The February 1917 Revolution was unplanned and spontaneous. The Tsarist secret police, the ohkrana, reported that the Revolution was “a purely spontaneous phenomenon, and not at all the fruit of party agitation”[8]. One relatively honest eye-witness, the Menshevik Sukhanov, recorded that “Not one party was prepared for the great upheaval”[9], confirming Trotsky’s account that “no-one, positively no-one – we can assert this categorically on the basis of all the data – then thought that 23 February was to mark the beginning of a decisive drive against absolutism”[10].
The February Revolution was, almost exclusively, the work of the Petrograd working class. Trotsky writes in his History of the Russian Revolution, “It would be no exaggeration to say that Petrograd achieved the February Revolution. The rest of the country adhered to it”[11]. The peasantry supported the February Revolution, but they did not make it. The removal of the Tsar was accomplished by the working class which drew behind it the peasants in the form of army delegates to the Soviets. That the Soviets assumed such an overwhelming importance right from the start was not only due to the memories of 1905 but because there was little alternative; state oppression after the commencement of the war closed the trade unions, abolished the socialist press, and arrested and exiled every revolutionary it could catch[12].
From 23-28 February, the revolution was confined to Petrograd, with the Soviet being convened on the afternoon of the 27th. The country went about its business unaware that anything unusual had occurred. The first city to react was Moscow, which had strikes and demonstrations on 28 February and the following day elected a workers’ Soviet. On 1 March, meetings took place in several provincial towns, including Tver, Nizhnii, Novgorod, Samara and Saratov. In the course of March there emerged, in all these cities, Soviets modelled on that of Petrograd. The leadership of these Soviets, with a few local exceptions, was Menshevik and SR. In early April, the provincial Soviets sent representatives to Petrograd where they formed an All-Russian Soviet. The revolution spread slowly across the country, more or less peacefully, with many villages not hearing the news until four or six weeks later, and little or no resistance was encountered[13]. The earliest reports of agrarian disturbances, such as assaults on private landed property, reached Petrograd in the middle of March, but they assumed mass proportions in April, stimulating the first mass desertions of soldiers who hurried home from fear of being left out[14].
The Russian bourgeoisie, true to expectations, proved to be cowardly and deeply counter-revolutionary. Sukhanov describes in detail, the manoeuvrings of the leaders of the bourgeoisie, whose first inclination was to betray the revolution and maintain the Tsar, and only when this stratagem collapsed did they move onto the riskier path of keeping the revolution in check by accepting the offer of the Mensheviks and SRs to become the Provisional Government[15]. Pipes gives a good description of the Provisional Government as a group of individuals who could not take the power, but had to have it thrust on them by, essentially, the abdication of leadership by the newly-born Petrograd Soviet which was the only real power in Russia at that moment[16].
In fact, the Provisional Government emerged out of the Duma and initially gave itself a title that clearly revealed its goals: Committee for the Re-establishment of Order and Relations with Public Institutions and Personages. Their first instinct, as Sukhanov explained, was to resort to repression, but as that was impossible, they were compelled to compromise and play for time. The aim of the liberal bourgeoisie was to halt the revolution by making cosmetic changes intended to preserve as much of the old regime as possible, thus they ‘gave’ to the masses, the liberties and freedoms that the workers and soldiers had already taken. The old regime had been severely battered, bruised and shaken, but was still in existence in the shape of the economic power of the landlords, bankers and big business, and the social and political power of the huge state bureaucracy, the officer caste, the Duma and the monarchy. The liberal bourgeoisie, believing the monarchy was still the firmest bulwark of private property and order, attempted to preserve the Romanovs, and the Provisional Government manoeuvred to replace Tsar Nicholas II with his son or brother. The workers, who had overthrown the Tsar, handed power to the leaders of the Soviets, who, in turn, handed it to the Provisional Government, who, in their turn, offered it back to the Romanovs![17].
