The Bolsheviks in February

The Bolsheviks had lost a lot of ground since 1914, and had also lately been badly hit by repression. Table 6.1, taken from Istoriya, shows the strength of the Party in February.

When we bear in mind that we are talking about a huge country with a population in the region of 150 million, we see that, in the beginning of the revolution, the Party represented a very small number. But against this we must take other factors into account. The quality of the Bolshevik cadres was undoubtedly superior to those of the other tendencies. Mostly working-class in composition, they would have had better training, and a higher level of discipline than the Mensheviks and SRs. A high proportion of them would have been what we might call the ‘natural leaders’ in their workshops, the most conscious and militant elements who enjoyed the trust of their fellow workers. Each one would be in touch with a much larger number. Above all, they could base themselves on the Bolshevik tradition left over from 1912-14, especially in big industrial centres. Organisationally, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were in a far worse state. In principle, the Bolsheviks had the edge over other tendencies. Sukhanov, who after all was a Menshevik, refers to them as the main workers’ tendency in Petrograd in February. But against this must be weighed the quality of the Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd. In February the leading cadres were Shlyapnikov, Zalutsky, and the young student, Molotov.

In the first volume of his informative and closely-observed history of the revolution, the left Menshevik Sukhanov, who also attended the meetings, says of the Petrograd Bolshevik leaders that “their flat-footedness or, more properly, their incapacity to think their way into the political problem and formulate it, had a depressing effect on us.”

Sukhanov gives the following appraisal of Shlyapnikov, who was one of the leading elements:

A party patriot, and, one might say, a fanatic, ready to appraise the entire revolution from the standpoint of the success of the Bolshevik Party, an experienced conspirator, an excellent technical organiser and a good practical member of the professional movement, but definitely not a politician, capable of grasping and generalising the essence of the given circumstances. If there was any political thought present here, then it was the pattern of the old-time party resolutions of a general character, but this responsible leader of the most influential workers’ organisation possessed neither independent thought, nor the ability or desire to work out the essence of the moment in all its concreteness. (N. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revolutsii, vol. 1, p. 50 and p. 94.)

The Menshevik Sukhanov no doubt underestimates the qualities of Shlyapnikov, which are presented in a one-sided manner. Nevertheless, there is at least a grain of truth in this pen-portrait which sums up many of the mental traits of a typical Bolshevik ‘committeeman’. As in 1905, the latter quickly lost their bearings when confronted with a new situation and lagged behind the movement until Lenin rearmed the party with the perspective of a new revolution. This fact has long been concealed by the writings of Soviet histories. For example, they claim that the Party issued a leaflet on 26 February. But more recent investigations have shown that the Petrograd Committee published its first leaflet on 27 February. But by this time Petrograd was already in the grip of a general strike and the spread of mutinies in the army and navy had sealed the fate of the regime. In other words, the Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd was following the movement, not leading it.

How did the party react to the February events? According to the voluminous history of the CPSU produced under Khrushchev, on the morning of 25 February, the Bolshevik Bureau met and decided to take energetic steps to spread the movement throughout the country. But other accounts present a somewhat different picture. The February Revolution caught not only Lenin, but the whole party by surprise. At the beginning of the revolution, the party was still in a weak position. So weak that, as Marcel Liebman points out in his perceptive study, the Petrograd Committee was not even capable of issuing a leaflet on the occasion of the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in January 1917. Yet in the space of a few months the Bolshevik Party’s membership had grown by more than ten times, transforming it into the decisive force in the working class. The growth of the Bolshevik Party in 1917 must represent the most spectacular transformation in the entire history of political parties. Yet in the initial phase of the revolution, the party showed itself to be woefully unprepared. The upsurge of the masses caught it off guard. “Lacking a vigorous and clear-sighted leadership,” writes Marcel Liebman, “the Bolsheviks of the capital had reacted to the first workers’ demonstrations with much reserve, and even with a suspiciousness that recalls their attitude in January 1905. They were somewhat isolated in the factories where they worked.”

At the beginning of the revolution, they did not give a good account of themselves. So far out of step were the Bolsheviks in Petrograd that at first they tried to restrain the movement on Women’s Day. VN Kayurov, a member of the key Vyborg District Committee, recalls how he intervened in a meeting of militant women workers on 22 February:

I explained the meaning of ‘Women’s Day’ and of the women’s movement in general, and when I had to talk about the present moment I endeavoured first and foremost to urge the women to refrain from any partial demonstrations and to act only on the instructions of the Party Committee.

But the women workers were in no mood to wait. Kayurov learned with “astonishment” and “indignation” that the party’s slogans had been ignored.

I was angered by the behaviour of the strikers. In the first place they had obviously ignored the decisions taken by the Party’s district committee, and then by me. The previous evening I had called on the working women to show restraint and discipline – and now, out of the blue, there was this strike. (See M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, pp. 117-118.)

