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p The news that Lenin would arrive in the capital that evening had reached Petrograd earlier in the day, and though it was the Easter holiday and there were no newspapers and the factories were closed, the good news spread to all parts of the city and to every ship and regiment. Workers, soldiers and sailors started preparing for the meeting.

p That night a guard of honour composed of soldiers and sailors formed up on the dimly lighted platform of the Finland Railway Station in Petrograd. Everyone waited excitedly. As Lenin stepped out of the train, the Kronstadt sailors presented arms and a military band played the Marseillaise. The workers of Petrograd showed their delight at his homecoming. Amid hurrahs and handclapping I. Chugurin, whom Lenin had known at the Longjumeau Party school, handed Lenin Party Card No. 600 of the Vyborg District Bolshevik organisation.^^50^^ Lenin embraced him warmly, greeted the soldiers and sailors and then went out into the square.

p The square and the streets adjoining the station were thronged with thousands of Petrograd workers and soldiers. Countless banners waved in the glare of searchlights. Many of them bore the 238 words: “Welcome to Lenin.” The band struck up the Internationale. Amid a steady roar of cheering, workers and soldiers lifted Lenin on to an armoured car. Standing on the car, he greeted the revolutionary proletariat of Russia and the army rank-and-file who had carried out the victorious revolution against tsarism. The proletariat of the whole world, said Lenin, was watching with hope the bold steps taken by the Russian workers. He ended his first speech to the workers and soldiers of Petrograd with a stirring call: “Long live the socialist revolution!”

p People thronged round the armoured car as it bore Lenin to the premises of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Here another meeting took place attended by Petrograd workers and soldiers, who welcomed their leader with great enthusiasm. Lenin spoke several times during the meeting and was listened to by thousands of working men and women, soldiers and sailors.

p April 4 was Lenin’s first working day in revolutionary Petrograd. It was a very full day. In the morning he had a meeting with leaders of the Bolshevik Party at V. Bonch-Bruyevich’s flat. In the afternoon he spoke twice at the Taurida Palace. The same day Lenin attended a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, at which the question of the emigrants’ return to Russia was discussed. Lenin described the circumstances of their journey back to Russia through Germany and proposed that the journey be approved by the meeting, and that steps be taken accordingly to get a corresponding number of interned Germans set free, particularly the prominent Austrian socialist Otto Bauer. Lenin’s proposals were not accepted.

p That same day Lenin managed to visit Volkovo Cemetery, where his mother and sister Olga were buried.

p Lenin’s return from abroad was of tremendous importance to the Bolshevik Party and the people of Russia. It was vitally important not only to the Russian but also to the world revolutionary liberation movement as a whole. The February revolution had radically altered the situation in Russia. The task to which the Party had given priority from the outset-the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy - had been carried out. Now the Bolshevik Party and the working class were confronted with a new historical, truly great in scope and significance task-the struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution. As soon as he arrived in Petrograd Lenin took direct control over the Central Committee and Pravda.

p Since the February revolution the Bolshevik Party, having emerged from underground, had been mustering its forces, working 239 out its tactics and extending its activities in a highly complex situation. To lead the struggle of the working class and the rest of the working people under the new conditions effectively, the Bolsheviks had to make a correct Marxist appraisal of the February revolution, elucidate its class character, take into account the changes in the balance of class forces and define the specific features of the new historical situation.

p The Bolshevik Party was the only party that had not hauled down its socialist colours. It was explaining to the masses the class nature of the Provisional Government as a bourgeois government and exposing its imperialist policy and the conciliatory tactics of the petty-bourgeois parties. From the very first days of its legal existence the Bolshevik Party began to organise and strengthen its ranks, to extend political work among the masses.

p The main propositions on the revolutionary strategy and tactics of the proletariat, its tasks in the new historical conditions after the overthrow of autocracy, had been formulated by Lenin in March in his Letters from Afar. However, not all the members of the Central Committee shared Lenin’s views of the prospects for revolution at that time. Some did not agree that the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was completed and that there must be a struggle for the transition to a socialist revolution. Before Lenin’s return to Russia the Letters from Afar had not been generally known in the Party. Only the first one had been published, in abridged form, in Pravda. The leading Party bodies in Russia felt the need for new, additional explanations by Lenin of fundamental questions concerning the new and remarkably bold political course of the Party elaborated by him. The Party officials were in need of personal contact with Lenin.