In February, the capitalists knew they had no significant armed force at their disposal and, initially, the decrees of the Provisional Government were carried out only to the extent permitted by the Soviets. “The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies … possesses the most important elements of real power, such as the troops, railroads, posts and telegraph communication. One may say directly that the Provisional Government exists only as long as the Soviet permits this”[18]. Sukhanov was one of those delegated by the Executive of the Petrograd Soviet to explain to the Provisional Government that the Soviet would leave the formation of the government to the bourgeois parties. He held the opinion, “It was clear then a priori that if a bourgeois government and the adherence of the bourgeoisie to the revolution were to be counted on … Power must go to the bourgeoisie”[19]. The Soviet leaders begged the bourgeois leaders to take governmental power, and promised to stop the “excesses” of the masses, and to restrict the actions of the Soviet itself.
This was quite understandable behaviour from the Mensheviks and SRs as it flowed naturally from their political and social perspectives for the Russian Revolution. However, it meant that the February Revolution brought to power those who opposed its success – the Cadets and their allies. On 2 March, the Provisional Government was constituted. It was comprised mainly of big landlords and industrialists[20].
The pressure of the petty bourgeois masses played a disproportionate role in the early stages as expressed in the system of elections in the Soviets. Initially, the workers were entitled to one representative for every 1,000 voters but one soldier for every company in Petrograd. This gave an overwhelming preponderance to the soldiers, with 800 workers’ deputies compared with 2,000 soldiers (in their vast majority junior officers from the democratic middle class who gravitated naturally to the more moderate Mensheviks and SRs). Cliff quotes one of the local Bolshevik leaders, Shlyapnikov, as saying that out of about 1,600 Soviet delegates in February only about 40 were Bolsheviks[21].
The strategy sketched by Lenin in Two Tactics, of the Soviet acting to destroy the autocratic state, to take state power through an armed popular militia, to act as the provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship and resolve the land question, had suffered a severe setback due to the lack of a genuine revolutionary leadership – and here the Old Bolsheviks offered nothing significantly different from the Mensheviks and SRs. As in 1905, the Bolshevik ‘committee-men’ quickly lost their bearings when confronted with a new situation and lagged behind the movement[22]. In the initial phase of the revolution, the party showed itself to be woefully unprepared, the upsurge of the masses caught it off guard. “Lacking a vigorous and clear-sighted leadership,” writes Liebman, “the Bolsheviks of the capital had reacted to the first workers’ demonstrations with much reserve, and even with a suspiciousness that recalls their attitude in January 1905”[23].
The Petrograd leadership was not alone, even though in 1912-14, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in winning the support of the great majority of the organised workers in Russia, even though during the war the Mensheviks had played hardly any role, “yet in the heady days of February-April, the two factions were again merged into a single organisation in every province except Moscow and Petersburg. Indeed, in many areas, they remained united right up to the October Revolution”[24].
Liebman has no hesitation in saying that even the most radical Bolsheviks had no perspective other than the consolidation of a bourgeois regime. “‘The coming revolution must only be a bourgeois revolution,’ wrote Olminsky, adding that ‘this was an obligatory premise for every member of the party, the official opinion of the party, its continual, and unchanging slogan right up to the February revolution of 1917, and even some time after.’” The same idea was expressed even more crudely in Pravda on 7 March, 1917, even before Stalin and Kamenev had arrived from exile in Siberia to give it a yet more right-wing slant: “Of course, there is no question among us of the downfall of the rule of capital, but only the downfall of the rule of the autocracy and feudalism”[25].
For over a decade, Bolshevik Party cadres had been educated in the theory of the provisional RDDPP (which included both the proletariat limiting its demands, and an interval of “decades” before the socialist revolution). Did Bolshevik leaders such as Kamenev impose that schema on the reality of the February Revolution with the result that the party tail-ended the Menshevik and SR-leadership in the Soviets between February and April? Certainly they found it possible to present the slogan of the RDDPP with a reformist face, a possibility that Trotsky had foreseen and warned against.