In his History, Trotsky asserts that “for Bolshevism, the first months of the revolution had been a period of bewilderment and vacillation”. (L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, p. 300.) There is plenty of evidence to back this assertion. The most experienced and politically mature leaders were in prison, in Siberia, or abroad. The Petrograd leadership, as we have seen, was ill-prepared for the tasks that loomed before it. The Russian Bureau was made up of Shlyapnikov, Molotov, and Zalutsky, who maintained contact with Lenin by letter. A member of the Vyborg District Committee, V.N. Kayurov, recalled that they “received absolutely no guidance from the leading organs of the Party. The Petrograd committee had been arrested, and Comrade Shlyapnikov representing the Central Committee, was unable to give [them] directions for future activity.” (Quoted in M. Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, p. 117.)

Having been caught off guard at first, once the scope of the workers’ action became clear, the Bolsheviks began to react, supporting the strike and working to extend it. More and more workers were becoming incorporated into the strike movement. By 25 February there were 300,000 on strike in Petrograd. The strike wave had turned imperceptibly into a general political strike: trams, small workshops, printers, shops, all were swept up into action begun by the women workers. Leaflets were issued with slogans: ‘Everyone in struggle! Onto the streets!’ ‘Down with the tsarist monarchy!’ ‘Down with the war!’

Gradually, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd recovered from their initial disorientation and got down to work. On the day the shooting started, three Bolshevik CC members were arrested. The Vyborg Local Committee assumed the function of leadership in Petrograd. From the morning of 27 February onwards, all the forces of the Petrograd organisation were sent out to the factories and barracks. Arsenals were raided. The Bolshevik V. Alexeyev organised the young workers of the Putilov plant into an assault group to attack the police, to seize their weapons. On the evening of the 27th, the Bolshevik leadership, consisting mainly of the Vyborg Committee, met to discuss what action was needed to transform the general strike into an armed insurrection. The order was given to fraternise with the troops and disarm the police, to raid the arms stores and arsenals, and to arm workers. The workers needed no urging!

Once they had recovered from their initial unpreparedness, the Petrograd Bolsheviks took a more offensive stance. They denounced pacts with the bourgeois liberals, flayed the defencists and called on the workers to take immediate action. The workers went to the barracks, fraternised with the troops, and were everywhere received with enthusiastic solidarity. The mood of the troops, some of whom were ex-Putilov workers, was revolutionary. The troops came over, one regiment after another. The same story was unfolding in Moscow. Together with the workers, the insurgent troops occupied the central arsenal in Petrograd. 40,000 rifles and 30,000 revolvers were instantly at the disposal of the workers. The going-over of the army was not an accident, but the result of years of harsh experience of the trenches, and beyond that the accumulated discontent of the long-suffering Russian peasant, brought to a head by the war. But the role of countless individual and nameless heroes cannot be underestimated.

The line usually put by bourgeois historians is that, whereas the October Revolution was a mere ‘coup’, the February Revolution was an elemental, spontaneous movement of the masses. The implied conclusion is that the first was a bad thing, the conspiracy of a small minority, leading inexorably to dictatorship, while the second… well, of course, as a revolution, one should not really approve, but then the tsarist regime was not entirely OK, and it did, after all, represent a democratic movement – a movement of the majority. Both these versions are false. The October Revolution was neither a coup nor a conspiracy, but the organised expression of the will of the overwhelming majority which had striven for nine months to find a solution to its problems through Soviet power. On the other hand, the description of the February Revolution as a merely ‘spontaneous’ affair is equally one-sided and superficial. One can say this only in the sense that no party had organised it. But this is insufficient. It conveys the impression of a kind of blind upsurge, like a stampede of cattle which occurs without rhyme or reason. The use of the word ‘spontaneous’ in this context explains nothing, and is merely a cover for the lack of explanation, or, worse still, a contempt for the ‘ignorant masses’ whose actions are attributed to mere herd instinct.

The Bolshevik Party as such could in no sense be said to have led the February Revolution. Yet somebody led it. Somebody took the initiative, called the strikes, organised the demonstrations. Every worker knows that even a strike of a couple of hours has a leadership. Someone always takes the initiative. Someone has to walk through the door of the manager’s office to present the workers’ demands. That person is chosen by the workers. And the choice is not ‘spontaneous’ (that is, accidental). The workers will inevitably choose the most conscious, the most fearless, the most committed man or woman on the shop floor to represent them. That person has a history which did not commence yesterday. He or she is known to the workers as someone who knows what they are talking about. These are the natural leaders of the working class. As a rule, though not always, most of them will be organised in the unions and left-wing political parties. In the case of Russia, they were mainly Bolsheviks.

