Chapter 2 - Lenin and Trotsky in the First Russian Revolution (1905)

2.1 Introduction

The events of the First 1905 Revolution, are given only in enough detail to show the very different experiences of Lenin and Trotsky; differences which played a major role in the subsequent development of the conflicting theories of Permanent Revolution (ToPR) and the Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry (RDDPP).

Trotsky returned to Russia early, in February, and was at the very heart of the St Petersburg Soviet from its inception, gaining a unique insight into working class psychology and the dynamics of proletarian struggle. Due to a conjunction of circumstances, Trotsky played a much greater role in determining the course of the 1905 Revolution than any other member of the RDSLP, specifically: the absence from Russia of other leading figures in the RDSLP; Trotsky’s exceptional all-round leadership abilities; the split in the RDSLP which allowed considerable scope for personal and independent activity separate from, and outside, party discipline; the relatively short duration of the St Petersburg Soviet (the ‘Fifty Days’) which meant that there was little time for either the Bolshevik or Menshevik faction to come to dominate it; and the conservatism of the Bolshevik “committee-men” (both in not opening the party to young workers, and their subsequent opposition to participation in the St Petersburg Soviet), which allowed others to take the lead in core working class activities.

Trotsky’s experience as a leader of the day-to-day struggle of the workers gave him a deep understanding of just how much the workers would sacrifice for their class aims, and how determined they would be to retain leadership of the struggle once they embarked on the path of direct action, and confirmed unambiguously in his mind that:

“the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations”(1).

At the start of 1905, the workers’ response was largely spontaneous, with neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks having any substantial weight in the workers’ movement(2). The beginning of the revolution found the RDSLP seriously weakened both by the split in the leadership and by arrests inside Russia (including nine of the original eleven members of the CC)(3) which had left the organisation confused and disorientated. The emphasis on internal party discussions after the Second Congress had paralysed public activity for many months and, until Vperyod appeared in January 1905, the Bolsheviks were without a public face, with a consequent lack of focus and organisation(4). Lenin, for much of 1905, concentrated his attention on Bolshevik membership and structure, launching a new weekly paper, Proletarii, organising a Bolshevik-only Congress in London from 12-26 April, and working towards healing the split in the RDSLP.

Immediately, Lenin had to correct the errors and mistakes of the Bolshevik committee-men: he had to persuade them to increase the recruitment of young workers, and to place these new recruits in local leadership roles. During this period, at the Third (Bolshevik-only) Congress, on the basis of actual events, he redefined the main ally of the proletariat in the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution as the peasantry as a whole. This proposed class alliance was the basis on which he developed, over 1905, the slogan that would be at the core of Bolshevik governmental policy until 1917, the RDDPP. As the proposed key for a successful revolution, this perspective was at the heart of Bolshevik strategy and, in the summer of 1905, in a key text, The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution(5) (hereinafter referred to as Two Tactics), Lenin described how the strategy and tactics for a successful bourgeois-democratic revolution flowed from this central concept.

Then, in November, he had to persuade the committee-men to participate in the activities of the Soviet as loyal members. Simultaneously he had to publicly campaign and argue that a principled unification of Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was possible and necessary. This required organising a preparatory Bolshevik Conference in December 1905 in Finland, and then preparing for, and participating in, the Unity Congress, April 1906, in Stockholm.

It can be seen that while Trotsky was more directly engaged with the workers themselves, Lenin’s activity in 1905 was overwhelmingly concerned with working to re-orient and re-group the party to meet new events.

2.2 Bloody Sunday to the General Strike

On 9 January 1905 - Bloody Sunday - in the early afternoon, a large crowd of about 200,000, led by the priest father Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar. The square was soon packed with workers, students, women, children and old people, many wearing their Sunday best. Some carried icons and church banners. There were no speeches. Everything was peaceful. However, troops were everywhere. The soldiers began firing. The dead were counted by the hundreds, the wounded by the thousands(6).

The January massacre had a most profound effect upon the Russian proletariat; a tremendous wave of strikes swept the country, spreading to hundreds of towns and localities, factories, mines and railways. The strike involved something like a million men and women. “For almost two months, the strike ruled the land”(7).

The movement swept through Poland, and from 14-20 January the Polish capital, Warsaw, was in the grip of a revolutionary general strike. The Baltic area was also caught up in the revolutionary current and, in Riga on 13 January, 15,000 workers marched in protest and 60,000 workers staged a political general strike. The movement cut across national lines: Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Lithuanian and Polish workers expressed their solidarity with their Russian brothers and sisters, and fought against the hated Russian autocracy. A railway strike began in Saratov on 12 January, which quickly spread to the other railway lines, spreading the news of the revolutionary wave outwards to even the most backward provinces(8).

From exile in Switzerland, Lenin immediately (18 January) greeted the January events as the beginning of the revolution in Russia: “The working class has received a momentous lesson in civil war: the revolutionary education of the proletariat made more progress in one day than it could have made in months and years of drab, humdrum, wretched existence”(9). Lenin was also to argue that “January 9, 1905, fully revealed the vast reserves of revolutionary energy possessed by the proletariat, as well as the utter inadequacy of the Social Democratic organisation”(10). For example, the St Petersburg Committee of the RDSLP, which was Bolshevik dominated, had only reluctantly agreed to participate in the 9 January demonstration, and then only a small group of about fifteen from a membership of almost 1,000 turned up(11).

The impact of 9 January pushed the whole of the workers to the left, with the mood flowing strongly in favour of militant action and support for the RDSLP, and Bolshevik and Menshevik workers now commanded attention at factory gate meetings. Lenin was desperate to take advantage of the opportunities but believed all his efforts were floundering because of the amateurism, and disunity of the organisation largely resulting from the effects of the split(12). Under the pressure of the mass movement, the Mensheviks in Russia moved rapidly to the left, creating unforeseen problems for the Bolsheviks. Dissatisfaction in the ranks of the St Petersburg RDSLP, and its supporters, with the bureaucratic methods of the local Bolshevik leadership, and its attitude to the developing mass movement, led to four of the six district organisations breaking away to join the Mensheviks(13).