The first exiles to return (about 12 or 13 March) were those who had been sent to Siberia, Kamenev and Stalin among them. The new arrivals used their seniority to push the party’s line further to the right. This was immediately reflected in the pages of the central organ. In an editorial in Pravda on 14 March, two days after his return, Kamenev wrote: “What purpose would it serve to speed things up, when things [are] already taking place at such a rapid pace?”[26]. The next day, he wrote another piece commenting on Kerensky’s statement that Russia would “proudly defend its freedoms” and would not “retreat before the bayonets of the aggressors”. Kamenev enthusiastically agreed, in terms which totally rejected Lenin’s policy of opposition to the war: “When army faces army, it would be the most insane policy to suggest to one of those armies to lay down its arms and go home. This would not be a policy of peace, but a policy of slavery, which would be rejected with disgust by a free people”[27].
In the solidly-proletarian Vyborg district of Petersburg which consistently voted for Bolshevik delegates to the Soviet, the local committee, predominantly worker activists, in their manifesto demanded a democratic republic [Constituent Assembly], the 8-hour day, seizure of the landlords’ estates and an immediate end to the war[28]. The Vyborg district committee also issued leaflets appealing for the establishment of factory committees which, with the revolutionary soldiers, would immediately elect representatives to a provisional revolutionary government. This would be under the protection of the insurrectionary revolutionary people and army[29]. These proposals were the same as those in Two Tactics, with the important addition of the demand for immediate peace, a significant move towards the policy that Lenin would propose in his April Theses[30]. However, the demand by the Bolsheviks of the Vyborg district that power be taken by the Soviet was not in order to move towards socialism, but because the Provisional Government was not moving fast enough against the autocracy and failing to implement the Social Democratic minimum programme, particularly land to the peasant.
The call that the Soviets should take the power was rejected by both the Bolsheviks who had returned from exile and the Soviet leaders, who used Lenin’s 1905 argument that the revolution was “bourgeois” and the working class was “not ready” to take power; the rank and file had no answer. The Bolshevik leadership present in Petrograd had adopted an interpretation of the RDDPP slogan that offered no alternative to the Menshevik perspective. “The left Bolsheviks, especially the workers, tried with all their force to break through the quarantine. But they did not know how to refute the premise about the bourgeois character of the revolution and the danger of isolation of the working class”[31].
It took Lenin five weeks from hearing of the victory of the February Revolution to reach Petrograd. His writings during this period show the transition in his thinking from the stagist theory of Two Tactics to the demands for a Commune-type state based on the Soviets, and the overthrow of capital, as a necessary precondition for the achievement of a democratic peace and land to the peasants. On 4 March, immediately on hearing the news of the Tsar’s overthrow, Lenin proposed his Draft Theses, March 4 1917[32], emphasising that the February Revolution was by no means a complete victory, and that revolutionary measures against the landlords and capitalists were required, including a “democratic republic and socialism”. On 6 March he sent his famous telegram to the Bolsheviks returning from Stockholm and Oslo to Petrograd: “Our tactic: no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is particularly suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee; immediate elections to the Petrograd City Council; no rapprochement with other parties”[33].
As soon as Pravda recommenced publication, Lenin began his Letters from Afar[34], the first of which was dated 7 March and contained demands which had been clearly described twelve years previously in Two Tactics, and had been the backbone of Bolshevik policy since then; the revolutionary overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and destruction of the autocratic state to be accomplished by the provisional RDDPP which would temporarily exercise state power through the Soviets resting on an armed militia of the proletariat and peasants. Comparing these to the actual policies of the Bolsheviks in Russia, one can see why they so shocked the Central Committee members. Most of the first letter was published, with about one fifth, which included the passages criticising those who supported the Provisional Government, censored[35]. All four subsequent letters were effectively suppressed.
Lenin’s Letters from Afar show that his ideas were in a state of flux, and his concept of how the second Russian Revolution would develop was changing. The February Revolution had placed the capitalist Provisional Government in power, but neither the Tsarist monarchy nor the autocratic state had been finally destroyed. Lenin began by demanding that the old state machine, the army, the police force and bureaucracy be smashed. But he recognised that this could be achieved only if there was a transfer of political power from the government of the landlords and capitalists to a government based on Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. These Soviets had to be extended across all of Russia to include, particularly, soldiers, rural wage-workers and the entire peasant poor. This would be a real RDDPP, and would be assured of victory if, from the start, it rested on the armed might of a workers’ and peasants’ militia, and fought for the confiscation of the landed estates of state, church, nobility and crown[36]. In this Lenin emphasised the radical and revolutionary dimension of the RDDPP but he had not moved outside a stagist perspective.
