It would be pointless to attempt to find any quotation by Lenin in which he specifically said he had been wrong on the question of the RDDPP. Not only was this not the style of the man, as had been shown in the Third (Bolshevik-only) Congress when a radical change towards the peasantry was presented as “nothing”[67], but during 1917 he was too busy with the tasks in hand to spend time on such matters which had, in any case, been decided by the actual revolution. Instead, as would be expected, Lenin took care to emphasise the continuity of the Bolshevik programme.
Even though Lenin played the decisive role in overcoming resistance within the Bolshevik Party to the adoption of an orientation toward the seizure of power and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship, he was waging a struggle against those who had been his closest allies and who claimed adherence to the political line that he, himself, had introduced into the party and made its major policy for over a decade.
Two conferences were called to determine the party’s perspectives and resolve the differences in the leadership. The first was the Petrograd City RDSLP(B) Conference of 14-22 April, and the second was the Seventh All-Russia Conference of the RDSLP(B) of 24-29 April. Given that all the key players were in Petrograd, the first conference effectively decided the issues, and the All-Russia Conference was more a mopping-up operation and opportunity for re-educating party members. To all appearances, the internal party struggle was over very quickly. The battle was won by the party’s rank-and-file, predominantly workers who stood well to the left of the leadership, who ensured that branch after branch adhered to Lenin’s theses. Liebman describes how the influx of new members “had the effect of crushing the nucleus of ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who claimed to be the guardians of Leninist orthodoxy, crushing them under the weight of new members who had been radicalised by the revolutionary events and were not paralysed by the principles of that orthodoxy”[68]. Stalin learned this lesson well, the faction fight in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s death would be largely decided by just such an influx – but in conditions where careerists, pen-pushers and bureaucrats made up the new recruits.
In February the Bolshevik Party had about 2,000 members in Petrograd. At the opening of the April Conference it had 16,000. These new members were politically raw, often very young (the Bolshevik Party was referred to as ‘the party of kids’ by the Mensheviks), eager for immediate revolutionary action (as the July demonstration would show) and impatient with the Old Bolsheviks[69]. These new rank-and-file members, were mainly working class and had not been through the debate of 1905-1907, had never been educated in the perspective of the RDDPP, and instinctively accepted Lenin’s new revolutionary theses: “These worker-revolutionists, only lacked the theoretical resources to defend their position. But they were ready to respond to the first clear call. It was on this stratum of workers, decisively risen to their feet during the upward years of 1912-14, that Lenin was now banking”[70].
In his Report on the Present Situation, at the City Conference, Lenin was clear that the existing Soviets were the implementation of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry and were interlocked with the bourgeoisie[71], while ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were locked into the form of the RDDPP at the expense of its revolutionary content.
In his Speech on the Resolution on the Current Situation given at the subsequent All-Russian Conference, Lenin again answered the arguments of Old Bolshevism that the Russian workers could not take power because the objective conditions in Russia did not permit it, by arguing that while it was true that the objective conditions for socialism did not exist in Russia, they did exist on a world scale. The Russian Revolution was not an independent act, but part of the world revolution. If the Russian workers had the possibility of assuming power before the German, French and British workers, then they should do so. Russian workers could begin the revolution, take power, start to transform society on socialist lines, and this would give a powerful impulse to the revolution that was already maturing in Europe. This is remarkably similar to Trotsky’s ToPR. Both men were now arguing that Russia might begin the socialist revolution, and with the help of the workers of Germany, France and Britain, would finish the job. True, it might be argued that a similar sequence of events had been mooted in Two Tactics …, but then it had been in terms of the RDDPP resulting in a progressive bourgeois regime, whereas now it was in terms of a Russian dictatorship of the proletariat beginning the transition to a socialist regime:
“‘This is a bourgeois revolution, it is therefore useless to speak of socialism,’ say our opponents. But we say just the opposite: ‘Since the bourgeoisie cannot find a way out of the present situation, the revolution is bound to go on.’ We must not confine ourselves to democratic phrases; we must make the situation clear to the masses, and indicate a number of practical measures to them, … When all such measures are carried out, Russia will be standing with one foot in socialism”[72].
Just what were these practical steps that would place Russia with one foot in socialism? Lenin listed: nationalisation of the land, state control over the banks and their amalgamation into a single bank, control over the big capitalist syndicates (sugar, coal and metal), and a progressive income tax[73]. Just as Trotsky had foreseen in 1906, the taking of relatively simple, bourgeois-democratic measures (which included ‘land to the peasants’) would, in a revolutionary situation, require the dictatorship of the urban workers and could not be separated from the first steps towards socialism.