In February 1905, Trotsky, aged only 25, was the first of the RDSLP leaders to return to Russia, reaching St Petersburg by the spring(14). During the first months of his return, hiding from the secret police, Trotsky could do little more than write. He had a clear field, as none of the main leaders of either the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks returned to Russia until much later. Both Lenin and Martov returned after the October amnesty, Martov on 17 October and Lenin on 4 November15. By the summer, Trotsky was the best known name of the RDSLP due to a stream of articles, leaflets, letters, and (particularly) an appeal to the peasants. These included a series of newspaper articles against the notion that the liberals were the natural leaders of the revolution, and developed his idea that the working class were the decisive force in the revolution:

“Other groups in the urban population will play their part in the revolution only in so far as they follow the proletariat ... Neither the peasantry, nor the middle class, nor the intelligentsia can play an independent revolutionary role in any way equivalent to the role of the proletariat ... Consequently, the composition of the Provisional Government will in the main depend on the proletariat. If the insurrection ends in victory, those who have led the working class in the rising will gain power”(16).

Lenin was concerned with the less glamorous, but essential, problems facing the Bolsheviks: how to overcome their routine ways of working and how to establish links between their relatively small forces and the masses of workers who were moving into struggle. A key part of Lenin’s plan to re-vitalise and re-organise the majority members of the RDSLP was the convening of the Third Congress of the RDSLP in the name of the (Bolshevik) Central Committee(17). The Mensheviks were invited to attend but stayed away and organised their own conference in Geneva. Lenin remained outside Russia devoting considerable time to the preparation and convocation of the Third Congress, and on 12 April 1905, the first Bolshevik-only Party Congress met in London. Lenin drew up nearly all the main resolutions and delivered a number of reports and speeches to the Congress. Considerable attention was given to the technical and organisational preparation for the overthrow of Tsarism, and there was to be a stepping up of the political, agitational and propaganda work, including paying special attention to work in the army, e.g. troops were to be contacted using leaflets, and a commission was established, under the control of the Central Committee, to formulate a programme of transitional demands specifically for soldiers. Nevertheless, it was agreed that especially at a time when events had raised the question of armed insurrection, the fundamental task facing the party was winning over the masses(18).

Lenin was determined to open up the party to young workers “boldly and widely, and again more widely and again more boldly without fearing them”(19), and he put considerable effort into confronting the dogmatism of the committee-men (who formed the majority of delegates to the Congress), whose natural reaction was against any demands for the workers to have a greater say in the running of inner-party affairs. These attitudes, which led to Lenin losing the vote on the resolution (actually moved by Bogdanov) On the Relations Between Workers and Intellectuals Within the Social Democratic Organisation, represented a strong conservative current within Bolshevism that Trotsky would have to face in the St Petersburg Soviet some seven months later(20).

Lenin appreciated the need for such people in building the party. The Bolshevik committee-men devoted their lives to the party, and had remained loyal to the revolutionary movement despite repeated arrests, imprisonment and exile. They provided the continuity of the movement, but their clandestine life style meant they had to be conservative in their behaviour to preserve their existence(21). “The committee-man,” wrote Krupskaya:

“was usually a rather self-assured person. He saw what a tremendous influence the work of the committee had on the masses, and as a rule he recognised no inner-party democracy. ‘Inner-Party democracy only leads to trouble with the police. We are connected with the movement as it is’, the committee-men would say. Inwardly they rather despised the Party workers abroad who, in their opinion, had nothing better to do than squabble among themselves -’they ought to be made to work under Russian conditions’. The committee-men objected to the overruling influence of the Centre abroad. At the same time they did not want innovations. They were neither desirous nor capable of adjusting themselves to the quickly changing conditions”(22).

The events in St Petersburg stirred the provinces into action. On 1 May, workers struck in nearly 200 towns throughout Russia. The major strike, of some 70,000 workers, lasting over two months from 12 May, was in the Bolshevik stronghold of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile town known as the Russian Manchester. The strike committee leading this ‘first Soviet’ (which pre-dated that in St Petersburg), made many important political demands such as the 8-hour day and freedom of assembly, but did not attempt to pose the question of power. The relative roles of the two Soviets was discussed later by the Commission on the History of the October Revolution of the State Publishing House, which decided that the St Petersburg Soviet under Trotsky’s leadership not only exercised power but posed the question of transferring state power into the hands of the proletariat(23). This difference in approach between the largely Bolshevik-controlled strike committee at Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the St Petersburg Soviet was confirmed by Zinoviev in his History of the Bolshevik Party(24) which, while omitting any mention of Trotsky’s role as leader of the St Petersburg Soviet, said “The Petersburg Soviet became an embryonic government. This was the reality of the matter: either this Soviet took power in its hands and dissolved the Tsarist government or the latter would dissolve the Soviet ...”.

The increasing strength of the protests forced the Tsar to make a series of concessions; on 18 February, the Tsar issued his first Manifesto in which he hinted at a constitution and popular representation, and set in motion a separate manoeuvre intended to divide and disorient the working class. To defuse the growing militancy in the factories the government set up a commission headed by Senator Shidlovsky to investigate and identify the causes of the discontent among the workers. In an unprecedented move, it was announced that workers would be represented on the commission by means of elected delegates. The proletariat agreed overwhelmingly to participate, and this gave them the experience of electing plant representatives, experience they would use nine months later in elections to the Soviets.

On 6 August the Tsar issued a second Manifesto promising a parliament or Duma, and finally, following nation-wide political strikes, he issued his third Manifesto on 17 October promising a constitution, an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, civil liberties and universal suffrage(25). This October Manifesto by the Tsar, gained primarily through the actions of the workers, solved nothing fundamental, but it gave the liberals (increasingly worried by the rising militancy of the workers), a reason to unhook themselves from the revolution. As Lenin and Trotsky had foreseen, the bourgeoisie, which had all along been striving to strike a deal with Tsarism, now deserted the revolutionary camp. The big capitalists and landowners united in a reactionary bloc - the so-called “Octobrists” - which threw its weight behind the Tsar. At the same time, the “liberal” section of the bourgeoisie supporting the Constitutional Democrat Party, the “Cadets”, came out in favour of a so-called constitutional monarchy, providing a pseudo-democratic, constitutional, smokescreen for the bloody reality of Tsarist rule(26).

