The Russian Revolution

In our last class we discussed why the need for united fronts and why revolutionaries oppose popular fronts. What we want to do now is to see how these principles were applied—or misapplied—in different revolutionary situations.

This class will focus on the Russian Revolution of 1917. In fact, there were two revolutions. The first took place in February of that year, when the tsar was overthrown and replaced by a liberal bourgeois government. A major factor was the rebellion of the masses at the tortures of the first interimperialist war, where out of some 15 million men, mainly peasants, mobilized for the war, some 5.5 million were killed, wounded or captured. Russia at that time was an example of what Trotsky called combined and uneven development. The mass of the population was peasants, the majority of whom were forced to live in squalor. But there was also a small but significant proletariat, concentrated in huge, relatively modern factories operated by mainly European capitalists. This proletariat had already gone through one revolution in 1905, which Lenin regarded as a dress rehearsal for 1917. In addition, tsarist Russia was known as a prison house of peoples because of Great Russian chauvinist oppression of the Ukrainians, Poles, Azerbaijanis and other national groupings.

What we want to do in this class is look at several key situations that occurred during the period February to October. At each of these junctures it was necessary for the Bolsheviks, whose central leader was Lenin, to make correct decisions. Had they not done so, there would have been no proletarian revolution.

So let’s start with the February Revolution. What replaced tsarist rule was a bourgeois government. However, the party of the liberal bourgeoisie—the Constitutional Democrats, or Cadets—was despised by the toiling masses. The bourgeoisie could maintain itself in power only through an alliance with the Mensheviks, a reformist workers party, and the Social Revolutionaries (SRs), a largely peasant party. And as Trotsky pointed out:

As Trotsky stated, the Bolsheviks “did not make the slightest concession to the People’s Front. Their demand was to break this People’s Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government.”

Simultaneous with the establishment of a bourgeois Provisional Government, the proletariat set up soviets, or councils, in factories, mines and other workplaces throughout the country. Soviets were established among the soldiers as well. This was a situation of dual power, meaning that alongside the official bourgeois government another power had arisen but one that was weak and incipient. The soviets could indeed have taken power, but the leadership of the soviets, initially in the hands of the Mensheviks and SRs, opposed this.

The April Theses

A number of issues were posed here. In his “April Theses” Lenin wrote that the Bolsheviks must oppose any support to the war, which remained, on the part of Russia, a predatory imperialist war owing to the capitalist nature of the government. This was a direct counterposition to the Mensheviks and SRs, who supported the war claiming that it was necessary to defend the so-called “revolutionary democracy” of the Provisional Government. This dovetailed with the line of the Cadets. Lenin pointed out that “without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace, a peace not imposed by violence.” The Bolshevik position was revolutionary defeatism—turn the imperialist war into a civil war.

Another central issue posed by Lenin was the need to give no support to the bourgeois Provisional Government. In particular there was the need to expose the government’s lying claim to oppose annexations in the war, stressing that that capitalist government could not cease to be an imperialist government.

Then there was the question of the class character of the government that was to be formed, with Lenin insisting that all power must go to the soviets—that such a government formed by the soviets was the only possible revolutionary government. This was sharply counterposed to the reformist conception, which was that the Provisional Government could be pressured into achieving the democratic tasks—distributing land to the peasants, achieving a stable parliamentary democracy, etc. I won’t elaborate hereon all the points raised by Lenin, but I do want to stress his call for a new revolutionary International to replace the rotten Second International, most of whose parties supported the imperialist war. Lenin understood that socialism in Russia could not be secured without revolution in Europe and elsewhere.

Now it’s important to understand that these positions were not spontaneously accepted by the other Bolsheviks. In fact, it was notable that when the “April Theses” were presented in the Bolshevik paper Pravda on April 7, not a single member of the Central Committee would cosign Lenin’s article. In fact, at several crucial stages of the revolution sections of the leadership balked at taking the decisive measures that were necessary to win power for the working masses.

In March 1917, Pravda, then edited by Stalin and Kamenev, wrote:

This obviously is contrary to Lenin’s argument that capitalist Russia could not cease to be imperialist and it approaches the line of the reformists who claimed that the existing imperialists could negotiate a democratic peace.

