In the early part of 1905, prior to the Third Congress in London, Lenin published a series of articles in Vyperod proposing that the RSDLP participate in any revolutionary government that came into being in the struggle against the autocracy. Articles such as The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry[24] argued for two new concepts, both in opposition to the Mensheviks. Firstly, Lenin proposed (see previous section) that the main petty bourgeois allies of the proletariat would be the peasantry. Lenin’s thinking had developed under the direct impact of the peasant uprisings beginning in 1902, followed by the rural explosion(s) of 1903-05. These led to To the Village Poor which introduced the concept of a reciprocal alliance of the poor peasant and the industrial worker[25]. This proposal was agreed and adopted as the policy and programme of the Bolsheviks at the Third Congress. (See Lenin’s Report on the Question of the Participation of the Social Democrats in the Provisional Revolutionary Government [26].)
Secondly, he proposed that, in addition to participating in the armed uprising in fighting unity with the revolutionary democrats, the RSDLP should not shrink from taking part in any provisional revolutionary government to secure the best conditions for the workers from the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution. Of course, the RSDLP representatives in any provisional revolutionary government would be subject to strict control by the party. At that time, in Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government[27], Lenin had cause to criticise Parvus’ call for a Social-Democratic government on the grounds that such a perspective had the insurmountable failing in the Russian context of effectively excluding the peasants. Parvus’ statement appeared in his introduction to Trotsky’s pamphlet Before the Ninth of January, where he had proposed the possibility of a Social Democratic government arising from the Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution. This was the first time such an idea had been mooted and, for many (including Lenin), Parvus’ introduction overshadowed the pamphlet it introduced. Indeed, there is evidence that Lenin believed that the body of the pamphlet carried the same message as the introduction. In his response to Parvus, Lenin gave an insight into his own understanding of the likely composition of the RDDPP when he absolutely ruled out any possibility that the provisional revolutionary dictatorship could be exclusively SD, and went so far as to say that even a SD majority was:
“impossible, unless we speak of fortuitous, transient episodes, and not of a revolutionary dictatorship that will be at all durable and capable of leaving its mark in history. This is impossible, because only a revolutionary dictatorship supported by the vast majority of the people can be at all durable … The Russian proletariat, however, is at present a minority of the population in Russia. It can become the great, overwhelming majority only if it combines with the mass of semi-proletarians, semi-proprietors, i.e., with the mass of the petty-bourgeois urban and rural poor”[28].
The irony here is that the debate in 1905 et seq was about whether or not the RSDLP should participate in a revolutionary government. Lenin considered a Social Democratic majority in the RDDPP as “impossible”, but in 1917 he would defend a revolutionary government initially composed entirely of Bolsheviks! Lenin’s insistence on majority support should also be noted. If land distribution ended the peasants’ revolutionary fervour, then the requirement for majority support (i.e. peasant support) placed a severe constraint on the revolutionary dictatorship. However, in 1917, Lenin would recognise that the party that enabled land distribution would gain the support of the peasantry as a whole, so that a revolutionary proletarian regime could – at least in its initial stages – gain the support of the overwhelming majority of the Russian population.
In June 1905, Lenin wrote the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution[29]. The title of the pamphlet is interesting because it made clear that Lenin was addressing differences in tactics; the aim of the revolution remained that of a (bourgeois) democratic state and this was not, apparently, in dispute. One of the main themes of the pamphlet was a sharp rebuttal of the Menshevik arguments that the RSDLP should not play a leading role in any provisional revolutionary government since such a presence would inevitably mean attempting to put into effect the entire Social-Democratic programme – including its maximum, socialist programme. The theoretical basis of the Menshevik argument was an extract from Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany[30] to the effect that the leadership of an “extreme party” should avoid taking over as a government when the historic conditions were not ripe for the domination of the class which it represented, nor for the implementation of those measures which that domination required.
Lenin, in a series of pamphlets and articles, roundly attacked the argument that the RDSLP in taking the leading part in the struggle to establish the RDDPP, and then playing a major role in any subsequent government, would necessarily have to lead an attempt at a socialist revolution. He gave two separate answers to the criticisms made by Martynov, the delegate from – and former editor of – Workers’ Cause who did not quit the Second Congress, and who symbolised the transition of the Mensheviks to reformism.
The first part of his answer is particularly interesting because it concerned the subjective factor, the role of the party leaders and their aims and objectives in participating in the provisional revolutionary government. Lenin argued it was acceptable for the RDSLP to participate in the transitional revolutionary government precisely because it would not attempt to introduce socialist measures! Because the RDDPP was not the period of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the RDSLP leadership would voluntarily restrict its demands to the minimum programme. The RDSLP itself would eliminate the subjective factor of leadership of the socialist revolution.