Carr has argued that before leaving Switzerland, Lenin had already come to the conclusion that the problems of the severe food shortages in the cities of Russia could not be solved ‘‘unless one renounces bourgeois relationships (and) passes to revolutionary measures”[37]. Correct, but initially, Lenin, after demanding that every toiler should see and feel some improvement in his life – bread, milk for children, accommodation – made the point that such measures were not socialist since they concerned only the distribution of goods, and that such a situation would constitute only a democratic dictatorship. However, to achieve peace, and provide food for the people, more than just the RDDPP was required. Now Lenin called for a workers’ government based not on an alliance with the whole of the peasantry, but with farm labourers, poor peasants and revolutionary workers in all countries[38]. With the support of these allies the Russian workers could utilise the peculiarities of their situation to achieve a democratic republic and then proceed to socialism[39].
Once again Lenin is deeply radical, but the idea that the revolution in Russia could spark the socialist revolution in Western Europe, with consequent feedback into Russia, is within the schema laid out in Two Tactics. In March, Lenin presented this idea several times: that revolutionary victory in Russia, the capture of power by the proletariat and poorest strata of the population and the elimination of the autocracy, would encourage the development of the socialist revolution in the West, and this would lead “the whole of mankind” to “peace and socialism”[40],[41]. However, by 11 March (the third of his Letters) Lenin shows that he is reconsidering the role of the RDDPP. He refers to the RDDPP, but immediately adds the qualification:
“It is not a matter of finding a theoretical classification. We would be committing a great mistake if we attempted to force the complete, urgent, rapidly developing practical tasks of the revolution into the Procrustean bed of narrowly conceived ‘theory’ instead of regarding theory primarily and predominantly as a guide to action”[42].
He was re-thinking his strategy. In the unique and desperate position in which Russia found itself, it was necessary to extend his previous theory to meet the needs of the actual situation. Two weeks later, in his unfinished Fifth Letter written on 26 March, the changes had progressed substantially. The title of the Fifth Letter is The Tasks Involved in the Building of the Revolutionary Proletarian State. To have moved from a workers’ government, whether or not in alliance with the poorest peasants, to a proletarian state, implied a qualitative change in his perspective. He developed this theme by calling for the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry to “take further steps towards control of the production and distribution of the basic products”. These actions, when completed, would mark the first steps in “the transition to socialism”[43]. Now the Russian Revolution is posed as a socialist revolution, and as beginning in semi-feudal Russia before Western Europe.
This is a very different perspective from that described in Two Tactics. Lenin had changed the goal of the revolution. The first steps towards socialism were to be taken in the short term since they were intended to resolve, for example, the food and housing shortages created by the war. True, Lenin in his Fifth Letter, in item 6 on the list of “immediate tasks”, wrote that only the RDDPP organised on a Soviet model and supported by such organs of government as a proletarian militia, would be capable of successfully achieving peace[44]. However, Lenin simultaneously proposed that this RDDPP be based not on the peasantry as a whole, but on the proletariat and poorest sections of the peasantry, and should take steps towards the control of production and distribution, that is take immediate steps in the transition towards socialism, a proposal that in 1905 was described as “anarchist” and “absurd”. The Fifth Letter is short, only two pages long, and there is no reference to how the RDDPP would take these steps. This was the last time Lenin was to pose the RDDPP as a goal to be achieved, and should be taken as an example of Lenin’s ideas in flux. At the very least, the actions proposed were in marked contrast to the schemas of Two Tactics, and may very well have been the first clear step outside that framework.
Lenin arrived at the Finland station on 3 April, and on the afternoon of 4 April presented his ten “April Theses”[45] to two meetings at the Tauride Palace where the Soviet held its sessions. Firstly he spoke to Bolshevik delegates of the Soviet, and then to a joint meeting of Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates.