At the April Conference that determined the fundamental line of the Bolsheviks, the main debate was over the character of the revolution. Lenin argued that the only possible revolutionary government was a government of the soviets, to be achieved through workers revolution. Lenin’s opponents, like Kamenev, argued that it was premature to establish a workers state and that the task was to carry out a bourgeois revolution which would carry out democratic tasks. This would be achieved by a bourgeois democratic government. Only at some unspecified later date could the workers come to power. In fact, the separation between bourgeois democratic tasks (such as distributing land to the peasantry) and socialist tasks (like putting the workers in power) was false, as the October Revolution showed. Lenin’s line prevailed at the Conference.

Trotsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks after his return from exile in May, noted that initially following the February Revolution the Bolsheviks were a small minority in the soviets, commanding less than 5 percent support. How then did they win over the majority of the proletariat? In the April Theses, Lenin counseled that “As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes in experience.” One key factor was the Bolsheviks’ intransigent opposition to the imperialist war, which was increasingly unpopular among the workers and peasants, who were being butchered wholesale. They also effectively exposed the class collaboration of the Mensheviks and SRs. These parties initially supported the Provisional Government from the outside but in May they joined the government. This suited the purpose of the Cadets since they themselves were politically isolated and they wanted the reformists to be in the government so they would have to take direct responsibility for government policy.

The Bolsheviks pointed out that the Menshevik/SR alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie ensured that no meaningful reforms would be made in the interest of the toilers. For example, the liberal bourgeoisie was allied to the landlords and would of course never confiscate their land. That is why the government consistently delayed convening a constituent assembly, which was supposed to resolve the land question. The Bolsheviks demanded that the bourgeoisie be thrown out of the government and that the soviet parties take the power. In June hundreds of thousands of workers marched with Bolshevik slogans including “Down With the Ten Minister-Capitalists.” As Trotsky later wrote,

“Nevertheless, the demand of the Bolsheviks, addressed to the Mensheviks and the SRs: ‘Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power into your own hands!’ had for the masses tremendous educational significance. The obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and S.R.’s to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks.”

It is not sufficient simply to oppose popular fronts. It is necessary to know how to break them. And just as the Bolsheviks demanded that the Mensheviks and S.R’s split with the bourgeoisie, we can use a similar method today in fighting against class collaboration. For example, militants inside the DSA today demand that the DSA split with the Democrats and kick out the Democratic Party electeds. This poses sharply the need for class independence.

The July Days

Now, in the July Days the most advanced layers of the masses revolted against an impending new military offensive being pushed by the government, now headed by Kerensky. This was a difficult situation for the Bolsheviks. Even in a revolutionary situation you do not always push the “go” button. Those who demonstrated during the July Days, the Petrograd workers, Kronstadt sailors and some soldiers, were the vanguard detachments. This was a semi-insurrection; these workers came out on the streets armed. But the working masses as a whole were very uneven. Most of the frontline soldiers and the workers in the provinces had not yet reached the conclusions of the more advanced workers. Any attempt to seize power would have been totally smashed and probably the chances of revolution would have been destroyed. At the same time, the Bolsheviks correctly did not want to disavow the militant workers, soldiers and sailors. They put themselves at the front of the demonstrators in a militant and orderly display, while at the same time trying to organize an orderly retreat.

The Bolsheviks did as well as could be expected in such difficult circumstances. The government brought troops in from the provinces. Lenin was forced to go into hiding and Trotsky and some other Bolshevik leaders were arrested. The popular front engaged in a massive slander campaign against the Bolsheviks, accusing them of being German agents. Lenin raised that the Bolsheviks were being subjected to a “Dreyfusiad,” referring to Dreyfus, the officer who was falsely accused by French reactionaries of being a German spy. However, the repression following the July Days was shallow and temporary. The party rebounded, as the workers and soldiers returned to its banners and leadership.

In addition to having a correct programmatic perspective, which is obviously essential, a revolutionary party needs to have a correct assessment of reality. This was in fact one of Lenin’s strong points. He had a keen appreciation of the actual relationship of forces and therefore what could be done and what could not be done. This alerted him to the fact that the situation in July was not mature for insurrection. At the same time, Lenin did not revise his perspective of proletarian revolution, and in fact the opportunity to take power was not long in coming.

Kornilov Coup and the Fight for Workers Power

In fact after the July Days the Bolsheviks were confronted with a defensive situation. Encouraged by the campaign against the Bolsheviks, the head of the government, Kerensky, plotted with the reactionary monarchist general Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship. However, Kornilov sought to make himself and not Kerensky the Bonapartist dictator. Kerensky and his Menshevik and SR bloc partners were forced to turn to the working class and the Bolsheviks to save them from a right-wing coup. The Bolsheviks energetically pushed to organize an effective united front against the coup. They were part of a Committee for Struggle Against the Counterrevolution, which included SRs and Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks.