This argument gave rise to criticisms from rank and file members of the RDSLP, which Lenin had to answer. His proposal that the party participate in the revolutionary democratic government and limit its demands to the minimum programme was interpreted by some Bolsheviks as meaning the RDSLP would be endorsing and continuing the repressive measures of a bourgeois state for a prolonged period! If Lenin had been proposing a process in which the revolution would flow more or less uninterruptedly from the bourgeois to the socialist, then these rank and file Bolsheviks had completely the wrong idea about how the Russian revolution would progress. Lenin would have been required to correct the misapprehension, to inform and educate the Party on the rapidity of the transition from bourgeois to socialist revolution. But what did he say? In The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry he replied:
“ … Participation in the provisional government with the bourgeois revolutionary democrats, they [Lenin’s critics] weep, means sanctioning the bourgeois order; it means sanctioning the perpetuation of prisons and the police, of unemployment and poverty, of private property and prostitution. … Social-Democrats do not hold back from struggle for political freedom on the grounds that it is bourgeois political freedom. Social-Democrats regard this “sanctioning” of the bourgeois order from the historical point of view. … they sanction it, not for its prisons and police, its private property and prostitution, but for the scope and freedom it allows to combat these charming institutions”[31].
Here, Lenin clearly accepted that RDSLP representatives in the provisional dictatorship would, indeed, be operating within a ‘republican-democratic bourgeois order’. The class rule of the bourgeois would be ‘sanctioned’, there is no suggestion that essential elements of the bourgeois state, e.g. prisons and police, were to be abolished during the period when the RDDPP held power. There can be little doubt that, in the given context, Lenin was envisaging a revolutionary dictatorship initiating, and resting on, bourgeois state norms. It will be shown later that such a state was expected to be ratified and exist for a significant period of time under the governance of a Constituent Assembly.
The second part of his answer was the huge numbers of peasants who were capable of supporting the democratic revolution but were not interested in supporting the socialist revolution[32], that is the forces necessary for carrying out the socialist revolution would be missing. Having the peasantry as the major ally imposed severe limits on the aims of the revolution. In The Peasant, or “Trudovik”, Group and the RDSLP, written in May 1906, Lenin’s perspective was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution came to an end when the peasants solved the land problem, because they had achieved their objective of taking ownership of the land for themselves. He explained that a period of time (‘decades’) would then be required during which class differentiation would occur in the countryside, before the victory of the struggle against capitalist society as a whole.
The peasant movement was not proletarian, it was a struggle waged by small proprietors to cleanse Russia of serfdom. It was not a struggle against the foundations of capitalism. The proletariat would lead the successful bourgeois-democratic revolution as a necessary step on its way to a genuine socialist revolution, but the masses of the peasantry were not interested in any immediate struggle against capitalist society. When the peasantry won the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the peasantry as a whole would have exhausted its revolutionary energy[33]. In Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement, 1 Sept 1905, Lenin argued:
“At first we support the peasantry en masse against the landlords, support it to the hilt and with all means, … we shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task – the socialist revolution. We promise no harmony, no egalitarianism or ‘socialisation’ following the victory of the present peasant uprising, on the contrary, we ‘promise’ a new struggle, new inequality, the new revolution we are striving for”[34].
Lenin never saw the peasantry as an ally in the fight for the socialist revolution. If he had, he would not have had the slightest grounds for insisting upon the bourgeois character of the revolution and for limiting the RDDPP to purely democratic tasks. Lenin correctly foresaw that land distribution would transform the poor peasants into middle peasants, ending their revolutionary dynamic. Their concern would then be to protect their newly-gained ownership of the land, not risk it by launching a struggle for a socialist revolution[35]. All Lenin promised was that after the victory of the struggle against the landlords for the democratic revolution, when no-one could know the balance of class forces, there would begin a new struggle for the socialist revolution, the victory of which would first require class differentiation within the peasantry.
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Lenin, V.I., The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry, March 1905, CW 8:293-303
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Krupskaya, N., Memories of Lenin, Panther History, 1970, p79 and 108 – 111
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Lenin, V.I., Report on the Question of the Participation of the Social Democrats in the Provisional Revolutionary Government, April 1905, CW 8:382-395
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Lenin, V.I., Social-Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, March 1905, CW, 8:277-292
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Lenin, V.I., The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry, March 1905, CW 8:291
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Lenin, V.I., The Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, June – July 1905, CW 9:15-140
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Engels, F., The Peasant War in Germany, International Publishers, New York, 2000, p70
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Lenin, V.I., The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry, March 1905, CW 8:300
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Lenin, V.I., ibid p298
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Lenin, V.I., The Peasant, or “Trudovik”, Group and the R.S.D.L.P. May 1906, CW 10:411
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Lenin, V.I., Social-Democracy’s Attitude Towards the Peasant Movement, Sept 1905, CW 9:237
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Lenin, V.I. Agrarian Programme of Social Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907, Nov-Dec 1907, CW 13:230