‘All Power to the Soviets’

Having won over the Party to the aim of a new revolution led by the working class, Lenin indicated the next step, which was to win the masses. Nothing could be further from the truth than the oft-repeated slander that Lenin was a conspirator, bent on the seizure of power by a minority of revolutionaries, as advocated by the great French revolutionary of the 19th century, Blanqui. Without for a moment doubting the personal sincerity and heroism of Blanqui, who developed important insights on the technique of insurrection, Lenin never had the view that the socialist revolution could be brought about by a determined minority. All his life, Lenin maintained a burning faith in the revolutionary potential and creative capacity of the working class. Socialism must be based on the self-movement of the proletariat, its active participation and control of society from the very first moment. Even before his return to Russia there were a number of Bolsheviks who, motivated by impatience, advanced the slogan ‘Down with the Provisional Government’. This was an ultra-left slogan, because the mass of the workers were still under the influence of the reformist leaders of the Soviets, who were supporting the Provisional Government. The task facing the Bolshevik Party at that stage was not the conquest of power, but the conquest of the masses. This idea was summed up in Lenin’s celebrated watchword: Patiently explain!

The Bolshevik Party had succeeded in winning over a significant number of the most conscious and advanced layers of the class. Their influence, especially in Petrograd, was growing by the hour. But that was insufficient. In order to change society, it is not enough to have the support of the vanguard, or to be a party of tens of thousands. It is necessary to win over the millions of politically backward workers, and, in the case of Russia, at least a large section of the peasants, beginning with the poor peasants and rural proletariat and semi-proletariat. In the spring of 1917, this gigantic task was still at its early beginnings. It was essential that the Bolshevik workers open a road to the rest of the class, especially in the provinces, who had illusions in the reformist leaders. It was necessary to speak to them in a language they could understand, and to avoid ultra-left gestures that would repel them.

Lenin understood that the working class learns from experience, especially the experience of great events. The only way in which a revolutionary tendency which is as yet in the minority can gain the ear of the masses is by following the course of events shoulder to shoulder with the masses, participating in the day-to-day struggle as it unfolds, advancing slogans which correspond to the real stage of the movement, and patiently explaining the need for a complete transformation of society as the only way out. Shrill calls to insurrection and civil war will not win over the masses, or even the advanced layer, but only repel them. As we see from the above, this is true even in the middle of a revolution. On the contrary, it is necessary to put the onus for violence and civil war on the shoulders of the reformist leaders who have it in their hands to take power peacefully and, by their refusal to do so, make bloodshed inevitable.

Realising that the ruling class wanted to provoke the workers into premature acts of violence, Lenin denounced those who claimed that he stood for civil war. He repeatedly denied that the Bolsheviks stood for violence, and placed full responsibility for violence on the shoulders of the ruling class. This did not at all suit the ultra-lefts who failed to understand that nine-tenths of the task of the socialist revolution is the work of winning over the masses by propaganda, agitation, explanation, and organisation. Without this, all talk of civil war and insurrection is irresponsible adventurism, or, as it is called in the scientific terminology of Marxism, Blanquism.

Here is what Lenin has to say on the subject: “To speak of civil war before people have come to realise the need for it is undoubtedly to lapse into Blanquism.” (LCW, The 7th (April) All-Russia Conference of the RSDLP(B), vol. 24, p. 236, my emphasis.)

It was not the Bolsheviks, but the bourgeoisie and their reformist allies who constantly raised the spectre of violence and civil war. Lenin repeatedly denied any suggestion that the Bolsheviks advocated violence. On 25 April, he protested in Pravda against “dark insinuations” of “Minister Nekrasov” about “the preaching of violence” by the Bolsheviks:

You are lying, Mr. Minister, worthy member of the ‘people’s freedom’ party. It is Mr. Guchkov who is preaching violence when he threatens to punish the soldiers for dismissing the authorities. It is Russkaya Volya, the riot-mongering newspaper of the riot-mongering ‘republicans’, a paper that is friendly to you, that preaches violence.

Pravda and its followers do not preach violence. On the contrary, they declare most clearly, precisely, and definitely that our main efforts should now be concentrated on explaining to the proletarian masses their proletarian problems, as distinguished from the petty bourgeoisie which has succumbed to chauvinist intoxication. (LCW, A Shameless Lie of the Capitalists, vol. 24, pp. 110-11.)

On 21 April (4 May, NS) the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks passed a resolution written by Lenin. The aim of the resolution was to restrain the Petrograd local leadership which was running ahead of events. It aimed to put the responsibility for any violence on the Provisional Government and its supporters, and to accuse the “capitalist minority of reluctance to submit to the will of the majority”. Here are two paragraphs from the resolution:

1. Party propagandists and speakers must refute the despicable lies of the capitalist papers and of the papers supporting the capitalists to the effect that we are holding out the threat of civil war. This is a despicable lie, for only at the present moment, as long as the capitalists and their government cannot and dare not use force against the masses, as long as the mass of soldiers and workers are freely expressing their will and freely electing and displacing all authorities – at such a moment any thought of civil war would be naïve, senseless, preposterous; at such a moment there must be compliance with the will of the majority of the population and free criticism of this will by the discontented minority; should violence be resorted to, the responsibility will fall on the Provisional Government and its supporters.