2.3 The October Strike and Formation of the St Petersburg Soviet

The strike wave which gripped nearly all industrial areas throughout the spring and summer, took on an increasingly political character, but the end of July saw a sudden drop in the urban strike wave. During the summer there was a sharp decline in strikes in big factories, but a gradual increase in strikes amongst the most downtrodden and oppressed layers; workers in the smaller factories such as bakeries, brickyards, domestic servants, sawmills and slaughterhouses. A new impulse came from Moscow with a dispute at one print-works over whether the type-setters should be paid for setting punctuation marks. “The Bolshevik Moscow Committee immediately strained every nerve to turn the print strike into a general strike”(27).

The Committee was successful, the strike rapidly spread to other print-shops and factories and, within a few days, had become general throughout the city, spreading to the railways in and around Moscow, which started to grind to a halt on 6 October. The railways were the arteries of Russian industry and with their stoppage all major industrial activity, through necessity or sympathy, ceased. On 9 October a national conference of striking railway workers was held in St Petersburg where demands were made for an 8-hour day, civil liberties, amnesty for political prisoners and a Constituent Assembly. The strike movement was beginning to transform itself into a struggle to deprive the state of some of its power and give it to the people.

By 10 October, the entire Moscow region was in the grip of the strike which spread inexorably outwards along the railway lines in all directions, reaching the capital on the 13th. On that day the Mensheviks in Petersburg called for the creation of a revolutionary workers’ council. Delegates were elected on the basis of one delegate for every 500 industrial workers(28). Small workshops were meant to combine, but numerical norms were not observed too strictly; in some cases delegates represented only a hundred or two hundred workers, sometimes even fewer:

“The Soviet ... an organisation which ... could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self control - and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours. ... In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organisation had to be based on the broadest representation. ... Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organisational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and plants”(29).

By mid-October, three quarters of a million railwaymen were on strike. On 16 October Finland joined in. The movement then spread swiftly to the post offices, telephones, telegrams, and professional workers. This compelled the Tsar, after consulting with his ministers, to issue the October 17 Manifesto. It was a successful ploy and on 21 October the general strike came to an end(30,31). Not only had the strike wave spread to include ever larger numbers of urban workers, the peasantry was slowly being drawn into such revolutionary activity as burning the landlord’s house, sharing out his grain stocks, etc. As would be expected, the peasant movement was both uneven geographically and lagged behind the town in revolutionary consciousness so their actions tended to be confined to their locality. Dimitrii Sverchkov has described how, for example, during the railway strike, white-collar staff often left their station by the last train owing to the danger of reprisals from the local peasants who saw the strike as an obstacle to their products reaching the towns(32).

At its peak, the St Petersburg Soviet gathered together 562 deputies from a total of 147 factories (the majority were metal workers, and these played the decisive role), (34) from workshops, 32 from the printing and paper industries, 16 from trade unions and 12 from the shop workers. The Executive Committee was formed on 17 October and consisted of 31 persons - 22 deputies and nine representatives of parties (three each from the two SD factions, and three from the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)). Sverchkov (a Bolshevik) reported that Trotsky, Sverchkov himself, Bogdan Mirzodzhanovich Knuniyants (member of the St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee and a former technological student) and Pyotr Aleksandrovich Zlydniev (left Menshevik, a worker in a large factory), formed the core leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet with Trotsky the undisputed ideological leader(33). The Soviet chairman was a lawyer with links to the Mensheviks, Khrustalev-Nosar, an indecisive man who kept his position by balancing on top of the momentous forces that the Soviet represented. Trotsky, Sverchkov and Zlydniev were later chosen as a trio to replace Khrustalev-Nosar after his arrest, but the leading political figure in the Soviet was undoubtedly Leon Trotsky(34).

Here was an extremely broad, democratic and flexible organ of struggle which gradually increased its representation and authority. Through the Soviet, the workers took over the printing presses to make use of the newly-gained freedom of expression, enabling the Soviet to publish its own newspaper, Izvestiya Sovieta Rabochikh Deputatov (Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’ News). It also formed an armed workers’ militia, initially for protection against pogroms, and even arrested (and in some cases executed) unpopular police officers. The Soviet represented practically the whole of the Petersburg proletariat but it was not all-inclusive. It did not, for example, allow representation to bourgeois-liberal or non-proletarian unions such as the ‘Union of Unions’, a federation of organisations and associations representing architects, doctors, economists, journalists, lawyers, professors, teachers and the intelligentsia generally(35,36).

St Petersburg, was both the Russian capital and industrial centre, and as such was the national focus of the events of the last three months of 1905. In St Petersburg itself the Soviet was the lynchpin for these events. It was the greatest workers’ organisation ever seen in Russia - unique even by Western standards - and served as the model for Moscow, Odessa, and more than 50 other towns and cities(37). This purely urban, proletarian organisation was the natural organisational focus and form of the revolution, as would be confirmed in 1917:

“The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies ... represented approximately 200,000 persons, principally factory and plant workers, and although its political influence, both direct and indirect, extended to a wider circle, very important strata of the proletariat (building workers, domestic servants, unskilled labourers, cab drivers) were scarcely or not at all represented. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Soviet represented the interests of the whole proletarian mass. ... Among the proletarian masses, the political dominance of the Soviet in Petersburg found no opponents but only supporters”(38).

The name “workers’ government”, which both the workers and the bourgeois press gave to the Soviet, expressed the fact that the Soviet was, in essence, a workers’ government in embryo, and this idea was developed by Trotsky in his ToPR. The Soviet represented the nascent power and revolutionary strength of the working class districts, counterposed to the power still retained by the military-political monarchy. It developed a programme of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, workers’ militia, etc.) in opposition to Tsarist autocracy, and was a vital phase in the political development of the Russian proletariat(39).

Trotsky wrote most of the proclamations and manifestos of the Soviet and gained enormous popularity with the workers. Lunacharsky, who was one of Lenin’s close collaborators at the time, recalled that Trotsky “held himself apart not only from us but from the Mensheviks too. His work was largely carried out in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and together with Parvus he organised some sort of separate group which published a very militant and very well-edited small and cheap newspaper, The Beginning”. And, he added: “I remember someone saying in Lenin’s presence: ‘Khrustalev’s star is waning and now the strong man in the Soviet is Trotsky’. Lenin’s face darkened for a moment, then he said: ‘Well, Trotsky has earned it by his brilliant and unflagging work’”(40). Trotsky was just 26 on 7 November, and became president of the St Petersburg Soviet on the 23rd.