p On the morning of April 4, Lenin delivered a report “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution" at a meeting in the Taurida Palace of the Bolshevik delegates to the All-Russia Conference of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. These were Lenin’s April Theses, which armed the Party with a scientificallybased plan of struggle for the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist revolution. Lenin repeated his report at a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who had taken part in the above- mentioned Conference of Soviets.

p Lenin’s Theses defined, first and foremost, the attitude to be adopted by the Party to the war, the most vital of all the issues facing the peoples of Russia and the whole world. The war that Russia was waging, even under the Provisional Government, wrote Lenin, 240 continued to be a predatory, imperialist war because of the bourgeois character, aims and policy of that government. Dependent financially and diplomatically on the more powerful British and French imperialists, the capitalist class could not wage any other kind of war but an imperialist one. It was therefore impossible to end the war unless the power of capital was overthrown, unless state power passed to the proletariat and the poorest strata of the peasantry which supported it. Only such a government could give the people peace, bread and freedom and set the country on the path to socialism. Hence the Bolshevik slogans: “No support for, not the slightest confidence in the Provisional Government!" and “All power to the Soviets!”

p In the April Theses Lenin proclaimed the goal as victory of a socialist revolution: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia,” he wrote, "is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution-which, owing to the insufficient class- consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.”   [240•*  This proposition is the basic and central theme that runs all through Lenin’s Theses.

p As far back as 1905, Lenin had regarded the Soviets not merely as instruments of armed uprising but also as the embryo of a new, revolutionary form of government. Mindful of the experience of the Paris Commune and the Russian revolutions of 1905 and February 1917, Lenin saw in the Republic of the Soviets the political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and placed before the Party and the working class the task of establishing such a republic in Russia.

p Marx had spoken of a new form of state power “of the type of the Paris Commune”. Marx and Engels said that the working class could not simply take over the old state machine ready-made and rule by means of it; it must replace that machine with a new one and convert its political supremacy - the dictatorship of the proletariat-in to an instrument for the socialist reconstruction of society. The parliamentary republic, they said, constitutes progress as compared with absolutism, but does not abolish the domination of capital; it merely makes it easier for the working class to fight for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

p Kautsky and other opportunists of the Second International distorted the teachings of Marx and Engels on the state, ignored their 241 ideas that it was necessary to create a new, higher type of democratic state, a state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and instead advocated the bourgeois political form of democracy, the parliamentary republic, as the best form of state for the transition to socialism. Exposing these opportunists, Lenin showed that life had produced a new “higher type of democratic state”, in comparison with the parliamentary democratic republic, and that a republic of Soviets would represent the dictatorship of the proletariat.

p This was a great discovery in Marxist theory, a discovery that was to be of the greatest importance in ensuring the victory of the socialist revolution in October 1917, in setting up Soviet power and building socialism in the U.S.S.R., and in evolving the political forms of the dictatorship of the working class in other countries.

p The April Theses formulated the economic platform of the proletarian Party. In the economic sphere Lenin stood for carrying out at once the revolutionary measures that the situation actually demanded, that were absolutely essential to combat the impending economic catastrophe and famine, and that would be comprehensible to and within the reach of the masses: first, nationalisation of all the land in the country along with confiscation of the landed estates and placing of the land at the disposal of the local Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ and Peasants’ Deputies; conversion of the large estates that were confiscated into model farms under the control of the Soviets of Agricultural Labourers’ Deputies; second, the immediate amalgamation of all the banks in the country into one national bank, to be placed under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies; and third, the setting up of workers’ control over the production and distribution of products.

p These measures, if executed in a revolutionary way, Lenin pointed out, would be an important step towards socialism. A few days later he raised with the Party and the working class the question of “the nationalisation of the banks and capitalist syndicates”, in order to undermine the economic strength of monopoly capital.

p In his Theses Lenin formulated the Party’s tactics in the struggle for a socialist revolution with the utmost clarity. These tactics were based on a Marxist analysis of the complex and contradictory situation. The specific feature of the February revolution was that in the course of its development a dual power had come into being. Alongside the bourgeois Provisional Government there existed the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, in which the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries had a majority.