2. By their outcries against civil war the government of the capitalists and its newspapers are only trying to conceal the reluctance of the capitalists, who admittedly constitute an insignificant minority of the people, to submit to the will of the majority. (LCW, Resolution of the CC of the RSDLP(B) Adopted 21 April (4 May), 1917, vol. 24, p. 201.)

In all his speeches and articles of the first half of 1917, Lenin emphasises the possibility and desirability of a peaceful transfer of power to the Soviets. He even stated that compensation could be paid to the capitalists whose industries were taken over, on condition that they handed the factories over without any sabotage, and collaborated in the process of reorganising production:

Don’t try to frighten us, Mr. Shulgin. Even when we are in power we shall not take your ‘last shirt’ from you, but shall see that you are provided with good clothes and good food, on condition that you do the job you are fit for and used to! (LCW, Titbits for the ‘Newborn’ Government, vol. 24, p. 363.)

Everyone knows that this was the central slogan of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917. But very few people have understood the real content of this slogan. What, concretely, was the meaning of the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’? Civil war? Insurrection? The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks? Far from it. The Bolsheviks were in a minority in the Soviets, which were dominated by the reformist parties, the SRs and Mensheviks. The central task was not the seizure of power, but winning over the majority who had illusions in the reformists. The Bolsheviks based their ‘patient explanation’ on the idea, constantly reiterated in the writings and speeches of Lenin from March right up to the eve of the October insurrection, that the reformist leaders should take power into their own hands, that this would guarantee a peaceful transformation of society, that the Bolsheviks were wholeheartedly in favour of this, and that, if the reformist leaders were to take power, the Bolsheviks would limit themselves to the peaceful struggle for a majority inside the Soviets.

Here are a couple of examples of how Lenin put the question (there are many more):

Apparently, not all the supporters of the slogan ‘All Power Must Be Transferred to the Soviets’ have given adequate thought to the fact that it was a slogan for peaceful progress of the revolution – peaceful not only in the sense that nobody, no class, no force of any importance, would then (between 27 February and 4 July) have been able to resist and prevent the transfer of power to the Soviets. That is not all. Peaceful development would then have been possible, even in the sense that the struggle of classes and parties within the Soviets could have assumed a most peaceful and painless form, provided full state power had passed to the Soviets in good time. (LCW, On Slogans, vol. 25, p. 186.)

After the failure of the Kornilov uprising, in an article called ‘On Compromises’, Lenin once again adopted the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’ and advocated a compromise proposal to the reformist leaders, whereby the Bolsheviks would not press the idea of an insurrection, on condition that the Soviet leaders break with the bourgeoisie and take power into their own hands. This would have easily been possible after the collapse of the counter-revolutionary offensive. The reactionaries were demoralised and disoriented. The workers were confident and a massive majority supported the transfer of power to the Soviets. Under such conditions, the revolution could have been carried out peacefully, without violence and civil war. Nothing could have prevented it. One word from the Soviet leadership would have been enough. After that, the question of which party would rule could have been settled through peaceful debate inside the Soviets:

I think the Bolsheviks would advance no other conditions, trusting that the revolution would proceed peacefully and party strife in the Soviets would be peacefully overcome thanks to really complete freedom of propaganda and the immediate establishment of a new democracy in the composition of the Soviets (new elections) and in their functioning.

Perhaps this is already impossible? Perhaps. But if there is even one chance in a hundred, the attempt at realising such a possibility is still worthwhile. (LCW, ‘On Compromises’, vol. 25, p. 307.)

Lenin was firmly convinced that a peaceful revolution was not only possible but probable, on one condition – that the reformist leaders in the Soviets took power instead of dedicating all their energies to propping up the rule of the landlords and capitalists. But their refusal to take power, particularly after the defeat of Kornilov, threatened Russia with catastrophe. This is the eternal contradiction of reformism – that, by clinging to the notion of a slow, gradual, peaceful transformation of society, they always create the most convulsive, catastrophic and violent conditions, preparing the way for the victory of reaction. Lenin was scathing about the hesitations and vacillations of the Mensheviks and SRs, who refused to break with the bourgeoisie and take power. As always, the reformists tried to frighten the masses with the alleged danger of civil war, an assertion which Lenin treated with well-merited contempt and ridicule. In his article ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’, Lenin answers these arguments, point by point:

If there is an absolutely undisputed lesson of the revolution, one fully proved by facts, it is that only an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, only an immediate transfer of all power to the Soviets would make civil war in Russia impossible, for a civil war begun by the bourgeoisie against such an alliance, against the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, is inconceivable; such a ‘war’ would not last even until the first battle; the bourgeoisie, for the second time since the Kornilov revolt, would not be able to move even the Savage Division, or the former number of Cossack units against the Soviet Government! (LCW, ‘The Russian Revolution and Civil War’, vol. 26, p. 36.)