Of all the RDSLP leaders, it was Trotsky who was most prominent in 1905:

“... Trotsky undoubtedly showed himself, despite his youth, to be the best prepared. Less than any of them did he bear the stamp of ... émigré narrowness of outlook which, as I have said, even affected Lenin at that time. Trotsky understood better than all the others what it means to conduct the political struggle on a broad, national scale. He emerged from the revolution having acquired an enormous degree of popularity, whereas neither Lenin nor Martov had effectively gained any at all”(41).

The advent of legal conditions created huge opportunities for the party press. Ten days after the Tsar’s October Manifesto, the Bolsheviks published the first issue of the paper Novaya Zhizn (New Life), their public face until its closure in early December. Its circulation rose to 80,000, a significant achievement for a party which only a few months earlier had been underground.

Trotsky had even greater success. On 13 November, in alliance with the St Petersburg Mensheviks, he took over the liberal paper Ruskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), changed the name to Nachalo (The Beginning) and turned it into a mass revolutionary daily paper. Its circulation reached a staggering half million by December! Whilst, theoretically, the organ of the Mensheviks, replacing the now defunct Iskra, the Beginning was, in practice, controlled by Trotsky; and the paper’s political line had nothing in common with that of the Menshevik leadership, being in de facto agreement with Lenin and New Life on all important questions relating to the activities of the Soviet. Trotsky in St Petersburg, and Lenin from Switzerland, constantly warned that the liberals would inevitably sell out.

Trotsky’s literary successes would continue after 1905. Funded by A. A. Joffe and M. I. Skobolev (the son of a wealthy oil magnate) Trotsky, in exile in Vienna, would produce his own newspaper, Pravda, from October 1908 until 1912. At its peak this had a circulation of over 30,000, of which anything from 500 to 1,000 copies of each number reached St Petersburg. The 1910 conference of the RDSLP, dominated by the Mensheviks and those Bolsheviks who believed in party unity, had made it the organ of the party so even local Bolsheviks sold it, much to Lenin’s annoyance, as the circulation of his own paper, ProletarII, in Petersburg was numbered in the few dozen(42). In April 1912 Lenin appropriated the name and published his own Pravda, effectively killing Trotsky’s paper(43).

Lenin, returned to Russia on 4 November, convinced of the need for the immediate re-unification of the two wings of the RDSLP. The rank and file members demanded it, knowing from their own experiences that continuing the split would severely damage the party’s standing with the factory workers and retard the party’s growth. Lenin wrote: “... it is now possible not only to urge unity, not only to obtain promises to unite, but actually to unite - by a simple decision of the majority of organised workers in both factions”(44).

Under the impact of the revolution, the St Petersburg Mensheviks were far to the left of the Menshevik leadership in exile, and had moved even further to the left under the influence of Trotsky. By the autumn, the members of the two factions in Russia had had established a joint committee despite the initial differences concerning attitudes to the Soviet. Both The Beginning and New Life defended the restoration of unity. The Bolshevik Central Committee (CC), with Lenin present, passed a unanimous resolution to the effect that the development of the revolution had removed the basis for the split in the RDSLP. The Bolshevik CC and the Menshevik Organisational Committee had also established a federative structure and were negotiating unification. Both fractions were to call their own conference preparing the way for a unity Congress as soon as possible(45).

Later, after his arrest, Trotsky questioned whether accepting representatives of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy would have added to the Soviet’s strength. His reply was unequivocal, the role played by the bourgeoisie showed that the Tsar had only to promise a parliament (Duma) (with what Lenin described as the “most reactionary constitution in Europe”), to placate their opposition. The Soviet was duty-bound to remain a class organisation, an organ of struggle. Bourgeois liberal deputies would be absolutely incapable of strengthening the Soviet:

“The liberal petty-bourgeoisie and capitalists tolerated the first phase of the revolution. They saw that the revolutionary movement shook the foundations of absolutism and forced it towards a constitutional agreement. They put up with strikes and demonstrations, adopted a cautiously friendly attitude towards revolutionaries. However, after the October 17 Manifesto, which offered a deal between the liberals and the authorities, it seemed to them that all that was left to do was to put it into effect. A continuing revolution threatened to undermine that possibility. From then on the proletarian masses, united by the October strike and organised in the soviet, put the liberals against the revolution by the very fact of their existence. The soviet, on the contrary, believed that the main struggle lay ahead. Under such circumstances any revolutionary co-operation between the capitalists and the proletariat was out of the question”(46).

It was this last point that separated the RDDPP from the ToPR. For all its revolutionary ardour, Lenin’s perspective was the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic state. Trotsky saw that the vanguard of the revolution was the urban proletariat, the natural organisational form of the revolution was the Soviet, and the proletariat once having seized power, would not restrict its demands to those of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

2.4 The Bolsheviks and the Soviet

By the autumn, mass meetings were occurring almost daily in all the industrial towns and cities throughout Russia. Huge opportunities opened up as the RDSLP rapidly gained ground among advanced workers. Absolutely key for the successful linking of the small number of organised Marxists to the broad mass of workers in struggle, was their attitude towards the St Petersburg Soviet. Lenin immediately grasped the significance of this new phenomenon, writing from exile:

“I may be wrong, but I believe ... that politically the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government. I think the Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government of the whole of Russia as early as possible, or should set up a provisional revolutionary government ...”(47).

On the key issue of what attitude to take towards the Soviet and in opposition to the Bolshevik committee-men, Trotsky and Lenin were in full de-facto agreement:

“In Petersburg, I continued working together with comrade Krasin [one of only two the members of the Bolshevik CC not arrested in February 1905] and at the same time kept in touch with the Menshevik group. At the centre of all our discussions in that period were the question of the armed uprising, the workers’ government, the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants. In the spring the Menshevik groups supported my theses on the necessity of preparing for an armed uprising and for the seizure of power by a provisional revolutionary government.”(48).

Trotsky also described the initial attitude of the leading local Bolshevik committee-men:

“The section of the Bolshevik Central Committee led by Bogdanov which was in Petersburg was flatly against the creation of a non-party organisation. ... I was present at the meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee ... where tactics in relation to the soviet were worked out. Bogdanov put forward the following plan: to propose to the soviet in the name of the Bolshevik faction that it immediately accept the Social Democrat programme and overall leadership by the party .... the meeting adopted Bogdanov’s plan. ... Some days later, after comrade Lenin’s arrival, the Bolsheviks’ view of the soviet changed in principle ....”(49).