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p The great mass of the people, who were taking part in political life for the first time and had no experience of politics, were temporarily disorientated and could not immediately distinguish friend from foe. In this situation, Lenin said, the majority of the working class, the majority of the working people, must be won over to our side. The anti-popular, imperialist nature of the Provisional Government must be exposed; this government must be deprived of the confidence and support of the workers and soldiers.

p By this profound analysis of the historical situation obtaining at the time, Lenin proved the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power to the proletariat. He armed Marxists with yet another convincing argument against the false allegations of the enemies of the proletariat, who claim that the Communists have always, under all circumstances, favoured the forcible seizure of power by the working class. At the same time he urged Bolsheviks to prepare for other forms of struggle also and called on them to arm the working class, the people.

p Concerning matters within the Party, Lenin called for the immediate convocation of a Party Congress and amendment of the Party Programme. In his opinion the new programme should give an assessment of imperialism and imperialist wars, expound the teaching of Marxism on the state, and advance the task of setting up a Soviet republic.

p Lenin proposed that the Party’s name be changed from SocialDemocratic to Communist Party, as Marx and Engels had called the proletarian party they had founded, since the official SocialDemocratic leaders in almost all countries had betrayed socialism. This name was scientifically correct because the ultimate aim of the party of the proletariat was to build a communist society. “It is time to cast off the soiled shirt and to put on clean linen,” wrote Lenin.  [242•* 

p In the sphere of the international working-class movement, Lenin proposed as a practical task the creation of a third, Communist International.

p Lenin’s April Theses provided an ideological basis for the unity of the Bolshevik Party organisations. They roused tremendous enthusiasm in the ranks of the Party and the working class and inspired the workers to fight for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

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p Lenin’s theses were published in Pravda on April 7. The open Party discussion that followed lasted nearly three weeks and Lenin’s position quickly won over leading Party workers and Party organisations.

p The April Theses incensed the enemies of the revolutionary proletariat. A slanderous campaign was launched against the Bolsheviks. Provocatory inventions and lies of the lowest kind were put about by the bourgeois press, primarily against Lenin. The fact that Lenin and other Bolsheviks had come to Russia through Germany was used to suggest that the new arrivals might be helping the German imperialists. The effect of this agitation was that some people started shouting in the streets for physical violence against Lenin.

p Plekhanov declared the April Theses to be anarchism and Blanquism.^^51^^ “Lenin has only just arrived, he doesn’t know Russia,” bawled Dan. Lenin is “destroying Marxism" with his Theses, announced Tsereteli, making play with a quotation from Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany, which stated that a class that seized power prematurely would perish.

p Ignorant people or renegade Marxists, Lenin told them, could go on about anarchism, Blanquism, etc. But people who wished to think and learn could not fail to understand that Blanquism was the seizure of power by the minority, and Lenin supported the transfer of power to the Soviets which were obviously the direct and immediate organisation of the majority of the people. This was the first point.

p Secondly, Blanquism was a denial of the need for the state and state power in the age of the transition from the rule of the bourgeoisie to the rule of the proletariat. "Whereas I, with a precision that precludes any possibility of misinterpretation, advocate the need for a state in this period, although, in accordance with Marx and the lessons of the Paris Commune, I advocate not the usual parliamentary bourgeois state, but a state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people.... Mr. Plekhanov, the ex-Marxist, has absolutely failed to understand the Marxist doctrine of the state.”   [243•* 

p The Petrograd City Conference of Bolsheviks opened on April 14. Lenin delivered a report to the Conference and summed up the debate on the current situation and the attitude to be adopted towards the Provisional Government. The Conference passed the resolution on the attitude towards the Provisional Government, moved 244 by Lenin. It called on the Bolsheviks of Petrograd to take energeticaction and to prepare for a socialist revolution in Russia. Lenin’s tactics were thus approved by the Petrograd Party organisation, the largest in the country.

p On April 20, the Petrograd City Conference was interrupted by a mighty political demonstration of the Petrograd workers and sol diers protesting against the imperialist policy of the Provisiona Government. Demonstrations were also held in other cities.

During the April demonstration a small group of members of the Petrograd Bolshevik organisation advanced a slogan calling for the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. This slogan ran counter to the Party’s line on the peaceful development of the revolution, on the gradual winning of a majority in the Soviets. The Central Committee explained that it was essential that the majority of the people be firmly rallied round the revolutionary proletariat, that unless this condition were observed an attack on the Provisional Government would be sheer recklessness. “The proletarian party would be making a dangerous mistake if it based its tactics on subjective desires where organisation is required,”   [244•*  Lenin warned.