He argues that a government that bases itself on the mass of workers and peasants, that puts an end to the war, that gives land to the peasants and acts in the interests of the working people, could brush aside the resistance of the propertied classes, and that, on that basis:

A peaceful development of the revolution is possible and probable if all power is transferred to the Soviets. The struggle of parties for power within the Soviets may proceed peacefully, if the Soviets are made fully democratic, and ‘petty thefts’ and violations of democratic principles, such as giving the soldiers one representative to every 500, while the workers have one representative to every 1,000 voters, are eliminated. In a democratic republic such petty thefts will have to disappear.

When confronted with Soviets that have given all the land to the peasants without compensation and offer a just peace to all the peoples – when confronted with such Soviets the alliance of the British, French, and Russian bourgeoisie, the Kornilovs, Buchanans, Ryabushinskys, Milyukovs, Plekhanovs, and Potresovs is quite impotent and is not to be feared.

The bourgeoisie’s resistance to the transfer of the land to the peasants without compensation, to similar reforms in other realms of life, to a just peace and a break with imperialism, is, of course, inevitable. But for such resistance to reach the stage of civil war, masses of some kind are necessary, masses capable of fighting and vanquishing the Soviets. The bourgeoisie does not have these masses, and has nowhere to get them.

It is astonishing that even now, Lenin’s approach to the question of power is not understood. Not only do the bourgeois enemies of Bolshevism persistently strive to pin firmly upon Lenin the label of a violent fanatic, hell-bent on blood and mayhem (Orlando Figes is the latest to peddle this disgusting distortion), but, incredibly, many of the sectarian grouplets who, for some reason, imagine themselves to be great Leninists, repeat the same childish nonsense about the inevitability of violence and civil war, without even realising that Lenin’s position was just the opposite. In dozens of articles and speeches in the course of 1917, Lenin explained that the notion that revolution necessarily meant bloodshed was a reactionary lie, deliberately put in circulation by the bourgeois and reformists in order to frighten the masses:

Some speak about ‘rivers of blood’ in a civil war. This is mentioned in the resolution of the Kornilovite Cadets quoted above. This phrase is repeated in a thousand ways by all the bourgeois and opportunists. Since the Kornilov revolt all the class-conscious workers laugh, will continue to laugh and cannot help laughing at it. (Ibid., p. 37 and p. 38.)

If we examine world history over the last hundred years, we see that, on countless occasions and in many countries, the working class could have taken power peacefully, as in 1917, if the leaders of the trade unions and mass Socialist and Communist parties had willed it. But, like the Russian Mensheviks and SRs, they had no intention of taking power. They found a thousand and one ‘clever’ arguments to show that the ‘time was not ripe’, the ‘correlation of forces was unfavourable’, and of course there was a danger of civil war, violence, the streets running with blood and so on. This was, after all, the argument of the German labour leaders in 1933, when Hitler boasted that he had come to power “without breaking a window pane”, although the German workers’ organisations were the most powerful in the world. It is always the same story with these ladies and gentlemen. Their reformist ‘gradualism’ always prepares a catastrophe. If there is bloodshed, it is always the result of these policies of class collaboration, of parliamentary cretinism, of popular frontism, which considered itself to be ‘realistic’ and ‘practical’ but always turns out to be the worst kind of utopianism in the end.

Our business is to help do everything possible to secure the ‘last’ chance for a peaceful development of the revolution, to help this by presenting our programme, by making clear its general, national character, its absolute harmony with the interests and demands of an enormous majority of the population.

Having seized power, the Soviet could still at present – and that is probably their last chance – secure a peaceful development of the revolution, peaceful elections of the deputies by the people, a peaceful struggle of the parties inside the Soviets, a testing of the programmes of various parties in practice, a peaceful passing of power from one party to another. (LCW, vol. 21, book I, p. 257 and pp. 263-64.)

And here is how Trotsky sums up the position in The History of the Russian Revolution:

The transfer of power to the Soviets meant, in its immediate sense, a transfer of power to the Compromisers. That might have been accomplished peacefully, by way of a simple dismissal of the bourgeois government, which had survived only on the good will of the Compromisers and the relics of the confidence in them of the masses. The dictatorship of the workers and soldiers had been a fact since the 27th of February. But the workers and soldiers were not [at that point necessarily] aware of that fact. They had confided the power to the Compromisers, who in their turn had passed it over to the bourgeoisie. The calculations of the Bolsheviks on a peaceful development of the revolution rested, not on the hope that the bourgeoisie would voluntarily turn over the power to the workers and soldiers, but that the workers and soldiers would in good season prevent the Compromisers from surrendering the power to the bourgeoisie.

