Implicit in Lenin’s strategy was that the workers and peasants could successfully make a revolution in favour of a third class, the bourgeoisie, which did not want such a revolution!
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Lenin, V.I., Should We Organise the Revolution, Feb 1905, CW 8:167-176
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Lenin, V.I., The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June – July 1905, CW 9:13-140
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Lenin, V.I., The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry, March 1905, CW 8:295
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Shanin, T., Russia, 1905-07, Revolution as a Moment of Truth, Macmillan, London, 1986, p296
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Kautsky, K. The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution (abridged translation), Journal of Trotsky Studies No 2 1994, p200-223
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletariat and its Ally in the Russian Revolution, Dec 1906, CW 11:363-375
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian programme of Russian Social-Democracy, March 1902, CW:13 349
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Lenin, V.I., Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement, Sept 1 1905, CW 9:230-239
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905 – 1907, Nov-Dec 1907, CW 13:239
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, Nov-Dec 1907, CW 13:238-242
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Lenin, V.I., ibid p430
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin: Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p200
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Lenin, V.I. Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, March 1905, CW 8:288
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905 – 1907, Nov-Dec 1907, CW 13:229 and 292-3
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Unity Congress of the RDSLP, May 1906 CW 10:342
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Lenin, V.I., The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905 – 1907, Nov-Dec 1907, CW 13:333
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Lenin, V.I., The Aim of the Proletariat in Our Revolution, March 1909, CW 15:379