To demonstrate that Lenin did, indeed, fundamentally change his revolutionary perspective during 1917, it is necessary to understand what he had previously proposed and what Lenin’s pre-1917 demand for a democratic dictatorship actually entailed. Thus, this chapter explores the origins, content and predicted likely outcomes of the slogan of the RDDPP, which encapsulated the Bolshevik strategy for the seizure of power in the forthcoming Russian Revolution. It discusses the slogan itself, identifies what was new in it and what elements Lenin retained in common with his Menshevik opponents, and argues that Lenin placed clear limits on the nature of the changes that a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship would introduce to Russian society and its economy. It describes how Lenin, himself, indicated such a dictatorship would function, the form it might take, and the key measures it would need to take to successfully carry through the bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is important for any analysis of the limitations of the RDDPP, and for understanding how, pre-1917, Lenin’s concept of the Russian Revolution differed from Trotsky’s.
The chapter also discusses inherent tensions and contradictions in the perspective of a RDDPP, and ends with a review of how Lenin believed, until 1917, that the RDDPP would solve the agrarian question in Russia in a way that would strengthen capitalism and that this would be achieved before the Russian socialist revolution. The latter would occur after, and as a consequence of, the socialist revolution in Western Europe. Additionally, the chapter introduces the idea that the political education that Bolshevik leaders, such as Zinoviev, Kamenev and others, received in the period 1905-1917 (the time span over which the RDDPP was an essential part of the Bolshevik programme), contributed to their actions over the February-October period prior to the October 1917 Revolution, which were so heavily criticised by Lenin.
Between 1903 – when he presented the agrarian programme of the RSDLP to the Second Congress in London – and 1905, Lenin completed an important leap in viewing the petty bourgeois peasantry rather than the urban petty bourgeois, as the major ally of the working class in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. At that time all currents within the RSDLP agreed that the Russian Revolution towards which they were working, was a bourgeois-democratic revolution, the outcome of which would be a capitalist state with a capitalist government. It was generally accepted by Marxists, even before the experiences of the first Russian Revolution, that the Russian big bourgeoisie would play no independent progressive role in the actual revolution:
“We told you already in 1848, brothers, that the German liberal bourgeoisie would soon come to power and would immediately turn its newly won power against the workers. You have seen how this forecast came true. It was indeed the bourgeoisie which took possession of the state authority in the wake of the March movement of 1848 and used this power to drive the workers, its allies in the struggle, back into their former oppressed position. Although the bourgeoisie could accomplish this only by entering into an alliance with the feudal party, which had been defeated in March, and eventually even had to surrender power once more to this feudal absolutist party, it has nevertheless secured favourable conditions for itself”[1].
Bolshevism, specifically emphasised the view that the Russian bourgeoisie, liberal or otherwise, was incapable of leading its own revolution to the end.
Prior to the experiences of 1905, international SD marched in step because it saw the major ally of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution as the urban petty bourgeois not the peasantry, and certainly not the peasantry as a whole. Lenin was at one with the leading theoreticians of the Second International on his attitude to agrarian questions. So wedded was Lenin to the views of Plekhanov and Kautsky, that in an 1899 review he wrote that Kautsky’s book (Die Agrarfarge (The Agrarian Question)) was the most important event in economic literature since the third volume of Capital[2].
It was expected that during the bourgeois-democratic revolution the working-class would lead the fight supported by revolutionary elements of the urban and rural petty-bourgeoisie, liberal bourgeoisie and intelligentsia; would defend its specific interests (8-hour day, existence of trade unions, right to strike, minimum wage, freedom to form its own political parties and struggle for socialism, etc.), but would not attempt to replace the bourgeoisie as the ideological leaders of the revolution. Plekhanov’s Marxism, while leading him to the conclusion that “the revolutionary movement in Russia will triumph only as a working class movement or else it will never triumph”[3] also led him to ignore key specificities of Russia’s social structure and of her revolutionary development, and to see that development as a shadow following Marx’s theory of Western historical development[4],[5].
The revolution of 1905 produced three key tendencies within Russian Marxism, which would separate into the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and a small group around Trotsky. Naturally, their differences centred on the historical character of the Russian Revolution, how it would be realised and the path of its development – because the answers to these questions defined the strategy, tactics and practical day-to-day activities to be undertaken.
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Marx, K. and Engels, F., Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, March 1850, Marx-Engels Selected Works, FLPH Moscow 1962, Vol 1, p106 – 117
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Lenin, V.I., Review of Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question, 1899, CW 4:94
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Quoted in Harding, N., Lenin’s Political Thought, Vol 1 Theory and Practice of the Democratic Revolution, Macmillan Press, London 1977, p46. See also Wolfe, B.D., Three who made a Revolution, Penguin, London, p112
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Trotsky, L.D., Stalin, Hollis and Carter, London, 1947, p426
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Knei-Paz, B., The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Clarendon Press, London, 1978, p4