In 1917 Lenin saw the actual RDDPP – admittedly without Bolshevik leadership – first failing to undertake any of the fundamental bourgeois-democratic revolutionary tasks and, later, playing an actively counter-revolutionary role. The key tasks of the RDDPP, as described in 1905, were to have been: the calling of a Constituent Assembly, the introduction of a radical land reform programme, the implementation of the RDSLP minimum programme, and the end of autocracy. The RDDPP had become a reality in 1917, it had been implemented, tested, and found wanting.
Lenin considered the RDDPP an essential part of his strategy between 1905-1917, but we have the luxury of hindsight. The majority leadership of the Bolshevik Party, instead of using Lenin’s Marxist method, took Lenin’s schema to justify their plan of action. No matter how vehement Lenin was, in 1905, in defence of his position, it can now be seen that in 1917 the RDDPP, as realised in the Soviets between February and July, became actively counter-revolutionary and would have to be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat if the essential task of the bourgeois-democratic revolution – the end of feudal relations on the land – was to be carried through. This is, of course, quite the opposite viewpoint from Kamenev and the other Old Bolsheviks, who argued that because the agrarian revolution had hardly begun, the call for a proletarian revolution was impermissible.
In an entry into his Diary dated 25 March, 1935, Trotsky wrote:
“Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place – on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring – of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to overcome the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders.”[74].
In this passage, Trotsky is referring to the political struggle within the Bolshevik Party. Quite correctly, he takes as his starting point the crucial significance of Lenin’s reorientation of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917. Without his overcoming the resistance of Old Bolshevik leaders to a strategic change in the political orientation of the Bolshevik Party, the revolution would not have been successful.
At the Seventh All-Russian Conference the draft of a new party programme was discussed and Lenin later proposed a revised version[75]. Bukharin’s comments are illuminating as he made clear that, in 1917, he saw the victory of the revolution could be achieved only through the victory of the working class, the overthrow of the capitalists, and the establishment of working class rule[76]. And how was this overthrow of the capitalists expressed in the changes made to the RDSLP programme (of 1903)? The following are two important additions to the original.
First, Lenin sited the Russian Revolution in the context of the world socialist revolution:
“The extremely high level of development which world capitalism in general has attained, …. (has) transformed the present stage of capitalist development into an era of proletarian socialist revolution. …
Objective conditions make it the urgent task of the day to prepare the proletariat in every way for the conquest of political power in order to carry out the economic and political measures which are the sum and substance of the socialist revolution”[77].
The second change specifically rejected a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic, the governmental goal of the RDDPP:
“The party of the proletariat cannot rest content with a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic, …
The party fights for a more democratic workers’ and peasants’ republic, in which the police and the standing army will be abolished and replaced by the universally armed people, by a people’s militia; all officials will be not only elective, but also subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of the electors; all officials, without exception, will be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a competent worker; parliamentary representative institutions will be gradually replaced by Soviets of people’s representatives (from various classes and professions, or from various localities), functioning as both legislative and executive bodies”[78].
This second point is doubly important since it was a cornerstone of Lenin’s rebuttal of Kautsky’s criticisms that he (Lenin) opportunistically opposed the Constituent Assembly in December 1917 and January 1918, only after it became clear that the Bolsheviks did not have a majority. In The … Renegade Kautsky, Lenin states 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 at the RDSLP(B) conferences held in April 1917, which accordingly adopted resolutions to the effect that a proletarian and peasant republic was superior to a bourgeois parliamentary republic, and that the Bolshevik Party would not be satisfied with the latter[79].
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Resolution on the Support of the Peasant Movement, April 1905, CW 8:400-404
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Liebman, M., op cit, p134
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Woods, A., op cit, p545
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Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol 1 p306
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Present Situation, April 1917, CW 24:142-143
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Lenin, V.I., Speech in Favour of the Resolution on the Current Situation, April 1917, CW 24:308
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Lenin, V.I., ibid 24:307
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Trotsky, L.D., Diary in Exile, Atheneum, New York, p46-47
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Lenin, V.I., Materials Related to the Revision of the Party Programme, May 1917, CW 24:459-479
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Bukharin, N. and Preobrazhensky, E., ABC of Communism, University of Michigan Press, 1966, p22
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Lenin, V.I., Draft of a Revised Programme, May 1917, CW 24:469
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Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 24:461
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Lenin, V.I., The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Oct-Nov 1918, CW 28:265