The concentration of the power in the Soviets under a regime of soviet democracy, would have opened before the Bolsheviks a complete opportunity to become a majority in the Soviet, and consequently to create a government on the basis of their programme. For this end an armed insurrection would have been unnecessary. The interchange of power between the parties could have been accomplished peacefully. All the efforts of the party from April to July had been directed towards making possible a peaceful development of the revolution through the Soviet. ‘Patiently explain’ – that had been the key to the Bolshevik policy. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 816, my emphasis.)

But maybe Lenin and Trotsky were only bluffing? Maybe they only put forward the idea of a peaceful transition in order to gain popularity with the workers, making allowance for their reformist pacifist illusions? To imagine such a thing would be to not understand anything of the method of Lenin and Trotsky, based on fearless revolutionary honesty. In his testimony before the Dewey Commission, Trotsky puts this very clearly: “I believe that the Marxist, the revolutionary, policy in general is a very simple policy: ‘Speak out what is! Don’t lie! Tell the truth!’ It is a very simple policy.” (The Case of Leon Trotsky, p. 384.)

The Bolshevik Party did not have two different programmes, one for the educated few and one for the ‘ignorant’ workers. Lenin and Trotsky always told the truth to the working class, even when this was bitter and unpalatable. If in 1917, that is in the midst of a revolution, when the question of power was poised point blank, they insisted on the idea that a peaceful transformation was possible (not ‘theoretically’ but actually possible), on condition only that the reformist leaders took decisive action, it could only be because this was actually the case. And so it was. Had the Soviet leadership acted decisively, the revolution would have taken place peacefully, without civil war, because they had the support of the overwhelming majority of society. In pointing this simple fact out to the workers and peasants, Lenin and Trotsky were not telling lies, or abandoning the Marxist theory of the state, but merely saying what was obviously true to the mass of workers and peasants.

By bringing out the contradiction between the words and deeds of the reformist leaders, the Bolsheviks prepared the way to winning over the decisive majority in the Soviets, and also in the army (which was also represented in the Soviets). This was the real way in which the Bolshevik Party prepared for insurrection in 1917, not by talking about it, but by actually penetrating the masses and their organisations with flexible tactics and slogans which really corresponded to the demands of the situation, and connected with the consciousness of the masses, not lifeless abstractions learned by rote from a revolutionary cookbook. The only reason why a peaceful revolution was not immediately achieved in Russia was because of the cowardice and treachery of the reformist leaders in the Soviets, as Lenin and Trotsky explained a hundred times.

Unless and until the revolutionary party wins the masses, it is pointless and counterproductive to place the emphasis on the alleged inevitability of violence and civil war. Such an approach, far from ‘educating’ the cadres or preparing them for serious revolutionary work (which at this stage consists almost entirely of the patient preparatory work of gaining points of support among the workers and youth and the labour movement) is more likely to confuse and disorient the cadres and alienate the workers we are trying to win. This was never the method of the great Marxist thinkers in the past, but was always a characteristic of the ultra-left sects on the fringes of the labour movement, who live in a ‘revolutionary’ dream-world all of their own, which bears no relation to the real world. In this hothouse, shut away from reality, small groups can while away the time endlessly debating the ‘insurrection’ and mentally ‘preparing’ themselves for the ‘inevitability of civil war’ while the real task of building the revolutionary organisation entirely escapes them.

In what way does a Marxist tendency concretely prepare for power? By winning over the masses. In what way can this task be achieved? By working out a programme of transitional demands which, setting out from the real situation of society and the objective needs of the working class and the youth, links the immediate demands to the central idea of expropriating the capitalists and transforming society. As Lenin and Trotsky explained many times, nine-tenths of the task of revolution consists precisely in this. Unless this fact is grasped, all talk about armed struggle, ‘military preparations’, and civil war is reduced to irresponsible demagogy.

As we have pointed out, when the Bolsheviks were a small minority in the Soviets, which were entirely dominated by the reformist parties, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were striving for an alliance with the bourgeoisie, they did not play with insurrection, but stressed the need to win a majority in the Soviets (“patiently explain”). The masses tended to look for what appeared to be the easiest, most economical solutions to their problems. That is why the Russian workers and peasants trusted the reformist leaders then as now. The Bolsheviks had to take this fact as their starting point. Lenin had a deep understanding of the psychology of the masses. On 8 July, he wrote:

The masses are still looking for the ‘easiest’ way out – through the bloc of the Cadets with the bloc of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks.

But there is no way out. (LCW, A Disorderly Revolution, vol. 25, p. 129.)