Lenin stated that a situation of dual power existed in Russia, due only to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat. It was now time to move to power being “in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”[46] with the only possible form of the revolutionary government being the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. While the Bolsheviks were in a minority they would restrict their activities to criticism, exposing the errors of the Mensheviks and SRs, all the time attempting to raise the consciousness of the masses to a level which understood the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets[47]. It is interesting to note that this policy called, in practice, for a Menshevik-SR Government since these were the majority parties within the Soviets. However, this was a time when the bourgeois government was impotent, the Soviets held all effective power, and were truly democratic, allowing a majority to be won by ideological struggle alone.
The fifth thesis offered the most radically new perspective: No return to a parliamentary republic, instead a republic of Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies from “top to bottom”[48]; that is a government based on the Soviets, responsible to the Soviets and controlled by the Soviets. The memoirs of Raskolnikov, a sailor Bolshevik stationed at Kronstadt, who was present when Lenin first arrived in Russia, described Lenin’s initial presentation at Finland station:
“It laid down a Rubicon between the tactics of yesterday and today. Comrade Lenin … summoned us away from half-recognition and half-support of the Government to non-recognition and irreconcilable struggle. … It was not without cause that our Party’s tactics did not follow a straight line, but after Lenin’s return took a sharp turn to the left”[49].
In the so-called economic theses, Lenin proposed confiscation of the landed estates and nationalisation of all land, immediate amalgamation of all banks into a single national bank under the control of the Soviets. He stated that “It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce’ socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies”[50]. His emphasis on ‘immediate’ was not lost on his audience. Carr comments, “Lenin’s cautious phraseology left room for a certain practical vagueness about the precise moment of the transition to socialism, but none for doubt about this transition as the main goal”[51].
The reaction of his listeners showed that the consequences of this were clear to them. Krupskaya describes the reaction of the Bolshevik delegates: “For the first few minutes our people were taken aback. It seemed to many that Lenin presented the question too bluntly, that it was still too early to speak of socialist revolution”[52]. It is recorded that only one person spoke in favour of Lenin’s theses – Alexandra Kollantai. That evening the Petrograd Committee rejected the theses by thirteen votes to two with one abstention. Lenin’s theses were published in Pravda on 7 April. They appeared over his name alone. Kamenev, as editor replied the next day in Pravda No. 27;
“As for Comrade Lenin’s general scheme, it appears to us unacceptable, inasmuch as it proceeds from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed, and builds on the immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution”[53],[54].
This accurately conveyed the stagist opinions of Kamenev, Stalin and most of the other Old Bolsheviks in the spring of 1917 – in fact it probably conveyed the opinions of the majority of the Bolshevik Party at that time.
This new prospect of a socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat simply did not fit into the mindset of the Old Bolsheviks. Here, it is necessary to remember that up to the outbreak of the February Revolution, only Trotsky had proposed that the Russian proletariat might win the power in advance of the Western proletariat, and that the revolution would not confine itself within the limits of a democratic dictatorship but would be compelled to undertake initial socialist measures. In this sense it is clear that the April theses of Lenin were “Trotskyist”.
Lenin’s first and immediate task was to win the Bolshevik Party to his new views. Traditionally, Trotskyists have made much of the differences between Lenin and the Old Bolsheviks in the period February to October 1917, particularly Stalin’s role. This is understandable in the context of the faction struggles that took place later, but to concentrate on the mistakes of the Old Bolsheviks would obfuscate the central point being made here. Lenin, even if he had maintained the stagist perspective of the RDDPP would have had serious differences with the reformist positions adopted by the Old Bolsheviks. What is important here, is the direction in which Lenin’s arguments developed, and his political trajectory in 1917, away from a stagist position to a permanentist perspective.
Lenin’s analysis began with the assessment that there was no objective reason why the workers did not take governmental power in February 1917. Despite actual power being in their hands, the proletariat did not elbow the bourgeoisie aside for no other reason than its unpreparedness, its lack of organisation and its lack of class consciousness[55]. This is most interesting since it gives the lie to those who suggest that Lenin called for a socialist revolution in October because he considered that between February and October 1917, Russia had made sufficient social, political and/or economic advance to proceed from the bourgeois-democratic stage to the proletarian revolution.