In our last class, we discussed how a united front serves two purposes: first, to mobilize the broadest possible forces against the class enemy; second, to demonstrate that the revolutionaries have the best strategy to defeat the class enemy. Lenin’s letter “To the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P [Bolsheviks]” of 30 August 1917 stressed these two fundamental points. The first was the need to defeat the coup; the second was to maintain political independence from Kerensky. Lenin stressed:

Rather than supporting Kerensky, Lenin said, it was necessary to expose his weakness. And this the Bolsheviks did, by demonstrating that they had by far the best strategy to defeat Kornilov. The Kornilov insurrection disintegrated: the railroad workers wouldn’t move him, his troops were won over by Bolshevik agitators, workers tore up the train tracks. As one Menshevik commentator conceded:

The result of the successful defeat of the coup was a marked shift in the balance of forces, favoring the Bolsheviks. In elections to the soviets in Moscow and Petrograd shortly thereafter, the Bolsheviks attained a majority. The Bolsheviks could then move from a defensive position and go on the offensive. From that time onward Lenin was agitating in the Bolshevik Party to prepare the insurrection.

I included in the readings a piece by Trotsky written in 1931, “For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism.” The piece is in fact a polemic against the leadership of the German Communist Party, who regarded the SPD as “social fascists” and refused to make a united front with them against Hitler’s Nazis. This stupid sectarianism enabled Hitler to take power without having to fire a shot. This led to genocide of the Jews, the destruction of the Communist and Social Democratic parties alike, along with the trade unions. In this article Trotsky draws heavily on the experience of the Bolsheviks and how they successfully led the struggle against Kornilov, building a powerful united front that included the reformists. Unfortunately the leaders of the Stalinist Comintern and the German Communists ignored this lesson from Bolshevism, with disastrous results.

Now back to Russia. Lenin had been correct at the time of Kornilov’s attempted coup to be concerned with conciliation toward the Kerensky government by some members of the Bolshevik leadership. In a letter written between September 12 and 14, “The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power,” Lenin wrote: “The point is to make the task clear to the Party. The present task must be an armed uprising in Petrograd and Moscow (with its region), the seizing of power and the overthrow of the government.” But all but one of the copies of this letter were burned by the majority of the Central Committee, who had been trying to keep Lenin’s appeals from getting into the hands of the worker-Bolsheviks.

Basically the issue was the same as back in April, except workers power was no longer a perspective but posed pointblank. The question was whether the party should accommodate its tasks to the development of a bourgeois republic, or mobilize the proletariat to conquer power. Some of the opponents of Lenin were the same people who had opposed the April Theses. They argued that the Bolsheviks were too weak to retain power and that instead the party should try to grow itself gradually within a framework of bourgeois democracy. This really was a vast underestimation of the revolutionary capacity of the working class. Moreover, the perspective of a stable bourgeois democracy in Russia at that time was precluded. Had the Bolsheviks missed the opportunity to take power, it is likely that another Kornilov would have arisen to smash the left and workers.

Lenin continued to face opposition in the Central Committee. Two members, Zinoviev and Kamenev, voted to oppose the armed uprising. But Lenin’s point of view prevailed, and the Bolsheviks led the working masses to power. But this was only possible because over the years Lenin had built a revolutionary party that rooted itself in the working class. Without that, there would have been no revolution. And as Trotsky was to put it, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer. That is the principal lesson of the past decade.”

The final question for this class was: “What do you think explains the resistance of some of the Bolshevik Party leaders to Lenin’s strategy of overthrowing capitalist-landlord rule and replacing it with a soviet government?” I didn’t explicitly answer that in the presentation but a clue is to look at the arguments made by his opponents. Their view was that the gains of the working masses could be best achieved by establishing a parliamentary democracy and pushing it to the left. So let’s see if anyone wants to take a stab at this question in the discussion.

To recap, we have looked at a number of situations where the Bolsheviks were challenged to make correct decisions in the fight to break the popular front—from the April debates in the party, through the July days, the attempted coup by Kornilov, and the decision to make the insurrection. The success of the October Revolution was due to the Bolsheviks’ intransigent adherence to class independence. In the words of Trotsky: “Loyalty to the revolutionary program, irreconcilable hostility to the bourgeoisie, decisive rupture with social patriots, deep trust in the revolutionary force of the masses—these are the chief lessons of October.”

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