After the news of the 1917 February Revolution reached him, and before his return to Russia, Lenin wrote his Letters from Afar. We note the beginning of a new attitude towards the Paris Commune, which had now become an example to be emulated. In the Third Letter he said:
“Following the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat must organise and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power”[23].
By calling for the proletariat, the poor and exploited sections of the population to control the organs of state power, Lenin was implicitly placing a question mark over the role of a Constituent Assembly. Whether, at that time, Lenin foresaw that an elected Assembly composed mainly of peasant representatives, would block attempts to introduce the Bolshevik programme is not clear[24]. However, in his rebuttal of Kautsky’s criticism that he (Lenin) opposed the Constituent Assembly in December 1917 and January 1918, only after it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not have a majority, Lenin claimed that as soon as he arrived in Russia he “proclaimed the superiority of the Paris Commune-type state over the bourgeois parliamentary republic” and, more than that, directly counter-posed the Commune-type state to bourgeois democracy:
“the conference of the Bolshevik Party held at the end of April 1917 adopted a resolution to the effect that a proletarian and peasant republic was superior to a bourgeois parliamentary republic, that our Party would not be satisfied with the latter, and that the program of the Party should be modified accordingly”[25].
During the crucial Petrograd City Conference (April), Lenin refers to the Paris Commune in his Report on the Present Situation in a very different manner from Two Tactics, effectively reversing his previous opinion of the Commune as “a government such as ours should not be”:
“The Paris Commune furnished an example of a state of the Soviet type, an example of direct power wielded by the organised and armed workers, an example of the dictatorship of workers and peasants. … There can be no dual power in a state. The Soviets are a type of state where the existence of a police is impossible. Here the people are their own rulers, and there can be no return to the monarchy. … To safeguard freedom, all the people to a man must be armed. This is the essence of the commune. … Events have led to the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry being interlocked with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The next stage is the dictatorship of the proletariat”[26].
Also in April, in his Letters on Tactics Lenin wrote: “The Commune, unfortunately, was too slow in introducing socialism”[27]. The qualitative difference between his assessment of the Commune as made in 1905, and in early 1917, shows that Lenin had revised his assessment of the class nature of the state that would result from the revolution and thus, implicitly at least, the role of the Constituent Assembly. If “the next stage” were achieved, the need for a bourgeois-democratic Assembly fell.
During the spring of 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks showed no open opposition to the Constituent Assembly, but at the Bolshevik Seventh All-Russian Conference Lenin demanded that undivided power rested with Soviets “from the bottom up” all over the country. In his Report on the Current Situation,(24 April) he said:
“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. … 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”[28].
Simultaneously with the Conference Lenin published a short series of articles in the newspaper Volna[29], in which he answered the question: should a Constituent Assembly be convened?, with an unambiguous ‘Yes’. Not only that, but he called for it to be convened as soon as possible, and the best way of ensuring that was to increase the number and strength of the Soviets, and to organise the arming of the working-class masses.
However, the perspective of establishing a commune-type state meant a bourgeois Constituent Assembly could no longer be the governmental goal of a Soviet power. Despite the public statements, the resolution passed at the Seventh All-Russia Conference resolved that the Bolshevik Party should take the necessary steps to “the successful transfer of the entire state power into the hands of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies or other organs directly expressing the will of the majority of the people (organs of local self-government, the Constituent Assembly, etc.)”[30]. This marked a definitive and qualitative change in the party’s formal position on the Assembly.
The emphasis here is quite different from Lenin’s declared aims pre-1917. Now “the entire state power” is to be transferred to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and the Constituent Assembly – the goal of the Soviets before 1917 – is relegated to an also-ran of “other organs” and put on a par with local self-government. In practice, the Bolsheviks were everywhere applying their energy to extending the Soviets to include the maximum number of people in revolutionary activity in order to raise their political consciousness, with the aim of the Soviets taking power and making the first steps towards socialism.
