On 10 April, Lenin had unambiguously stated, “This revolution took the first step towards ending the war; but it requires a second step, namely, the transfer of state power to the proletariat, to make the end of the war a certainty”[80]. This was the position endorsed at both the Petrograd City Conference and the Seventh All-Russia Conference. The major theme at both conferences had been a fight against the RDDPP, a struggle against Old Bolshevism with its attempts to fit reality to Lenin’s old schemas. The goal was now a Commune-type state, the strategy was maintenance by the Bolsheviks of complete organisational and political independence, and an action plan based on the slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.
The key to Lenin’s position, and from which the slogan “All Power to the Soviets” flowed, had been stated in his Letter on Tactics: The first task that faced the Bolshevik party in the Soviets was to split off the anti-defencist, internationalist, ‘Communist’ elements who stood for a transition to a commune-type state, from the SRs, Mensheviks and other defencists, who were opposed, and were in favour of supporting the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government[81].
The strategic task facing the Bolshevik Party in April was not the immediate seizure of power, but overcoming the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat and peasantry, the winning of the masses to a revolutionary perspective. Lenin understood that these lessons must come from experience, but that in a revolutionary situation the working class learns very quickly. Even before the April Conferences, Lenin had reduced the question of taking power to a struggle for influence within the Soviets, and emphasised the need for patient, persistent, explanatory work adapted to the actual needs of the masses[82]. From this flowed the slogan All Power to the Soviets.
To avoid confusion it needs to be made clear that the governmental goal of Lenin (and Trotsky) was a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government with the broadest possible base. The Petrograd City Conference, in its Resolution on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government, determined that “all state power” should pass to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and to this end prolonged work was necessary to extend the power of the Soviets to all of Russia, and to raise the class consciousness of both urban and rural proletarians, which would be demonstrated by the increased representation of the Bolshevik Party in the Soviets[83]. While Lenin did not directly address this aspect in what he wrote, it was absolutely clear that his entire declared strategy rested on the Bolsheviks gaining the support of the majority of the working people, as reflected in winning the leadership of the Soviets.
The same resolution was passed at the All-Russian Conference and further elaborated in Lenin’s Report on the Current Situation:
“We are all agreed that power must be wielded by the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. … This would be a state of the Paris Commune type. Such power is a dictatorship, i.e. it rests not on law, not on the formal will of the majority, but on direct, open force. … This form (Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies) represents the first steps towards socialism and is inevitable at the beginning of a socialist society. … The Soviets must take power not for the purpose of building an ordinary bourgeois republic, nor for the purpose of making a direct transition to socialism. This cannot be. What, then, is the purpose? The Soviets must take power in order to make the first concrete steps towards this transition, steps that can and should be made.
… The first measure the Soviets must carry out is the nationalisation of the land. … The alternative is: either the Soviets develop further, or they die an ignominious death as in the case of the Paris Commune. If it is a bourgeois republic that is needed, this can very well be left to the Cadets”[84].
For Lenin, the route to power was for the Bolsheviks to win the political lead in the Soviets, and place the poor peasants, the agricultural labourers, soldiers, and workers under their leadership. In his speeches and articles in the period April-June, while dual power existed, Lenin repeatedly demanded All Power to the Soviets. In this way the reformist leaders of the Soviets would either end feudal relations on the land or stand exposed before Russia’s peasant masses; to either end the war or lose their base among, particularly, the soldiers. The slogan All Power to the Soviets was an educational slogan that was part of Lenin’s strategy of patiently explaining to the masses that the Bolsheviks were the only party capable of meeting their needs. It was intended to expose the limitation of the reformist leadership, and help win the masses to Bolshevism. As Trotsky explained:
“The correlation of forces inside the Soviets at the time was such that a Soviet Government would have meant, from a party point of view, the concentration of power in the hands of the SRs and Mensheviks. We were deliberately aiming at such a result, since the constant re-elections to the Soviets provided the necessary machinery for securing a sufficiently faithful reflection of the growing radicalisation of the masses of the workers and soldiers. We foresaw that after the break of the Coalition with the bourgeoisie the radical tendencies would necessarily gain the upper hand on the Soviets. In such conditions the struggle of the proletariat for power would naturally shift to the floor of the Soviet organisations, and would proceed in a painless fashion”[85].
The slogan of all power to the Menshevik and SR-led Soviets was by no means a return to the theory of the RDDPP, since the goal was now not a bourgeois-democratic state, but the first steps towards the beginnings of a socialist transformation of society. The slogan All Power to the Soviets was used to win the mass of the population, who still had confidence in the SR and the Menshevik leaders, away from the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, and towards the Bolshevik Party and the goal of a Commune-type state, precisely by exposing the refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to break with the Provisional Government, end the war, and resolve the land question.
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Lenin, V.I., Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution, May 1917, CW 24:67
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Lenin, V.I., Letter on Tactics, April 1917, CW 24:45
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 24:49
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Lenin, V.I., Resolution on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government, April 1917, CW 24:155
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Current Situation, April 1917, CW 24:242
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Trotsky, L.D., The Russian Revolution in Essential Trotsky, London, 1963, p37