Sverchkov confirmed Trotsky’s description of events: “The Petersburg Bolsheviks decided that the Soviet had officially to adopt the programme of the Social Democrat Party. They put this before the Soviet with the threat that if it was rejected, they would immediately leave the Soviet. ... the vast majority of the Soviet consisted of Social Democrats ... (and) we ourselves categorically rose up in arms against this proposal”(50). Zinoviev confirmed: “A section of the Bolsheviks had made the mistake of demanding that the Soviet officially adopt the Social Democrat Party programme. But Lenin ... soon corrected this major mistake”(51). It was an indication of future events (in 1917) that when Lenin intervened to pull the Bolsheviks away from their sectarian attitude, his letter Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies to the Bolshevik journal New Life was rejected!(52). Gorev, a Bolshevik present at the time later wrote:

“Lenin put an end to this negative approach to the soviet of deputies. .... His impression of the Petersburg soviet, to which he was taken clandestinely, is particularly interesting. ... There were about 500 people there in all. It made a tremendous impression. Lenin sat silent and listened. After the session, a small group of us took him to the Vienna restaurant to celebrate his return, and we stayed there until morning. Lenin began to chastise the members of the (Bolshevik) committee for being completely incapable of appreciating the enormous force represented by the soviet and putting forward ridiculous proposals that the soviet should subordinate itself to them. He then said that the soviet was also the embryo of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry which he had been propagandising since the summer ... ‘Let the peasants join it as well’ he said ‘and it will be a soviet of workers’ and peasants’ deputies, an organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’”(53).

In Our Tasks and the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, and Socialism and Anarchism, both written in November 1905, Lenin spelled out how he saw the development of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies into a provisional revolutionary government. The Soviet was “not a labour parliament and not an organ of proletarian self-government, (it was) a fighting organisation for the achievement of definite aims”(54). The Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional (and therefore temporary) revolutionary government with a democratic programme that included: the complete and immediate realisation of political freedom, the repeal of all legislation restricting freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, the press, association and strikes. The membership of the Soviet should be broad and mixed, and Lenin specifically called for the inclusion of the Union of Unions - rejected by the Soviet - because the goals of that organisation included the convocation of a National Assembly which fitted well with Lenin’s aim of an Assembly “that would enjoy the support of a free and armed people and have full authority and strength to establish a new order in Russia”(55).

It has been hypothesised by, for example, Woods(56) that what prevented Trotsky from joining the Bolsheviks in late 1905 was the conduct of the Bolshevik committee-men in St Petersburg. Woods is undoubtedly correct in his appreciation of Trotsky’s attitude to the formalism of the committee-men, but Trotsky, despite his outstanding and heroic role as leader of the St Petersburg Soviet, had not overcome his conciliationism, his focus on the reunification of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and would certainly not have made a move to join either faction prior to the Unity Conference. Additionally, Trotsky and Lenin were beginning to develop differences on the class nature of the unfolding Russian Revolution. The concept of the Permanent Revolution was stirring in Trotsky’s mind, while Lenin, at the Third (Bolshevik-only) Congress, had already begun to introduce the concept of a revolutionary democratic dictatorship which he would subsequently codify and elaborate as the RDDPP in numerous articles and pamphlets, beginning in June-July 1905 with the publication of Two Tactics.

2.5 The Struggle for the 8-Hour Day

The October general strike in St Petersburg had been a major factor in forcing the Tsar to issue his Manifesto. During this great strike delegates had proclaimed that when work was resumed they, and their fellow workers, would never agree to return under the old conditions(57). On 26 October, delegates from one of the St Petersburg districts, without the knowledge of the Soviet, decided to introduce the 8-hour working day at their factories by direct action. The following day the delegates’ proposal was adopted by overwhelming majorities at several workers’ meetings. At the Alexandrovsky engineering works the question was decided by secret ballot to avoid pressure; the results were 1,668 for, 14 against(58). From 28 October, several major metalworking plants began to work the 8-hour day. On 29 October, it was reported to the Soviet, amid thunderous applause, that the 8-hour day had been introduced, “by take-over” means, at three large plants. The workers now used the same direct action methods in support of their own, specific demands, that they had previously adopted in support of the more general demands for freedom of assembly and of the press. Trotsky now asked the decisive question, “Were the rights of the factory owners, the capitalists, to be more protected than the privileges of the monarchy?”(59). The answer was given by the thousands of workers who downed tools and left the plants and factories at the end of their 8-hours shift. These actions were an inspiration for the ToPR.

St Petersburg was probably the most militant city in the Russian empire throughout 1905. But the St Petersburg workers were trying to do too much, too soon. The revolutionary movement was strung out like a horse race with the St Petersburg proletariat way ahead of the proletariat in other towns and cities, and the proletariat as a whole, way ahead of the peasantry. The Soviet Executive Committee repeatedly tried to rein in the enthusiasm of the St Petersburg proletariat and, for example, argued against the immediate struggle for the introduction of the 8-hour day. But as Sverchkov said “... the demand for the 8-hour day was so precious to the workers that they did not listen to these arguments, did not think over the approaching consequences or the calamities of unemployment, and they could not give up the idea of the shortening of the working day to the desired length by direct action”. In individual plants where the employers offered to reduce the working day to ten or even nine hours “the workers’ response was a few dozen votes for the owners’ offer and a thousand votes for the 8-hour working day”(60).

However, the situation was becoming more and more confused and difficult. Towards the end of October the government proclaimed a state of siege in Poland, and almost immediately thereafter announced that those sailors in the important naval base of Kronstadt who had supported the October general strike, would be court-martialled. In response, the Soviet called a political strike demanding the end of courts martial and the death penalty, but the balance of forces meant it was compelled to accept a compromise, that the sailors would be tried by an ordinary military court and not a court-martial, and the strike was called off on 5 November. Trotsky was aware not only of the growing weariness of the strikers, but also of the difference in level of revolutionary spirit in St Petersburg and the provinces; “We must drag out the preparation for decisive action as much as we can, perhaps for a month or two, until we can come out as an army as cohesive and organised as possible”(61). This would be a lesson well learned and would stand Trotsky in good stead to plan and lead the October 1917 Revolution.