In July 1917, Lenin outlined the six-month history of the demand for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly in Constitutional Illusions[31]. He described how the Provisional Government, aware that any Constituent Assembly would have a majority of peasants who were well to the left of the SRs, had continuously postponed the calling of elections because, with such a Constituent Assembly, it would have been virtually impossible to protect the interests of the landowners. In Russia, where the bourgeoisie was closely intertwined with the landowners and the nobility, the seizure of the land without compensation, could have been achieved only by carrying through the most ruthless revolutionary measures against capital. Lenin and the Bolsheviks proclaimed that only the strength and authority of the Soviets could guarantee the successful election and convocation of such a Constituent Assembly, giving the impression that the Constituent Assembly remained an acceptable goal for the party.
Thus, while the general direction the party was taking on the question of the Constituent Assembly was clear, there remained considerable ambiguity in the individual published statements of Lenin and others on the precise relationship between the Soviet regime and the Constituent Assembly. Nevertheless, it had become clear that the role of the Assembly would be determined by the outcome of the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. With the victory of the proletariat and its allies, the Assembly would become subordinate to the organs which best represented the interests of the victors, the Soviets. In this inversion of the importance of the proletarian and bourgeois-democratic institutions, lay a qualitative difference between 1905 and 1917.
Trotsky gave an insight into the relative strengths, and contradictory relations, of the Soviets and the bourgeois-democratic institutions which allows a better understanding of the fate of the Constituent Assembly, when he reported on the outcomes of the May elections to the local councils (dumas and zemstvos). These were democratically-elected bodies, based on a wide franchise, with one vote per person over the age of 21 and, in theory, they had responsibility for such important functions as municipal transport and food supplies. In fact, however, in many country districts the peasants tended to see these bodies as a means of preserving the landlords’ hold on the land, and it was often necessary to use force to overcome peasant opposition, and allow the elections to proceed[32]. Generally, the SRs gained the largest single vote, typically at least one third of the votes cast. Thus, a combination of SRs and Mensheviks shared leadership and nominal control of both the local councils and the local Soviets[33]. This leadership had, as its common perspective, the goal of a democratically-elected Constituent Assembly, making it all the more surprising that the functions of the local councils were subsumed into the Soviets and not the other way round. Trotsky explains this as being due to the class nature of the two institutions: “… at critical moments, when the interference of the masses was defining the further direction of events, these governments simply exploded into the air, their constituent elements appearing on different sides of a barricade”[34].
Lenin returned to the lessons to be learned from the Commune in State and Revolution, written while in hiding in August and September 1917. He pointed out that the most significant change to the Communist Manifesto was made by Marx and Engels on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune and quoted: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’”[35]. Lenin would continue to extol the Commune as an inspiration until the end of his life[36],[37], but he was keen to emphasise that one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not act with sufficient vigour. He drew the lesson that in Russia it was necessary to smash the bureaucratic-military machine as a pre-condition for an alliance between the peasants and the workers. This could “be achieved only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat at the same time takes a step towards the socialist reconstruction of the state”[38]. The progression is that the workers first destroy the military bureaucratic machine and simultaneously take the initial steps towards socialism, as the pre-condition for the alliance with the peasantry! This is a radical version of Trotsky’s ToPR!
Lenin’s attitude to the Provisional Government was clear, overthrow it by armed insurrection and replace it with Soviet power. How did the Constituent Assembly fit into this? Lenin replied that the Commune, or Soviet, substituted the parliamentarism of bourgeois society with institutions in which the elected representatives themselves had to account for their actions directly and immediately to their constituents. Representative democracy remained without a parliament. The arguments advanced by Lenin in State and Revolution were a drawing together of his ideas, as developed over the previous seven months, and left little space in the proletarian state for the presence of a Constituent Assembly. Lenin and Trotsky may have been flexible on governmental form and structure, but they would have found it impossible to have accepted the existence of a Constituent Assembly which was, in principle, in fundamental contradiction with core Bolshevik perspectives.