However, one reason for the unpreparedness, lack of organisation and lack of consciousness was, as Lenin went on to explain, the betrayal of the revolution by all the so-called workers’ and peasants’ parties. Without the complicity of the Mensheviks and SRs in the Soviets, the Provisional Government could not have lasted long, if at all. But Lenin reserved his most stinging criticisms for those among the Bolshevik leadership who had placed the Bolshevik Party as a prop for the Mensheviks and SRs:
“The person who now speaks only of a ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of ‘Old Bolsheviks’)”[56].
Lenin explained that one must know how to change schemas when they did not fit the facts:
“… at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves ‘Old Bolsheviks’. Didn’t we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the ‘revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?
My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variegated than anyone could have expected.
To ignore or overlook this fact would mean … reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.” …
One must know how to adapt schemas to facts, instead of reiterating the now meaningless words about a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ in general. … Is this reality [of dual power] covered by Comrade Kamenev’s Old-Bolshevik formula, which says that the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution is not completed’? It is not. The formula is obsolete. It is no good at all. It is dead. And it is no use trying to revive it”[57].
Lenin was clear: the RDDPP existed in the form of the Menshevik and SR-led Soviets, but the democratic dictatorship was handing power to the Provisional Government, an amalgam of landowners and the big bourgeoisie; this new situation required a dictatorship of the proletariat to establish a Commune-type state, to complete the proletarian revolution. The vehemence with which Lenin attacked the key governmental slogan that the Bolshevik Party had used for over a decade should not be missed, particularly as there now exists a current within world Trotskyism which denies he ever made such a statement[58]. He considered the RDDPP as no good at all, as dead, and that those who still espoused it had gone over to the class enemy. “On the whole”, things might have worked out according to Bolshevik ideas, but on the key questions of whether the socialist revolution could begin in Russia, the class nature of the revolution that would solve the agrarian question, and the necessary governmental slogan, things had worked out “differently”.
Lenin, in April 1917, was clear that what was missing was the subjective factor – the level of understanding of the workers (and their allies). As long ago as 1906, all Russian SDs had predicted that the revolution would triumph as a workers’ revolution or not at all, but only Trotsky had warned that the slogan of the RDDPP might assume a counter-revolutionary character in the very moment when the question of power was posed. Now he had been proved correct. The practical interpretation of Lenin’s theory by the Bolshevik leaders led to serious mistakes being made at the time of the February Revolution, which were only corrected by Lenin after his return. Zinoviev admits this in his tendentious History of the Bolshevik Party:
“This evolution in our views … proceeded with definite inconsistencies which were to produce amongst us very dangerous differences on the eve of October 1917. Some of us (including myself) for too long upheld the idea that in our peasant country we could not pass straight on to the socialist revolution, but merely hope that if our revolution coincided with the start of the international proletarian one it could become its overture”[59].
Anti-Trotskyists often refer to Lenin’s throw-away comment made at the end of his Concluding Remarks in the Debate Concerning the Report on the Present Situation April 14. In reviewing alternative political positions to his own he said, “Trotskyism: ‘No tsar, but a workers’ government.’ This is wrong. A petty bourgeoisie exists, and it cannot be dismissed”60. This author believes it likely that, as in November 1915 in On the Two Lines in the Revolution (see previous Chapter), there was confusion in Lenin’s mind between the opinions of Trotsky and Parvus but that, in any case, Lenin’s comment was of purely passing interest as he would soon be defending a Bolshevik-only government. In fact, of course, both men recognised that the support of the petty bourgeois peasantry was required if the revolutionary government was to last for any time. However, one academic has suggested that Lenin’s comment was made to protect himself from the charges of “Trotskyism” that some ‘Old Bolsheviks’ were levelling at him[61]. If this were so, it would not have been surprising as, at that time, Lenin had no idea that Trotsky would soon accept the necessity of the Bolshevik Party and be standing at his side as his major ally in making the October, socialist Revolution. Of note is that Lenin did not differentiate himself from the most radical of Trotsky’s proposals, that the Russian socialist Revolution would precede the European.