To the employers, each in their own factory, it appeared that the Manifesto gained by the October strike went hand-in-hand with a strengthening of the workers’ stand against capital and, of course, the unilateral introduction of the 8-hour day by direct action was bound to provoke a strong reaction on their part. Now the government, the largest single employer in St Petersburg, took the lead, making an issue of the 8-hour working day, and began to close state plants while simultaneously clamping down on workers’ meetings, breaking them up by force, in order to demoralise the workers. Until November, the capitalists had tended to respond individually, but with the government taking the lead, collectively declared war on the revolutionary proletariat, beginning a lock-out by which to starve the workers into submission. The fact that they had not waited and linked up with other workers nation-wide, now left the St Petersburg proletariat exposed and isolated.

A number of private factories were closed down and tens of thousands of workers were thrown onto the streets. The factory owners were recovering their confidence and now adopted a hard-line. For the workers of St Petersburg retreat was unavoidable. On 6 November the Soviet adopted a compromise resolution declaring that the 8-hour demand was no longer universal, and calling for the continuation of the struggle only in those enterprises where there was some hope of success. Such a solution was clearly unsatisfactory because it failed to provide a co-ordinating slogan and meant the movement would fragment into a series of separate struggles - each of which would be much weaker for being isolated. Workers in a small number of factories did gain a reduction in the working day of a half or even one hour, but most had to accept their former conditions or even worse. At the giant Nevsky plant, for example, not only was there no reduction in the working day, but the workers had to agree to no wildcat strikes or meetings on factory premises(62).

Trotsky pointed out that the coalition between private capital in St Petersburg and the government, had transformed the question of an 8-hour working day into a question of the authority of the state, and that the workers of St Petersburg could not, therefore, achieve victory in isolation from those of the country at large:

“Of course the eight-hour working day can only be introduced with the co-operation of state power. But state power is precisely what the proletariat was fighting for at that moment. Had it won a political victory, the introduction of the eight-hour day would have been no more than a natural consequence of the ‘fantastic experiment’. But it failed to win; and therein, of course, lay its gravest ‘fault’”(63).

To carry out a retreat in an organised fashion was well-nigh impossible. On 12 November, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies passed a resolution on the temporary suspension of the struggle for the introduction of the 8-hour working day. The state-operated plants re-opened for work, but under the old conditions. The gates of thirteen more private factories and plants closed and the number of workers locked-out had risen to about 100,000. On 12 November, the Soviet decided to retreat in the most dramatic of all the meetings of the workers’ parliament. The vote was divided. Representatives of several textile, glassmaking, and tobacco factories wanted to continue the struggle, but Trotsky, supported by the metalworkers, won the vote(64).

Nevertheless, many workers chose to fight on. “Comrade workers from other factories and plants”, the workers of a large factory who had decided to continue the struggle wrote to the Soviet, “forgive us for doing this, but we have no strength left to suffer this gradual exhaustion of ourselves both physical and moral. We shall fight to the last drop of our blood ...”(65). These reactions of the workers were a direct source of the ideas that would, in the following year, be published as the ToPR.

On 14 November, Bolshevik delegates successfully proposed to the Soviet, a resolution drafted by Lenin on factory closure and unemployment, calling for all factories which had been closed to be re-opened, and all those dismissed to be re-instated. In the resolution Lenin called for the Soviet to appeal for a general strike if its demands were rejected. Whilst endorsing the sentiment, one can only wonder at the lack of appreciation of how the workers would respond to such a resolution, given that only one week before, the Soviet had to call off a political strike in support of the Kronstadt sailors, and only two days before had admitted defeat for the co-ordinated struggle for the 8-hour day(66). Deutscher points out that during the existence of the Soviet, no alternative tactical or strategic line was ever proposed by the Bolshevik delegates (after their initial hiccup), and goes so far as to describe Trotsky’s leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet as “faultless”(67). Any criticism of Trotsky’s role is noticeable by its absence from Lenin’s writings.

The defection of the bourgeois liberals had tipped the balance in favour of reaction. By 22 November, the regime felt strong enough to arrest Khrustalyov-Nosar on the premises of the Soviet Executive. Trotsky had been de-facto leader of the Soviet from the start and after the arrest of Khrustalev-Nosar, when he was elected temporary chairman, he was both de facto and de jure leader. However, the “heavy battalions” of labour were exhausted. The defeat of the attempt to introduce the 8-hour day by direct action, and the factory and plant closures that followed, weakened the St Petersburg proletariat and lowered its combativity, so that when, on 3 December (the day after the mutiny by the Rostov regiment in Moscow), the St Petersburg Soviet was closed down by government troops and the police, and the delegates present were arrested, there was no reaction. Now leaderless, and worn out, it was in no state to react to the December Moscow uprising.

It was the specific demand of the 8-hour day that led to the final split in the opposition to the Tsar, and turned capital into an openly counter-revolutionary force. From this, the Mensheviks drew the conclusion that in the struggle against Tsarism, the working class would have to rein in its demands to within limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For Trotsky, it would lead to his argument that the proletariat, as an independent revolutionary force at the head of the popular masses, could not restrict itself to limits set by the bourgeoisie.

2.6 The Moscow Uprising

The Moscow Soviet was formed on 21 November and at its first meeting there were 180 delegates representing about 80,000 workers. By the beginning of December the revolution had begun to penetrate the minds of the peasants in the army. Under the hammer blows of decisive military defeats - the battles of Yalu, Shalo and Mukden, and the fall of Port Arthur - in the war against Japan, and the influence of the general revolutionary movement, sections of the armed forces and the villages were now entering a state of ferment. Huge areas of European Russia were affected, especially the central “Black Earth” zone stretching from the Ukraine to the southern Ural mountains. However, the consciousness of the rural masses lagged substantially behind that of the towns and this proved a fatal weakness undermining the St Petersburg Soviet and the December, Moscow uprising. Although a wave of peasant discontent spread through the armed forces, the government was able to contain the mutinies that did occur. This confirmed that a major weakness of the 1905 Revolution was the lack of a firm base amongst the peasants; that the peasant-soldier revolts were not on a sufficient scale to make a fundamental difference to the outcome.