Although they were still numerically small, the Bolsheviks by this time had some hundreds of members in the key factories: about 75-80 in the Old Lessner factory, around 30 in the ‘Russo-Baltic’ and ‘Izhorsky’ shipyards, and smaller groups in other factories. In the Putilov works, with its 26,000 employees, there were 150 Bolsheviks. These were still very small numbers, but with their revolutionary, uncompromising class policies, individual Bolsheviks undoubtedly played a role out of all proportion to their numerical strength in the February events. Without waiting for a lead from the party, the worker-Bolsheviks in the factories and barracks moved into action, providing decisive leadership to the strikers and demonstrators. Their past political activity provided them with political capital that placed them head and shoulders above the raw masses that surrounded them.

There can be no doubt that individual Bolshevik workers, as the most organised and militant elements in the factories, played a key role, giving a revolutionary class content to the slogans of the movement and an organised form without waiting for orders from the Bolshevik leadership. They had not read much theory, and in most cases simply remembered the basic party slogans on the war, the land, the republic, and the eight-hour day. But this limited stock of ideas, linked to a basic class instinct and revolutionary spirit, was enough to give them a colossal superiority and make them into giants in their workplaces and on the streets. The party agitator now came into his own.

These local leaders were sufficiently able to lead the workers to the overthrow of tsarism, but no more than that. In order to have gone further, they would have required a firm and clear guidance from the party leadership. But the Bolshevik leadership in Petersburg, still clinging to the inadequate and outmoded slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”, had no perspective of the assumption of power by the working class. Even the most radical of them did not look further than the establishment of a bourgeois republic. The overthrow of tsarism therefore left them confused and disoriented. Thus, while the leading role in the February uprising was played in large measure by Bolshevik workers, the Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd lost the initiative as a result of their initial hesitations. As Lenin so often repeated, the workers and the rank and file proved far more revolutionary than the most revolutionary party.

As in the factories, so in the barracks, many of the ‘natural leaders’ of the soldiers were Bolsheviks, who now came into their own, like the ex-Putilov men who joined the army during the war. The decisive sections of the advance guard were under the influence of the Bolsheviks. The years had not passed in vain. Most of these would have been Bolsheviks, trained in the revolutionary school of 1905 and 1912-14. But the masses were a different matter altogether. The war had transformed the composition of the factories by drawing in a large number of formerly backward, unorganised, and inexperienced layers. In order for the heavy, multi-millioned masses to draw all the necessary conclusions, a further experience was necessary. It is natural for people to take the line of least resistance, even in a revolution. For this very reason the masses always cling obstinately to their traditional mass organisations. The thinking of the masses is very economical: why discard an old tool before trying to make it work? The only difference in Russia in 1917 was that the broad masses had neither a clearly recognised party nor a mass trade union, but only a vague idea of the ‘Social Democrats’. True, the most advanced workers were Bolsheviks and in the period immediately before the war had been in the majority – of the organised workers at least. But the masses newly awakened to political life could not immediately distinguish between the left and right wing. They were not immediately concerned with the niceties of programmatic details but were moved by a general desire for change. They were capable of carrying out a revolution but not of preventing power from slipping out of their hands. Their actions were far in advance of their consciousness. It required the experience of great events and the patient work of the Bolsheviks for the consciousness of the masses to be brought up to the level demanded by the real situation.

This also explains why the lines of demarcation separating Bolshevik and Menshevik workers were not so clear. Suddenly, the differences between them seemed less important. Did they not both defend a bourgeois-democratic republic? In any case, there was a strong urge for unity as a result of the revolution itself. The Menshevik workers, swept along by the revolutionary wave, fought side by side with the Bolsheviks. The idea of unity in action of all revolutionary groups was widespread at this time. At rank-and-file level, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and even SR workers collaborated in action without any difficulty. In many areas, not for the first time, Social Democratic groups fused spontaneously. This fact is highly significant. It shows just how tenacious the idea of unity is in the working class and also just how complex the task of building a revolutionary party is.

Even though in 1912-14, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in winning over four-fifths of the organised workers in Russia, even though during the war the Mensheviks had played hardly any role, yet in the heady days of February–April, the two factions were again merged into a single organisation in every province except Moscow and Petrograd. Indeed, in many areas, they remained united right up to the October Revolution. Such was the power of the banner of the old, traditional party, the RSDLP, despite all that had gone before. Even in Russia in 1917, Lenin’s struggle to separate out the genuine revolutionary tendency was not accomplished either easily or at one blow. In Russia, as in every other country, the mass forces of Bolshevism and the future Communist International did not drop from the sky, but were formed out of a struggle of contradictory trends within the existing traditional organisations of the working class (the Social Democracy) which, only after a long period of struggle with many vicissitudes, resulted in a split and the formation of a new party. This process, the stages of which we have attempted to outline in the present work, only really ended in October 1917, when the revolutionary wing finally won over a decisive majority in the Soviets and led the working class to the seizure of power.