-
Cliff, T.C., Lenin: All Power to the Soviets,, Pluto Press, 1975, p82
-
Sukhanov, N.N., The Russian Revolution 1917 A Personal Record, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p5
-
Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol 1 p122
-
Trotsky, L.D., Ibid, Vol 1 p1
-
Harding, N., Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol 2 Theory and Practice of the Socialist Revolution, Macmillan Press, London, 1981, p11
-
Pipes, R., The Russian Revolution, Harvill Press. London, 1997, p340
-
Pipes, R., Ibid, p326-327
-
Sukhanov, N.N., The Russian Revolution 1917 A Personal Record, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p18 and p54-55
-
Pipes, R., op cit, p287-290
-
Woods, A., Bolshevism the Road to Revolution, Wellred Publications, London, 1999, p509 – 511
-
Guchkov, Minister of War quoted in Chamberlin, W.H. The Russian Revolution, Grosset & Dunlap, NY, 1965, Vol 1:435
-
Sukhanov, N.N., The Russian Revolution 1917 A Personal Record, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p 8-9 and 12
-
Lenin, V.I., The Revolution in Russia and the Tasks of the Workers in all Countries, March 1917, CW 23:350-354, for details of composition of the Provisional Government
-
Cliff, T.C., Lenin: All Power to the Soviets,, Pluto Press, 1975, p97
-
Sukhanov, N.N., op cit p43
-
Leibman, M., Leninism Under Lenin, Merlin Press, London, 1975, p117
-
Woods, A., op cit, p517
-
Both quoted in Liebman, M., op cit, p127
-
Quoted in Liebman, M., op cit, p123
-
Quoted in Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Pelican, 1983, Vol 1, p75
-
White, J.D. Lenin The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Palgrave, 2001. P130-131
-
Longley, D.A., The Divisions in the Bolshevik Party in March 1917, Soviet Studies, 1972, 24(2) pp61-76
-
Lenin, V.I., The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution, April 1917, CW 24:21-26
-
Trotsky, L.D., History of the Russian Revolution. Three volumes, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, Vol 1 p273
-
Lenin, V.I., Draft Theses, March 4 1917, March 1917, CW 23:287-291
-
Lenin, V.I., Telegram to the Bolsheviks Leaving for Russia, March 1917, CW 23:292
-
Lenin, V.I., Letters from Afar, March 1917, CW 23:295-342
-
Editors Note 127, CW 23:407
-
Lenin, V.I., Letters from Afar, March 1917, CW 23:341
-
Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Pelican, 1983. Vol 2 p34 (Carr is quoting from Third Letter from Afar, CW 23:323 March 1917)
-
Lenin, V.I., Draft Theses, March 4 1917, March 1917, CW 23:289
-
Lenin, V.I., Letters from Afar, March 1917, CW 23:308
-
Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 23:332
-
Lenin, V.I., To Our Comrades in Prisoner of War Camps, March 1917, CW 23:348
-
Lenin, V.I., Letters from Afar, March 1917, CW 23:330
-
Lenin, V.I., ibid, CW 23:341
-
Lenin, V.I., ibid, CW 23:340
-
Lenin, V.I., The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution, April 1917, CW 24:21-26
-
Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 24:22
-
Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 24:22-23
-
Lenin, V.I., Ibid, CW 24:23
-
Raskolnikov Kronstadt and Petrograd in 1917, New Park Publications, London, 1982, p76
-
Lenin, V.I., The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution, April 1917, CW 24:24
-
Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Pelican, 1983. Vol 1 p91
-
Krupskaya, N., Memories of Lenin, Panther History, 1970, p297
-
Quoted in Lenin, V.I., Letters on Tactics, April 1917, CW 24:50
-
Quoted in Sukhanov, N.N., op cit, p289
-
Lenin, V.I., Report at a Meeting of Bolshevik delegates to the All-Russian Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, April 1917, CW 36:437
-
Lenin, V.I., Letter on Tactics, April 1917, CW 24:45
-
Lenin, V.I., ibid p24:44 and 50
-
Barnes, J. Their Trotsky and Ours: Communist Continuity Today, Fall 1983, New International, Vol 1, No 1, p 63
-
Zinoviev, G., History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, London, 1973, p177-178
-
Frankel, J., Lenin’s Doctrinal Revolution of April 1917, Jnl of Contemporary History, 1969, 4(2)117-142