With the mutiny of the Rostov regiment in Moscow on 2 December, and the arrest of the St Petersburg Soviet on 3 December, the initiative passed to the workers of Moscow. However, the local Bolsheviks hesitated, and when the news that the soldiers of the regiment had seized weapons and thrown their officers out of the barracks, reached the Moscow Committee, it decided not to change its meeting agenda, and continued with the scheduled discussion on the agrarian question! This inaction was particularly reprehensible as the Rostov regiment, which held over half the machine guns then available in Moscow, was welcoming agitators, and representatives of the sapper regiment which guarded one of the Moscow arsenals, had approached the Soviet. The faint-heartedness of the Moscow Committee in not contacting the Rostov regiment, failing to attempt to bring it out of its barracks and link it with the Moscow Soviet, meant that in a couple of days the mutineers were demoralised, disarmed and confined to their barracks. This defeat effectively eliminated the prospect of organised units going over to the side of the workers. On 4 December, the Moscow Soviet passed a motion congratulating the soldiers on their uprising and expressing the hope that they would come over to the side of the people. But by that time the soldiers’ revolt had been crushed(68).

On the other hand, the workers in the factories of Moscow were impatient for action, and on 7 December, the Soviet voted unanimously for a general political strike. Under the circumstances, no matter what the subjective intentions, this was a vote for an uprising. The general strike began the same day as the decision was taken, involving more than 100,000 workers, increasing to 150,000 on the following day. On 7 and 8 December mass meetings and street demonstrations occurred in Moscow with isolated clashes with the police. The Moscow Soviet published six issues of a daily paper from 7 to 12 of December, the Moscow Izvestia Sovetov Robochikh Deputatov (Bulletin of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies) which attempted to draw wider layers of the population into struggle, but made no direct mention of an armed uprising(69). Only after the fighting had actually begun did Izvestia begin to give instructions to the fighting squads.

The Governor of Moscow - General Dubasov - with only 1,500 soldiers on whose loyalty he could count was, initially, confined to the centre of Moscow. Outside of this area the city was, de facto, in the hands of the Soviet. But Dubasov had been able to disarm and confine to barracks, those elements of the army on whose loyalty he could not rely. He also had a great stroke of luck. On the night of 7 December, the committee that linked the revolutionary parties, including the two foremost Bolshevik leaders, was arrested, leaving the movement overwhelmed by events. Dubasov was also lucky that the only railway line in and out of Moscow not brought to a halt by the strike, was the Nikolai line leading to St Petersburg, and which would bring the Semyovovsky regiment to his assistance. Revolutionaries in St Petersburg, lacked the arms, explosives, and expertise to break the Petersburg-Moscow rail link, and reinforcements loyal to the Tsar were successfully transferred to Moscow(70).

On 8 December, a mass meeting was broken up by the police and arrests made. The Soviet did not react because the Bolsheviks continued to wait for the troops to come over, but it was already too late for that. At this point, taking advantage of the hesitation, the counter-revolution struck back, On 9 December, a crowd was attacked by dragoons, and the building used for RDSLP meetings was surrounded by troops and machine-gunned. In the course of these clashes there were many injured, killed and arrested. On that evening, unorganised street crowds spontaneously set up the first barricades, and hostilities began in earnest. But by December 15 the superiority of the government forces was complete, and on December 17 the Semyovovsky regiment crushed the Presnya District, the last stronghold of the uprising(71).

Armed uprisings were not confined to Moscow(72). There were, in fact, a whole series of armed uprisings - in Kharkov, Donbas, Yekaterinoslav, Rostov-on-Don, the Northern Caucasus, Nizhni-Novgorod and other centres. The national question also caused uprisings, in Georgia and the Baltic states in particular. There were uprisings too along the railway lines in the Donetsk region and Siberia where battles occurred at several stations, attracting the support of peasants in the surrounding districts. But the Moscow uprising did not succeed in re-arousing the proletariat of St Petersburg, which meant that the government could concentrate its forces on crushing the workers of Moscow, and then put down the local movements one by one. Despite being the starting point of the October strike, Moscow had been overshadowed by St Petersburg during October and November. The Moscow uprising in December 1905 was largely a matter of a few, small, lightly-armed guerrilla groups. The Moscow Bolsheviks were too late when it came to taking advantage of the mutinous movement in the garrison. In the course of the summer of 1906 the peasant outbreaks did, again, assume mass proportions but by that time the backbone of the working class movement had been broken so the peasant revolts could be put down one by one accompanied by mass hangings, the flogging of all the males in the village, rape, and police instigated pogroms of the Jews.

2.7 Lessons Learned

For Lenin, the lessons learned confirmed the need for a party to co-ordinate and lead the uprising across all of Russia, the necessity of an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry, and of winning over at least a section of the armed forces(73). Trotsky did not draw up a similar detailed list. His major analysis, Results and Prospects, deals with the general perspective for revolution in Russia, and although it states that a class alliance between the proletariat and peasantry was essential for victory, precise details are lacking. However, in his review of the activities of the Petersburg Soviet(74), Trotsky foresaw that any new revolutionary upsurge would lead to the creation of Soviets all over the country, led and co-ordinated by an All-Russian Soviet whose programme would be based on the lessons learned in the ‘Fifty Days’. In particular Trotsky proposed the same solution as Lenin for overcoming the core weakness of a purely urban revolution - to establish revolutionary co-operation with the army and the peasantry, and to create Councils of Peasants’ Delegates (Peasants’ Committees) as local organs of the agrarian revolution. Interestingly, also as Lenin, he also called for the Soviet to organise elections to a Constituent Assembly!

In 1905 the proletariat emerged as the key driving force of the revolution against the autocracy. However, 1905 also confirmed that no revolution could succeed in Russia without the support of the peasantry. Indeed, the Achilles’ heel of the 1905 Revolution consisted of the fact that the proletarian advanced guard was exhausted before the bulk of the working people, the peasants, moved into action (for an analysis of strike statistics for 1905-06, see Lenin(75)).

The undoubted winner in 1905, in electoral terms, was the populist Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party which gained the votes of the overwhelming majority of the peasantry. While mouthing Marxist and socialist phrases about land to the peasant, the SRs were generally reformists with a sprinkling of terrorist activists. This party would continue to receive the votes of the bulk of the peasants until at least the elections to the Constituent Assembly at the end of 1917.