In 1905, Lenin had disputed with the Mensheviks on whether or not it was permissible for the Social Democrats to participate in the transitional revolutionary government. Only Trotsky unequivocally foresaw “the participation of the proletariat in a government … as a dominating and leading participation”[39]. How far and how fast Lenin moved in Trotsky’s direction on this point is indicated by an event that happened on 4 June 1917. During a speech, the Menshevik Tsereteli, then a Minister of the Provisional Government, said that there was no political party which was prepared to take full power in Russia. Lenin interrupted and shouted “There is!” Later in his own speech from the rostrum, Lenin declared that the Bolshevik Party was “ready to take over full power at any moment”[40].
By mid-September, the Bolsheviks had obtained a majority in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies of both Moscow and Petrograd, and Lenin had reached the conclusion that they could and should take state power through armed insurrection. Lenin wrote to the Bolshevik Central Committee and argued that by immediately ‘giving’ the land to the peasants and by establishing democratic institutions and liberties, the Bolshevik Party would form a government which nobody would be able to overthrow[41]. However, even at this stage Lenin could say “Our Party alone, on taking power, can secure the Constituent Assembly’s convocation”[42]. Lenin was now talking in terms of the Bolsheviks alone taking power, establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and convening a bourgeois Constituent Assembly!
Thus, in September, the convocation of the Assembly, after full and free elections, was seen as requiring the success of the revolutionary forces, but no clash of interests between the two was indicated. Why was the door to the convening of the Constituent Assembly being kept open even at this late stage? One possible reason for this apparently ambiguous policy was given by Trotsky; “the Bolsheviks …. had not yet renounced the idea of the Constituent Assembly. Moreover, they could not do this without abandoning revolutionary realism. Whether the future course of events would create the conditions for a complete victory of the proletariat, could not with absolute certainty be foreseen”[43]. In other words, the Constituent Assembly was seen as a possible safety net. At the beginning of October, Lenin wrote Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?[44], in which he argued that the Bolshevik Party alone had sufficient base in revolutionary Russia to take power and hold onto it. The Constituent Assembly is referred to, but only to draw attention to the failure of Kerensky’s government to convene it, and the widespread intimidation of peasants through arrests and military measures to rig the outcomes of the elections.
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Lenin, V.I., Letters From Afar, March 1917, CW 23:325-326
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White, J.D. Lenin The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Palgrave, 2001, p156-157
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Oct-Nov 1918, CW 28:265
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Present Situation April 1917, CW 24:145
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Lenin, V.I., Letters on Tactics, April 1917, CW 24:53
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Current Situation, April 1917, CW 24:239-241
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Lenin, V.I., The Political Parties in Russia and the Tasks of the Proletariat, April 1917, CW 24:99
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Lenin, V.I., The Seventh (April) All-Russia Conference of the R.S.D.L.P.(B.), April 1917, CW 24:275
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Lenin, V.I., Constitutional Illusions, July 1917, CW 25:194-207
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Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol 3 p32
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Sukhanov, N.N., The Russian Revolution 1917 A Personal Record, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p496-497
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Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol 1 p345
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Marx, K. and Engels, F., Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, Moscow, 1951, 1:22
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Lenin, V. I., How to Organise Competition, Dec 1917, CW 26:413
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Lenin, V. I., Extraordinary 7th Congress of the RCP(B), March 1918, CW 27:133
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Lenin, V. I., The State and Revolution, Aug-Sept 1917, CW 25:422 and 426
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Trotsky, L.D., Results and Prospects, New Park Publications, London, 1962, p202
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Daniels, R.V., Red October, Secker and Warburg, London, 1967, p17
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Lenin, V.I., The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power: A Letter to the Central Committee and the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the RDSLP(B), September 1917, CW 26:19
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid CW 26:19
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Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, 2:328
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Lenin, V.I., Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? October 1917, CW 26:87-136