To Trotsky, the general strike and creation of the Soviets proved once and for all, the superiority of town over countryside, and the proletariat as the only force capable of leading the revolution to overthrow the autocracy. Unfortunately, while he recognised the key role of the Social Democratic Party in the revolution, there was no clear recognition of the necessity of a disciplined, Leninist party; rather, Trotsky appeared more concerned with demonstrating the need for the party to work within and through the mass organisations thrown up by the class in the process of the struggle. Nevertheless, 1905 did confirm to him the necessity of gaining the support of the peasantry, since without that support the struggle for the army could not be won. The key to winning this support was for the RDSLP to revolutionise feudal ownership(76).

In 1905, for the first time, revolutionary SD became a key force within the working class across the whole of Russia, and the decisive role of the party for any successful overthrow of the autocracy was confirmed to Lenin. Within a space of nine months, the consciousness of the workers advanced by leaps and bounds on the basis of their own experiences: from priest and petition in January, through economic strikes for better wages and conditions, to the highest expressions of the class struggle - the political general strike, workers’ self-defence squads, and armed insurrection in December. Under Lenin’s leadership the Bolshevik faction overcame its mistakes and advanced to the head of the revolutionary proletariat. Qualitatively, the need for an organisational weapon - the Bolshevik Party - to lead the workers to victory was proved, and its leadership was tempered in the heat of the 1905 Revolution.

2.8 References

1. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, pvi

2. Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1978, p207

3. Woods, A., Bolshevism the Road to Revolution, Wellred Publications, London, 1999, p173

4. Woods, A., ibid p160

5. Lenin, V.I., The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June-July 1905, CW 9:15 - 140

6. Cliff, T.C., Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p149 - 153

7. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p81

8. Woods, A., op. cit, p182 - 184

9. Lenin, V.I., The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia, Jan 1905 CW 8:97 - 100

10. Lenin, V.I., Should We Organise the Revolution? Feb 1905, CW 8:167 - 176

11. Cliff, T.C., Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p155 - 156

12. Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905, CW 8:143-7

13. Somov, From the History of the SD Movement in Petersburg in 1905 - Personal Reminiscences, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p58 - 60

14. Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p110-116

15. Woods, A., op. cit p237

16. Trotsky, L.D., Iskra No 93, 17 March 1905, quoted in Deutscher The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p118-9

17. Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905 CW 8:143-7

18. Lenin, V.I., The Third Congress of the RDSLP, April 12 April 27, April 1905, CW 8:359 - 449

19. Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905 CW 8:143-7

20. Woods, A., op. cit., p199

21. Woods, A., op. cit., p199 - 200

22. Krupskaya, N., Memories of Lenin, Panther History, 1970, p125 and p124-5

23. Sverchkov, D., At the Dawn of the Revolution 1925, quoted in Pete Glatter, A Revolution Takes Shape, Revolutionary History, Vol 9, No 1 p11-118

24. Zinoviev, G., History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, London, 1973, p128

25. Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p126-127

26. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p157 -161

27. Vasil’ev, M., Proletarian Revolution, Moscow 1919, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p169 - 170

28. Sverchkov, D., op. cit. p112

29. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p104

30. Woods, A., op. cit., p210 - 216;

31. Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., The Decisive Days, in Revolutionary History, Vol 9 No 1 p107-111

32. Sverchkov, D., op cit p114

33. Sverchkov, D., op cit. p117 - 118

34. Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p140

35. Sverchkov, D.,op cit. p112

36. Wolfe, B.D., op cit p318

37. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p104

38. Trotsky, L.D., ibidp254

39. Trotsky, L.D., ibid pix

40. Lunacharsky, A., Revolutionary Silhouettes, London, 1967, p60-1

41. Lunacharsky, A., ibidp60

42. McKean, R.B. St Petersburg Between the Revolutions, Yale University Press, 1990, p54 and 59

43. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p49

44. Lenin, V.I., The Reorganisation of the Party, Nov 1905, CW 10:37-8

45. Woods, A., op. cit., p236 - 237

46. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p254

47. Lenin, V.I., Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, Nov 1905, CW 10:21

48. Trotsky’s letter to the Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the RCP(B) of the State Publishing House saying he did not have time to write an introduction to Sverchov’s book, quoted in Revolutionary History, Vol 9 No 1 p117

49. Trotsky ibid p117 - 119

50. Sverchkov, D., op. cit. p120

51. Zinoviev, G., History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, London, 1973, p128

52. Cliff, T.C., Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p161

53. B Gorev The Bulletin of Revolutionary History No 1 January 1922, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p123

54. Lenin, V.I., Socialism and Anarchism, 24 Nov 1905, CW 10:71

55. Lenin, V.I. Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, 4 Nov 1905, CW 10:24-25

56. Woods, A., op. cit., p236

57. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p179-186

58. Trotsky, L.D., ibid 180

59. Trotsky, L.D., ibidp181

60. Sverchkov, D., op cit. p159

61. Trotsky, L.D., Investia No 7, 7 Nov 1905, quoted in Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p132 - 134

62. Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., op cit 161

63. Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p185

64. Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p135

65. Quoted in Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p184

66. Lenin, V.I., Resolution of the Executive Committee of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies on Measures for Counter-Acting the Lock-Out. Nov 1905, CW 10:50-51

67. Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p135

68. Vasil’ev, M., Proletarian Revolution, Moscow 1919, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p169 - 170

69. Pokrovsky, M.N., The Year 1905 - A History of the Revolutionary Movement, State Publishing House, Moscow, 1925, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p172. [Pokrovsky was a Party historian loyal to the Stalinist faction. It is now recognised that his history of 1905 was the commencement of the re-writing of events to play down the role of Trotsky - Deutscher, footnote, p135 The Prophet Armed]

70. Vasil’ev, M., Proletarian Revolution, Moscow 1919, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p169 - 170

71. Lenin, V.I., Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Aug 1906, CW 11:171-178

72. Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., op cit p166-167

73. Lenin, V.I., Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Aug 1906, CW 11:171-178

74. Trotsky, L.D., The Soviet and Our Revolution, 1907, see www. marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/ourrevo/ch05.htm

75. Lenin, V.I., Strike Statistics in Russia, Jan 1911, CW 16:393-421

76. Trotsky, L.D., 1905, Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p49